The Queen of Attolia by Megan Whalen Turner Page A

robe and carried them to his desk. They held the paper in place. He dipped the pen into the ink and began trying to write.
     
    He practiced his writing a little every day and was working on it one afternoon when someone crossed thelibrary to knock on the frame of his open door. He looked up to find his father’s secretary standing with another man just behind him.
    “Yes?” said Eugenides.
    “I’ve brought a tailor,” said the secretary. “Your father mentioned that you might need your dinner clothes refitted or a new set altogether before you can come down for dinner.”
    “Am I coming down for dinner?” Eugenides asked. He hadn’t thought about it. Now that it had been brought to mind, he longed for a permanent excuse to miss the formal dinners with the queen and her court.
    The secretary looked at him without speaking. The tailor waited patiently.
    “I guess I’ll have to, eventually,” said Eugenides, and rinsed his pen. “I don’t know why the old suit won’t fit, though.”
    The tailor helped him dress, doing up the buttons on the undershirt when Eugenides fumbled with them. Dressed, Eugenides bunched in his hand the extra fabric of what had been a fitted overshirt.
    “I’m thinner,” he said, surprised.
    “Probably because you don’t eat,” muttered the tailor through the pins in his mouth, and looked up in time to catch a warning glance from the minister of war’s secretary. He looked back down at the cloth he was pinning, but he didn’t forget the rumors he’d heard. Having seen the queen’s Thief with his own eyes, hethought that they were probably true: that the Thief sent his food back to the palace kitchen without touching it, that he kept to his room, seeing no one, that he’d probably die soon, and the whole city grieving as if he were already gone and that vicious bitch of Attolia to blame. The tailor shrugged and paid close attention to his work.
    “The undershirt will have to be recut,” he said. “I might need a few days to get it done.”
    “Take your time,” said Eugenides.
     
    The gibbous moon, slightly more than half full, shone from a clear sky on the queen’s palace in Attolia. In the summertime, when the palace windows were open, she could lie in the darkness of her bedchamber and listen to the wheels of the heavy carts rumbling in the streets as farmers dragged their produce into the city for the morning market. It was winter. The windows were closed, and when she woke and looked into the darkness around her, the room was silent. She flicked the covers off with an angry sigh and stood up. From the doorway to an anteroom, an attendant appeared. She collected a robe and gracefully slid it over the outstretched arms, settling it on her mistress’s shoulders.
    “Does Your Majesty require something?” she asked.
    “Solitude,” said the queen of Attolia. “Leave me.” The attendant dutifully left her post and went to stand in the hallway outside the queen’s chambers. The queenmoved to a window and pulled aside the heavy curtains to look at the moon while passing a sleepless night, one of many.
     
    When Eugenides paused in the entranceway to the lesser throne room, those closest to him halted their conversations, puzzled to see a stranger in the doorway, then shocked when they recognized him. He looked older, and unfamiliar after his absence. He’d had the barber clip his hair short again, and his right arm was hidden in a sling. As the court looked him over, silence spread away from the bottom of the stair into the throne room like a wave through a small pond, and he stood immobilized by the stares.
    “Eugenides,” said the queen.
    He turned to find her in the crowd. She held out a hand, and he stepped down the stairs and across the throne room to take it and bow over it.
    “My Queen,” he said.
    “My Thief,” she answered.
    He lifted his head. She squeezed his hand, and he forbore to argue with her.
    “Dinner, I think,” said the queen, and the court