Moira's Pen

by Megan Whalen Turner

Genres: YA Epic Fantasy; YA Literary Fiction; YA Romance

Synopsis

Journey to the world of the Queen’s Thief in this beautifully illustrated collection, featuring bestselling and award-winning author Megan Whalen Turner’s charismatic and incorrigible thief, Eugenides. Discover and rediscover friends old and new, and explore the inspiration behind Megan Whalen Turner’s rich and original world. A stunning and collectible volume to return to again and again.

This collectible companion to the New York Times–bestselling Queen’s Thief series is ideal for longtime fans, as well as readers discovering Megan Whalen Turner’s epic and unforgettable world for the first time. The collection includes all of the author’s previously published short fiction set in the world of the Queen’s Thief, as well as never-before-published stories, vignettes and excerpts, poetry and rhymes, a guide to objects from museums around the world that inspired the author, and a very special recipe for almond cake.

The kings and queens of Eddis, Attolia, and Sounis all make unforgettable appearances, as do beloved and surprising characters from throughout the series and beyond. Meet Eugenides as a young boy in “Breia’s Earrings,” and Irene as a young princess in “The Princess and the Pastry Chef.”

The six novels in the acclaimed and bestselling Queen’s Thief series are rich with political machinations, divine intervention, dangerous journeys, battles lost and won, power, passion, and deception. This collectible volume features illustrations and decorations throughout, illustrated endpapers, a stunning full-color jacket with embossed foil and gold stamping, a cast list, maps, and an introduction by the author. 

Release date: November 1, 2022

Publisher: HarperCollins

Print pages: 288

Sample

Eddis Goes Camping

 

The pony was fat and shaggy still from the winter. Its short legs flicked across the hard-packed road and Helen’s own round, solid body bounced uncomfortably on its back. She had a bundle with her, but it was as small as she could make it, just blankets, a loaf of bread, and other bare necessities. She had her belt knife, and her own crossbow hung on the saddle with the cranking mechanism geared for her nine-year-old arms. With luck, anyone who noticed her riding up the road away from the palace would see nothing out of the ordinary and would forget her again quickly.

The Spring Festival was finally over and everyone was in bed recovering. Helen doubted that anyone but Xanthe, her nurse, would even wonder where she was. By bedtime, of course, Xanthe would be alarmed, but by bedtime she would have found the drawing chalked inside the door to Helen’s sleeping room. Xanthe couldn’t read, or Helen would

have written a note. Instead, she had drawn a picture of her pony with its bundle of blankets and food, and a picture of herself waving good-bye.

It was only for one night, and Xanthe would eventually forgive her, but only if Helen made it away from the palace without drawing anyone’s attention. If her mother sent for her and Helen couldn’t be found, people would assume she was playing with her cousins in some obscure part of the palace . . . so long as no busybody remembered that she had gone out on her pony. If that happened, his stall would be checked, and when it was found empty, the hue and cry would be frightful. Her aunts would start wailing that she and the horse had gone over a cliff or been eaten by a lion, and her father would send out the entire population of the capital city in a search. At the thought, Helen urged the pony on a little faster.

Finally, their path left the Sacred Way. It cut across the shoulder of the hill and then down to the valley road that led up into the hunting preserves. Out of sight of the palace, once among the trees, Helen relaxed. The pony slowed, and she patted his neck.

“Don’t slow too much, Nestor,” she told him. “We have a long way to go.” The place she was heading for was more than half a day’s ride away. She’d found it the previous fall when she wandered much farther than she’d intended. There had only been time for a quick look and a promise to return after the winter was over.

She had been out before on overnight hunting expeditions, and she’d sometimes spent whole days out on her own. This wouldn’t be very different, and it was the only way she could explore her secret hideaway and still keep it secret.

