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Heyheyhey qt fans!! So I did a thing... I made an Irene inspired solid perfume!
Made with sweet orange, lily, jasmine, and Egyptian musk
https://www.etsy.com/listing/996005383/irene-perfume-queens-thief-inspired?ref=shop_home_active_2
Anyone whose read the Queen’s Thief series by Megan Whalen Turner knows that it’s a story that will consume your heart and never ever leave.
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@meganwhalenturner When you created the character Eugenides, were you influenced by the indigenous concept of heyoka? Eugenides, Thief of Eddis, heyoka-ism.... I notice there are a lot of parallels between the role of the thief and the role of the heyoka.
"Am I insufficiently kinglike? Costis has been telling me so." "Unkingly, in so many ways, My King. Not the least of which is listening to your guard tell you so."
Attolis to Attolia in Megan Whalen Turner’s King of Attolia
Does anyone else just die over this exchange? It reminds me of “Window glass is expensive, you know.” (QoA)
Can we just presence that by the end of TAT, The Mask is Gone. Gone. GONE.
The Scribe’s Wedding Night
This is easily one of my favorite QT fanfics, which I inhale. It never ceases to amaze me how this community communicates the parallels they draw and the connections they make not by direct analysis of the literature but by writing it into their own spinoff headcanon. I had not made the parallel that you make and for you pointing it out to me I am ever grateful. That Costis is to Teleus as Kamet is to Relius.
And that Costis and Kamet's friendship (and romance) instigated by Eugenides is a reflection of the friendship between Relius and Teleus instigated by Irene....(and/or romance? mmm. I don't necessarily headcanon romance but their platonic love is so tender and deep it doesn't even matter)
And I also imagine that when all is revealed... Costis is to Eugenides in the way that Kamet will become to Irene. Very early on even when he had little to no interaction with Irene, he "sympathized with the queen as her choices grew fewer and fewer and her freedom slipped away...")
Costis been the only one to see Eugenides in his most intimate vulnerable moments... in the same way that Kamet is among the only ones to see Irene in her most vulnerable moment.
Can we just presence that by the end of TAT, The Mask is Gone. Gone. GONE. We become invincible and unstoppable in our power only after we have been shattered into a million pieces. I believe that that was what MWT meant to convey: That the miscarriage was Irene's ultimate breaking point. And she broke. And Rose Again. And the true nature of her power was revealed to have nothing to do with her ability to maintain the mask. (as she had thought) That it was her vulnerability that made her powerful. That it was nothing ABOUT HER and what she DID that made her powerful. It was simply that she WAS. That it is nothing that we do our say that makes US powerful, when all is said and done. It is simply that we ARE. Powerful beyond measure each of us. We are all kings and queens. Of our own kingdoms.
That it is OUR vulerability that makes US powerful.
There was a landing stage, but not a true dock. The water of the river being well below the stage, the queen was lifted, as decorously as possible, from the rocking boat onto the shore. There were two bright spots of color on her cheeks as she sorted the folds of her dress and then raised her eyes to Eddis. Eddis waited politely. She was dressed in trousers and low boots, her over-tunic identical to those of her offers' but embroidered in gold. She wore not crown...
Queen of Attolia, Megan Whalen Turner, p. 303
I have wondered about this part for a long time. Would any QT fan care to have a go at offering their interpretation of this moment to me: “There were two bright spots of color on her cheeks...” MWT uses “blushing” so strategically to convey embarrassment and/or self-consciousness in her characters: Eugenides flushes when he reveals that he is in love during his proposal and Attolia laughs at him. Irene blushes when her court confirms everyone but her knew that Dite was in love with her. Even Helen blushes at one point having to do with Sophos having affection for her. And then Sophos is just embarrassed/self-conscious all the time.
