The Queen of Attolia

The second novel in Megan Whalen Turner's Queen's Thief series is set in a world resembling the ancient Mediterranean, where three small countries vie for power while the expansionist Mede Empire watches from across the sea. The mountain country of Eddis, ruled by a young queen also called Eddis, sits between the lowland nations of Attolia and Sounis. Eugenides, the queen's cousin and the son of her minister of war, holds the hereditary position of Queen's Thief, a royal spy and infiltrator.

The novel opens with Eugenides hiding inside the queen of Attolia's palace, where he has been spying on Eddis's behalf. Attolia's soldiers discover him and chase him through the palace's tunnels, chimneys, and corridors. He leaps from a parapet, survives the fall, and flees through the city, but crashes into a board nailed between olive trees outside the walls, a trap set specifically for him. Dogs bring him down, and the queen of Attolia greets her captive by name.

News reaches Eddis, who admits she was wrong to send him despite his warnings. Eddis has already closed the gates of the Hamiathes Reservoir, cutting off water to Attolia's crops through the Aracthus River, but Attolia refuses any ransom. Further enraged by the calculated insults of Eddis's ambassador, Attolia initially orders Eugenides hanged. The Mede ambassador Nahuseresh, a relative of the Mede emperor, intervenes, suggesting a quick death is exactly what Eddis hopes for. Attolia devises a more devastating punishment: She has Eugenides strapped to a chair and orders his right hand severed with a sword, invoking an old tradition for punishing thieves. He begs to serve her instead, but she refuses. Three days later she finds him feverish with infected wounds and orders him returned to Eddis before he dies.

An Attolian officer dumps Eugenides's unconscious body onto the stones of Eddis's courtyard. Eddis maintains her composure, releases the reservoir waters as agreed, and orders the next 10 large Attolian trade caravans seized as reparations. The palace physician Galen treats his injuries: a severe head wound, an infected eye, dog bites, and the cauterized amputation. The fever worsens. Eugenides becomes delirious, fighting every dose of lethium, a sedative painkiller, until Eddis's voice cuts through his confusion and he obeys her command to swallow the medicine.

Eugenides retreats into months of isolation, practicing writing with his left hand and enduring nightmares of Attolia, the dogs, and the falling sword. Eddis visits when he is lucid, deliberately concealing that the country is now at war with Attolia. After the caravan seizure, Attolia issued an ultimatum, and Eddis responded with two words: "War, then." She opened the reservoir to destroy Attolia's irrigation, and the council voted unanimously for war. Eugenides learns all of this only when the magus of Sounis, the king's chief scholar-advisor, visits and is shocked by the Thief's ignorance. Eddis confirms the larger threat: Sounis plans to ally with Attolia, and if Attolia accepts military aid from the Mede Empire, all three countries will be consumed.

When a craftsman arrives with prosthetic hands and hooks, Eugenides flees to the temple of Hephestia, the Great Goddess, where the goddess's messenger Moira tells him bluntly to stop whining. While supposedly confined to his rooms, Eugenides secretly organizes a covert operation. During Sounis's Navy Festival, his men disguise themselves as Sounisian sailors, board the warships, and detonate their powder magazines, destroying the fleet. He also frames the magus as a traitor, forcing the scholar to flee to Eddis. The destruction of the navy shatters the alliance between Sounis and Attolia, and Sounis turns to Eddis for supplies, trading grain in exchange.

As the war enters a second year, Eugenides resumes sword training, attends council meetings, and endures being treated as a national symbol, though privately he is paralyzed by fear of Attolia's threats. He asks Eddis for 10 days' leave and spends them scouting Attolia's megaron at Ephrata, a fortified royal residence on the coast, counting the garrison and studying the approaches. He returns with a plan: Take a small force down the dry Aracthus riverbed, bypass Attolia's army, and capture the queen. Eddis is furious he went to Attolia without her knowledge, but he insists he must go himself, admitting he dreams about Attolia and cannot explain his feelings. After a long silence, Eddis tells him to go steal the queen of Attolia.

The march takes three nights through the canyon. Disguised in Attolian uniforms, the force sails to the coast. Eugenides's cousin Crodes, posing as an Attolian messenger, delivers a forged message to Ephrata claiming a baron has betrayed the queen. Wooden cannon, painted to look real, appear in the tree line. Attolia, believing she faces bombardment, orders a surrender and descends to a hidden harbor to escape by boat. There she finds Eugenides waiting.

He sails her to a hidden cove and presents a choice: death by drowning, or marriage to him as king of Attolia. He lays out the strategic logic: Together, Eddis and Attolia can stop the Mede and force Sounis to make peace. He returns her hidden knives, tells her she can kill him, and confesses he loves her, recounting how as a boy he watched her dancing alone under the orange trees in her garden. Attolia dismisses his declaration as the greatest lie she has ever heard but cannot bring herself to kill him. They climb the cliff stairs together.

That night, Mede soldiers attack the camp. Nahuseresh, alerted by a mysterious woman at Ephrata, has tracked them. The Eddisians are overwhelmed, and Eugenides surrenders. Attolia greets Nahuseresh as her rescuer and has Eugenides chained. But on a ridge overlooking the battlefield, she turns on the Mede, revealing she knows he has been undermining her throne and suborning her barons. Below, her army executes a pre-planned maneuver, splitting its lines to let Eddis's forces attack the Mede directly. Teleus, the captain of Attolia's guard, rises from the grass behind Nahuseresh with a crossbow. The Mede concedes. When he asks what surety Attolia will offer Eddis, her silence tells him: She will marry the Thief.

Attolia is ferried across the river to meet Eddis. She rides back to Ephrata and unlocks a room to find Eugenides asleep on the floor. For a moment she believes he has been poisoned and feels desolate, realizing she loves him. Eddis checks and confirms he is only sleeping. He wakes, accuses both queens of forgetting him, and laughs for the first time since losing his hand.

Formal negotiations begin in Attolia's capital. Eddis privately offers Attolia a treaty without marriage, but tells her that if she chooses Eugenides, she must believe his sincerity. The ceremony stalls when Attolia refuses to consecrate an altar to Hephestia, revealing that the goddess's messenger Moira betrayed Eugenides twice: She told Attolia how to trap him in the olive grove and later where to find him in the mountains. Stunned, Eugenides takes a kid goat to an unused solarium, slits its throat on a stone table as a sacrifice, and demands answers from the gods. Every window in the palace shatters. The Great Goddess shows him a vision of the Sacred Mountain exploding. A second goddess asks the crucial question: Would he have his hand back and lose Attolia, and see Attolia lost to the Mede? He understands at last that the betrayal was the price of the outcome he now holds.

He sleeps for three days. When he wakes, Attolia is beside him. She confesses that after cutting off his hand, she listened outside his cell for two nights, hearing him cry and then chant a prayer in his fever, and that the sound of his tears has filled her dreams with weeping ever since. She did not recognize love until she thought she had lost him. She asks who she is, that he should love her. He answers: "You are My Queen" (359). She believes him. He asks if she loves him. She says yes. He tells her he loves her. And she believes him.