Author's Notes: I wrote this a while ago. Actually, I'm about to put up quite a few fics I wrote a while ago, so if you've got me on author alert and have already read my stuff on livejournal, I apologize for spamming you. This is a missing scene from The Thief, from the Magus' PoV.
The magus sighed, but immediately wished he hadn't. Pol and Ambiades were both light sleepers, Pol notoriously so. Sophos he needn't worry about. The magus waited silently for a moment before he relaxed; only the thief shifted in his sleep, and the magus doubted the boy was going to wake any time soon.
He had been reluctant to add this old house to their list of stops. The magus did not like to visit it. Each time it felt as though he were trespassing on another family's tragedy, as though at any moment the house's owners might return. It was a jolt to remember that the house's owners were dead, and that the tragedy was his. Why couldn't he remember? Shouldn't he be sad?
The magus could imagine the house full of people, if he tried. He could see olive trees through the windows, where a few rowdy boys might have played. There were several chairs, which might have been shoved around the table for a family meal. The bedroom door stood ajar, as though a boy wanting to be comforted after a bad dream has just pushed through to see his parents.
Perhaps these were memories. But if they were, they were hazy, only glimpsed through a screen of screaming men and dusty books. Sword practice, scrolls arranged in orderly rows.
It wasn't long before the magus was asleep. In his dreams, a family ran through the small house, a mother was cooking at the fireplace, a father was coming through the door with a laughing child clinging to each leg. But slowly, very slowly, they faded away. Their actions grew smaller, their voices lower. And then he was outside the house, looking up at it and realizing that he did not know where he was. He saw himself painting the house with red paint, and covering it over with old papers inscribed with his own, meticulous handwriting.
He was glad to leave in the morning. The house was flooded with light, and each absent memory that snagged at his mind taunted him. The magus, who knew all there was to know about the country of Sounis, who was told by the king's own spies everything that he could not learn from a book, who had killed more men than he could count, could not remember the first five years of his life. He didn't want to try.
He didn't want to remember.
He didn't want to be sad.