The Queen of Attolia Read Online Free PDF

see him, and she listened to his labored breathing as her eyes adjusted to the dark.
    He lay on his side in a corner of the cell with his injured arm cradled against his chest and a knee pulled up to protect it. He sweated in the damp cold of the cell and didn’t move until Attolia prodded him with one slippered foot. He opened his eyes and looked up at her without expression. The lamp that someone held behind her shone down on his face, and she could see the scar on his cheek. His skin was so pale that the scar showed dark against it.
    His eyes were bright, and she bent down to look into them, expecting the hatred she often saw in the faces in her prison, but in Eugenides’s eyes there was only fever and pain and an emotion she couldn’t put a name to.
    “Please,” he whispered. His voice was low but clear. “Don’t hurt me anymore.”
    Attolia recoiled. Once, as a child, she’d thrown her slipper in a rage and had knocked an amphora of oil from its pedestal. The amphora had been a favorite of hers. It had smashed, and the scent of the hair oil inside had lingered for days. She remembered the scent still, though she didn’t know what in the stinking cell had brought it to mind.
    She bent over Eugenides again, needing to be sure her punishment had been effective.
    “Eugenides,” she said, “what can you steal with only one hand?”
    “Nothing,” he answered hopelessly.
    Attolia nodded. Eddis would think twice before risking a favorite in Attolia’s power. He was very young, she realized. She hadn’t considered his age before and reminded herself that his age didn’t matter. All that mattered was the threat he posed. Still, seeing him huddled on the floor, she felt a little surprised that Eddis would endanger someone so young. But Eddis was not much older, Attolia thought. Not many years ahead of Eddis herself, Attolia was a far more experienced queen. She turned to the jailer.
    “I said I wanted a doctor to check him.”
    “He did, Your Majesty.”
    “The bites on his leg are infected.” She pointed with one finger at the swollen red skin that showed through the torn cloth.
    The prison keeper looked suddenly wary. “Hechecked the burns, as you ordered, Your Majesty.”
    “Only the burns?”
    “I suppose, Your Majesty. Those were your orders, Your Majesty.”
    Attolia sighed in irritation. A familiar, not uncomfortable emotion. “If I didn’t want him dead of one infection, why would I want him dead from another?”
    “I’m sorry, Your Majesty.”
    “You’ll be sorrier.” She turned to the captain of her guard, who had accompanied her. “Get him back to Eddis before he dies.” She left the cell and made her way up the many stairs of the palace to her private anteroom. She passed through it and into her bedchamber, where she sent away her various attendants and sat for a long time in a chair looking out over the sea as the last sunlight faded from the sky. She dismissed thoughts of the Thief lying on the floor of his cell, but found herself thinking instead of her favorite amphora, broken, and the oil spilled.

C HAPTER F OUR
    T HE QUEEN OF E DDIS STOOD in the courtyard to meet her Thief when they brought him up the mountain. With her stood those of the court she couldn’t order to be elsewhere. She remembered Eugenides asking once why so many of the events around her looked like a circus and why he always had the part of the dancing bear. When she saw the litter they carried him in, it looked like nothing so much as a cage, though it was closed off by curtains and not bars.
    Eddisian soldiers carried the litter. They’d taken it from the Attolians at the base of the mountain and carefully lifted it up the winding road that followed the old watercourse of the Aracthus River. The Attolians walked beside it, and her ambassador and his party walked behind. Meeting her gaze as they entered the courtyard, the ambassador shook his head slightly, warning her to expect the worst. He’d sent her word