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[artino-c]

“And the main house [of the Kallicertes estate]?” “Burn it.” (...) “Tear the buildings to the ground,” said Irene. “Cut down every tree, grub up every living thing. There is to be no stone unturned. And when you’re done, pile the wood into whatever remains of the house, and then I want it to burn. I want it to burn for days.” (...) “Relius,” she said, calling her adviser back from the doorway. She’d been staring out the window so long, he’d quietly excused himself. “There’s a bank of coleus along the east side of the garden.” “Yes, my queen?” “Leave it untouched.”

— "Burning Down the House of Kallicertes" in Moira's Pen (2022)

QoA (pre-RotT?) Irene is so conscious of her own contempt to the notion of worship — she calls what she gives the New Gods "lip service," and once the presence of the Old Gods is revealed to her, instead of anything akin to awe, what she develops towards them is a sense of... resentment? Mistrust? Presumably due to their betrayal of Eugenides, whose devotion she witnesses firsthand in her prison*

This passage of the short story is so striking — her destruction of the actual, physical house of Kallicertes is explicitly motivated by personal revenge; it happens by decree, by the power of her word...and then, just as personally motivated, this command to spare the coleus plants that were her only allies. This expression of gratitude, like the expression of anger that preceded it, is so unpragmatic and sentimental and final — there's at the same time a feeling of humane and of divine in it...I just love it.

[artino-c]

Of all the scenes I’ve drawn and re-drawn and overdrawn in my twenty years of Queen’s Thief fan art, I have never attempted This Scene. I don’t know why, but I figured it was past time. I still criminally under-draw Costis (but not as much as I under-draw Sophos). Not to worry, though—I’m on to A Conspiracy of Kings audiobook now, and it took effort to finish this piece instead of launching into our bby mankiller bunny.

Also I think Gen’s wearing the same coat as he was in my last piece, but given his attendants, that’s really not surprising.

[artino-c]

i really like outsider POV, but the thing is, it fundamentally works better when whatever is going on with the characters in question is so fucking weird that no reasonable outsider could ever discern it

like, the ideal outsider POV should have at least some element of 'what the fuck is wrong with these people'.

[artino-c]

something i love about the apology scene in thick as thieves is that even though it's pivotal for both characters and crucial to their future friendship it absolutely does not fix things. it doesn't even establish a baseline of expected future behavior for either character??

"Kamet," said the Attolian in a low voice, "I am sorry. I hope you will forgive me." [...] I opened my mouth and no words came. I didn't know what to say when "sorry" meant something, what to say to an apology that was so obviously sincere.

kamet accepts the apology, and over the next few chapters they become much closer (with less commentary by kamet about the uncomfortable power dynamic between them). but costis doesn't take this for granted--so much so that he expresses surprise after kamet saves him from the well

"What?" I was mystified. "If I wouldn't leave you in a well, why would I abandon you in a ditch?" He looked momentarily as confused as I felt. "I don't know," he admitted. [...] "Actually, I don't know why you didn't leave me in a hole in the ground."

and kamet doesn't rule out that costis might hurt him if they came into conflict again, not even near the very end of the book (when he already told the reader in an earlier passage that losing costis' friendship is a worse outcome than dying):

"Well," I said, realizing that the strange feeling rising in my chest was anger, "you are an idiot." "What?" I didn't back down. He was securely locked in the cell opposite, after all, and I'd already lost his goodwill. I had nothing left to lose. "You knew what I thought of Attolia."

idk what to say about this except that the messiness of this makes it feel so much more real

[artino-c]

i’m not really interested in doing apologia for news from the palace but i do think it’s possible to read too much into philo and phaedo loving when adults mix them up necessarily meaning they’re biologically related. tbh if they’re not that’s also a potential reason for them to care about a superficial and/or coincidental resemblance

[artino-c]

“her queen danced like a flame in the wind, and the mercurial king like the weight at the center of the earth”

what a beautiful way to show a relationship between two characters

[artino-c]

The Sidosians, the Medes, and the History of Ianna-Ir

I wrote a post a while ago where I compiled all the different demonyms and other descriptive words that the books use to describe the Medes. This post is about a different group who are not mentioned nearly as often: the Sidosians.

There are only three textual mentions of the Sidosians in the entire series (if you know of another one please tell me!)

"It’s very old," the queen said with a smile. "This was an Attolian megaron, a fortified room on a hilltop, when your emperor's present palace was an empty plot of land in the Sidosians' territory."

The Queen of Attolia (ch 14)

He taught me to write with a pen as well as with chalk, and one day he taught me numbers—not the marks I already knew, but Sidosian numerals.

The Return of the Thief (vol 1 ch 8)

Not since Nussam led his forces across the isthmus to conquer the Sidosian empire had the world seen an army that size.

The Return of the Thief (vol 2 ch 1)

From these, we know that the Sidosians controlled Ianna-Ir before the Medes did, and that they invented the number system currently used in the Little Peninsula. That's pretty much it.

However, I get the impression from the books that the area around Ianna-Ir has a history very similar to that of ancient Mesopotamia: a region inhabited for thousands of years and controlled by various culturally-related empires. The Mede Empire seems to be the most recent of these, though it is clearly very well-established and has been around for a long time. Kamet's map from Thick as Thieves gives us a hint that the aforementioned Nussam from the other side of the isthmus was also the Mede ruler who conquered the Sidosians:

On this map, there is a city called Sidusia on the river, between Ianna-Ir and Iannis. If we assume that Sidusia is related somehow to the Sidosians, they probably originated in this general area. On the other hand, there is only one region labeled "Mede," on the opposite side of the isthmus from Ianna-Ir and Sidusia. This makes me think that the Medes originally came from the other side of the isthmus, and that the area around Ianna-Ir was not originally part of the Mede homeland.

