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--
"We can't just -"
"It's not unprecedented," the senior priestess of the records interrupts. "We can't mark the girl down as legitimate, but we can mark her down."
The junior priestess of the records, who the senior priestess privately suspects of practicing her glare on the mirror, levels her glare on the senior priestess. "Usually it's a woman who turns up alone."
"But not always."
"When was the last time, then?"
"Before you were dedicated to Hephestia," the senior priestess says, pointedly, and hopes her glare is effective even if unpractised. "Let it go. Put the girl in the records as the daughter of Eugenides the King's Thief, leave the second half blank, and remind yourself that he must have laid her on the other altar first and she's no concern of ours."
"Fine. Fine." The junior priestess wilts. "You can't help but wonder, that's all."
The senior priestess glances around the record room, with its neat racks of codices and its untidy writing desk, and reminds herself there are no dark corners and the Thief had, to all appearances, left already with his infant daughter gurgling in his arms. "Who knows? Maybe he's got a secret wife somewhere."
--
Once there was a woman of Sounis, who had lived all her life in the capital. Her parents had been born of Eddis but had come down from the mountain to trade in wool and found they liked the sea air. The woman was clever and handsome, and had plenty of suitors, from her family's customers and their Eddisian neighbours and even their Sounisian neighbours, but she disdained them all. She declared that she would only marry the man who brought her something interesting as a courting gift.
The boy who lived next door brought her a beaded shawl, and she laughed and said he would look handsome in it, but not handsome enough to tempt her. The boy from down the street saved up and brought candied fruits traded all the way from an island in the Great Southern Ocean, and she said he was sweet, but not sweet enough to marry. The son of a wealthy merchant brought her a book of love poetry. She thanked him for his kindness, but said she had heard enough pretty words of love.
Finally, one day, a young man said he had heard she wanted an interesting courting gift, and he hoped he had one that qualified. He was a handsome youth, with the looks and accent of Eddis but without tattoos, and a sparkle in his eye. The woman had almost resigned herself to spend her life unmarried, but she said she would see it.
"Listen first," her suitor said. "In the far mountains of Suninex, a bird nests, they say, large enough to carry off a horse to feed to her chicks - or a man grown. Its feathers are purest blue and set in its throat is a stone the size of a fist. So long ago the Shallow Sea was shallow enough to wade, a young man from the highlands set off to the capital to sell his grandfather's horses." And so he told her the story of Roshan, who would become King Roshan, and how he stole the feathers and the stone of the monster-bird which no man before had lived to bring home, and how, later, he traded the stone to the Lady of the Night for the life of his only daughter.
It was late before he finished. The woman had quite forgotten herself listening. But when he fell silent, she laughed, and told him, "That was quite the tale. If you offer me a blue feather as a courting gift, though, I'll have you beaten in the public square as a fraudster."
"Of course not," the youth answered. "The tale itself was the first gift. And if I pleased you, I'll return and bring you another."
And so the youth returned, again and again. Not every evening or even every month, for he warned the woman he had other business in Sounis and sometimes other business in Attolia, but he returned. A year passed, and he told her stories of kings and sailors and clever goatherd girls, of brothers who killed each other for jealousy and sisters who rescued their brothers, of star-crossed lovers triumphant. He told her, at last, the story of the god Eugenides and the first Thief of Eddis, and when he was done he said, "I have a truth to offer you, and a question."
"I'll take it," said the woman, and took his hand, for she had decided long since that if the question was if she would have him for a husband, the answer was yes.
And the youth said, "I am the King's Thief. I will never be yours entirely; the god's claim comes first. Knowing that, will you have me anyway?"
"I will," the woman said. And they wed at the small altar of Hephestia in Sounis.
When the Thief returned to Sounis, they lived in her parents' house as husband and wife and were happy; when he was gone, she said her husband was away trading. They had sons and daughters, and when their father was there he played with them and told them stories, and when he was gone their mother told them stories of the adventures he must be having. Twenty years passed this way. Then it happened that the woman had another child, a daughter, born early while her husband was away.
When he came home and saw the baby safe in her mother's arms, the Thief's face turned grey.
