Think of it as stealing not you but the king's faith in you." "And what happens to me without the king's faith?" "If you're smart, you leave Sounis,"… - Megan Whalen Turner

"Eugenides," he said. He had recognized the voice.
"Yes."
"What have you done?"
"Not much yet," answered the Thief from the darkness. "I remain fairly limited in my physical activities." He held up his right arm, and the magus started before realizing that the hand he saw had to be a wooden one, concealed by a glove.
Another booming explosion filled the air, and the magus turned back to the window but could see only a glare reflecting on the whitewashed walls of the buildings below.
"I had to send someone else to light the fuses," Eugenides said behind him.
"Fuses?" asked the magus, with a sick feeling.
"In the powder magazines of your warships," Eugenides explained.
"Powder magazines?"
"You sound like the chorus in a play," said Eugenides.
"And the play is a tragedy, I suppose?"
"A farce," Eugenides suggested, and the magus winced.

"I know exactly when. I was hiding in a takima bush in the Queen's Garden, watching the older son of the Baron Erondites tell Attolia that he loved her. He was trying to propose a marriage and she thought he was talking about a poem he was writing. I was laughing like a very quiet fiend, trying not to make the branches around me shake, and then, between one heartbeat and the next, and to my complete surprise, it wasn't funny anymore." He rubbed his chest, as if a remembered pain. "I wanted to kill him. Once she was gone, I very nearly jumped out of the bush onto his head. Poor Dite."
Poor Eugenides, thought Sounis, to fall in love with a woman he had already made into an enemy.

Will you serve me and my god?"
"I will, Your Majesty."
"Then come out," said the king, helping him, "knowing that you'll never die of a fall unless the god himself drops you.