SPOILERS AHEAD. DO NOT READ UNLESS YOU'VE READ THE FULL SERIES.
AUTHOR'S NOTE
This is a story about a 10-year-old boy who's named Eugenides, after the God of Thieves. (I've written two books about Eugenides, The Thief and The Queen of Attolia.)
Eugenides' family calls him Gen and wishes he would grow up to be a soldier like most of the men in the country of Eddis. Gen would rather follow in his grandfather's footsteps and become the King's Thief.
One thousand years before this story takes place, a person could become the King's Thief by stealing a stone called Hamiathes' Gift (if he or she didn't die in the process). Some time in the past, the stone was lost, and the King's Thief became a title handed down from parent to child.
Gen's family finds the title embarrassing and hopes it will disappear; Gen doesn't. Despite his family's objections, he intends to be the next Thief of Eddis. All he needs to do is practice . . .
THE corridor was long, and it was a good place to pick up speed, but the stone floor was covered in rugs and a rumple at this point could be fatal. Gen kept a careful eye on the ground in front of him and only glanced up quickly to be sure the way ahead of him was clear.
Gods forbid he should run into another aunt.
He had slipped by Aunt Livia earlier only because she had been startled.
Most of his aunts would have thought it beneath their dignity to clutch at a passing nephew, but not Aunt Livia. She had only missed his collar by a fingertip. Gen had laughed out loud as he ran on.
He was approaching a smaller rug. It lay like a trap in the middle of the passage and he lifted his feet to sail over it.
Behind him he could hear the pounding footsteps of his cousins.
The corridor was a good place for them to pick up speed as well, and he rather hoped that one of them might slip on the carpet.
There was a stutter in the steady thump of boots behind him.
Someone may have slipped, but Gen couldn't take the time to check, and it didn't seem to have slowed the group. They were all older than he was by several years. Their legs were longer and they were gaining ground fast, yelling threats as they came. What they threatened he couldn't quite hear as too many voices mingled into a shouted babble, but he could imagine.
Exactly what they had in mind didn't matter because the corridor would soon be interrupted by a light well that let sunshine from the skylights above fall to the rooms two floors below. His path ended in a balcony that overlooked the atrium. He could follow it clockwise or counterclockwise around the open space. Already he could hear his cousins' footsteps shortening as they slowed to see which way he turned, to the left or the right. He lengthened his steps.
Ahead of him was a stone bench and beyond that was a low wall. The far side of the well was eight feet away. Gen put one foot onto the bench and the other on the top of the wall and leapt across the well with only air between him and the stone floor 30 feet below. He made the far wall easily and landed one foot on it for a brief moment before he tumbled over. There was no bench below him and he fell heavily onto the stone floor, scrambling up again immediately and checking to his left.
If his cousins had guessed what he intended, they might have sent someone up a passage there to spoil his moment of triumph, but the passage was empty. He could turn back to savor his victory.
The light well was four times as long as it was wide. By the time his cousins had run around the side of it, whichever way they chose to go, he would be safely away.
They knew it and had panted to a halt in front of the bench. None of them dared to attempt the jump.
What they said was not nice.
There were so many things that Gen wanted to shout back that he couldn't settle on any one of them. He put his thumbs in his ears and stuck out his tongue. A heavy hand fell on his shoulder and he whirled in panic.
"Sten," he gasped. "Gods, you scared me."
His older brother Stenides stood behind him. He looked grim, but Gen smiled in delight and turned back to his pursuers more cocksure than before. He put his thumbs back in his ears. He couldn't open the fingers on his right hand to achieve an entirely satisfying wave, and he had no sooner begun waving the fingers of the other hand when Stenides shook him hard and his hands dropped.
"What's he done?" Stenides asked.
Gen turned to his brother, speechless with outrage, while Cleon, the leader among his cousins, answered from across the light well.
"Sten, he's taken Breia's earrings. The gold ones father gave her on her birthday."
They were beautiful earrings, gold set with crystal and onyx. Too lovely really for a girl of 13, they were quite valuable. To have taken them was far more than a child's prank. Stenides looked down at his brother unhappily.
"Ask him why," Gen said, as angry as he had been exuberant only a moment before.
Stenides turned to Cleon. Cleon threw up his hands. "Because he's a little savage and someone should have wrung his neck years ago, why else?" he shouted. The cousins behind him, Timos and Tenris and Phaedrus, loudly supported him.
Gen shouted over them, his shrill voice cutting across their deeper ones. "Because she said that if father hadn't married so far beneath himself, he could have made himself king!"
Gen felt Stenides stiffen beside him and the boys on the far side of the light well were abruptly silent. Their situation had changed. A moment before they had been securely in the right, and suddenly they suspected they were deeply in the wrong.
Even Cleon. If his sister Breia had in fact insulted their cousins' family, then it was Stenides who was going to come around the light well with grim purpose.
