The Thief

Quotes

1. Ambiades, I realized, was the kind of person who liked to put people in a hierarchy, and he wanted me to understand that I was at the bottom of his. He was supposed to treat me politely in spite of my subservient position, and I was supposed to be grateful.

   For my part, I wanted Ambiades to understand that I considered myself a hierarchy of one. I might bow to the superior force of the magus and Pol, but wasn't going to bow to him. Neither of us moved.

2. 

   "...Everything about you reveals your low birth. You'd never be comfortable at the court."

   "I'd be famous."

   "Oh, you're already that, Gen," he said pityingly.

3. 

   "You can always give me some of Ambiades's food."

   The magus gave me an ugly look. "You'll get your share and nothing else. No one's going hungry so that you can eat."

   "I don't see why not," I said as I lay down on the grass for a nap. It had dried in the sumer sun to crakling stalks that poked me in the arms and neck. "I'm a lot more important than anyone else here," I told the blue sky above me.

4. 

   "I can steal anything."

   "So you claimed. It was a wager to that effect that landed you in prison." He picked a pen nib off the desk behind him and turned it in his hands for a moment. "It is too bad for you that intelligence does not always attend gifts such as yours, and fortunate for me that it is not your intelligence I am interested in, but your skill. If you are as good as you say you are."

   I repeated myself. "I can steal anything."

   "Except yourself out of the king's prison?" the magus asked, lifting one eyebrow this time.

   I shrugged. I could do that, too, but it would take time.

5. 

   Neither the king's reward nor Pol could stop me, but I wanted to be a kingmaker myself. I wanted to be the first one to steal Hamiathes's Gift in hundreds and hundreds of years. I wanted to be famous. Only I couldn't steal the damned thing if I didn't know where if was, and only the magus could find it for me. I would stay with him until he led me to the stone, but I promised myself that someday I would stick a sharp knife into his arrogance and give it a good twist.

6. 

   "He couldn't have found the whereabouts of the stone from the papers in my study," the magus went on. "I was careful to destroy any records. But he could have followed us and stolen the Gift once it was located."

7. 

   "Gen-" Sophos started to ask another question, but I interrupted him.

   "No," I said, "not Gen. Eugenides from now on. I never, never, want to hear Gen again in my life."

   The magus laughed while I shook my head.

   "You haven't spent any time in the king's prison," I said. "And you haven't had to drink your way through every disreputable wineship in the city of Sounis. I cannot tell you how sick I have been of cheap wine and of being dirty. Of talking with my mouth half closed and chewing with it open. Of having bugs in my hair and being surrounded by people who think Archimedes was the man at the circus last year who could balance four olives on his nose."

   The magus looked around the books piled in my study. "I remember that Archimedes. I think it was five olives," he said with a straight face.

   "I don't care if it was twelve," I said.

8. 

   "If you want to keep something safe from thieves, hide it carefully and keep a close watch over it."

9. 

   The magus described the fighting with the guard in detail and made me look very good indeed.

10. 

    While the magus, realizing his error, was trying to word an apology, my father came to look in at me. "I thought I heard you laughing up your sleeve," he said.

11. 

    With my good hand I reached under the braid at the base of my neck to free the thong that was tied there. It was the shorter of the two that Pol had given me on the banks of the Aracthus. One-handed, I couldn't easily get the knot undone, and several strands of my own dark hair came with the thong when I pulled it free.

    I glanced back briefly at the magus and was delighted to see his mouth open in astonishment.

    "Gen," he said under his breath, "you viper."

    Above the queen's extended palm I held Hamiathes's Gift. It had hung hidden in my hair since I'd braided it there after first fighting in the Sea of Olives.

12. 

    The minister of war snorted. "Not if he had to follow you on a horse," he said.

13. 

    The queen laughed, and I flushed in the privacy of my bedroom. I do hate horses. That was the first sign that I wasn't going to be the soldier my father hoped for.

14. 

    I am a master of foolhardy plans, I thought. I have so much practice I consider them professional risks. Sooner or later they would have needed the cell and the chains for someone more important, the minister of the exchequer, for instance, and I would have been moved to another cell. Sooner or later I would have had my chance to escape, if I hadn't died of disease first.

15. 

    I stifled a snort of my own in the silence that followed. The magus must have still been tired. He must have once known, but forgotten, that the minister of war had married the daughter of the previous King's Thief. He was talking to my father. The magus might have remembered this, might have recognized me from the first time he'd seen me in Sounis, but we had never been introduced. When he'd come with Sounis's marriage proposals, I had been sulking in my rooms.

16. 

    "Surely I am a better mistress to serve?"

    "You are more beautiful, Your Majesty." The queen smiled again before I finished. "But she is more kind."

    So much for discretion. The smile disappeared. You could have heard a pin drop onto the stone floor as her alabaster cheeks flushed red. No one could ever accuse the queen of Attolia of being kind.

17. 

    "I don't know how he would have gotten out of the prison on his own," said the magus. "It seems a foolhardy plan to have relied on my intervention."

18. 

    The minister of war snorted. The magus didn't recognize this as high praise, and he said stiffly, "I've been told that his father wanted him to be a soldier. I'd be happy to inform his father that he has a son to be proud of."

19. 

    The magus might have heard me thinking. "He does have other skills to be proud of," he said. For instance, I thought, stealing Hamiathes's Gift not once but twice. Who else in history had done that? But the magus referred to the fight with the Queen's Guard at the base of the mountain. That wasn't a skill I appreciated much. If I'd been as inept with a sword as I was in a saddle, my father might not have driven me so hard to be a soldier and to let the title of King's Thief lapse forever. It had been meaningless for so many generations, and he'd felt strongly that it should disappear for good.

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