"...Everything about you reveals your low birth. You'd never be comfortable at the court." "I'd be famous."… — Megan Whalen Turner

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.

"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.

"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.