“You could shorten the time without shortening your life,” said the magus.

I looked up at him. I’d lost the thread of the conversation. In the moment it took me to recover it, I realized that he was now nervous himself. I relaxed in my seat. “Go on.”

“I want you to steal something.”

I smiled. “Do you want the king’s seal? I can get it for you.”

“If I were you,” said the magus, “I’d stop bragging about that.” His voice grated.

My smile grew. The gold ring with the engraved ruby had been in his safekeeping when I had stolen it away. Losing it, I was sure, had badly damaged his standing at the king’s court. He glanced over my shoulder at the curtained alcove, and then he got to the point.

“There’s something I want you to steal. Do this for me, and I’ll see that you don’t go back to prison. Fail to do this for me, and I will still make sure that you don’t go back to prison.”

Prisoners left the king’s prison all the time. Masons, carpenters, blacksmiths, any skilled craftsmen could expect to finish their sentences working for the king’s profit. Unskilled workers were collected several times a year and sent to the silver mines south of the city. They rarely returned, and other prisoners just disappeared.

It was clear enough what the magus had in mind, so I nodded. “What am I stealing?” That was all I cared about.

The magus dismissed the question. “You can find out the details later. What I need to know now is that you’re capable.” That I hadn’t been overcome by disease, crippled, or starved beyond usefulness while in prison.

“I’m capable,” I said. “But I have to know what I’m stealing.”

“You’ll be told. For now it isn’t your business.”

“What if I can’t steal it?”

“I thought that you could steal anything,” he taunted.

“Except myself out of the king’s prison,” I agreed.

“Don’t try to be smart.” The magus shook his head. “You don’t pretend well.” I opened my mouth to say something I shouldn’t have, but he went on. “It will require some traveling to reach my object. There will be plenty of time for you to learn about it as we go.”

I sat back in my chair, mollified and delighted. If I got out of the city of Sounis, no one would bring me back. The magus had to have known exactly what I was thinking because he leaned close over me again.

“Don’t think that I am a fool.”

He wasn’t a fool, that much was true. But he didn’t have my motivation. He leaned back against the desk, and I sat back in my chair thinking that the gods had listened to my prayers at last. Then I heard the rings on the top of the curtain behind me slide across their rod, and I remembered the two feet in the alcove. My stomach, which had settled a little, began to jump again.

The boots stamped across the room, and a hand came over the back of the chair in order to grab me by the hair. The owner of the hand lifted me up as he walked to the front of the chair and held me facing him. “Don’t think that I am a fool either,” he said.

He was short, just as his father had been, and stocky. His hair was a dark gold color and curled around his ears. It would have looked effeminate on anyone else. It probably endeared him to his mother when he was a child, but there was nothing endearing about him now. My hair was pulling free of my head, and I was standing on the tips of my toes to relieve the strain. I put both hands on top of his, tried to push the hand down, and found myself hanging entirely off the ground.

He dropped me. My legs folded under me, and I sat on the floor with a thump that jarred my entire body. I rubbed my head, trying to push the hair back into my scalp. When I looked up, the king was wiping his hand on the front of his clothes.

“Get up,” he said.

I did, still rubbing my head.

The king of Sounis was not polished. Nor was he an impressive bearlike man the way kings were in my mother’s fairy tales. He was too short and too oily, and he was a shade too fat to be elegant. But he was shrewd. He routinely doubled his taxes and kept a large army to prevent any rebellion by his citizens. The taxes supported the army, and when the army itself became a threat, he sent it off to fight with his neighbors. Their victories enriched the treasury. The kingdom of Sounis was bigger than it had been anytime since the invaders had broken off pieces of it to award to their allies. The king had driven the Attolians out of their land on the Sounis side of the Hephestial Mountains, forcing them back through the narrow pass through the country of Eddis to the Attolian homeland on the far side. There were rumors that he wanted to annex land there as well and that Attolia was preparing for all-out war.

Ignoring his magus, Sounis walked over to the bench on the wall beside my chair. He pulled a small casket off it and carried it to the magus’s desk, where he tipped its contents out. A cascade of double-heavy gold coins. A single one would buy a family’s farm and all its livestock. Several pieces fell and rang on the stone floor. One landed by my foot and lay staring up at me like a yellow eye.

I almost bent to pick it up but stopped myself and said instead, “My uncle used to keep that much under his bed and count it every night.”

“Liar,” said the king. “You’ve never seen that much gold before in your life.”

He couldn’t know that I’d overstayed my welcome one night while creeping through his megaron and had crawled up through the space where the pipes of the hypocaust ran to hide in his treasure room. I had slept for a day in stuffy darkness on the ridged tops of his treasure trunks.

Sounis tapped the chest, lying empty on its side in front of him. “This is the gold that I am going to offer as a reward if you fail to bring back what I am sending you for. I’ll offer it to anyone, from this country or any other, who brings you to me.” He tipped the casket upright and snapped the lid down.

I felt my stomach dropping. It would be hard to outrun a reward like that. I’d be hunted from one end of the world to the other.

“I’d want you alive of course,” said the king, and carefully described the grisly things that would happen to me when I was captured. I tried to stop listening after the first few examples, but he went on and on, and I was mesmerized like a bird in front of a snake. The magus stood with his hands across his chest and listened just as carefully. He didn’t seem nervous anymore. He must have been satisfied that the king had accepted his plans and that his threats would encourage me in my work. My stomach felt worse and worse.

My cell, when I was returned to it, felt warm and safe by comparison to the magus’s study. As soon as the guards were gone, I lay down on my stone bench and dumped the king and his threats out of my head without ceremony. They were too unpleasant to worry over anyway. I concentrated on a vision of myself leaving the prison. I made myself as comfortable as possible and went to sleep.

CHAPTER TWO

TWO GUARDS CAME FOR ME late the next morning, and I was surprised again. I had thought that the traveling the magus had mentioned would take some time to plan for. He had clearly gotten the king’s approval for the plan only the previous night. My hopes, which had been falling and rising, sank again as I realized that the magus hadn’t mentioned how far we would travel. It might be no more than a few miles. But I cheered up once I was free of my chains.