The secrecy was essential, because without it the place wouldn’t be hers alone. At the very least, she would have to share it with other children her age, but it was more likely that someone older, one of the new spears, would take it and chase the children away. Someone like her brother Pylaster, who had just left the boys’ house and received his first spear, would declare it his personal kingdom, and only his closest friends would be allowed to join him there. He would lose interest eventually, when he wasn’t a new spear anymore, but by then some other new spear would have claimed it. Helen would never have a chance.

By the time she reached the age when a boy received his spear, she would have left sword practice and horseplay behind and undergone the mysterious alteration that would make her a young woman with long skirts and jewels in her ears and no interest in anything sensible. She rolled her shoulders in distaste at the thought, but she had seen it happen to too many cousins to doubt its inevitability. Her mother must have her way. For the time being, however, there was freedom, exercised with discretion.

Helen arrived in the early afternoon. The day was gray and the spring wind was chilly. High up in the mountains there was still quite a bit of snow, and she

shivered even in her sheepskin jacket. She wished the sun were shining. The narrow valley was dark and much less inviting than she’d anticipated. The temple itself, when she reached it, was desolate, the marble cold and gray and lifeless. She hesitated a moment before she swung down from Nestor’s back. He was nervous and jerked at the reins as she tied them to a sapling.

He whickered, as if to say there was still time to make it back home before dark. “Don’t be silly,” she said aloud. She’d been looking forward to the trip all winter and she wouldn’t quit, even though the high sides of the valley made her feel very small. She started for the temple with the stubbornness that so often drove Xanthe to despair.

The temple must have been impressive once. Sitting sideways across the end of the narrow valley, its entrance porch at one end facing and nearly brushing the cliff face before it, it was as large as any temple Helen had ever seen. Its pillars and interior walls still stood, though most of its roof was gone. Rubble had fallen from the cliff face, burying the approach to the front entryway, but the temple’s foundation was stepped on all sides, so it was easy for Helen to climb up to the terrace and slip between the pillars. Holes in the walls made it unnecessary to go through the front doors. Helen crawled across the tops of fallen stones nearly as high as her waist and slipped into the naos.

The floor was a dangerous wash of broken roof tiles mixed with the remains of the timbers that had supported them. The marble walls were bare. The

statuary of the friezes had come down and smashed; lighter chunks of white marble were mixed with the roofing. Beside Helen was a piece from the head of a horse, and next to it was a broken-off hand with a bit of marble rein still running through it. The statue must have been beautiful when it was whole, and Helen was flooded by a sudden sadness. If Nestor had whickered again, she would have gone home.

He didn’t, so she squared her small but sturdy shoulders and picked her way to a hole in the far wall. Halfway across, she paused to look toward the bare stone altar. The roof above was intact and the marble floor under it was mostly clear, but the pedestal that had once held a statue of some god or goddess was empty.

On the far side of the naos, there was a larger hole in the wall and an open path between the fallen stones. Once she was clear of the rubble and had a look at what lay before her, she stopped. She was so pleased that she hugged herself. The terrace on the far side of the temple was mostly free of broken masonry, and beyond it was an outdoor room, with the steep cliffs at the end of the valley for walls. The grass there was already green with the advance of spring. Under the gray skies, it seemed to glow with its own light. There were paths laid out, and the hedges of a garden, still visible, at one side. But mostly there was just the smooth carpet of the grass, and beyond it the opening of a cave in the cliffs.

The cave was a potential problem. Helen eyed it carefully for several minutes, then she went back for Nestor. It wasn’t easy to coerce him up the stepped

foundation and across the terrace behind the back of the temple, but once he reached the grassy carpet, he seemed happy enough, and she relaxed. The sun had started to break through the clouds, the sacred space behind the temple had begun to seem almost welcoming, and Nestor wouldn’t have dedicated himself to the grass with such an appetite if he’d smelled a mountain lion’s lair in the nearby cave.

She pulled off his bridle and left him to graze while she explored. The longer she stayed, the more at home she felt. Something very tight in her chest seemed to release itself, slowly unwinding, like thread off a spindle. On reflection, she decided the metaphor might not be apt. “I’d be in a mess the way Agape’s yarn always is,” she murmured to herself.