Surely this moment where Attolia is blushing as she requires her staff to physically present her to the Queen of Eddis while Eddis looks on, as competent and strapping as any of her male officers. Eddis would have probably scrambled up the dock herself, so capable was she in her trousers. Do you interpret Attolia blushing as embarrassment at requiring assistance to be helped up and down obstacles in her skirts? Because it's the traditional proper thing to do for "a lady," and Attolia knows Eddis ain't no typical proper lady and she envies her for it? As a queer individual myself, I cringe whenever I am in a "feminine position" where I require the help of masculine individuals to help get basic things done. (or dont require it, but as a result of being female-presenting, I am offered it)
I mean if there's a 4 foot obstruction in front of me to leap across, and a guy offers me his hand because some damsel-in-distress-situation gets put into play, I won't reject his hand because I don't want to make him feel rejected, but sometimes I feel like "dammit if I didn't look like a woman, I would have been free to leap (or fail to leap over this thing myself) and I woulda felt like a badass if I had been left to my own means to get myself from point A to point B without being a damsel in distress. So is she embarrassed at being treated like a lady in front of Eddis, who is a woman, doesn't need to be treated like a lady cuz she's a badass motherfucker in her soldiers uniform and trousers? It's interesting. The blushing is so interesting to me. Because a lot of cisgender heteronormative women pride themselves on their "power" to get men to do these things for them. And it's something I just can't relate to myself. And I'm wondering that even though Irene looks like a cisgender heteronormative woman, she also feels weird about it.
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"Why send Costis?" I asked, still puzzled by that. "He's honest, not stupid," the king pointed out. "No, of course not. That's not what I meant." "You would have eluded a man with twice his cunning," said the king, and that was probably true.
Kamet ~ Thick As Thieves, Megan Whalen Turner
How beautiful, the point here being that cunningness repels cunningness. opposites attract, and similarities accumulated in fear often repel each other. If Kamet had met his match in regards to his own cunningness, he would have known what to expect. And shattered by a lifetime of trust issues, made himself unavailable because he could predict and foresee. He was thrown off only by honesty after a lifetime of being lied to. ("I'm sorry Kamet." Nahusaresh said so many times the words emptied of meaning.) And Attolis knew of Kamet's cunningness, rivaled only by the King's own ability to deceive.
We see here the heart and love behind Attolis's mastermind. That only Costis's pure, unadulterated, un-maskable honesty and integrity could possibly overcome the fortress of walls Kamet had been forced to build around himself to survive his childhood and his past. Attolis knows what cracks walls. What melts ice.
Kamet and Irene are so alike on the inside. A slave and a queen were one and the same. Talk about non-binary revelations of all we should actually be anticipating and expecting from life.
I'm so glad they had that tender, knowing final scene together where Kamet drops easily to sit cross-legged at the foot of her couch the way Eugenides so often does.
My Father dropped from his horse almost before the animal had stopped moving and strode, oblivious, through six layers of ceremonial reception, to take my mother in his arms. I stared, remembering his words after we'd escaped Hanaktos. As I watched him lift her off the ground, watched her wrap her arms around him and lay her head on his shoulder, it was apparent that I had misunderstood what he meant when he said that only I was "important."
