Thick as Thieves by Megan Whalen Turner
CHAPTER TWELVE
The Attolian dismissed this with a shake of his head. Then he took his eyes off the approaching galleys and looked at me instead while the words sank in.
“He was poisoned the day you offered me my freedom,” I said to the deck under my feet.
Where another man might have shouted, or cursed, or questioned, the Attolian just stood silent. In Ianna-Ir, I had picked him for an idiot, but by this time I knew better. He was thinking everything through before he responded—the persistence of the Namreen, my fear that he would see the wanted poster in Koadester, the empire’s well-known policy on the treatment of slaves of a murdered master. Every single thing that he had noticed, he was reevaluating.
“I wondered why you said Nahuseresh ‘had’ a sense of decorum. Did you poison him?”
Well, that was a question I hadn’t anticipated. “No, it was his brother, probably at the emperor’s direction.”
“You would have left the Anet’s Dream, but you couldn’t swim.” He hadn’t been asleep when I went exploring on the riverboat.
“Yes.”
“And you still meant to disappear in Sukir.”
“Yes.”
He nodded slowly. “I thought we were Immakuk and Ennikar, but we were just Senabid and his master, weren’t we?” His words were more full of contempt for himself than for me. “Is that why you didn’t want to tell me those jokes? You were afraid I’d see myself in them?”
“No,” I protested.
“No,” he agreed. “I wouldn’t have. I’m that stupid.”
Just then a bump shook the ship, the war galley wasting no time on a gentle interception. The captain shouted in outrage. The sailors looked over at us, suddenly uncertain. The soldiers came up over the railings, so many to collect just the two of us, their numbers proportional to the rage of a confounded king.
As I looked away, the Attolian leaned over me, planting one large finger against my chest. “If you had told me,” he said quietly, equal parts betrayal and rage in his voice, “if you had told me in Sukir, I would have let you go.”
Almost as if he’d heard this declaration of treason, a soldier as big as the Attolian, but older, with gray in his hair and a fancy badge on his breast, stepped up to the Attolian. It was Teleus, captain of Attolia’s palace guard, and he said very loudly, “I hereby arrest you both in the name of the king.”
This time the Attolian did shout. “What?”
“Think, you idiot,” said his captain.
Two men grabbed me then and dragged me away. I tried to insist that it was not the Attolian at fault, but no one listened. I doubt the Attolian even heard over his own shouting. In moments I was tossed over the side of the ship into the war galley and the galley was pulling away. Someone tugged me to a bench where I sat down so hard I nearly fell over backward. The galley’s high sides hid everything from view but the temples on the hillside above Attolia’s palace. I sat watching it grow closer, wavering, as I blinked again and again.
The galleys stroked to the shore, cutting through the waves like a stylus across wet clay. We arrived at the dock, and I wiped my cheeks with my sleeves. The guards were gentler getting me off the boat than they had been putting me on—there was one at either hand to swing me across the gap between the ship and the quay to where even more guards waited, dressed in their breastplates and greaves, their helmets with the rounded tabs in front to protect the nose. They were impersonal and anonymous and stood intimidatingly close. I looked for the Attolian—I was still thinking of him as the Attolian, even surrounded by other Attolians—and located him at last arguing with the captain of the palace guard, poking him in the chest as he’d poked me—which was out of character and seemed like an excessively bad idea. The captain’s only response was a series of curt orders that set the guards around him in motion. They hastily formed into groups, and each set off from the waterfront in a different direction. The captain led one group away while the Attolian was escorted to my side. He’d been saying something as he came, but when he saw me, he fell silent and looked pointedly away. Then we marched, surrounded by guards, through an eerily quiet city.
I noticed it immediately—there was no one lingering in the street. My view was limited by the armsmen all around me, but the few people I could see moved quickly and kept their heads down. I looked more carefully. The palace guards were watchful, but not of me. Their eyes were on the streets, the people, the alleys we passed. Their hands were on their swords. The hairs on the back of my neck lifted.
The Attolian, blinded by his anger, was oblivious until we had passed through the open space of a market and were making our way up a street of wineshops, all of them shuttered. It was probably where he’d once upon a time been separated from his pay as a country bumpkin, and it should have been crowded at this time of day. It also wasn’t on any direct path between the waterfront and the palace. We were taking an exceptionally circuitous route.
“Where is everyone?” the Attolian asked.
“Silence,” said the leader of our cohort.
“The queen,” someone said under his breath.
The queen had gone on a rampage against her citizens? The queen had poisoned her second husband the way she had poisoned the first? Only two words spoken, but those two words said it wasn’t either of those things. The words conveyed a world of grief, and the Attolians loved their savage queen.
The Attolian looked stricken. “Dead?” he asked.
“Silence!” said the cohort leader again.
“Shut up, Haemus,” snarled the Attolian back. “Is she dead?” he demanded of the men around him.
Several guards shook their heads, not outright disobeying their commander.
“Miscarried,” the man beside me whispered.
“A son, I heard,” said another.