She looked into the cave first, which was high but shallow. There was a darker space at the back that led deeper into the mountain, but it was a crevice too narrow even for a child. A trickle of water came out of it and flowed in a channel to a basin cut in the rock. She had a drink and filled her waterskin before she whistled for Nestor to come have a drink as well. The water was cold and tasted of snow.

When the pigeons came home in the evening, she loaded her crossbow and shot quarrels at them until it was too dark to see where they fell. She did not hit a single bird. She had brought only the loaf of bread and a packet of sugared nuts for her dinner. Sighing, she went to gather wood for the fire. The dark was rising quickly and her skin prickled with cold. She collected a stack far larger than she would need.

She started her fire on the terrace looking out over her little territory, and rolled out her blankets beside it. Opening the bag holding her food, she looked into it dubiously. Glancing over one shoulder at a hole nearby leading into the naos of the temple, she considered how much the success of her return depended on luck. With much reluctance, she then tore the loaf in half and carried one half, and all the nuts, into the temple to lay them on the altar in front of the empty plinth. Better safe than sorry.

When she had eaten the remaining half of the loaf, she rolled herself in her blankets and lay down between the fire and her woodpile to sleep. Without waking fully, she could lift the sticks from the pile and add them to the fire. She listened to Nestor snuffling as he settled down for the night, then, without knowing exactly which moment it happened, she drifted off.

The cold woke her. The cold, and the feel of the empty marble under her hand as it searched for her woodpile. Thinking she must have used up all the wood closest to her, she extended her reach. Still no wood. Sighing with frustration, she opened her eyes to the dying firelight. Her woodpile wasn’t there. She sat up, still half-asleep, and looked more carefully around the terrace. There was no wood. She looked back at the fire, which was a mistake. It made her night-blind, and once she had assured herself that the little campfire could not have burned through all her wood without leaving more ash, and that she hadn’t mistakenly fed it all her fuel while asleep, she was left unable to see anything else.

She turned away from the fire and waited patiently for the blindness to clear, only to see at last that every stick of her wood was gone. She almost turned to check the fire again, but Helen didn’t make the same mistakes twice. She looked elsewhere instead. Before she fully realized what she was searching for, she saw it: the glow of another fire burning nearby. Burning with her wood.

Her mouth firmed and her expression hardened. Brigands wouldn’t have left her sleeping, and a decent person wouldn’t have taken all of the wood, even if he’d had no time to gather his own. A decent person probably would just have joined Helen at her fire. Only a sneak would take all of her wood and leave her in the cold. The list of possible suspects was long enough. Any one of the new spears would have done it. They were so full of their own importance once they were out of the boys’ house. One of her cousins, or perhaps Pylaster. The bread and nuts on the altar had been an unsuccessful sacrifice. Whoever had taken her firewood was going to announce her escapade to the palace, and there was going to be a tremendous din when she got home.

The cold shuddered through her, and she clenched her fists in frustration. She wanted to take their horses and leave the arrogant new spears to walk home, but she couldn’t get Nestor across the terrace without waking anyone asleep inside the temple, and she wouldn’t leave him behind. She would have liked to steal the wood back but doubted she could, and even if she were successful, the older

boys would wake when they felt the cold, just as she had. There wouldn’t be any secrecy the next time they took it. She might be very sturdy for a girl, but she was still only nine, and tiny compared to her brother’s companions. However, she was determined not to creep up like a penitent to their fire. At least she could steal back enough wood so that she could sleep the rest of the night in the warmth generated by her own fuel.

She kicked off her blankets and got quietly to her feet. The firelight was definitely coming from inside the temple, which she felt was scandalous. One shouldn’t camp inside a temple, even an abandoned one. Softly, she crept along the wall toward the light. She felt carefully for fallen blocks of stone but didn’t encounter any. When she reached the hole in the temple wall, she found it more door shaped than she remembered, but the regular shape of the doorway was the least of the mysteries. She crouched in the darkness, just beyond the reach of the light from the fire burning before the altar, and stared. Whoever had stolen her wood, it wasn’t a new spear.