"What's the matter, my husband?" his wife said. "She was born early, but she lived, and now she's healthy and strong. How can she be anything but a joy to us?"
"Because she can be nothing to us," said her husband. "She is marked by my god, and I must take her home to Eddis."
His wife grew angry then, and told him, "If you steal my daughter, you are no husband of mine."
"I told you my god had the first claim," the Thief said. He took his daughter and left. And the woman who had been his wife wept, and told her children their father was dead, and never spoke again of her last daughter.
--
The junior priestess looks at the senior priestess with an expression like she had bitten on two pieces of bread and found a sheep turd between them. "Him? Convince a woman to marry him?"
"He wasn't always so ..."
"Imposing? Gloomy? Have you ever, even once, seen him smile?"
"He smiled at Baroness Epiracthia at the king's coronation. He even danced with her. Twice. Baron Epiracthus looked like he was about to burst."
"There's an idea," the junior priestess offers, pursing her lips.
"What?"
"Maybe he seduced someone else's wife. That only takes being charming for one night."
--
Once there was a woman of the coastal provinces on the very edge of Attolia, who had married a man with seven hundred sheep, half an iron mine, and very little charm when those were discounted. She had been young and let her mother drive her into the match, for her mother said she would want for nothing with such a husband. And indeed, at first, he showered her with gifts. He dressed her in the finest wool, dyed purple with imported dyes; he draped her in silver necklaces, and he hired a girl from the town to be her maidservant and tend to her every need.
But she was lonely, and she had cause, for her husband treated her like his other treasures and tried to lock her away. When she was a new bride she had gone constantly to the marketplace, until her husband saw her there talking to a handsome young smith's apprentice, and dragged her home and beat her, and forbid his stableboy from saddling a horse to take her into town again. She cried to her mother, but her mother only said, "Some men are jealous. He is your husband now, and you should try to keep him happy."
So she stayed home and spun, and she and her maidservant gossiped and traded stories as they worked. And one day they talked of a banquet he meant to throw and all the wine they'd need, and the maidservant joked about how stupid the guests would get when they were drunk and how her husband, especially, looked like a marmot with his cheeks all puffed up and pawing at the table. The woman laughed at first. But her husband had overheard; he threw the maidservant out of the house in a rage, while the woman watched too terrified to speak in her defence, and then he beat her for laughing at him.
She did not have the chance to cry to her mother, for her husband was riding to the capital the next day to meet with some Continental merchants, and he dragged his wife with him. She spend the days hiding in their inn room, but her husband was a notable enough man to be invited to the King's court dinners, and to leave his wife at the inn would have made people wonder. The woman came to the banquets. She smiled at other wealthy merchants, and baron's heirs, and foreign visitors with tales to tell. She danced with them all. And she smiled at the Thief of Eddis, who lurked at the edges of the banquets in a cloud of gloom.
On the third night he emerged from the shadows and danced with her. He even smiled back.
Her husband scowled, but said nothing of it as they rode home. He hired her a new maidservant, an old woman who hardly spoke and certainly never gossiped.
The woman left a silver fibula pin on the altar of Philia, goddess of mercy, and prayed his good temper would last the winter. She told her mother, and her mother said, "I'm glad you're working things out. He'll take good care of you."
When spring came roaring up the passes, they went to the capital again. But this time, when he left for his first day's meetings, he took the only key to their inn room and locked her in, and laughed when she began to pound on the door. "It's a good lock. No one can get to you in there," he said, "not even the Thief of Eddis."
The woman paced. She wept. She thought of climbing out the window on a rope of bedsheets, but where would she go? If she made her way home her own mother would have sent her back to her husband. She thought of her prayer to Philia, but the winter was over; Philia had done all she would. She would need to seek help elsewhere. Not even the Thief of Eddis, she thought, and aloud she said, "Eugenides, free me from my husband and I will give you the most precious thing that is mine." Then, tired with her weeping, she lay down to sleep.
When she awoke the sky was dark and the Thief of Eddis was climbing in her window.
"I wondered why you weren't at the king's banquet," he said. And when she had explained why, he asked, "Do you want me to steal you away to Kathodicia where your husband will never find you?"