Sounis Sophos in Conspiracy of Kings
Earlier in CoK, there is a wince-worthy moment where Sophos's father is being asked about his family members and he vehemently says that "only Sounis (Sophos) is important-- implying that he couldn't care less about the women. His appearance of Attolian-esque chauvinism irritates Sophos off and then here we all realize along with him that his father told others that his wife and daughters were not important to him so they wouldn't be linked to him and in danger of being held even more deeply hostage than they already were. So that those men could not use his family to leverage power over the men. I love how much hugging and holding and kissing there is in CoK. There's so much very direct affection and innate trust in each other's touch. It works to contrast so starkly against the timid shyness and trauma and fear that permeates Irene's and ultimately Eugenides's worlds where they love each other but even slight physical contact comes with such trepidation and hesitation. The "bear hugs" that Sophos gets from his father at least twice. How in the villa siege, Sophos climbs off the balcony and catches his mother and sisters as they leap into his arms and his littlest sister "positively throws herself off the terrace." Real family intimacy to have so much trust in each other. How Sophos "picks his sisters up with one arm." How Helen "hugs herself" almost subconsciously in difficult times and Sophos automatically reads that as a request for comfort and goes to her. It's like, even with the problems with his father that he had growing up, Sounis still had very direct, openly expressed affection modeled for him within his family (far more than is normal in my own family) and as a result he has a lot of trouble reading and accepting Irene's affection for him. When it was there the whole time. In her chilly deadpan way she pretty much tells him everything she knows about how to rule a country. That was her way of opening up to him showing love to him even though he didn't know it. I loved how in that moment we saw that Irene loved Sophos because she knew that Gen loved him and Sophos loved Gen. The same way Gen's love and loyalty to Relius and Telius was unconditional no matter how badly the started off. And I think what CoK is reminding us here is of all the different languages of love out there that there really are. And to consider what others in our own lives have been through that they are sometimes limited in how they can express their love and commitment and devotion to someone. So be open to the subtle Attolia-esque nuances of that subtle affection. Oh and I would like to think that a lot of that reserve falls away the moment Attolia takes Eddis's hand when Sounis is leaving. Even Helen struggled to read Irene initially... "She is slow to trust.... but yeah I didn't say I was swearing any oaths to her!"
All the Times Irene is Shown "Pulling Away” from Eugenides
The one that everyone else on the Little Peninsula sees as a ruthless aggressor is really just the opposite. It takes a lifetime to unlearn pain patterns that were necessary for survival in an earlier time. That learning curve for how to accept affection and love in their place. It probably appears as a “short temper” in the process.
All those times Eugenides tries to take her hand and pull her toward him and she pulls away because she’s terrified of him-- of his strength and his power and stealth and that’s why she cut his hand off in the first place... Fear is the tragic universal motivation for anyone harming another. That time where he appears in her tent with his sword and she thinks he’s there to kill her and he kisses her instead...
That moment in QoA when she’s about to see the Mede army and the Eddisian army clash on the front lines before they rescue her--it’s not even her army or countrymen-- and she looks away. Because deep down she’s just like Eugenides in that it hurts her to harm people.
...
Eugenides reached to take her hand, but she was sitting at his right side and he had to reach across his body. He raised himself on his elbow, but she freed her hand and pushed him gently back into bed. (QoA p. 358-357) His wildness sometimes frightened her."No," she said repressively, and was unprepared when he pulled her down the steps in spite of her refusal. She staggered, and struggled for her balance, but he didn't let go of her hand. The court hissed in barely concealed rage to see their queen treated so. Even those who opposed the queen liked the Eddisian less."The court is watching," she pointed out."I thought you wanted me more exposed to the public eye." he teased. "I reverse myself," she said coldly, "and argue for a little circumspection." She tugged at his hand, but he didn't release her. She gave up, unwilling to be seen trying to pull away. (KoA p. 98) She came through the palace doorway ahead of her attendants, who joined her one by one, all showing signs of haste. The people on the stairs moved silently out of the queen's way, and she looked down at the king, who still hadn't looked up. Walking stiffly, she came silently down the stairs. The guards broke their cordon to admit her.She reached for Eugenides and touched him on the face. He lept backward like a startled deer, so explosively that Costis almost fell over trying to hold him. The queen snatched her hand back as if she had been burned. (KoA p. 175-176) ...Nothing stirred in the courtyard, not even the air, while the queen looked down at the king and the king looked down at his feet...The queen had begun another slow step backward up the stair behind her when the king caught her by the wrist and pulled her forward...[Costis] had to shift his footing with care, and shift it again as the king let go of Attolia's wrist in order to catch the robe at the elbow and pull her closer. (KoA p. 176)