(Note that Gitta's map does label the Ianna River region "Mede," as well as the region to the west of the isthmus, but it's a later map made by someone who is probably much less familiar with Mede history and geography than Kamet. I'm guessing that the label is meant to indicate that the area has been part of the Mede Empire for a long time. Gitta's map also has a smaller regional label of "Sidosia" to the southeast of Ianna-Ir, but there is no city called either Sidosia or Sidusia. The scale and orientation Gitta's map is also different enough from Kamet's that it can be difficult to compare the two.)

Kamet has also added a parenthetical label beneath Sidusia that reads "The New Palace." There is no reference made to this palace in the book itself, or anywhere else in the series that I know of, and it's obviously not the primary palace of the Mede emperor, which we know is in Ianna-Ir. The New Palace might be an ongoing contruction project of the emperor's, or a smaller palace that was completed more recently where he sometimes stays. My silly pet theory is that the New Palace was the name of the Sidosian ruler's residence at the time of the Mede conquest, and everyone just kept calling it the New Palace even after the Medes built their own palace in their new capital city.

While the emperor's palace in Ianna-Ir may be relatively new, the city itself is much older. The region around the current Mede capital of Ianna-Ir has a cultural continuity that predates the Medes, and possibly also the Sidosians. Kamet tells us in Thick as Thieves that Immakuk was the king of Ianna-Ir, and the stories about him and Ennikar appear in a number of ancient texts:

"You said you were reciting from the first tablet," said the Attolian. "There are more than a hundred in the temple of Anet alone," I said. "No one knows how many there are altogether. Scholars argue about it. Some of the tablets are retellings of other tablets, only differing in style. Sometimes parts of the story change."

The current Mede gods are also much older than the empire: Anet, Shesmegah, Tenep, Ne Malia, Prokip and the Queen of the Night all appear or are mentioned in the Immakuk and Ennikar stories, and all of them are worshipped by the present-day Medes.

The tablets were written in Ensur, a language that is still studied but no longer seems to be spoken. Kamet says that Ensur is "from before the Mede," but doesn't specify whether or not there were other dominant languages in between. It's possible that Ensur was the language of the Sidosians, but the words sound unrelated enough that the speakers of Ensur might have belonged to a group that controlled the region before the Sidosians.

Immakuk is a fairly a clear parallel to Gilgamesh, who was king of the Sumerian city of Uruk, and the in-universe history of the Immakuk stories maps very closely onto what we know about Gilgamesh. The oldest stories about him are written in Sumerian, but the first combined version of the Epic of Gilgamesh is written in Akkadian, the language of the Akkadian, Babylonian, and Assyrian empires that controlled Mesopotamia (including Sumer) at various times. Sumer, Akkad, Assyria, and Babylonia all had a great deal of cultural overlap with each other, including gods and writing systems. Perhaps Ianna-Ir and Sidusia were once ancient city-states like Uruk and Akkad, and it was the Sidosians who happened to be in power when the Medes arrived.

Even though the Medes are likely not the original inhabitants of the city, it seems clear to me that Ianna-Ir, its gods, and its heroes are deeply entrenched in Mede culture by the events of the series, even if the Medes had to cross the isthmus to get there. They might have had different gods when they conquered the Sidosians, and gradually adopted the religion of their new empire's heartland. It's also possible that Mede culture had long been influenced by the ancient stories of their neighbors and that they already worshipped some of the same gods. Given the history of ancient Mesopotamian religion, the second option might even be more likely.

[artino-c]

trying to figure out how to draw Eugenides from The Queen's Thief series by Megan Whalen Turner

[artino-c]

I love how in The King of Attolia Eugenides and Irene's situation is basically the opposite of a fake marriage scenario.

Instead of two people pretending to be married & in love, it's two people who are married & in love but everyone around them thinks they were forced to marry each other and their love is "fake."

[artino-c]

Attolia broke an amphora once…

[artino-c]

Mother why does the River not rise

It is not the River's time

-Thick as Thieves

Irene Attolia, the Queen's Thief, Megan Whalen Turner

[artino-c]

This:

always makes me think

[artino-c]

Happy valentines daaaaay <3

[artino-c]

once again i'm thinking about that line in thick as thieves when kamet's like "it's so weird that costis would refer to me as a setran. the last time we talked about this i made a huge deal about how dumb it was that he thought i was mede. i just can't figure out what's going on with him"

[artino-c]

i spent so much energy being disappointed that helen marries sophos that i sometimes forget about the really great parts of conspiracy of kings

[artino-c]

when i read Thick as Thieves, i didn't come away with the impression that Costis was having a great time for most of the book. he does seem to be more in his element than he was during The King of Attolia (not a high bar!), and clearly feels more at home when he's fighting and hiking and hunting vs. being a pawn in court intrigue where he has very little control over what's happening to him

BUT. while Kamet was definitely the more stressed of the two during their road trip for a variety of reasons, i think Costis was also pretty stressed out at times! he finds out early on that his charge cannot physically defend himself! he has to fight a lion! he gets captured by slavers! he almost dies of a fever! Costis does a pretty good job of staying calm for Kamet’s sake but no way he wasn’t internally freaking out at least a little when he had to give Kamet stitches, or during any number of other dangerous situations they find themselves in

i also think it's easy to overestimate how close Costis thinks he and Kamet are at the beginning of the story. he can DEFINITELY tell that Kamet thinks he's a complete dumbass at first (they literally talk about this), and i'm sure he can also tell that Kamet is wary of him and does not trust him initially! he and Kamet are definitely not on the same page about things for much of the book - we know that Costis feels betrayed when he learns that Kamet kept so much from him - but i'm also certain their relationship changed over time in Costis' mind too