"He would not weep, but my mother would," the woman answered. The Thief nodded, for it was the answer he'd expected, and made a different offer.
His hands were gentle and his kisses were sweet, and for the next three days he crept in as soon as her husband left and stayed through the afternoon. The woman rode home on a cloud of fond memory. That summer and autumn she was meek and quiet. Her husband had sold his sheep and bought shares of three more mines, and he was busy enough with them to leave her in peace. In the winter, she gave birth to a daughter.
Her mother cried for joy at her new grandchild, and her quiet old maid gave prayers of thanks to Ula that mother and child were well. But her husband flew into a rage. "A girl? What good is a girl? Might as well leave it in a snowbank for the wolves to eat." And he threw the cup of wine he had brought for his wife across the room, and shattered it.
It had not been lawful since before the days of the Merchant Empire to expose an unwanted child. The woman held her daughter close and did not speak.
Ten days later she awoke from a nap to a silent room. She thought nothing of it, for her daughter hardly cried and slept long and still. But when she found the basket by the window empty, she screamed.
Her mother and her maid came running, but they had not taken the child to soothe. Her husband came running, and he asked what all the noise was for, and then he slapped her. "You can't even keep a child who can't crawl from crawling away?"
The woman felt cold all over, and suddenly she remembered the bargain she had offered to Eugenides last spring. Her next words felt like someone else was speaking with her lips. "I, husband? Who was it that said a girl was only good for wolfbait? There are no footprints in the snow outside my window - who could have gone anywhere he wished through the house? Will we find tracks from the side door? To a deep gully, perhaps, or to the pond that never quite freezes? Look me in the eye and say you hated my child but did no harm. Can you say that to my face while my bruises come out?"
The evidence was circumstantial, but her mother and her maid had heard his wolf-bait remarks and testified against him, and he sealed his own fate by insulting the magistrate. Her husband was hanged for murder before the snow melted. His widow, now the part-owner of four iron mines, did not weep.
And if she ever heard the Thief of Eddis had a daughter now, she kept her opinion to herself.
--
The senior priestess sighs. "If he seduced someone else's wife," she says, "he would still have needed to be charming for one night. And have you ever heard of him getting involved in wintertime sport?"
"If we've never heard of it that might just mean he's very sneaky," the junior priestess points out. Her pen is dripping ink on the table; she knocks it off on the inkpot and tucks it behind her ear. "Sneaky is what the Thief does."
"Whosever bed he was crawling into would have to know how to keep a secret, too. There's no gossip." The senior priestess of the records scowls. "We'd know. No one wants her son to marry his sister by accident."
"Oh, so is that why you took that excessive offering from Baroness Phoria and then put that little blot mark -"
"You know perfectly well about the loose paper in the lowest cubbyhole. Don't play stupid."
The junior priestess rolls her eyes. "But we're just going to let the Thief get away with it."
"He's the Thief. He's sneakier than anyone." The senior priestess shrugs. "For all we know he grabbed a baby out of some poor shepherd's hut and left a bag of jewels in exchange."
--
There once was a woman of Eddis who lived in the Macheddic Mountains far from any city, as close to Mur as the capital of Eddis, almost on the cliffs of the Glass Gorge. It was a poor land and she came from a poor family, but they had warm wool blankets and warm mutton stew and their pride, and that contented them.
The woman loved a boy from a family as poor as hers. They met driving their flocks over the same hills, and their meetings were full of laughter. She would have married him, but his family would never have allowed it. Her grandmother had stolen sheep from his great-uncle, and in such a poor country insults outlive the insulted. So the woman and her sweetheart met in secret in the hills, while his parents tried to arrange his marriage to a litster in town who fancied his handsome face. And then, late in the spring, her monthly blood failed.
It happened that a few days later, the woman was in town, having brought a load of wool to the brokers. She went to the tavern afterwards, and settled in a corner to drown her sorrows.
After a while, a stranger sat down beside her and asked, "Why do you look so sad, my lady? What grieves you?"
"And what business is it of yours?"
"None at all," said the stranger, who was a small man with gleaming eyes and no tattoos. "But sorrow shared is sometimes lightened."
