"Thick As Thieves" may be Kamet the slave’s story, but it’s HER, the queen’s story too. Told by him. Felt by both.
I am currently in my second re-read of Thick As Thieves. (The first time, I read it on my phone Kindle app while I was waiting the thousand years for delivery of my physical book to my doorstep overseas.) So now the highlighter and the markers and the pens get no rest as I underline and circle and proceed to personalize/trash the margins with my musings.
I observe with mounting frequency and intensity that pretty much anything we can say about Kamet, we can say about Irene. And my heart breaks again for them both. If you’re anything like me, you approached Thick As Thieves starving for more about Irene and how her healing and character development are going and were initially disappointed that only 4 out of 337 pages actually physically have Irene on them…. until you realize how parallel Kamet and Irene run and ACTUALLY Irene is on ALL 337 pages without actually physically ever being mentioned. Kind of how god/goddess is all around us, omniscient, omnipotent, whether we know it or not. Kind of how Eugenides also is, in his Universe. And also in our heart and minds, he’s there, even though we don’t see or hear him.
I made a list of some of the ways Irene = Kamet, Kamet = Irene:
They both initially choose Power over Freedom. Irene to hold her throne– there is no other choice because her people would have been doomed, cheated, subjugated into oblivion by her evil fiance. Kamet to be one of the most powerful men in the empire as Nahusaresh’s right hand. They both couldn’t really even imagine the later was an option…. until Eugenides comes for Irene, and Costis comes for Kamet.
MISTRUST runs through their veins and their fear and angst and struggle against having their wounds ripped open, each time, is utterly raw and palpable.
They both cannot swim. The inability to swim being symbolic of their feelings of helplessness, drowning, the agony of their imprisonment beneath black water. Black, Irene sees, not only because it is dark, but because of the fatality it holds. For Irene, we get it, in just a couple words: “Do you swim, your majesty?” Eugenides asks. “No.” she answered shortly. And Kamet, more the talker, articulates multiple times throughout TAT both their terror, and the terror of every other person in the world who cannot swim who is faced with being forced into the ocean against their will: He’d “swallowed half the sea that night…” “If I fell, I’d drown” And there’s the part where he causes Costis to lose the purse with his King’s money in the river when he is “clinging to him like a monkey” in shallow water.
When Eugenides first takes Irene out in a boat, she thinks it’s to murder her. The first time Costis takes Kamet out in a boat, he also thinks its to kill him.
Both Kamet and Irene are taken from their homes as children. Kamet is literally abducted when his small village is raided. Upon her brother’s sudden death and Irene is suddenly heir, her old nurses, everything and everyone familiar is suddenly gone and she has new rooms and new servants in the palace and then she is sent away to her malevolent fiance’s home, where she is completely alone without allies. Also, Kamet is a scribe-slave, so they were both probably surrounded by superficial opulence and finery seemingly incongruent with what we first think of when we think of imprisonment.
They both wear masks of impassive calm over their anxiety and fear:
“I went after him, drawing on all my years of practice to give an appearance of calm that I didn’t feel.” (Kamet, TAT, p. 32)
“She’d been sick and frightened, while waiting to see if the captain of the guard would follow through on his promise” to kill her second suitor. (QoA)People look at them both, and see a slave: Irene feels the barons looking at her the way people looked at the slave girls in the market. (QoA, p. 203)
They both struggle with feeling untrained, physically defenseless in a harsh world where death by sword is almost imminent. Irene seems to have learned to shoot a pistol, wield a knife, hunt on horseback later in life, but still she can’t “pretend to be a soldier,” and “envies Eddis” because Eddisian society sees far less gender barriers than Attolian and trains its women in the art of war alongside their men (and also, allocate traditionally women’s work like sewing to both genders when they are too old to fight!). Also, she rules by her Guard. And comes undone at the thought of halving it. Burly men like Costis and Teleus to protect her where she cannot protect herself. And, for Kamet, we know “what happens to a slave who arms himself in the empire… what they do to slaves who even look for too long at a sword, or a dagger, or anything more dangerous than a penknife.”
Immediately following QoA, p. 199-207, when Irene is reflecting extensively on how her rise to the throne/enslavement came about, we learn the most important thing we know about Kamet and how he connects to the Queen: “The secretary shrugged, too wise to say that he sympathized with the barbarian queen as her choices grew fewer and her freedom slipped away.”
They both appear snotty because they’re scared. “I knew my anxiety had made me appear arrogant.” (Kamet, TAT p. 82), “Attolia gave her a haughty look back. ‘We are in accord, Your Majesty?” she asked.” (QoA, p. 303)
Haughty, Bitter, Amused : Megan Whalen Turner consistently uses the same adjectives to describe both of them and their reactions to things.
Kamet is often “exhausted,” and he compares himself to Costis’s virility and vitality in the same way that Irene often “feels old” and compares herself to Eugenides who looks “so young.” Exhaustion and feeling older than their years represent their living in constant fear and unhappiness, and each looks to their divine counterpart who comes to unlock their hearts and sees energy, strength and youth on the other side, being returned to them in their redemption.
Can you think of any more?
The first time I read TAT, I missed Attolia Irene so much, because she’s my favorite. Now, since I made this connection, I hear her whenever I listen to Kamet. So in my second reread, I don’t miss her anymore. She’s right there, through Kamet.