Crownbreaker

by Sebastien de Castell

  There’s something particularly pathetic about a man awaiting execution bewitched by the beauty of the marshal who’s sent him to the gallows.

  But when Torian Libri flashes that smile at you… When those high cheekbones rise even higher and that long black hair shimmers like onyx as it drapes down a neck so smooth you could stare at it all day long even when you weren’t contemplating how much you’d like to throttle her…?

  And yeah… Those eyes.

  “Like sapphires,” Reichis purred.

  It’s worth noting that squirrel cats don’t purr.

  Lieutenant Libri gave the six marshals escorting me a curt nod and they left me in her charge. No back-up, no handcuffs. That’s because Torian liked to remind me that she was faster on the draw than I was and could easily bury one of those finger-length throwing knives she favoured in my throat before my hands ever reached my powder holsters.

  “We can’t keep meeting like this, card player,” she began, sliding her arm through mine to lead me through the grand foyer as though I were her escort to a royal ball rather than a prisoner headed for the palace dungeons. She leaned her head against my shoulder. “People are going to start thinking we’re sweet on each other.”

  Her absurdly affectionate behaviour drew the attention of nobles and courtiers cockroaching their way around the palace in search of opportunities to advance their interests and frustrate those of their rivals. Reichis, convinced by all the stares that people were admiring him, shook himself, causing his fur to change colour from its natural brown to a rich silver accented with blue stripes almost the hue of Torian’s eyes.

  “Well now,” she laughed. “Aren’t you the handsome rogue?”

  A blush of pink bloomed across the silver of Reichis’s coat. Nearby, a pair of Gitabrian merchant lords, looking especially splendid in their jaunty purple hats, went to the trouble of whispering loudly in the Jan’Tep tongue of my people to ensure their insult wouldn’t be lost on me. “Did you see the animal that just slunk into the royal palace?” the first asked. “The filthy creature’s coat is probably full of fleas.”

  The other chuckled merrily. “Indeed… Perhaps he should borrow the squirrel cat’s instead!”

  Almost a year I’d lived in this palace, and I swear every single person to walk these halls thinks they’re the first to come up with that joke. There are variations, of course. “What a beastly stench… And the squirrel cat doesn’t smell much better!” was a popular one. Sometimes it was my accent that amused them: “What is that awful mewling the beast makes? Why, I do believe Her Majesty’s tutor of cards has learned a new word!”

  My personal favourites were the heated debates over whether it was Reichis or myself who’d mated with the most barnyard animals. Reichis didn’t mind the stares and sneers though, mostly because I was generally the butt of the jokes, but also because the insults helped him identify the targets for his next heist.

  “Yep,” he grunted, scampering down my shoulder before landing on the marble floor. “Gonna get me that purple hat.”

  “You’re a squirrel cat,” I reminded him. “What could you possibly want with a hat?”

  He glanced up to give me a snarl. “You sayin’ I wouldn’t look good in a hat?” Without waiting for a reply he grumbled off to perform his latest feat of feline larceny. “You know who looks dumb in a hat? You look dumb in a hat. Gonna poop in your hat, that’s what I’m gonna do. Not that you’ll notice.”

  Torian smiled as she watched him go. She’s got a soft spot for the squirrel cat, possibly due to a natural affinity for animals whose preferred means of resolving conflict involves maximum bloodshed.

  She tugged my arm and resumed our march down the great hall. A hard right turn brought us to a set of stairs that led to the lower levels beneath the palace, where they kept the kitchens and storerooms.

  And the dungeon, of course.

  “The queen’s going to hear about this,” I informed her as we descended.

  “The queen loves me,” Torian countered.

  That, regrettably, was true. Queen Ginevra had a thing for tough, determined young women, and they didn’t come any tougher or more determined than Torian Libri. Except maybe the queen herself, of course.

  We arrived at a row of six cells reserved for those prisoners the crown preferred to keep close by. Each cell was unusually well appointed, with red-and-gold velvet curtains behind the bars to provide warmth and a measure of privacy. A small reading desk and a sturdy chair were bolted beneath a plaque written in archaic Daroman for which I hadn’t yet found the translation, but was fairly sure read, “Yeah, you’re screwed.”

  The cot in the corner was narrow, but not uncomfortable. You got a decent night’s sleep in these cells, as I’d discovered from spending rather more time in them than was customary for one of Her Majesty’s royal tutors.

  “The queen loves me too,” I reminded Torian.

