Free The Thief by Megan Whalen Turner

“Eddis has refused him so far, but she won’t be able to if he can show that he isthe rightful ruler of her country. We’ve warned her that at his next proposal he will be the bearer of Hamiathes’s Gift.” And that’s why we were all out in the dark fetching what he had already promised to deliver.
    “What if no one believes in your silly Hamiathes’s Gift anymore?” I asked. “What if we find it and everyone says, ‘So what?’”
    “She is not so secure on her throne that she can risk offending her people’s gods. No woman could be.”
    I looked into the fire. For a while there was quiet around the campfire. “He doesn’t want the queen,” I said at last, the truth forcing its way out. “He doesn’t even want the country. He wants the pass through the mountains so that he can invade Attolia.”
    Pol and Ambiades nodded their heads on the other side of the fire. To anyone who knew Sounis, this explanation made more sense than the one the magus offered.
    The magus shrugged. “It’s not important why he wants the Gift. What’s important is that we get it. And now I think you’d better get some rest.”
    Like a good tool, for instance, a very well-behaved hammer, I stretched out by the fire and went to sleep.
     
    The next morning light came slowly to the gorge, and I was well rested by the time our day started, but the conversation of the night before still rankled, and I took care to chew with my mouth open at breakfast until themagus winced and looked away. The gorge grew wider, and the olive trees disappeared. We walked past juniper and red shank and green shank bushes and the occasional fir tree as the stone cliffs were replaced by steep hillsides covered with loose rocks. Finally, in the evening, the gorge widened still further, and we were in a narrow valley filled with trees. The path underfoot changed from hard rock to dirt and then to dirt covered with pine needles. We made no sound as we climbed out of the valley into a larger forest that stretched indefinitely in front of us.
    “I told you there was nothing up here but trees,” I said as I turned around to look at the way we had come. I could see down the cut of the gorge until the trail twisted, and between the mountains I could see all the way out to the plains beyond. The road we had followed to the foothills was not visible, nor was the city, but we could see a bend of the Seperchia twisting across the plain, and beyond that there was a glimpse of the sea.
    “Can we stop now?” I wanted to know. “My feet are tired.”
    “No.” The magus shook his head. “Get moving.”
    Our trail continued between the trees. We made no sound as we walked and walked. I looked up at the branches that blocked any view of the sky overhead, mountain fir, with their cones beginning to open in order to drop their seeds. I said, “This is boring. How come boring makes me so tired?”
    When no one answered, I asked again, “When can we stop?”
    The magus slowed down to look over his shoulder. “Shut up.”
    “I just wanted—”
    Pol was behind me as usual. He leaned forward to give me a shove in the shoulder blades.
     
    It was almost dark when we came to a road through the forest paved with giant stones laid perfectly evenly. We waited under the trees until the magus was sure that the road was empty, and then we all sped across to the forest on the other side.
    “Where does the road go?” Ambiades asked the magus.
    “From Eddis’s capital city to the main pass through the mountains.”
    “How did they lay it?” Sophos wanted to know.
    The magus shrugged. “It’s been too long to know. It was laid at the same time as the old walls of our city. No one knows how it was done.”
    “Polyfemus,” said Ambiades.
    “What?” asked Sophos.
    “They probably think Polyfemus did it. He was the giant with one eye that supposedly built the old walls of the city and the king’s prison. Don’t you know any of these stories?”
    Sophos shook his head.