Thick as Thieves/Queen of Attolia connection

[checkers65477.livejournal.com]

I've been rereading pretty slowly to savor everything and came across this connection.

It's after Costis falls into the well and Kamet runs away, before he gets to the city.

"Nothing about my plans had changed, but I stood for a long time staring down the empty road, my arms hanging useless at my sides, waiting, as if he would appear, as if the world would settle back into its proper course, like the wine in a tilting cup saved just before it tipped too far. But the cup was overturned, the wine spilled. My master was dead. Now the Attolian was dead as well."

And it struck me how similar this was to that scene in QoA when Helen and Irene come into the room where Eugenides was being kept in Ephrata. The imagery with the overturned wine cup when Irene thinks Gen is dead, and now when Kamet thinks Costis is dead. It reminds me of the broken amphora, too, showing such desolation and regret.

Man, it's stuff like this that sort of explains why the books take so daggone long to write.

 

Comments

[agh-4.livejournal.com]

I love this connection. I LOVE IT.

They're both hit by (what they think is) the loss of Gen/Costis and by how that loss reveals feelings and care they hadn't fully realized before. The moments/interactions after Gen and Costis each turn out to be alive are also some of the funniest and most touching bits in either book, I think.

The touching bits:

"Emotions welled up in me until I was near drowning in them. I reached to touch his warm, living hand and swallowed a laugh and a sob. ... Something in my chest split then like an overfull wineskin, and I laughed out loud."

"Eugenides looked up at her, and Attolia felt transparent, as if her mask were gone, as if he could see her heart and know that a moment before it had been stopped by grief."

This is giving me chills, and while I would definitely chalk it up as a reason to read the central relationship in this book romantically, we can all have our cake/nutcake however we like, and eat it, too. The cake is the strength and importance of Kamet and Costis's relationship. My idiom skills are not that hot today.

...

I've thought it before and I'll think it again, someone could write a 50-page paper about cups/amphoras/bottles in these books. !

[agh-4.livejournal.com]

I think I missed the spilled-wine link because I was busy telepathically shouting at Kamet to at least check the well!!!, and because I was distracted by another QoA connection a few pages later:

"But my thoughts were like birds that wouldn't settle, flying around in my head. I heard again and again the single yelp and the silence from the well, saw the miller's smug animosity, smelled the stink of the flour, and felt again the pounding of my footsteps as I ran away."

vs

"He struggled for breath as his thoughts circled like birds that couldn't find a perch, searching for a way to change the truth, to change the queen of Attolia, but her decision was final, the action irrevocable."

I'm less certain what to make of this parallel -- they're both moments of loss (in a place that smells bad???), and it's a very effective way to express Kamet's and Gen's reactions, but ... while Costis is ok (hashtag thanks Eugenides, paging freenarnian), Gen's hand is definitely gone. True, there is both more and less to that loss than it seems at first. What do you all think?

Is there a third time that this bird imagery appears, or am I just thinking of the ones in Gen's stomach by the river at the end of the Thief?

[freenarnian.livejournal.com]

*buffs icon*

Sometimes I envision MWT sitting at her desk writing and reading these comments and thinking, "Dang it, I knew I'd used the bird/thoughts analogy before, somewhere..."

:)

[agh-4.livejournal.com]

That ... is also a possibility. :)

It's a very good analogy.

I love your post

[11rod88staff11.livejournal.com]

Thank you. I am so warmed when I read others who are reading the Kamet/Costis relationship romantically, even though friendships run strong with this kind of love and relief to find the other is alive and okay too..... I can't even begin to say how much I support the very nature of how Kamet/Costis Romance or "Just Friendship" CAN go either way at this point in history in which same gender couples are finding their voices and their time to shine in history while still being very silenced and oppressed at the same time. The fact that MWT just, essentially both did and did not write a whole entire book about the unfolding romance of a very Very hot same gender couple.... SO reflects what the world needs: to be awash in the reality of two men's love for each other... And SEE that love... for the story of that love to be out in the world without simultaneously being polarized, sensationalized or labelled as a "gay story" by those who are still offended or uncomfortable by the notion that gender is a spectrum, that romantic love exists between two individual people, not necessarily between a man and a woman. MWT IS herself Eugenides as she moves about in the world, raising the vibration of her global audience. How she tells it, without saying so much as to tip any scales in any one direction... is so precious and spellbinding. Diplomacy. In her own name.

May
Irene / Eugenides
Helen / Sophos
Costis / Kamet
all be celebrated for the infinite quality of their pairings.

[agh-4.livejournal.com]

"as if the world would settle back into its proper course, like the wine in a tilting cup saved just before it tipped too far"

WAIT.

"Eugenides started violently and knocked the wine cup on the arm of his chair. He made a halfhearted effort to catch it but only added a spin that flung the wine farther. The cup broke on the ceramic tiles.

!!!???

Sophos has just realized just how real the gods are; the world is not in its proper course for him? Something else?

