Free The Queen of Attolia by Megan Whalen Turner

of the temple. The smaller set of doors that led into the naos was also open.
    As he passed from the pronaos into the naos, his footsteps were quiet from habit. The altar was deserted. The incense burned in braziers unattended by a priest,and there was no sign of supplicants, or of a recent sacrifice. The great gilded statue of Hephestia looked down on no one but Eugenides. He walked to the alcove just before the great altar, where there was a smaller altar dedicated to Eugenides, God of Thieves. A curtain provided privacy to supplicants. Eugenides pulled it closed and sat on one of the marble benches that ran along either side of the alcove. He lifted his feet up onto the bench, out of sight of any casual glance under the curtain, and wrapped his arms around his knees.
    He’d left his room without his sling. He wondered if anyone had had time to stare when he was hurrying past. He tilted his head back against the marble walls behind him and closed his eyes. He didn’t look at the altar, decorated with an assortment of objects stolen by his ancestors and himself. He hadn’t come to pray. He’d come to hide.
     
    The stars were out when Eugenides picked his way carefully down the road from the temple. He shivered as he slipped through the doorway into the courtyard and nodded to a guard as he entered the palace. The hallways were empty, and he passed no one else on the way back to his rooms.
    The library doors were open, and the light from the fireplace inside flickered in the dark hall. He paused at the doorway to look in and saw his fatherand the queen sitting in silence in his armchairs, waiting for him.
    “You shouldn’t be here,” he said.
    They both stood. Eugenides looked at his father. “I was in the temple,” he said.
    “We knew that,” the queen replied. “You could hardly be dragged home from there without risking a rain of thunderbolts, and now that you’ve been safe from being disturbed all day, you’re blue with cold. Sit at the fire.”
    Eugenides didn’t sit by the fire; he lay down on the hearth in front of it, close enough to be burned by stray sparks, and pillowed his head on his arms, shuddering from the cold.
    “Cowardice has its own rewards,” his father observed, looking down at him.
    “More than you guess.” Eugenides spoke into his arms. “Moira came. She brought me a message from the gods.”
    The queen and his father were silent. Eugenides rolled over on his back to warm his other side. He stared at the ceiling. He knew that after the destruction of Hamiathes’s Gift the year before, what had seemed an indelible belief in the goddess-given authority of the Gift had slowly faded from most people’s minds, until the gods were once again a vague possibility instead of a nerve-racking reality—even for his father. He counted on Eddis, who had held the Gift, to believe still in theimmortals. She looked suitably wary, whereas his father looked only politely interested.
    “Stop whining,” Eugenides said.
    “What?” Eddis’s expression shifted from wary to puzzled.
    “That was the message. For me, alone among mortals, the gods send their messenger to tell me to stop whining. That’ll teach me to go hide in a temple.”
    “Eugenides—” said Eddis.
    “And I thought that I was doing fairly well,” he said bitterly.
    “You’ve been locked in your room all winter practicing your handwriting,” Eddis said.
    “Yes,” said Eugenides.
    “And what did you plan to do when your handwriting was perfect?” his father asked.
    Eugenides sat up and shifted to lean against the heated stones beside the fireplace, with his legs stretched out in front of the fire to warm. “I thought I might go to one of the universities on the Peninsula,” he said at last. “I thought that if I went away to study, I could come back in a few years and be…useful.”
    He pulled his knees up. “I’m sorry.” He shrugged. “I thought it was a good plan.”
    Eddis looked at him helplessly and then at