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“The last time this was done, my grandfather brought me,” Eugenides said, startling Irene. They were at the edge of a forest near the middle of her country, preparing to walk to a temple within it. Sacred to Philia, goddess of mercy in the new pantheon, this isolated temple had been used by many Attolian monarchs for a rite to show gratitude when the country had weathered special hardships. The present Attolia and her king had come to mark a year since the little peninsula’s victory against the Mede invasion.
Irene remembered the time her husband meant, the only other time this particular ritual of gratitude had been performed in her life. Her brother had lain ill for days, his life despaired of, and his poisoners put to death as slowly and as painfully—but her brother survived, in the end. Her father had given thanks here. Her brother lived only two months after that; then he’d been killed in what she would never believe was an accident, and Irene sent to the house of Kallicertes.
“Why did your grandfather care?”
Gen shrugged expansively. “We were always doing errands he wouldn’t explain. I suspect he just wanted to see for himself whether your brother still lived. I remember walking through the forest, but not much else.”
“It was very peaceful,” Irene agreed. “I can’t remember what the temple looks like.”
The royal family would lead the way in, with some of their party following, and local people joining the celebration after the rear guards. Irene and Eugenides had a fancy to carry the babies themselves, so Irene held still while their nurse and Phresine bundled Eugenia into a sling on her back.
Some of Philia’s followers had traveled a long way to participate, and not everyone had thought to pack a lamp. White-robed novices began to light candle stubs and offer short-lived lanterns made of decorated paper, carried by twine handles. Irene was sure her party meant to give her a clay one diligently brought from the palace, but she caught a novice’s eye and accepted one stamped with a motif of baby animals. Eugenia burbled happily, which Irene chose to interpret as approval.
When she walked into the forest, Gen and Hector were beside her, Gen moving in step with the queen. If she had reached out with her free hand to hold his, perhaps the night would have unfolded differently, but she did not. They passed on either side of a thick, old tree, and Gen disappeared from Irene’s peripheral vision.
She rounded the tree, expecting him to have paused, but he was simply not there.
“Eugenides?”
She turned to face the way they had come. Her guards and courtiers should have been a few paces away, on the road to the village, but there was no crowd, and no road. Nothing but trees as far as she could see.
Irene placed a hand on the tree and walked around it again, backwards, looking out to be sure she hadn’t gotten disoriented, but there was nothing for it. The forest had changed around her. The setting sun had been on her left when she entered the forest, so she squared her shoulders and pointed herself north. She should come to Philia’s temple, or to the river, and then she’d know where she was.
“Really,” she said aloud, lifting her hem to step cleanly over a prominent root, “you do things like this and wonder why I don’t worship you. When my husband leaves salt on your altar tonight, remember it comes from him and not me.” Transporting her across a forest with no warning indeed. She hoped Teleus didn’t know she was missing. He’d be frantic.
Maybe he should be. Was this forest safe at night for one person with a baby? There could be bears or wolves, for all she knew. She had a knife in her sash, its ornamented hilt easy to mistake for jewelry, but that wouldn’t help much against teeth, or even against a sufficiently aggressive deer. She was an accomplished enough hunter to recognize that. Belatedly, she remembered something her knife could do for her, and stopped to shallowly cut an arrow into a tree. The mark wouldn’t harm it.
Before she had walked much longer, Irene did hear something move nearby, something more than a breeze stirring. The snap of a twig, a rolling noise of pebbles or nuts. Eugenia heard it, too. The baby put her hands on Irene’s shoulder and twisted in her sling to look. The queen couldn’t identify why, but her gut told her it was the noise of a human who had stumbled. She kept her eyes ahead, as if she hadn’t noticed.
When she had gone far enough to leave another arrow mark, and still she could sense the presence of another person, she shifted Eugenia and called out, “Eugenides, is that you?” It was hard to imagine she’d heard her husband before he heard her, but the night was already strange.
After a long moment, someone dropped out of the branches of a tree a little ahead of her. Not Gen. A little boy of about eight, putting his hands on his hips. “Do you know my grandfather?” he demanded.
“Sorry?”
“You knew I might be me. Did my grandfather tell you?”
A little boy called Eugenides, in the forest of Philia’s temple with his grandfather.
“I know the older Eugenides very well,” she told him.
~~~
In another part of the forest, Eugenides, the King of Attolia and Thief of Eddis, moved silently in the direction of someone crying. It had the hushed, labored sound of someone who doesn’t want to be crying and hopes nobody will notice.
He recognized her at once when he found her. The princess Irene, barely teenaged, sitting on the forest floor with her hands clasped around one knee. “Are you hurt?” Gen asked.