Timos, Tenris, and Phaedrus shuffled their feet nervously. Four on one they could beat Stenides. . . if they chose to. But that would mean supporting Breia's insult, and only a fool would do that. Breia was a whey-faced little shrew, and she'd overstepped herself. The King of Eddis was ill and both his sons had died. He had only daughters to inherit unless one of his brothers seized the throne. With her sniping comment, Breia had insulted not only Gen's mother, who was the daughter of the King's Thief and strictly speaking not a member of a landholding family, but also Gen's father, implying that he would consider denying his niece her rightful inheritance. This kind of insult dragged whole families into feuds that lasted for years.
Cleon looked appalled. Then he shrugged an apology. "I'm sorry, Sten," he said. "I had no idea. I'll talk to father and he'll talk to Breia."
The cousins bobbed their heads and melted away.
Stenides turned to Gen.
"You're lucky, whelp," he said. "If I hadn't been here they would have pounded you to mush and taken the earrings back." Gen's theft would have been overlooked by common consent, as the earrings would have been safely returned, and nobody would have heard any more of Breia's insulting words.
"If they'd caught me," said Gen.
"Which they would have."
"Would not," Gen protested. "I would have disappeared like that"—he snapped his fingers—"before they were halfway around the light well."
"You would have hopped it?"
"Yes!"
"That's why you've been standing on one foot this whole time?" Stenides asked.
Gen stuck out his chin and put his sore foot on the ground, but he didn't put any weight on it. He'd twisted his ankle falling from the wall. It hadn't hurt at first, but as the excitement faded it was beginning to hurt quite a bit.
Stenides smiled at him and then turned to offer him a ride on his back.
"You're an idiot," he said.
"Breia should have her lips sewed shut," said Gen.
"She'll probably wish she had before her father's through with her." It was Breia's insults that would be officially forgotten, but nonetheless discussed in scandalized whispers by everyone in the palace now that Gen had been successful in his theft.
So long as he left the jewellry on an altar, dedicated to a god or goddess where it could never be retrieved by the original owner or by himself, no criticism would come his way.
He was holding the earrings so tightly in his right hand that he could feel their sides digging into his palm and suspected that their delicate wires would be badly bent before he got them to the temple.
"He's not going to give her another set of earrings, that's for certain," said Gen with great satisfaction.
Stenides sighed.
"If you had just told me. . ."
"If I had told you, you would have told Cleon and he would have made her apologize, and she would have smiled with all of her teeth showing and said, 'Oh I am so sorry, of course I was just joking. . .,' and she was not joking at all," said Gen.
Stenides came to a staircase. "Do you want to go dedicate them now?" he asked.
Gen had to think for a minute before he answered. The boys' dormitory would be empty in the middle of the afternoon. He needn't dedicate the earrings immediately.
"Do you want to go lie down for a while?" Stenides asked, sensing his hesitation.
"Yes, please," said Gen.
"All right, then."
Stenides started up the stairs. He took Gen all the way to his cot and laid him gently on it.
He ruffled his younger brother's hair. "Cleon would have been very sorry after he'd pounded you to mush, but Phaudrus wouldn't have been," he said.
"You want to watch out for him."
Gen looked up at his brother. Stenides was one of his favorite people, certainly his favorite sibling. Like Gen, Stenides didn't fit well into his martial world. He had a gift for the mechanical and the mathematical. It was Stenides who had taught his younger brother to read and was most often to be found absorbed in his unwarlike hobby of watchmaking. In spite of being different, Stenides was well liked. Gen sighed.
"Did you see my jump?" he asked.
"Gods, yes I did," said Stenides. "I thought I'd never exhale again. What possessed you to do something that insane?"
"It wasn't insane."
"You might have been killed."
"Of course not," said Gen, genuinely surprised. "I've practiced."
Stenides looked at him in horror. "Do you mean to say that you have done that before?"
"Of course."
Stenides was momentarily dumbstruck. "Gen, did grandfather teach you to do that?"
Gen looked away.
"I'm going to be the Thief of Eddis," he said.
Stenides sat down on the bed beside him.
"Gen," he said, "You shouldn't listen to the stories he tells you. Being the Thief. . ., it's just a title. It doesn't mean anything anymore."
Gen only looked stubborn and Stenides was wise enough to give up an argument he knew he couldn't win.
"Well," he said.
"Promise me at least that you won't go jumping across any more light wells."
Gen smiled. "All right," he agreed easily.
"Good enough," said Stenides and walked away.
Gen lay back down on his cot and looked at the earrings in his hand. His grandfather actually stole cloak pins to leave on the altar of the God of Thieves. Admiring the way the light sparkled in the bits of crystal, Gen decides he preferred to steal earrings.
He'd lied to Stenides.
Of course he was going to continue jumping over light wells.
Someday, he promised himself, he was going to be the next Thief of Eddis.
The End.
THE QUEEN’S THIEF NOVELS
The Thief
The Queen of Attolia
The King of Attolia
A Conspiracy of Kings
Thick as Thieves
The World of the Queen’s Thief Collection
SHORT STORIES
Instead of Three Wishes
