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8c0e0d7
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He looked gravely at the king. "It isn't an easy thing to give your loyalty to someone you don't know, especially when that person chooses to reveal nothing of himself. But no matter, Your Majesty. You are revealed at last." The king looked down at his nakedness and back at the captain. "Was that a joke?" he asked."
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Megan Whalen Turner |
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326e5cd
|
Tell me a story then...keep me occupied." "A story?...What makes you think I can tell a story?" "Insight," said the king, "Go on."
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Megan Whalen Turner |
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e97d10f
|
Ah," said the magus, understanding at once. "I see that he means to be prepared if he meets him again." "Surely that's unlikely," said Sounis. "I don't think unlikely means to him what it does to the rest of us," said the magus."
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Megan Whalen Turner |
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726aa7b
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Being six feet off the ground does give one a sense of superiority.
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superiority
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Megan Whalen Turner |
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2f36067
|
I can't leave her there all alone, surrounded by stone walls... She's too precious to give up.
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Megan Whalen Turner |
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29f8fe7
|
Anyone who can steal the king's seal ring can manage the locks on his record room.
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eugenides
gen
sounis
the-thief
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Megan Whalen Turner |
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96888f2
|
Eddis looked at her minister, curious. "Your head?" she asked. Attolia explained. "He had to be forcibly dissuaded from strangling his son." "So have we all from time to time," Eddis said seriously."
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Megan Whalen Turner |
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9dac4f2
|
What a strange world it is, where prisoners are left their weapons and the written word is a mortal danger.
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Megan Whalen Turner |
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ee46dc0
|
One cannot toss ambassadors back like bad fish," said Eugenides. "You treat them with care, or you'll find you've committed an act of war."
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Megan Whalen Turner |
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460b13a
|
I am very good at groveling.
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Megan Whalen Turner |
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9bee01f
|
Would you like to hear more romance of the evening? He told me that the Guard should be reduced by half, and I threw an ink jar at his head." "Is that when he cried?" "He ducked," Attolia said dryly. Grown more confident of the queen's humor, Relius said, "I had not pictured you for a fishwife." "Lo, the transforming power of love."
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intrigue
love
romance
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Megan Whalen Turner |
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f6d4230
|
The window opened in the same direction as the king's, and there, summer-bright and framed by the darkness of the stairwell, was the same view. Costis passed it, and then went back up the stairs to look again. There were only the roofs of the lower part of the palace and the town and the city walls. Beyond those were the hills on the far side of the Tustis Valley and the faded blue sky above them. It wasn't what the king saw that was import..
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eugenides
homesickness
the-king-of-attolia
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Megan Whalen Turner |
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3897c99
|
In the silent aftermath, I said, "We'll give them a second chance." With my right hand, I reached to the other pocket. I had known as soon as I lifted the false bottom in the gun case and looked underneath what it meant. I had tried without ceasing to find some alternative to Attolia's ruthless advice and I had failed. Gen's gift told me that I had not failed for lack of trying. I'd lifted out the matching gun and read its archaic inscripti..
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Megan Whalen Turner |
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9383ad7
|
Why didn't you tell me to take Attolia's advice from the beginning?" "I thought you should figure it out. What you learn for yourself, you will know forever," said Eugenides. "Pol used to say that," said Sounis, surprised. "I learned it from him. I just wish to my god that I had his patience for the process."
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Megan Whalen Turner |
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5e54fb6
|
It might have been preferable," Eddis admitted, dryly, "if you had thrown off your chains of bondage solely for love of me. It would certainly have been more flattering." Standing so near to him, she was looking up into his face and watching it closely. "I am willing to accept, however, that we are real people, not characters in a play. We do not, all of us, need to be throwing inkwells. If we are compatible with one another, is that not su..