She startled to her feet, unfolding herself like a crane. “What? No. Not really. I got lost. Who are you?” Irene backed away from him the whole time she spoke. This was after the orange trees, but before she was the shadow princess. She was in a growth spurt, and her face wasn’t really the same shape it would be by the time she’d reached adulthood. It was the year she liked to wear an amber bee charm on a velvet ribbon as a necklace, before her first husband told her it looked babyish. For her, it was the night her father thanked Philia.
Gen put his hand and hook on his head. “I’m not going to bother you,” he promised. “But do you want to walk with me? I know how to get to the temple.”
She stopped shying away from him. “You have a baby!” The young Irene lit up, her attention caught.
“His name is Hector.”
“Oh, please, may I hold him? There are almost never any babies in…in my house.”
Gen removed Hector from the sling on his chest. Saying, “Be careful, he’s in a phase where he likes to yank hair,” he passed him to the girl who would be his mother. She eyed Gen’s hook warily, but then she had Hector and all she could do was smile.
“He must be the prettiest baby in the world!” she gushed. She stuck her tongue out at the baby to make him do the same, and both giggled. Gen felt a bit like crying.
Drily, he told her, “He has a twin sister, or I would agree.” He wondered where Eugenia and his Irene were. He hoped they weren’t also caught in whatever supernatural puzzle this was. His wife would hate that.
After a moment, he and his strange companion did resume walking north. She kept looking at his hook out of the corner of her eyes. Eventually he smiled at her and observed, “I was in a war.” It wasn’t even a lie, he thought, pleased with himself.
“Oh. I’m sorry. You’re not from Attolia, are you?”
On a whim, Gen said, “Actually, I’m a prince of Eddis.” She wouldn’t connect that with the Thief.
Her brow furrowed. “You’re not called Pylaster, are you?”
Gen could have kicked himself. He’d forgotten that the adults all intended for Irene to marry his cousin and be Queen of Eddis, before so many princes died that both countries were left with teenaged queens. Of course, Irene married an Eddisian prince in the end anyway.
“No,” he said firmly. He was older now than Pylaster ever got to be. “Pylaster is my cousin. He’s just a boy. He’s nice.” That might be the rose-colored lens of hindsight, an adult’s tolerance for a vexing cousin, but Irene didn’t have anything to worry about. It no longer mattered what kind of person he was, or would have been. Gen smiled encouragingly.
Irene did not look convinced.
~~~
The Queen of Attolia looked down at young Gen. His hair was the uncertain length of a person growing out a short cut, longer than he wore it since he lost the hand. She caught herself staring at it, the perfect right hand.
She cleared her throat unhappily. “Do you know how to reach Philia’s temple? I only have a general direction.”
“So, so, so. My grandfather told me I have to find it myself. It’s thataway, more or less. I think.”
“I think so, too.”
Eugenia made a birdlike squeak to demand attention, and, when she got it, waved her tiny hand enthusiastically at Gen. Irene wondered whether she thought her daddy looked familiar, or just was interested in another child. Gen waved back. “Hey, there,” he said simply. At this age, he was always around baby cousins, and the first children of his sisters. They did not fascinate.
“Is your grandfather nearby?” Irene asked, following Gen. She could easily imagine the old man stalking them to monitor his pupil’s progress.
“Nah. It’s just me, as usual.” His voice was proud.
“You’re on your own often?”
“He says people have to learn by doing. This isn’t even dangerous,” he added scornfully. “You know I’m going to be Thief of Eddis, right?”
“Of course.”
“Yeah. And this is just walking.”
Irene suppressed a laugh. “I imagine I wouldn’t have found it frightening if I hadn’t gotten turned around. It reminds me a little of that game where you close your eyes while your friends lead you somewhere, and then you have to find where you started. Do you play that game in Eddis?”
She meant it generally, as in whether the game was known to him, but he said, after a pause, “My cousins say it’s no fun to play it with me, so I’ve only done it once or twice. My cousins always think I cheat at everything. My cousins…never mind.”
“That’s what friends are for, I suppose?” Irene wasn’t sure what else to say. She’d never had enough playmates of any kind.
“I don’t have friends,” Gen said bluntly.
Irene opened her mouth to tell him that wasn’t true, but of course all his friends were people they knew as adults. There was Sophos, or the magus, but still this Gen would not meet them until his teens. For all that he was surrounded by other children, she knew perfectly well that he was continuously singled out, and often missed group milestones because he was away with his grandfather. Who did he play with and confide in? Helen and Stenides, both years older and occupied with their own unconventional paths. “Is that lonely?” she asked. “Or are you glad to be left alone?”
“Oh. Huh.” Gen put his hands in his pockets and tilted his head in a familiar contemplative gesture. “Both, I suppose. I think…I think if I could pick some days of the week to always be left alone, that would be the best thing.”
“Perhaps you can try it someday.”
“Sure, when I’m king of the world.”
