I am a master of foolhardy plans, I thought. I have so much practice I consider them professional risks. Sooner or later they would have needed the c… - 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 stifled a snort of my own in the silence that followed. The magus must have still been tired. He must have once known, but forgotten, that the minister of war had married the daughter of the previous King's Thief. He was talking to my father. The magus might have remembered this, might have recognized me from the first time he'd seen me in Sounis, but we had never been introduced. When he'd come with Sounis's marriage proposals, I had been sulking in my rooms.

The second night you repeated the same words over and over. I think the fever had set in by then. Do you remember what you said?
"No."
She knew every one of them. His voice, broken and stumbling, had filled her dreams until she had wept in her sleep, crying tears for him that she'd never been able to cry for her father or for herself. "Oxe Harbrea Sacrus Vax Dragga..." she began.
Eugenides's chin lifted as he recognized the opening words.
"It's the invocation of the Great Goddess at her spring festival," he said calmly, "calling her to the aid of those that need her. Those words are archaic.