  This is usually the part where she unlocks the door and shoves me into one of the cells. Instead she turned on me, the sharp glare in her eyes catching the lantern light. “Too bad you don’t seem to feel the same about her, spellslinger.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Torian began circling me in the narrow passage, halting periodically to poke me with a sharp fingernail. “It occurs to me that if you genuinely cared about Her Majesty, you’d stop pissing off her marshals service, who are, in case you’ve forgotten, responsible for her security. That’s the first rule.”

  Poke.

  Don’t take the bait, I reminded myself. Just let her push you around a little and soon you’ll be enjoying a nice, comfortable cell for the night.

  “The second rule is that you stick to your own job, which best as I can determine is to play cards with Her Majesty. Tell her jokes. Make her laugh. Occasionally strut around the palace with your tousled hair and pretty face, spouting Argosi frontier wisdom about ‘The Way of Water’ so the warmongering nobles of this gods-forsaken empire get just nervous enough to focus their murderous impulses on you instead of the queen.”

  She took a quick breath before asking, “Well, card player? You got anything to say for yourself?”

  “You think I have a pretty face?”

  Poke.

  “I could ignore the rest of it, for her sake. But the third rule, spellslinger? That’s the one neither I nor the people I work for can forgive.”

  She tried to poke me again but my patience was wearing thin and this time I batted her hand out of the way. “If you’re planning on locking me up for the night, do it, but don’t keep—”

  “The third rule,” she went on, barrelling over me, “is that should you ever stumble upon gossip that a Jan’Tep bounty mage has entered my territory, you always—always—come to me with the information first so that I can do my job.” She spun around now, addressing an audience that wasn’t there. “But what does the spellslinging Argosi card sharp do instead? He sneaks out of the palace to square off against a lord magus—a lord magus—all by his lonesome. Doesn’t even bring along the damned squirrel cat, who, frankly, is starting to look like the brains of the operation.”

  “You seem to have forgotten one thing, lieutenant.”

  She turned back to me, instantly snaring me with that indigo gaze. One corner of her mouth rose, just a fraction, offering the hint of a smile. When she spoke, the words came out in a soft exhalation of breath as though she were reading aloud from a book of love poems. “I forgot that you outsmarted the mage, didn’t I?”

  “Yeah,” I said, though at that precise moment I couldn’t quite remember what I was agreeing to.

  Strange as it sounds, I was fairly sure that Her Majesty Queen Ginevra the First of Darome had assigned Torian Libri to be my liaison to the marshals service—or “babysitter” as Torian put it—out of some perverse desire to see us matched. We were both young, both unattached. Torian had an endless horde of suitors begging for her attention. I had… Well, I guess we didn’t have all that much in common afte
r all. Regardless, the queen seemed determined to pair us up.

  And she wonders why so many of her subjects keep trying to assassinate her.

  Torian tapped a finger against my chest. By sheer chance it snuck through a tear in my shirt. I felt the tingle of her skin against mine. “Fooled him with one of those ingenious ploys of yours?” she asked, letting her fingertip linger there.

  “It was kind of ingenious, now that you mention it. See, I hired an actor to—”

  “I.” Poke. “Don’t.” Poke. “Care.” Poke.

  “Ow! That last one broke the skin!”

  She held up her finger, showing me the single drop of blood clinging to the nail. “Poor baby. Tell me something, card player. What happens to my queen on the day you run out of tricks?”

  It was the second time I’d been asked that question. Normally that would’ve been cause for reflection on my part, but I was getting tired of being poked and prodded throughout a litany of grievances I’d heard a dozen times before. Despite my earlier determination not to aggravate my situation, I did something then that no sane person would ever do: I grabbed Lieutenant Torian Libri, perhaps the most feared marshal in the entire service, by the lapels of her long leather coat and shoved her away from me.

  Now, when it comes to reflexes and fighting techniques, there’s no one I’ve ever met more dangerous than my mentor, Ferius Parfax. But Torian comes awfully close. She had my arm twisted behind my back and my face mashed between the bars of one of the cells before I could even screech like a lost little boy. That came shortly after.

  “Did you seriously just try to lay hands on me, card player?”

  Her lips were almost touching my earlobe, warm breath teasing the tiny hairs on my neck. There is no more awkward feeling in this life than being simultaneously terrified and aroused. Still, while my arta forteize is only so-so, I have excellent arta valar, or as Ferius calls it, “swagger.”