So we learned of the heir just as he slipped away. His sex might have been only a rumor, a reflection of the longed-for security an heir would have brought to the country, but talk of it meant the pregnancy had been far along. The queen was old for a first child, and late miscarriages were often deadly. The Attolians might lose her yet. No wonder the city was as silent as a held breath. How long would the Eddisian king rule without his queen? Not long, I guessed. If I weren’t already doomed, I would have been planning to leave the city by morning. Civil war was coming and on its heels, no doubt, the Medes.
We continued up the streets in the silence the squad leader had called for—I wondered if he had been a friend of the Attolian—and reached the walls around the palace without crossing through the open plaza at its front. We entered the grounds by way of a side gate to a small courtyard. A door led to stairs down to the bowels of the palace—and the prison cells underneath it. At the bottom of the stairs the Attolian was led away without a backward look, while I was taken through a room filled with all the horrors I had fled in Ianna-Ir and out the other side to a warren of stinking, dimly lit hallways and a lightless cell. There was no door to the cell, only a barred gate, and far away one sad lamp to cast the flickering shadows of the passing guards onto the wall near me. I could also hear the Attolian shouting somewhere. He sounded angry but unafraid. I was not surprised.
Unfortunately, he was also getting closer.
I sat against the front wall of the cell, away from the barred door, hoping to be out of sight. The Attolian had stopped shouting, but I was certain I heard his stamping feet among the others making their way toward me. I heard keys jingle as a nearby cell was unlocked and then locked again and the guards awkwardly shuffled away. I sat quietly, breathing through my open mouth.
“I know you are in there, Kamet.”
I twisted to peer out at him. He was sitting across the passageway, leaning, as I was now, on the bars of his cell.
“Costis,” I said, using his name for the first time since he had told it to me, on board the riverboat at the start of our journey. “Costis, I’m sorry.”
He crossed his arms and continued to look furious. “No one has
“And you?” I asked.
“And me,” he spat. I think the argument I had overheard had been over the role of the Attolian—whether he would guard me from outside a cell or be guarded himself.
“The other guards at the waterfront. They were decoys?”
“Yes. I should have realized, but I was too busy feeling like an idiot.”
Which suddenly made me furious.
“Well,” I said, realizing that the strange feeling rising in my chest was anger, “you are an idiot.”
“What?”
I didn’t back down. He was securely locked in the cell opposite, after all, and I’d already lost his goodwill. I had nothing left to lose. “You knew what I thought of Attolia. You heard me after that Namreen tried to take my head off. Did you not wonder why I met you at the docks? Did you ever think? Did you never ask yourself why I would want to come to your stinking backward country and spend the rest of my life scrabbling for a living on a vomit-stained street corner writing love letters for drunks and bills for tailors?”
He recoiled as if bitten by a rabbit. Then he snarled back at me, “What makes you think my king would have turned you out on a street corner?”
“Costis”—I flung out a hand at the distance the two of us had come—“he sent you halfway across the world to steal me out of spite. He doesn’t care what happens to me.”
He refused to concede, but it would have been difficult, if not impossible, to refute the pettiness of Eugenides. Costis could only mutter into his chest, “That’s not true.” He had so much faith in his silly king.
“If you had let me disappear in Sukir, you would have been a traitor.”
Costis had uncrossed his arms without thinking, and now he sullenly crossed them again. “If your master is dead, then it wouldn’t matter to the king where you went. I keep telling you, you idiot, but you won’t listen.”
Oh, I listened. I knew all I needed of the king of the Attolians. He was so incompetent he couldn’t stop his servants from dumping sand in his food. He was so careless of the lives of his servants that he exiled Costis when he couldn’t protect him. So careless of my life that he thought I would come like a dog to his hand when he sent for me. Like Nahuseresh, he cared only about what he wanted, and to hell with anyone else. I knew what men with power were like, even if Costis didn’t.
“One of us is an idiot,” I said. “I don’t think it’s me.” I’d had no choice but to stake everything on a chance to escape my fate, and I’d lost. Scribing on a street corner would be a paradise compared with what I saw in my future.
We waited for a very long time. It was hard to tell how long in the darkness and the unbroken silence. The prison’s guards brought us food. I slept a little, with my knees up and my head on my arms. Finally, the palace guards came again and unlocked our doors. They tried a joke or two at our expense, but the black look Costis gave them restored the silence as we walked the dark passageways and up the narrow stairs to the palace. We passed open windows in the corridors, and the sky above was a deep blue, like lapis. It had felt like years in the palace’s prison cells, but perhaps this was just the dawn of the day after we had been taken on the war galleys. I didn’t know if I would see the sky again, and I tried to capture its color in my mind’s eye. I did not believe that the news of Nahuseresh’s death had not reached Attolia. His guards might not have heard, but the king surely knew.
We were taken to a small audience room, one near the great throne room. There were no windows, only candles in the iron chandeliers overhead and in the sconces on the walls to give us light. The room was full. Men and women lined the walls, leaving open only a narrow aisle that led to a throne on a raised stage. Costis stood frowning beside me.