(Sorry for aggressively pouncing on this post. I'll shut up for a bit, now.)

I love that you timely reflect...

[11rod88staff11.livejournal.com]

my own inclination to feel like I should apologize for aggressively pouncing all over posts that get my blood rushing through my veins and I just want to shout "OMG I KNOOOOOOWWWW" from some rooftop. Like I have to rein the feral nature of my enthusiasm in, stuff it back into my jeans.

The amphoras, the wine cups, the spilling of them, the breaking of them..... before I started reading the QT series... I wasn't as aware of just how beautifully a powerful, poetic motif such as this could echo to the very depths of my soul. Indeed, I concur, about that 50-page paper just about said cups/amphoras/bottles motif.

[kulai-raito.livejournal.com]

Aren't we all getting wiser with each reading of the books. Thank you MWT for making us smarter. This is how it was like for me.

First book was like: Okay, you got me. Completely. I missed all your hints and hung to your every word throughout and that included that the gift was lost.

Second Book beginning: Ouch. Then towards the end: SQUEE i'm in love and thought the book was crafted to perfection with subsequent re-reads. And conclusion: You still got me.

Third Book: I think I get the writing style now. Still manage to blow the mind towards the end. Godly Gen.

Fourth book: Yeah, I'm getting the hints a lot better now, I've been condition to, you know.

Fifth book: Alright, I'm prepare to read every passage in scrutiny. Question things when too little info is given but please she's getting better at connecting and believing and not believing parts. And predicting things.

Yeah, the fifth book had a lot of parallels and connections to the other books and in a way that binds the avid Queen's Thief readers.

You really know how our brain works and now we are following. (I hope)

[(Anonymous)]

This. So much this!

TaT was the first book in the series that I was able to "keep up" with throughout the entire book. I truly believe this is not because MWT's writing has changed, but because I have been taught to pay better attention!

-Puppeteergirl

[beth-shulman.livejournal.com]

This is fantastic.

[aged-crone.livejournal.com]

Checkers, you wrote: "Man, it's stuff like this that sort of explains why the books take so daggone long to write."

See, I have a different theory, refining thoughts I've had before (regarding pulling the wings off of flies...). I think that MWT, being a genius of a writer, actually tosses these books off in a week or two. But then she holds onto them, laughing quietly to herself as she sees us writhing in agony, waiting and waiting and waiting for the next book.

She sees us analyzing patterns in the publication dates - 4 year wait, okay then it will be 4 more years; no, 6 year wait, okay so it will be another 6 year wait; no, 4 year wait, okay, so it'll be either 4 years or 6 years; nope, 7 year wait - and giggles as she messes with our minds.

I wonder if she salts slugs, too? ;)

Just don't tell her I said so...

[checkers65477.livejournal.com]

I think you're on to something here.

I have hesitated to answer because I worry that if Megan sees we are on to her she'll make it TEN YEARS before the next book. You know, she can write Gen as spiteful so well. And why is that, I ask? WHY?

[aged-crone.livejournal.com]

Well, if she *really* wanted to be spiteful she would completely overturn all our expectations by having the book come out in just a few months. "Ha! *That* will show them!" she will say, as we are filled with shame and mortification for guessing so incorrectly...

[freenarnian.livejournal.com]

To say nothing of the fact that having TWO new MWT books to mull over and pick apart would probably see us all committed to an asylum for overexcited reprobates.

[manderelee.livejournal.com]

I would totally go insane. Totally. And I'd love every minute of it.

From a physics and a metaphysics standpoint...

[11rod88staff11.livejournal.com]

I sense this is clear evidence that the linear timeline that we abide by is but an illusion. That these books have already all been written and MWT was literally born having had them inside of her the entire time and there is no such thing as the time that she is taking to create stories that have already been written (except for at the same time she probably is sitting at a physical desk, actually typing them..) I mean.. the connections, the connections the CONNECTIONS, that there is no stone left unturned, no thread left hanging... now not one word, not even one miniscule mark of punctuation is just randomly there, but there or not there for a million infinite reasons. Everything within is just SO connected to something else... It just positively blows the linear timeline apart. It's like the Universe already exists on some other timeline, in some other dimension and MWT is its channel. There is no way that she's "writing them as time goes on." They're already written and they all were from the very moment the pen touched the paper back in 1996 or whichever moment The Thief first unfolded.

Re: From a physics and a metaphysics standpoint...

[checkers65477.livejournal.com]

She's already written the next one??? Then she really IS mean, keeping it from us so cruelly. ;-)

Re: From a physics and a metaphysics standpoint...

[11rod88staff11.livejournal.com]

But think about HOW BEAUTIFULLY FAR REACHING into our collective soul our fan fics and fan art and fan creations are BECAUSE of how much time we have to turn each book completely inside out over and over and and over again in our hearts, bodies minds and souls... she KNOWS that if she releases the next one too early, our OWN creativity in response to each book wouldn't proliferate and trascend as fully across physical time!