He was a stranger. He would not spread gossip to all her neighbours. So the woman admitted, "I grieve because the boy I love is promised to another. His family hates mine for an old insult. So he must marry a woman of the town, and our child will grow up without a father." And when the stranger asked, she poured out the long story of the old insult, and when his brows furrowed and he said her grandmother had done the God of Thieves proud to so cleverly make sure her children were fed, she did not laugh.
The stranger bought her wine after that, and they talked so long she had to walk home by moonlight.
A month and a half later - as long as it might take a man to climb by secret ways into the Glass Gorge, travel to Mur, conduct some business there, and return - the stranger came to town again. He came this time with a sturdy wooden box on his shoulders, and stayed with the woman's family. A man walking to town saw him scraping beneath a boulder with a curious metal tool, looking pleased. A neighbour visiting late saw him in the barn watching a glass vessel bubble over a tiny fire. The woman's father bought a ewe, not on credit, but with a silver coin stamped with a Murrish bear, and made a remark about clearing old debts. In short order Rumour declared the traveller a dowser who had found a silver vein.
And, faced with the chance of their old enemies becoming rich, the woman's sweetheart's family asked the stranger if he would be their Auletia to settle the old feud.
He returned and told them, "They are willing. As proof of goodwill, they will give you as many ewe lambs as once ewes were stolen from you. But in return, they want their pick of your males." Their old ram had died in the winter, so it made sense they'd want fresh blood. The family agreed.
The woman drove the ewe lambs to their pasture three days later. "Any male on the farm, right?"
"Right," said her sweetheart's father, thinking a male lamb or even his steady old ram was cheap for these ewes, let alone the goodwill of a rich family.
"This one," she said, and took her sweetheart by the hand.
They might have protested the trick, had he not looked so happy. But they still had the ewes, and the feud had grown tiresome. The woman and her sweetheart made their vows at Proas's altar the next day. The stranger left town, muttering about investors and royal licence. The year dragged on, and he did not return. Winter came. The rumours grew quiet. In due course the woman gave birth to a daughter.
And one day, she and her husband woke in the morning to find their daughter gone from her crib, and a bag of silver coins stamped with Eddisian griffins in her place.
They put it about the girl had died of a sudden fever, buried the coins, and poured wine on the roots of a tree as they prayed to whatever gods were listening to leave them alone.
--
"You really think so?"
"It's as good a story as any."
"It's still not a very good story."
"Granted," allows the senior priestess. "But let's face it, the Thief turning up with a daughter however he got one is a fireside tale. What would he want with one?"
The junior priestess rolls her eyes. "Someone's got to be the next Thief, I suppose. He's what, sixty years old now? He won't be around forever."
Maybe forty-five, the senior priestess thinks, but she lets that go. There's a more obvious objection. "Who says there needs to be a Thief?"
"Eugenides?"
"And why should we care what he thinks?"
"He is a god," the junior priestess says, in the voice of someone who wasn't quite convinced herself of the fact.
"Oh, you meant that one?"
"Yes, I meant the god! Why do we need to have two Eugenideses anyway? What was his mother thinking saddling him with a name like that? No wonder he's so strange!"
The senior priestess sighs. "They don't give us veto power. Sometimes I wish they did." The junior priestess raises an eyebrow. "Let me tell you about the twin sons of a very stupid man, when I was newly dedicated..."
--
But something nags at the senior priestess. They set the girl down as the daughter of Eugenides the King's Thief, mother's name unknown. They set about checking the last four generations of an innkeeper's son and a brewer's daughter who had come themselves, hand in hand, to ask for the approval of their family trees. It's always nice to see a love-match. Then they close up the records-room and have supper.
And when the junior priestess is asleep, the senior priestess returns to the records-room with a lamp, and opens the ledger kept underneath the box of loose paper in the lowest cubbyhole, closed with an elaborate knot. It would have been - thirty years ago, maybe more, she doesn't remember just how old the Thief is. But he can't have been full-grown when the record was made, not with his dour certainty. Not when no-one talks about it. This ledger isn't a thick one, in any case.
And there it is, laid out in plain letters. The original name of the Thief, the date of his birth, and the firm notation, "Henceforth to be called: Eugenides, at his own petition."