~~~
“Does it get very cold in Eddis?” the young Irene asked Gen, the latest in a string of questions.
“You would think so. You’re very curious about Eddis. Are you planning a visit?”
She grew quiet for a few moments. Her voice strained, as if it was hard to admit, she explained what Gen already knew. “My father is thinking of marrying me to an Eddisian man.”
“To Pylaster.” She looked at him sharply. Gen shrugged. “If you’re going to wander through forests the King of Attolia is visiting and ask about my cousins by name, you can’t be annoyed when I know who you are.”
Irene huffed loudly, then patted Hector’s back when he fussed at the sudden noise. “Well, maybe you can tell your family to look for some other princess.”
“What would you like to do instead?”
“Not spend the rest of my life in Eddis!” wailed the girl. “They don’t even swim there, and they’re really superstitious, and they don’t make spiced almonds, and they all have tattoos, even the women!”
“Nobody is going to make you get tattooed,” Gen soothed. “If you really want one, that’s different. But you’re Attolian, and everyone will understand. It’s not how you grew up.”
Shyly, Irene asked, “Do you think they’ll let me learn to ride and fight, like Princess Helen? Even though I’ll be starting old?”
“I have quite a vision of you as a queen, becoming good at hunting.”
“I do want to try archery so badly.” Her voice was wistful. “I suppose I couldn’t really run away, anyway. They’d just find me and bring me back.”
“I really believe you could,” Gen promised. “But you can’t run away and also be a queen, you know.”
Irene grinned at him for the first time. “Well, maybe I’ll run away if my father does decide I’ve been bad, and marry me off to the Thief instead.”
Eugenides stumbled. “What?!”
“He was only joking!” she hastened to assure him. “I’m sure he was joking. The Thief is really so terrifying, then?”
Gen shook his head, trying to clear it. “It must have been a joke, of course you’re right. The Thief is only a little boy.”
“I thought he was an old man. Did he die?”
“Oh. No, I beg your pardon. I’m thinking of his apprentice. The Thief is a widower, and he will not remarry. He isn’t even a noble. I don’t think I care for this joke at all.”
“If someone thinks to ask my opinion for a change, I’ll say to stick to Eddisian princes.”
“As a great favor to me, thank you.”
~~~
“What do you mean, he made you climb even though your foot was broken?”
Little Gen sighed at the ignorance of adults. “It wasn’t broken-broken, just kind of smashed. Our friend Galen said it was mostly bruising. Anyway, it was good practice.”
Irene flung her free hand skywards. “Gods forbid you practice climbing after you healed.”
“You’re being,” Gen told her, clearly relishing a new word: “obtuse.”
“Oh, pardon me,” she rejoined sarcastically.
“Sometime I’ll get really hurt and have to climb to escape, and I won’t have back up. So I have to know how. It wasn’t that terrible,” he insisted.
Irene touched Eugenia’s foot to reassure herself her daughter was too little to climb anything just yet.
“I’m surprised you still want to be Thief after that.”
“You’re not from Eddis, or you’d understand.” When Irene made a noncommittal noise, Gen waved his hands in the air and tried to explain. “Someone tried to assassinate my other grandfather before my father could even be born, and the Thief stopped it. And a couple of Thieves before him put a stop to a plot from Melenze to poison the incense at a royal wedding. I want to do things like that, too.”
Irene nodded, a little sadly. “You will be a great hero, Eugenides.”
“I can’t not do it.”
“Of course. Because you are sacred to your god.”
Gen scoffed. “Oh, that. That’s not what I mean. That’s just a…a reason. So people don’t act like we’re the gonna-getcha man.” Irene thought with some amusement that people did anyway. “But I like climbing and jumping stuff nobody else can, and I like secrets, and I want to keep my cousin Pylaster safe from bad guys and all that, because someone needs to. And I like shiny things. I figure the rest of the Thieves did, too, and that’s why we tell the stories we do. My mother’s like me. Except for the ways she’s like you.”
“Like me?”
“She thinks Grandfather should have put me on his back and carried me out of the cistern. They argued about it for weeks. With shouting. My brother Stenides kept taking me sledding so I wouldn’t hear it.”
“I think when you’re grown up, you’ll take her side.”
~~~
When Eugenides knew they were drawing close to Philia’s temple, he took his son back from the child Irene. The air was thick with potential: rain clouds close to bursting overhead, or the magic of the forest about to shift again. He wanted Hector safely snuggled on his chest.
There was very little in the way of a clearing at this temple, as if its custodians chose to take mercy even on the trees. Gen watched his footfalls with greater than usual caution, even for him. He had a stub of candle in a glass jar at his hip so he didn’t have to dangle a light from his hook, but even so he couldn’t find the pathstones he half-remembered at this place.