My thoughts wandered—to the blue of the sky I had glimpsed and memories of the blue of the sea we had sailed across. I thought of the sandal-making slave in the city who had warned us of the Namreen, and the kind people on the desolate farm beside the salt pans who’d given us more for a song than they had for a coin. I hoped the slaves from the tin mine were safely arrived at the sanctuary and prayed that the other slaves of my master had been spared torture once I had fled like a guilty party. I thought of Laela and hoped she hadn’t suffered. I thought of Marin and hoped she was happy.
All around the courtiers chatted and whispered, having easy conversations about horse races and trade ships and quieter ones about the queen. They cast the occasional glance in my direction, but I knew they had not gathered there because of me. Whispers had traveled through the palace that the king would have an audience—and they had come to see him, hoping for news of their queen. How appalled they must be to think that their queen might die and they might be left with the Thief of Eddis as their sovereign.
Then the king entered the room.
I couldn’t see him at first, but I knew someone had arrived because every head turned in his direction and words died on every lip. It might have been someone else, some baron who was a power behind the throne, but no, the man who stepped out from among the attendants dropped onto one of the gold-leafed chairs on the dais with a clear sense of ownership. He was too far away for me to see him very well, but the strength of his personality was apparent—reflected in the undivided attention of every single person in the room. Great Anet, I thought, I have been deceived, and I looked over at Costis in amazement because it was he who had deceived me. This was not the weak and silly man he had described. This was not the king of the Attolians they talked about in the empire. This was a man who held his court in thrall as if he were the emperor himself.
“The queen lives and will be well,” said the king, and everyone breathed again. In unison, they dipped their heads and turned their palms up, grateful to receive the blessing of their gods, but not because they would have abandoned Eugenides if she had died. No. They feared the worst because they cared for her and perhaps, as I later learned, because the king’s health was also poor. The Attolians knew their precarious position and feared to lose either head of state. He was their sovereign as much as she. I could not doubt it.
Oh, my Costis, I thought, oh, my friend. I turned to him, panic filling my heart because he was as solid and unflappable as ever, and he was an idiot. Never in all his stories of the king had he shown me this man sitting on the dais—this man, who had seized a throne and in so short a time made it indisputably his own. I’d counted on the fact that Costis was the favorite of a weak and petty man—that the king who had forgiven him once would forgive him again and that any consequences of the king’s anger would fall on me alone. But powerful men like this had no patience for those who disappointed them. I looked at Costis and only in that moment recognized—to my horror—that the expression on his face was not anger but stubbornness. He meant to lie to his king. He would try to conceal my master’s death, sure that the king would free me and I could flee before the king learned he had been deceived.
“Great king,” I said, turning away from him, shouting toward the far end of the room, struggling to advance, but held by the arms of the guard.
All around me people inhaled sharply—it was as if the whole room had gasped. I’d merely used the archaic form of “great,” hoping to flatter him. “Great king,” I repeated even louder, “my master, Nahuseresh, is dead. I have—I have deceived your servant to secure my freedom.”
I heard Costis shout from behind me that it was his fault, not mine, and I could hear him struggling to come forward. The king waved one hand, and Costis was silent. The king waved again, and the men holding me back eased their grip. I stumbled as close as I dared and dropped to my knees, hastily assembling in my head a story to persuade the king of Attolians that I had left the empire for no other reason than a desire to serve him.
“Kamet.” He spoke with such familiarity, as if we were friends meeting
“I am reluctant,” said the king slowly, studying his boots as if they were a surprise there on the end of his legs, and wriggling one, as if checking its polish before starting again, “I am reluctant to incur the wrath of the gods by claiming that a man lives when they may take any of us at their pleasure, but I believe that Nahuseresh is in perfect health.”
I couldn’t imagine what he meant.
The king shifted on his throne. “It is my fault. Let neither of us blame Costis.” How amusing that both of us were absolving Costis, but it was nonsense. The king was speaking nonsense.
“Nahuseresh was not poisoned.”
Of course he was poisoned. Laela had told me so.
“My ambassador in the empire, Ornon, arranged for Laela to meet you in the passage and misdirect you. We didn’t tell Costis.”
Misdirect me? Lie. He meant “lie to me.”
I thought back to when Laela had stopped me before I reached my master’s apartments—had saved me from the inquisition. Hadn’t she? I shook my head in disbelief. There had been no one to support or contradict her story. We had been alone. But it was impossible. It was absolutely impossible. Why would Laela lie?
We don’t trust one another. We don’t do each other favors.
Everything she said had made sense to me—my master was desperate to recover his place at court, and he had been failing. The emperor was unhappy, Nahuseresh’s friends had turned away from him, and he was an embarrassment to his brother—so the emperor had gotten rid of him. It seemed perfectly clear, but I had taken it for truth, had believed Laela without question because I had believed in her. I had trusted her. I’d left the palace in a panic on the basis of nothing but her word. Oh, Laela, I thought. Did you lie to me?
She had.
She had lied. I could feel my heart breaking. When only she could have betrayed me, she had. Laela. Laela, I thought. Why?