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Megan Whalen Turner |
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b3d23b7
|
Lilies, I rule, heads, you do," he [the King] said, and threw the coin into the air. "Lilies, you rule, heads, you throw again," said Attolia. The coin dropped. Eugenides looked at it and then showed it to her. "No need," he said. The coin sat in his palm, obverse, showing the lilies of Attolia. He flipped it again and again and again. Each time it landed showing the lilies. ... (Relius) He wanted to dismiss the coin toss as slight of hand..
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eugenides
relius
|
Megan Whalen Turner |
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251a4bf
|
Is that what the wine is for? To help you think?" "Oh, the wine. The wine, Costis, is to help hide the truth. It doesn't work. It never has, but I try it every once in a while just in case something in the nature of the wine might have changed."
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Megan Whalen Turner |
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7e8894d
|
We are taught to treat a practice sword with all the respect of a real weapon, so no thoughtless mistakes are made" "Oh... In Eddis, we learn to keep tack of the weapon we have in our hand."
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Megan Whalen Turner |
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a9eed1c
|
I thought that being king meant I didn't have to kill people myself. I see know that was another misconception.
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Megan Whalen Turner |
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628fe58
|
That one,"-he nodded toward the closed door-" will rule more than just Attolia before he is done. He is an Annux, a king of kings."
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Megan Whalen Turner |
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01840b4
|
All of my own impulses to balance and move seemed to conflict with those of the guards, and I was jerked and jostled down the portico, just as graceful as a sick cat.
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Megan Whalen Turner |
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c49a46a
|
I know that if you don't look for an alternative, Sophos, you certainly won't find one.
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good-advice
logic
|
Megan Whalen Turner |
|
5e6fe69
|
Who was the Thief that she would love him? A youth, just a boy with hardly a beard and no sense at all... A liar, she thought, an enemy, a threat. He was brave, a voice inside her said, he was loyal... A fool, she answered back. A fool and a dead one. She ached with emptiness.
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Megan Whalen Turner |
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e5f2c95
|
I'm sorry, Dite." Dite shrugged away the apology. "You have spared my brother when you could have killed him and you have offered me escape from the cesspit of my family and this court. You know what it means to me, to make music in the court of Ferria. You've put a purse and an impossible dream in my hand. I don't know why you should apologize." "Because I am exiling you, Dite. I intend to raze your patrimony and salt its earth. You emphat..
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Megan Whalen Turner |
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6bb8df4
|
The two soldiers laughed, and even the king smiled. Reinforcing Costis's suspicion that Eugenides had been responsible for Ornon's lost sheep, Boagus asked, "Do you still baa like a lamb when he walks into the room?" Eugenides shook his head. "Ornon took me aside first thing after the coronation and explained that it would be against my dignity." Aulus and Boagus stared. Eugenides expression was bland. "He said that?" Aulus asked. "He did,..
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Megan Whalen Turner |
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3aae6f6
|
We would have died without the additional men," he admitted matter-of-factly. "But we would have taken the entire Mede army with us. Poets would have written about us, and songs would have been sung about us-" "For all the good that would have done your dead bodies," Eugenides cynically interrupted. "Well, I wasn't looking forward to it," said Sounis caustically. "But over our dead bodies the Medes would never have been accepted by the peop..
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Megan Whalen Turner |
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815cab8
|
Were you lying?" "I never lie," he said piously. "About what?" "The sand, the snake." For a young man who never lied, he seemed surprisingly unoffended by the question."
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lying
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Megan Whalen Turner |
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ecff290
|
She was the stone-faced queen, then and ever after. She had needed the mask to rule, and she had been glad to have it. She wondered if Eugenides was glad of his.
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Megan Whalen Turner |
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576387d
|
The queen!" someone shouted in alarm, and the King erupted like a wild animal caught in a snare." --
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irene
|
Megan Whalen Turner |
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3e169d9
|
The Thieves of Eddis don't have breaking points. We have flash points instead, like gunpowder.
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Megan Whalen Turner |
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b9cceea
|
I cut off your hand. I have been living with your grief and your rage and your pain ever since. I don't think-I don't think I had felt anything for a long time before that, but those emotions at least were familiar to me. Love I am not familiar with. I didn't recognize that feeling until I thought I had lost you in Ephrata. And when I thought I was losing you a second time, I realized I would give up anything to keep you-my lip service to o..