She could see through the doorway and between the heavy interior pillars that held up the roof. The marble floor was clear of debris and scattered with carpets. Standing candelabras with fine wax candles augmented the light of the fire, which burned inside the repaired walls of the fire pit. Not only was the fire pit repaired, Helen realized, but the roof and the walls. The murals were restored, and so were the

friezes above them. She laid a hand on the smooth-worked masonry of the doorway, then looked back to the interior.

Bathed in the light of the fire, a woman more beautiful even than Helen’s mother lay on a couch with a little table beside her, and on it a bowl filled with pigeon eggs. As Helen watched, the woman selected an egg and cracked it on the edge of the table. The larger pieces of shell she tossed toward the fire, but the smaller pieces she carelessly let fall. When they landed on the pure white cloth of her gown, she brushed them to the floor.

Looking down at her from the altar was a young man. Helen thought at first that he might be the age of a new spear, but then he looked older and she wasn’t certain. He was dressed all in gray, sitting cross-legged and eating nuts out of a silver bowl. Her nuts, Helen realized. She must have made a sound. The woman on the couch shifted a little and spoke to the figure on the altar. “Who is it?”

The young man looked over at Helen, and she pulled back into the darkness.

“It’s Eddis,” said the man, and Helen snapped her head around in surprise, looking up and down the terrace for her father.

“She’s found her firewood missing,” the man continued, inexplicably. Helen could see no one else on the terrace.

“You are eating her nuts,” the woman on the couch said languidly. “It was unkind to take her fire as well.”

“Nonsense,” he responded. “If you think I am unkind, ask her to join us.”

“I suppose we can make her forget again by morning.” The woman beckoned Helen with one beautiful white hand. “Do come, dear,” she said.

Against her better judgment, Helen stepped cautiously as far as the interior pillars.

“The last Eddis, is it?” the goddess asked, but she was speaking to the man. “Have I seen her before? She looks like her father.”

“Have you seen her father?” the young man asked, amused.

“I’m not sure. Perhaps her grandfather. Certainly she is not a pretty girl, but I suppose that is neither here nor there with this one. What’s your name, dear?”

“Helen,” she whispered, too bewildered to be hurt by the casual condemnation of her looks. She might not have been hurt anyway; she knew she wasn’t pretty and wasn’t particularly bothered. She wondered if all this was a dream. A chill breeze from the open doorway behind her swept across the back of her neck and she shivered. It felt real.

“You’re cold. Come closer to the fire.”

Helen took another few hesitant steps. All of her wood was in the fire pit, and she could already feel its warmth. She saw that there was a third figure watching her from the base of the altar—another woman resting against a cushion. Beside her was a lap desk, as if she had just set it aside. She still held a white quill pen in her hand as she leaned forward to look at Helen.

Another shudder went through Helen, as if someone had walked over her future grave. She waited for it to pass, but it only grew worse until she dropped to a crouch, wrapping her arms around her knees and holding tight as she stared at the woman by the altar.

“Poor chick,” the woman on the couch murmured, and Helen felt a breath of warm air caress the back of her neck. The shudder faded away and in its absence came a dreamlike feeling. The woman with the white quill pen was Moira, who recorded men’s fates. She was the messenger of the gods. Sitting on the altar above her, so indecently comfortable in such a sacrilegious place, was Eugenides, the Thief. Helen didn’t know who the third immortal was. The goddess of the temple, she assumed. A moment before, everything had been more frightening than she could bear. Now she accepted it with less excitement than she’d felt at the loss of her firewood.

“She isn’t Eddis yet,” Moira pointed out calmly. “No, not yet,” agreed the goddess on the couch. “But her Thief was just born, wasn’t he? Yesterday? Last week?”

Moira laid down her pen, and unrolled the scroll on her lap desk. “Four years ago,” she said dryly.

