You don't understand your weakness, if you think the greater nations will protect you. We will see how much longer you rule your backwater, Your Maje… - Megan Whalen Turner

The magus might have heard me thinking. "He does have other skills to be proud of," he said. For instance, I thought, stealing Hamiathes's Gift not once but twice. Who else in history had done that? But the magus referred to the fight with the Queen's Guard at the base of the mountain. That wasn't a skill I appreciated much. If I'd been as inept with a sword as I was in a saddle, my father might not have driven me so hard to be a soldier and to let the title of King's Thief lapse forever. It had been meaningless for so many generations, and he'd felt strongly that it should disappear for good.

Your Majesty," he asked innocently, "is it true that your cousins once held you down in a water cache?"
Ornon, in the act of putting down his wine cup, paused.
"Is it also true that they wouldn't let you out until you agreed to repeat insults about your own family?

He looked up from the where he had been carefully smoothing the embroidered cover, and seeing his face, Costis felt the shock like a physical blow. If Attolia could look like a queen, Eugenides was like a god revealed, transformed into something wholly unfamiliar, surrounded by the cloth-of-gold bedcover like a deity on an altar, passionless and calculating.