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Megan Whalen Turner |
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2cb2bb9
|
I am an ambassador," Akretenesh warned me, anger bringing his confidence back. "You cannot shoot." "I don't mean to," I reassured him, still smiling. I adopted his soothing tones. "Indeed, you are the only man I won't shoot. But if I aimed at anyone else, it might give others a dangerously mistaken sense of their own safety." I raised my voice a trifle, though it wasn't really necessary. "We will have another vote, Xorcheus." They elected m..
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Megan Whalen Turner |
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6ff03ab
|
Costis flinched and looked away from this compensation to the king's handicap, only to find himself looking into the king's face instead. Eugenides matched Costis look for look, his expression grave, his eyes like pools of darkness deeper than Costis could penetrate. For a moment Costis could see, not so much what was hidden but that there were things hidden that the king did not choose to reveal. Things that were not for Costis to see. The..
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eugenides
|
Megan Whalen Turner |
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360053a
|
If I couldn't be Eddis, I would be Attolia. If they needed to see my uncle in me, then I would show him to them. And I would take Attolia's advice because if I identified my enemy and destroyed him, Sounis would be safe.
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Megan Whalen Turner |
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e42fbfb
|
On the bed, Eugenides stirred restlessly. "Upset at the sight of blood?" he said. "Not my wife, Ornon." "Your blood," the ambassador pointed out. Eugenides glanced at the hook on his arm and conceded the point. "Yes," he said. He seemed lost in memory. The room was quiet."
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irene
king-of-attolia
|
Megan Whalen Turner |
|
dda509a
|
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."
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Megan Whalen Turner |
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201a993
|
The queen was settling on the edge of the bed, ungainly with hesitation and at the same time exquisite in her grace, like a heron landing in a treetop.
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|
eugenides
the-king-of-attolia
|
Megan Whalen Turner |
|
33314a1
|
If Attolia could look like a queen, Eugenides was like a god revealed, transformed into something wholly unfamiliar, surrounded by the cloth-of-gold bedcover like a deity on an altar, passionless and calculating.
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Megan Whalen Turner |
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01b2900
|
He waved at his attendants. "I dragged them like a ball and chain all the way across the palace and back." "If sterner measures are called for, we can find a larger ball and chain." The queen turned and disappeared into the partment. "Oh, dear," Eugenides muttered as he followed...The queen's sterner measures, dispensed by the Eddisian Ambassador, arrived before dawn."
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Megan Whalen Turner |
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f5e2524
|
The pain was as unexpected as a thunderclap in a clear sky. Eddis's chest tightened, as something closed around her heart. A deep breath might have calmed her, but she couldn't draw one. She wondered if she was ill, and she even thought briefly that she might have been poisoned. She felt Attolia reach out and take her hand. To the court it was unexceptional, hardly noticed, but to Eddis it was an anchor, and she held on to it as if to a lif..
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Megan Whalen Turner |
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63b66e4
|
The room was full of people. "Ninety-eight days," said the queen, folding her hands in her lap. "You said it would take six months." Eugenides picked at a nub in the coverlet. "I like to give myself a margin. When I can." "I didn't believe you," the queen admitted with a delicate smile. "Now you know better." The king smiled back. They might as well have been alone. The queen turned her head to listen. There was shouting in the guardroom. C..
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Megan Whalen Turner |
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e1c73e4
|
Oh gods, stairs.
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|
Megan Whalen Turner |
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9a1f472
|
The younger one looked to be completely useless.
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Megan Whalen Turner |
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1a75c47
|
The room was quiet, the others flicking glances at me. I ignored them. After years in Sounis's palaces being eyed with disgust by my uncle and my own father and courtier after courtier, I assure you I am unrivaled at pretending not to notice other people's glances.
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Megan Whalen Turner |