second read, 2021: I am not sure what to say except that this may be one of my favorite books of all time. The idea that a character possesses certain traits and skills that he chooses to keep hidden for 90% of the book is so, so cool. Costis is so lovably unaware of everything that's really going on. Ornon and Dite and Phresine and Philologos and all the side characters make the world rich and are also really fun.

I'll be back here to make a list of my favorite quotes soon, but for now... go read The Thief if you haven't, and then go read all of the books in order, because MWT is a stellar author and you need her books in your life :)

UPDATED TO ADD QUOTES... if you, like me, just want to peruse some of your favorites :)
(spoilers abound!)

Spoiler

➽ The queen danced like a flame in the wind, and the mercurial king like the weight at the center of the earth.

➽ The silence around was a gift, and she took refuge in it. For this brief time she did not need to move or speak, did not need to tease apart the truth from the lies, did not need to justify her action or her inaction. Her king found no such refuge in stillness. He preferred to pace. She had seen it often enough already, back and forth as silent as a cat in a cage. But he could be still as well, as skillful in stifling movement as in moving, as silent as sunlight on stone. He knew that the stillness was as near as she could come to peace, and he offered it to her.
When Phresine knocked, she waited for the click of the latch and then she called her attendants in.

➽ The king sat with his feet on the chair and his knees drawn up to his chest, looking over them and out the window. So motionless was he, and so silent the progress of his tears, that it was the space of a breath before Costis realized the king was crying.

➽ "Oh my god," he prayed to Miras. "Oh my god, oh my god."
If he choked on a bone and died, I wouldn't care. It wasn't true.
Costis prayed as he ran. To Miras, his own god, and to Philia, goddess of mercy, that she would preserve the king from harm. "Oh, Goddess, please let the little bastard be all right," he prayed. "Oh, please let there be nothing wrong. Let this be a mistake. Let me look like a fool, but keep him safe."

➽ The king lifted a hand to her cheek and kissed her. It was not a kiss between strangers, not even a kiss between a bride and room. It was a kiss between a man and his wife, and when it was over, the king closed his eyes and rested his forehead against the hollow of the queen's shoulder, like a man seeking respite, like a man reaching home at the end of the day.

➽ "She is my queen. Nothing else matters. I will be loyal until the day I die."

➽ Forgetting Costis standing nearby, forgetting possibly that anyone or anything else in the world existed, the king said shakily, "Tell me you won't cut out my lying tongue, tell me you won't blind me, you won't drive red-hot wires into my ears."
After one moment of gripped immobility, the queen bent to kiss the king lightly on one closed eyelid, then on the other. She said, "I love your eyes." She kissed him on either cheek, near the small lobe of his ears. "I love your ears, and I love"— she paused as she kissed him gently on the lips—"every single one of your ridiculous lies."

➽ The king's attendants remained, digesting the fact that their helpless, inept king had promised his wife to destroy the house of Erondites in six months and had done it in ninety-eight days.

➽ "You misunderstand me, Captain. I am pardoning him."
Teleus, who had faced his failures and his death and the death of his friend and accepted his own salvation at the hand of a man he despised, ran out of the strength to accept any more. He contradicted the king. "Her Majesty has condemned him."
Eugenides, wounded and tired and surrounded by the walls and the stench of the prison where he had lost his hand, responded, not mocking but snarling, "Am I king?"

➽ "I am what you have made of me," the queen said softly.

➽ "If we truly trust no one, we cannot survive."

➽ "Your Majesty, please get down," Costis said hurriedly. The king was almost at the end of the crenellation, and he dreaded what would happen when he got there.
"Why? Costis, I'm not going to fall."
"You're drunk."
"Not that drunk," said the king. "Watch." He tossed the wineskin to Costis, who caught it and clutched it in horror as the king turned himself upside down and balanced, one hand on the narrow ridge of the stone."
"Oh, my god," said Costis.
"O my god," said the king, cheerfully. "You want to call on the god appropriate to the occasion."

➽ "If you are going to reject the gods' reward, you have to go very carefully. You can't let them know that you hate being surrounded every minute of every day by people who think you should be acting like a king, and that you cannot possibly stand one more day listening to prating idiots tell you how lucky you are while a man you hate is laughing his guts out on the far side of the Black Straits, and there's not a damn thing you can do about that because you are trapped in the only disaster you've ever gotten yourself into that you absolutely cannot get out of."

➽ "Never call on the gods if you don't really want them to appear."

➽ "The public perception of your honor has nothing to do with anything important, except perhaps for manipulating fools who mistake honor for its bright, shiny trappings. You can always change the perceptions of fools."

➽ "Will you serve me and my god?"
"I will, Your Majesty."
"Then come out," said the king, "knowing that you'll never die of a fall unless the god himself drops you."

➽ It would be ridiculous to come into a steam room dressed in clothes, or for that matter, wearing a metal cuff and hook on the end of your arm. So Eugenides was as naked as anyone else, but no one else used clothes as a disguise, and none of them was as naked, therefore, as the king.

➽ "He is an Annux, a king of kings."

---
2020:
The only reason I didn't like this one as much as the previous book is that it was mostly from Costis' POV, and I did not like Costis. I mean, he's fine, but I was craving Gen and Attolia, so it took me a long time to accept him as the MC. Once I did... ahhh, I haven't got the words to explain how good this book is.

Tip: if you, like me, didn't know anything about the plot of this book before reading it, and then didn't much like Costis, go back and reread/skim it and think about all the things Gen has been doing THE. WHOLE. TIME.

Sometimes, if you want to change a man's mind, you have to change the mind of the man next to him first.