The King of Attolia (The Queen's Thief, #3)

by Megan Whalen Turner

It was unnatural to look back at events and be unable to believe that what you remembered could actually have happened.

“I can’t keep on apologizing,” he said. “Why not?” she asked, over his head. “Well,” he said pensively, “I think you would be bored.”

He might dismiss them from his service, but Costis guessed that dismissing them would only reveal his inability to control them.

Without fail, Ornon could predict that the king would dance with the wrong people, the wallflowers, the younger daughters of weak barons, nieces and unmarried older women of no importance. He would pass over the older daughters presented to him and the women of the powerful families with whom he was supposed to be forming alliances. It wasn’t through ignorance that he erred. Ornon had told him often which women to dance with, but the king claimed he couldn’t remember. Ornon thought it more likely that the king had reached his limit and refused to force himself through one more politically motivated performance.

He wondered how the Attolians thought Eugenides had managed to become king if he was the idiot they assumed him to be. Perhaps because they had never seen him as the Thief, with his head thrown back and a glint in his eye that made the hair on the back of a man’s neck rise up. The Attolians had only seen this new and uncomfortable king. Ornon himself wondered what had become of the Thief. Ornon had seen no sign of that character in Eugenides since the wedding.

As a ten-year-old boy, the Thief of Eddis could stop a grown man in his tracks with a single look. Where had that look gone? It worried Ornon that Eugenides’s role as Thief might have been an essential aspect of his confidence and strength of character.

The Attolians only thought that they wanted a weak king. A weak king meant uncertainty. If the king didn’t wield the power in the country, all kinds of other people would fight to wield it for him. They would fight to gain power and fight to keep it. Some of the fighting would be public, with rebellions and civil wars; more of the fighting would be secret, with poisonings and political murders. Unless the queen continued to hold power, it would be an ugly future for her nation.

The king shrugged his shoulders slightly and said, “I could send you to ask them.” The man laughed. His laughter was edged with contempt. “It would be a long trip, Your Majesty. I would so much rather hear the answer from you.” “Oh, the trip would be quicker than you think,” said the king, pleasantly. “Most of my male cousins are dead.”

her queen danced like a flame in the wind, and the mercurial king like the weight at the center of the earth.

The king lifted a hand to her cheek and kissed her. It was not a kiss between strangers, not even a kiss between a bride and a groom. It was a kiss between a man and his wife, and when it was over, the king closed his eyes and rested his forehead against the hollow of the queen’s shoulder, like a man seeking respite, like a man reaching home at the end of the day.

“I didn’t think he ever did as he was told,” she said, smiling. “I only told him what he was going to do anyway,” said Costis. “That would be the trick,” Ileia agreed.

After one moment of gripped immobility, the queen bent to kiss the king lightly on one closed eyelid, then on the other. She said, “I love your eyes.” She kissed him on either cheek, near the small lobe of his ear. “I love your ears, and I love”—she paused as she kissed him gently on the lips—“every single one of your ridiculous lies.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “You were right,” she said. “I was?” The king sounded bewildered. “The apologies do get boring.”

“You are treasure beyond any price.”

“I know something you don’t,” the king told her. “Who put the quinalums in the lethium?” “That, too.”

If Attolia could look like a queen, Eugenides was like a god revealed, transformed into something wholly unfamiliar, surrounded by the cloth-of-gold bedcover like a deity on an altar, passionless and calculating.

“Ninety-eight days,” said the queen, folding her hands in her lap. “You said it would take six months.” Eugenides picked at a nub in the coverlet. “I like to give myself a margin. When I can.” “I didn’t believe you,” the queen admitted with a delicate smile. “Now you know better.” The king smiled back. They might as well have been alone.

“Dite, I don’t need quinalums to give me nightmares; they come on their own.

“You were jealous . . . of Dite?” The king, the master of the fates of men, before their eyes was reduced to a man, very young himself, and in love. Picking again at the coverlet, he answered, with his eyes cast down, “Wildly.”

“Liar,” Relius cried. “Liar.” “Well, yes, I am,” the king agreed,

What had shifted his opinion of the king? It might have been Costis’s suspicions of Sejanus, but he thought it was more likely the king’s tears, and the realization that the king, no matter how obnoxious, suffered just like any other man, from teasing without mercy, from isolation, from homesickness.

He could not, as Ornon had suggested, bludgeon the king over the head, and he suspected that nothing short of that would keep the king in bed much longer.

As she took a breath to speak, he said, “Have I mentioned that I am king?” She exhaled in exasperation. “And I am an old woman, and boys with fevers who want to hear a story shouldn’t interrupt, king or not.”

What kind of man, he wondered, referred to himself as “safely dead”?

He broke off as the queen appeared in a doorway opposite. “You’re awake,” he said. “Phresine is not,” pointed out the queen. “Oh?” “You gave her lethium.” “She gave it to me first.”

“Gen is still acting the buffoon?”

“He didn’t marry you to become king. He became king because he wanted to marry you.”

Don’t look so uncomfortable. I have learned that there is a flaw in your philosophy. If we truly trust no one, we cannot survive.”

“Because the king will not quit, Teleus,” said Ornon as he joined them. “You must have noticed,” he said. “He whines, he complains, he ducks out of the most obvious responsibility. He is vain, petty, and maddening, but he doesn’t ever quit.” Ornon shrugged. “Ever.”

“He may not quit, but he will lose.” “Oh, I wouldn’t place my money on it. I’ve seen him suffer setbacks.” Ornon looked at the queen and away. “I have never seen him, in the end, lose. He just persists until he comes out ahead. No match is finished for him until he has won.” Ornon shrugged expressively. “He won’t quit, and he won’t thank you for interfering.”

“It isn’t an easy thing to give your loyalty to someone you don’t know, especially when that person chooses to reveal nothing of himself.”