Her Thief? Helen wondered. There was a Thief at the Palace of Eddis, but he was old. He’d certainly been born more than four years before. He had a grandson, though, who was about that age. She remembered that the palace had been in an uproar

after his birth, when he was named Eugenides after his grandfather and after the immortal who sat eating Helen’s sugared nuts as if each one were a prize.

She looked up, and the Patron of Thieves smiled down at her. Such a wicked smile, Helen thought. Full of mischief and self-satisfaction and humor. He smiled like one of her grown-up cousins, Lycos, who had been exiled when Helen was six. She remembered him well; he could make you laugh one day and cry the next. When he left the court, she’d been heartbroken, and also relieved. She eyed Eugenides warily, but she had a generous nature. It tipped the balance in his favor, and she smiled shyly back at him. His own smile deepened in response, a nicer expression altogether, and Helen decided that she liked him very much, as if approval or disapproval of a god were an everyday affair.

“Have a seat here by me,” said the goddess from across the fire, pointing to a cushion in front of her couch. Helen circled the fire and sat. From there, she could still see Moira, and also a heap of fabric that lay in a bundled pile beside the fire pit. Woven with different colors and kinds of thread, it was lumpy and soft in places and smooth and tight in others. Brightly colored and streaked through with dull browns and blacks, it still seemed to carry a coordinated pattern. Helen stared, trying to make it out, but too much cloth was hidden in rumples and folds.

Moira looked up from what she was writing on her lap desk. “Eugenides has stolen the fabric from the loom of the Fates. Little will happen in the world of men until they restring their loom.”

“It was very bad, Gen,” said the goddess over Helen’s shoulder. “Everyone will be angry.”

“You said you missed Moira.”

“I did, didn’t I? I suppose they will be angry at me, too. Such a bore. Are the pigeons roasted, Moira dear?”

The recorder looked with narrowed eyes at a row of birds on skewers that leaned over the fire pit. “Not yet,” she said.

“You aren’t angry, are you, Moira?” the Thief asked in winning tones.

“No,” said Moira. “You very nicely brought the weaving here, so I can catch up on my work while we visit.”

“Moira is my daughter,” said the goddess, behind Helen. “And we haven’t seen each other for years. No, don’t look it up, Moira; I don’t need to know exactly how long. It is too long. You should tell those women to keep their own records.”

Moira shook her head.

“Or the men. Tell the mortals to keep their own histories.”

Moira smiled. “They do so much already. There is less and less work for me all the time.”

“Good,” said the goddess, her mother, who Helen realized must be the wind Periphys.

“I’m sure there will always be enough to keep you busy,” said Eugenides. He had lain down on his stomach and had his chin propped in his hands. His knees were bent and his feet moved idly in the air.

“Busy enough,” agreed Moira.

“I’d like some wine, I think,” said the goddess. “Will you fetch me a cup, chickie?” When Helen looked over her shoulder, the goddess gestured to a table she hadn’t seen before. She blinked, unsure if it had been there before the goddess gestured. It was in the dim light beyond the candelabras and she might have overlooked it. It was a low table with a silver inlaid top, covered with dishes of food and cups that matched the wine set. Helen got up and went to pour the wine into the mixing bowl. She carefully avoided looking at the food while she added water to the wine and swirled the two until they mixed, then turned to lift the bowl toward the altar.

She hesitated then, just for a moment; the wine sloshed in the bowl, but she steadied it without mishap. She had lifted the wine automatically for the blessing, but there was no impersonal statue of a god or goddess above the altar, just Eugenides looking sardonic. Helen considered turning to the goddess reclining on the couch, but she wasn’t certain that this temple belonged to Periphys. It was unlikely that it belonged to Moira. Helen couldn’t put it past Eugenides to make himself and his friends comfortable in someone else’s temple. Amused, Eugenides resolved Helen’s dilemma by waving one hand in benediction. The wine was officially blessed. Politely hiding her own amusement, she offered her

reverence in his direction and turned back to the table to pour the mixed wine into a cup, careful not to spill a single drop. She then carried the wine to the couch and dropped to her knees, her eyes modestly lowered.