Hah, thinks the senior priestess, I knew it, and she reties the elaborate knot.
--
Once there was a man of Eddis, whose name was Eugenides. His name had not always been Eugenides, but when the name his mother gave him became insufferable, it had been the only name he could think of bearing. He served his country and his god, and never regretted the blood on his hands.
He had many acquaintances, few by his real name. He had a few friends, who he spoke to seldom. There had never been room for a lover, and no chance of children. Eugenides did not regret that either. Still there were days, more of them as early grey appeared in his hair and his old broken bones started to ache in bad weather, when he wondered who would be the Thief after him.
Late one spring he was trapped on the isle of Chios by a storm. Three days in a damp inn while the wind howled outside had left him glum and miserable; he huddled over his wine goblet and watched a woman and a child of five or six, who might have been her granddaughter, might have been a late-in-life daughter, playing string games beside the hearth. The girl's hands were fast and nimble, and she exclaimed in delight when she made the figure of the aqueduct appear between them. So did her maybe-mother. And Eugenides thought, I wish there were someone I could teach.
For two days more he mulled it over, and the thought would not leave him. So be it. Eugenides was a man who made his choices swiftly.
On Chios, the temples of the old gods had all been turned to music halls and taverns, and the temples of the new gods sat neglected. On the isle of Sera people clung to their gods as Sounis and Attolia snatched them back and forth with constant wars; on Chios they had decided the gods were useless and set them aside. But the stranded traveller was accustomed to finding no altar to his own god. He went out into the storm instead with his cloak pulled close, made his way to the docks where six ships waited with sails furled, and threw into the waves his copper cloak-pin, which he had stolen idly as a youth and kept as a guilty reminder of his sacred purpose. My god, he thought, I want a child. Tell me how to find one, someone who can be the next Thief of Eddis. Tell me that so I need not be the last Thief.
Then he went back to the inn, and drank by the fire until his hands were warm and his head was spinning, and staggered like an old man to bed.
Eugenides did not remember most of the dream he had that night, only that it was warm and soft and his body still went bowstring-tight as if he had been stabbed, overtaken with feelings he thought as foreign to him as love. He remembered whispering thanks, and the words, "No. You won't thank me for this," and hands curled tight against his ribs. The bruises were not there in the morning. His cloakpin was, laying atop his folded tunic. Outside the wind had finally gone still.
Not until three months later, when he managed to fall seasick on a riverboat down the Aracthus, did Eugenides work out that his prayer had been answered, not refused. He was not a man given to regrets. Once the shock subsided, he started to plan.
It happened that that winter, the free hospital in the capital of Attolia took in a woman who said her husband had died in a fire, and she was going to live with her sister in Kathodicia, and this was her first child, yes, at her age: three lies and a truth. She did not scream in labour. She left three days later with her infant daughter, though the midwives begged her to stay. Fourteen days after - hard winter roads and exhaustion - the Thief returned to Eddis, a baby on his back.
Eugenides had known at once that his daughter would never be the Thief of Eddis, and he wondered, as he gave her name to the priestesses of the genealogies, if that was why his god had thought he would not be grateful.
She charmed the court as he never could, and her father loved her as he had forgotten he could love. She married too well and birthed five children. When she had her sixth child, they both knew. She grieved. Her father gave the boy his god's name, his own name, and hoped.
And ten years later, when it was Eugenides with white hair and trembling hands but his daughter who fell, he knew why he would not be grateful.
--
"Eugenides."
The senior priestess of the records wishes her old teacher were here. She could have made an argument that they had veto power. They don't, but it would have sounded good. But she went to pasture years ago - her grandson's sheep pasture by the coast, where she said the sea air was good for her old bones - and the senior priestess doesn't think the argument would hold without her teacher. She can only ask, "Are you sure?"
"I didn't pick it," says the daughter of the Thief.
Her first two sons had been Stenides and Temenus. Sensible, ordinary names. The senior priestess sighs, and reminds herself the Thieves are priests of a very particular god, and the last man who was called Eugenides is eighty years old and still hale and unsmote.
If it all ends in tears, well. Everything does, eventually. She reaches for her inkpot.
--