The Thief (The Queen's Thief Book 1) by Megan Whalen Turner

Author:Megan Whalen Turner [Turner, Megan Whalen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2009-09-09T22:00:00+00:00

It was not my favorite story, and I wished I hadn’t brought it to mind just then, when I had work to do.

“Did you know,” I asked the magus, “that when you think someone is very intelligent, you say he is clever enough to steal Hamiathes’s Gift?”

The magus cocked his head. “No, I didn’t. Is it just among your mother’s people?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. But I know what happened if you tried and got caught.”

“I don’t know that either,” the magus said, surprised by a gap in his scholarship. He wasn’t surprised that I knew. I suppose crime and punishment are things that most thieves keep track of.

“They threw you off the mountain.”

“Maybe that’s what happened to your mother. Maybe that’s why she left Eddis.” He was teasing, doing his best to lift my spirits. He’d either gotten over his anger or was pretending that he had.

“Not threw as in exile,” I said, and described with one hand the arc of someone falling a long distance. “Threw as in over the edge of the mountain.”

“Oh,” he said.

We were all quiet again. It was another quarter of an hour before we heard the sound the magus had been waiting for. It was a variation in the wash of the river beside us. The magus stood and turned to look at it. I did the same, and in the space of a few heartbeats the river disappeared. The flow of its water stopped, came again in slushy bursts over the falls, and then stopped again. It was as if a giant tap somewhere had been turned by the gods, and our ears, which had ceased to register the sound of water, were now pounded by the silence of no water at all.

I stood with my mouth open for a long time as I realized that upstream there was a reservoir and the water that made the Aracthus flowed through a sluice in its dam. At the end of the summer, if the water in the reservoir was too low, then the sluice gate was closed and the river disappeared. I shook my head in wonder.

In the bulging rock where the waterfall had been, there was a recessed doorway. The lintel of the doorway was the rock itself, but set into it were two granite pillars. Between the pillars was a door pierced by narrow slits that were wider in their middles and narrower at the ends. The river water still sprayed through these slits and dropped into the round pool that remained in the basin below.

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