As they entered the colonnaded porch, Gen felt the pressure change in his ears, with a pop when he swallowed that he associated with a handful of times he’d descended a mountain faster than most people would believe.
Then came a slap of a sandal on marble. “Good evening,” he called clearly, not willing to startle whoever was there.
“Sweet relief,” his wife said drily, appearing from nowhere, the sudden brightness of her disposable lantern silhouetting the child who had frozen when Gen spoke. He only had an impression of size and posture, but he thought he knew who this was.
“Irene,” Gen said urgently, turning towards the young girl. “This is my wife. I want to talk to her for a second, so why don’t you and, er, her young friend go on in?”
Both Irenes made faces at him. In the low, oddly positioned light from their candles, he doubted the children could take in how much they were the same expression, the same face, but it made his heart twist painfully. The adult Irene passed the child Eugenides the paper lamp.
The princess stepped forward, trying to be friendly. “Hello. My name’s Irene.”
Gen stared up at her, tongue-tied and reddening. “Uh-huh,” he finally managed, before abruptly turning and entering the sanctuary, Irene trailing behind.
The adults reached for each other’s arms, clutching each other for support while they dissolved into laughter. “Why is this happening?” Irene asked, her voice edged with anxiety. “Do you think we can get back?”
Eugenides made a thoughtful sound in his throat. “Oh, you think…I had assumed they had come to us. Oh no. I’m not sure now. I wish I could remember what happened.”
“I don’t remember you at all,” Irene whispered. “I remember getting lost and bumping into some Eddisian guests, but I would never have…. I remember carrying someone’s baby, but you didn’t make any impression.” She kissed his cheek while he made a mock-wounded noise.
“I remembered bumping into someone who knew Grandfather, but I would have sworn it was only for a moment. I, uh, I think I tried to block out the memory of the girl I was in love with at the temple.”
“Are you being terribly embarrassing in there?” she teased.
He frowned and put his right arm around her waist, hook not touching her, to pull her with him when he shifted position. “We don’t want to be standing in front of the archway. Not exactly embarrassing, I remember now what I was sent to—”
The child Gen ran out of the temple at full speed, through the place they had been standing before his adult self remembered to move, and into the forest.
Young Irene followed, shouting. “Hey! Help, that boy stole something off the altar! You can’t do that!” She bolted into the forest as well, shouting “Phresine! Grab him!” before her voice abruptly fell out of their hearing.
The queen looked at her husband with a raised eyebrow. Defensively, he insisted, “They stole it from us first! It was a lengthy drama, and very stressful, and the Thieves of Eddis were wronged.” He put his face against the top of Hector’s head and widened his eyes innocently.
“I wonder—” Irene began, but then Phresine had emerged from the woods. Her Phresine, in the clothes she wore before the party was separated in the present.
“My Queen, were you calling for me?”
Irene relaxed against the comforting pressure of Gen’s body. “No. No, I heard it too. All is well. I suppose it was a kind of ghost.” She shouldn’t have said that. Teleus, who was entering the porch with some of his men, hated ghost stories, and he gave her an affronted grimace when he didn’t think anyone else was looking.
The party entered the temple together. Gen left the sacrifice of bagged salt for a priest to snap up another day and use in feeding the needy, and said the necessary words of gratitude, but Irene’s thoughts were far away, with a daydreaming girl who faded away when her brother died, and a boy who could have been lost to her at any time, if his god hadn’t protected him better than his grandfather ever did.
She thought of those children, grown up, with full lives to come that they couldn’t imagine, in the dungeon of their palace.
Her husband squeezed her hand when they exited. “The prayers to Philia always make me feel rather bleak,” he offered, evidently aware of the change in her mood. “I’m sure some people find ‘Mercy, whether we deserve it or not’ comforting, but I just think about why I don’t.”
Irene squeezed his doubly-precious left hand back. “We deserved it at one time, and those children are still with us, I suppose. Perhaps Philia doesn’t see the difference.”
Gen guessed her thoughts. He gestured at the twins. “So, so, so. These two will have a better time. We’ll insist on it.”
“Let’s talk to the minister of the exchequer about creating a budget just for breaking the palace windows,” she said, to make him laugh, but also because she thought they’d need it, if the gods were going to carry on with her family like this.
The gods in poems made pretty speeches when they wanted to make a point about…well, whatever it was. Irene’s conclusion was that there were some old hurts and new anxieties they ought to talk about, now they were parents themselves. Gen might have a better idea of whether that was the response Philia was trying to elicit, or if there was still something Irene was missing. Grumpily, she decided that if making the couple interpret it was so damn important, there were more attractive mediums for the message. Dance. Haruspicy. Irene had come to a spiritual epiphany once from eating a good bowl of soup. Traveling through time indeed. Outrageous.