Instead of taking the wine, the goddess lifted a hand to brush Helen’s cheek. She tucked a finger under Helen’s chin and lifted it and looked into Helen’s eyes. For a moment, Helen saw something beyond this slightly silly woman, something so vast that Helen felt as if she were staring up into the night sky and in danger of falling into it. “She will do,” she heard the goddess say. “She will do very well.”

“Of course she will,” said Eugenides, dropping from the altar and stepping around the rumpled pile of the Fates’ tapestry. “But what she wants just now is a pigeon, so take that wine cup or I will.”

Periphys reached for the cup and directed Helen back to the cushion with a smile. “Are they done?” she asked.

“Well, I am tired of waiting, so I say they are,” said Eugenides. He lifted two skewers away from the fire and carried them over. To Helen’s surprise, he came to her first. He squatted down in front of her to look her in the eye a moment, as if he understood the growing distress that bubbled just beneath this odd sense of comfort that Periphys had provided. How could she be Eddis? Her father was Eddis. If Helen ever did inherit the throne, she would be Eddia, the feminine version of the state name, not Eddis. And that could only happen if her older brothers Pylaster and Lias died, and probably her younger brother

Janus as well. A woman could inherit the throne of Eddis, but only as a last resort. Helen might hold Pylaster in contempt most of the time, but she loved him, and Lias and Janus as well.

“Don’t worry, little one, about what is to come,” said Eugenides. “You will wake in the morning and all this will be a dream, gone before the dew leaves the grass. Now, eat your pigeon, which you don’t deserve because you are a woeful shot. I will exchange with you for a pile of firewood and a handful of almonds.” He handed her a skewer and waited until she took the first bite before he moved to Periphys. The goddess was offended at the wait, but the Thief returned her disaffected look with one of his own that left her flustered and defensive. She took the pigeon from him and turned a cold shoulder. He laughed and returned to the fire for two more pigeons, one of which he handed to Moira before he vaulted back onto the marble pedestal to eat his own.

It was quiet while they ate. Periphys sulked and picked at her food. But when she snuck a look over her shoulder at the Thief, he smiled. “You are dreadful,” she told him.

Eugenides’ smile only grew. Periphys sighed and rolled her eyes. Helen had a feeling that this had happened many times before. Sooner or later, the Thief was always forgiven. They talked then, Moira and Periphys and Eugenides, and like a child at any grown-up conversation, Helen understood less and less until she lost interest and concentrated on the pigeon.

She woke in the morning from her dream of gods and temples, lying on the terrace, wrapped in her blanket. The fire beside her was dead and she was stiff with cold. Shivering, she sat up. She looked first toward the empty space where her woodpile would have been and caught at the dream just as it was fading. There had been gods in the temple, she remembered, and the God of Thieves had eaten her almonds. Still shivering, she unwrapped her blanket and hurried between the fallen stones of the temple walls to the opening near the altar. The opening was a ragged hole nearly blocked by rubble, as it had been the day before. Inside the wall and the interior row of columns, the floor was again scattered with tiles and debris. The frescoes were gone and the fire pit was broken on one side. The dream seemed less real with each passing moment, but Helen clung to it as stubbornly as she had ever held on to anything in her life. On the far side of the fire pit, she dropped to her knees and swept her hands across the floor. In the cracks between the stones, there were eggshells. No large pieces, but small ones that might have fallen from the goddess’s skirts.

Helen looked up at what remained of the roof over her head. In the rafters and in the niches of the metopes were a thousand pigeon nests. Of course there were eggshells between the stones. She rose and stepped quickly away from the fire pit, past where the table laden with food had stood, and dropped to her knees again. On the dirty floor, among the debris, she found what she was seeking. A splatter of wax. Fresh and clean and white, it could

only have fallen from the candelabras the night before. She used her belt knife to scrape up one perfectly round wax disc and pinched it between her finger and thumb. Her thumb fitting into the depression that had formed as it cooled, she rubbed the wax thoughtfully against her finger. Then she opened her heavy sheepskin jacket and slid the disc, just the size and shape of a button, wholly unremarkable in itself, into the small purse attached to her belt. She stood to look around the temple once again. There was no other sign that the events she remembered were anything but a dream.

