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“Helen,” someone whispered, the sound strangely close. “Helen, are you awake?” The teenage queen jerked as she left sleep entirely, feeling like she’d passed through a doorway into cold rain. She kicked reflexively, but the shadowed figure rolled out of the way of her following elbow jab and huffed in a familiar voice, “It’s me, cut that out!”
She hit her favorite cousin with a pillow. “What are you doing? It’s the middle of the night!”
“Ow,” he complained unconvincingly. He folded his legs like he intended to be there a while. Helen sighed with great resignation and made herself comfortable.
She was curious about the details of how he’d even gotten into her bedchamber, but his grandfather never answered questions like that, so she didn’t bother asking. Gen was different, and maybe he would be glad to tell her, but there was no telling what might get back to the Thief, and what he considered worthy of punishment. Helen would never trust him again after the business with Lader. He knew it, too. The elderly Thief had given her a considering look about a month after Gen…did it, her mind supplied euphemistically, shying away from the worst memory of both teens sitting on the bed. “Ah,” Gen’s grandfather had said, “you’re done with me now.” She had denied it, but now she was a little older, she found that immature. A queen had to be able to reject people. Helen just did not want Eugenides to be mad at her.
In the present, she bumped her knee companionably against Gen’s. “So, what’s going on?”
She could hear the deep breath he took. “Grandfather is dead.”
“What?” Helen had heard him with crystalline clarity, but it seemed impossible. She had spoken to Eugenides only that morning. She wondered when she was going to stop feeling shocked when people around her died without warning.
Gen made a night-cloaked motion that she thought might have been wiping his eyes. “He fell on the stairs. So, well, I’m your Thief now.”
“I’m so sorry,” Helen told him. “He didn’t even have a chance to finish training you.” Gen was only thirteen.
There was a brief and total silence. “Actually, he told me he was going to do it. I took the oath already.”
Helen was so filled with righteous fury that, if she had not been a queen with people relying on her, she would have marched into the underworld like the heroine Carou so she could grab Eugenides by his tunic and shake him. He had killed himself and abandoned a thirteen-year-old boy to do his job. Gen was frightened and trying not to show it, turning up to talk about it under the cover of darkness.
“Are you all right?” Helen asked.
Gen twitched; she’d actually surprised him. He stumbled over his reply, interrupting himself as his mind moved faster than his mouth. “Of course I—I don’t know, I—No. Not really.”
Helen climbed out from under the covers and crawled to his side. She flipped up the end of the woven decorative blanket that sat on top of her bedding and wrapped it around her shoulders and his as she pulled him into a hug. Gen leaned into her, and they sat like that for a time, the only important thing that they loved each other.
Gen spoke first, his voice cracking with puberty and sorrow. “What if I’m not good at it? I mean, I know Eddis is a modern country, and maybe you don’t need to pretend the gods endorse you, or have people assassinated before breakfast, but a Thief is not just a spy everyone knows about, no matter what…some people say,” he finished weakly, deliberately not naming his eldest sister.
“No,” Helen said, and felt him deflate. “No, I agree with you.” Gen straightened and dried his face on the edge of his shirt without dislodging Helen’s blanket from his shoulders. “I need my Thief. And my Thief was never your grandfather. You are.”
“So, so, so. Everyone knows I’m your favorite,” he joked.
Helen remained solemn. “I say it because the gods have told me so.” Gen squirmed. He did not believe in the gods. If he ever did, he stopped when his mother died. If Helen were a goddess, she would want better than an atheist child for her high priest, but that was for the god of Thieves to worry about. “There is no one like you, Gen,” she added. “Queen’s Thief or not.”
“I’m going to be the best Thief who has ever lived,” he swore. She’d heard that before. “Don’t wait for me to grow up, you have problems now.”
Helen laughed and moaned. “Don’t I just.”
“Tell me.”
“We refused Sounis’s marriage proposal today.”
Gen whistled. “Good.”
“He’s going to ask again next year. The ambassador told the minister of the exchequer so over pastries.”
“Gross.”
“My mother’s driving herself mad trying to find me someone better to marry instead.” She hugged her own knees, since Gen had shifted. “I don’t know how long I can stay single, but I’m not letting someone else come and call himself king.”
“You are Eddis,” he affirmed. His voice was so forceful that it seemed to ring with more than its natural tones, and she was not sure how much to attribute to the man he was becoming. She shivered and drew closer to him.
“What would you do?” she asked, genuinely curious.
He considered briefly. “Get Sounis to marry Attolia instead,” he told her with a shrug. “They deserve each other.”
They stayed up planning so long that Helen and Gen were both yawning, and lay down in the center of the bed while they talked. She did not remember falling asleep, but when she woke in the morning, her first thought was to realize that Eugenides had left her a knife. She put it under her pillow before her attendants could come in and see.