She slipped a finger into the purse to nudge the small bit of wax. Determined not to forget what little she still remembered, she went to fetch her pony. Nestor was uncommonly uncooperative, jerking his head and sidling away from her at every opportunity. Finally, she lost her temper and stamped her foot on the green grass carpet outside the temple. “I am not going to forget!” she said. “And I don’t care how distracting you are.” Almost as if he were embarrassed, the pony lowered his head and meekly approached.

On her ride home, she was drenched by a sudden shower, Nestor slid on a rocky part of the trail and almost went down, the wind blew particularly lovely white clouds across the sky, and a rainbow appeared as well. There were mysterious rustlings in the bushes and quite a few animals emerged to watch her curiously. Stubbornly, she ignored the distractions and instead went over and over what details she could remember from her dream: Lias and Pylaster

and Janus dead, herself the last ruler of Eddis, the four-year-old boy who would be her Thief. From time to time, she slipped a finger into her belt purse to poke at the wax button and reaffirm her memories.

As she approached her home, worry curled up like smoke around her. If her mother had asked for her, if someone had noticed the missing pony, if Xanthe had panicked and revealed the message Helen had left . . . the possibilities infused every thought, until even the dream seemed less important than the coming moment of truth when she arrived at the entrance gate to the stableyard.

“Your Highness!” The stable master came himself to take Nestor’s reins in hand. “Our royal Queen, your mother, was most concerned”—Helen’s fists tightened on the reins in alarm—“that you would be back late from this morning’s ride.” Of course he had noticed the empty stall, and one of the stablers must have seen her bundle, but no one had given away her secret. Stony faced, the stable master said, “I assured her that I would send you to her when you returned.”

“Th–thank you, cousin,” she said, signaling her awareness of her debt to him with the familial address. She turned to go, but the stable master stopped her with a touch on her arm.

“If Your Highness had left a message to say where you were riding, I could have sent a messenger out. In the future, it would be a courtesy.”

“Yes, of course,” stammered Helen, happy to accept the bargain. He was willing to keep her secrets in the future, but only if he knew she was

safe. She could go back. Automatically, she was searching in her belt purse as she hurried across the stableyard in response to her mother’s summons. She could go back. The belt purse was empty.

She hesitated, looking at her empty hand. Go back? She considered again. It had been good to camp on her own in the mountain valley, but there were other places to explore, and it had been cold there, she remembered. The narrow valley held the winter chill. She would try someplace lower in the mountains next time. There was something else that she wanted to remember, but she couldn’t think what. She hurried on across the stableyard, hoping it would come to her later.

She didn’t remember. Not when she played with her cousin Eugenides, by far her favorite among all her many cousins, not even when the sickness came that took all three of her brothers in a matter of days. She never returned to the narrow valley high in the hunting preserves and never visited its abandoned temple again, though she continued her independent trips, skillfully maintaining a pretense of obedience to her mother’s will with the complicity of Xanthe and the stable master and an ever-growing community of supporters.

She never thought of her dream again, until the morning she woke to find a wax button on the pillow by her head. Though it was as clean as if it had just dropped from an unregulated candle the night before, the wax hadn’t soaked into the linen. It lay lightly on the cloth, and when she lifted it up, she could see the ridge she remembered, where her belt knife had

scraped it free years before. When Xanthe came to the door, her cheeks wet with tears, Helen already knew that her father was dead.

“My Queen,” said Xanthe, “you are Eddia.”

Helen shook her head, still sorting through her newly returned memories. Knowing the consternation it would cause, and knowing she would overcome it, she said, “No, I am Eddis. The gods have told me so.”