  “You’ll want to clean that cut,” I said, my voice calm as still water despite the pain in my wrist where her grip was squeezing the bones together. “Wouldn’t want your poking finger to get infected.”

  “What are you talking abou—” She pulled away suddenly, letting out a surprised gasp.

  With my free hand I pushed myself away from the bars and turned. She was staring at the blood on her index finger with a bewildered expression. I flicked her throwing knife in the air and caught it neatly between my own thumb and forefinger. The delicate point glistened red. “Nice balance,” I said, then flipped the short blade over again before offering her the blunt end. “You should hang on to these.”

  She didn’t take it right away. You could tell she was working through what had just happened. “You lifted the knife from my coat when you pushed me. Palmed it so that once my hand was locked around your wrist all it took was a twitch of your fingers to cut me.”

  I nodded.

  “Pretty smooth for someone who trips over his own feet whenever anyone asks him to dance.”

  One time. One time.

  “Now you know,” I said.

  She tilted her head. “Now I know what?”

  I chose my next words carefully. For all the mistrust between us, I’d never doubted Torian’s loyalty to the queen. A while back, with a different ill-tempered marshal, I’d failed to comprehend just how dangerous such devotion can be. My oversight had nearly destroyed all our lives. “You asked what would happen to the queen once I ran out of tricks.”

  She held up a bleeding finger. “And a paper cut is your answer?”

  “My answer is that I always have one more trick.” I took the risk of moving closer to her. “You have my word, Lieutenant Libri, when I use that last trick up, when I finally run out of ways to outwit my enemies and those of the queen? I’ll come to you. I’ll tell you it’s time and then I’ll leave her service for good. I’ll walk right out the city gates and I’ll keep on walking till I’m long gone from your country.”

  I held out a hand so we could shake on the bargain.

  Those impossibly blue eyes of her went first to my outstretched hand and then back to me. For once, there was no taunting or scolding in her gaze, just a kind of sadness that caught me off-guard. “I wish things could work that way, Kellen.”

  Torian hardly ever calls me by my proper name. It’s always “card player” or “swindler” or occasionally “squirrel cat boy.” The Argosi talent for eloquence—what we call arta loquit—teaches that every utterance of a person’s name is meaningful, each unique inflection filled with signs waiting to be interpreted. Her use of my name just then told me that something was very, very wrong.

  I looked down at my chest, through the little hole in my shirt where she’d poked me with her fingernail. Blood from the tiny, almost insignificant wound had already begun to coagulate, the sharp, burning sensation replaced by a tingling numbness. I tore open the shirt—clumsily, because my fingers were also becoming numb. There, just beneath the skin surrounding the red dot of dried blood, was a slowly blooming patch of the second-most beautiful azure I’d ever seen.

  My vision began to blur. My eyes sought out Torian, but she wouldn’t meet my gaze.

  “You…”

  I couldn’t get the words out to ask why she’d gone to all the trouble of poisoning me just to lock me in a cell for the night when she knew perfectly well I’d put up with this token incarceration a dozen times before.

  She’s not putting me in a cell, I realised far too late. This was all a ruse.

  My balance fled all at once. My legs crumpled beneath me. I’d’ve fallen to the hard stone floor had Torian not caught me and propped me up. The familiar echo of marshals’ boot heels came down the passageway towards us. My head settled awkwardly against Torian’s shoulder. “This is the problem with tricks, Kellen,” she murmured. “You’re not the only one who uses them.”

  4

  Arta Forteize

  Four men carried me on their shoulders, reminding me of the four deuces the old man had dealt me back in the saloon. Daroman card players call that particular hand an eight-legged horse: the beast upon whose back gamblers are borne to the underworld at the moment of their death.

  Our path twisted and turned along unfamiliar passageways, heading deeper and deeper beneath the palace. We passed through one locked door after another until finally descending a set of stairs I hadn’t known existed, which was troubling considering how carefully Reichis and I had cased this place.

  “Where…?”

  No point in even trying. My tongue was a bloated sponge I couldn’t spit out.

  A hand I could barely feel touched my cheek. “Don’t speak,” Torian said, her voice little more than a distant echo. “Don’t do anything, okay? Just… Trust me.”

  A phlegmy cough erupted from my throat, which I guess was me trying to laugh. I suppose if I were a lying, manipulative poisoner, I too would tell my victim, “Don’t worry, it only seems like I’m burying you alive. Really I’m secretly saving you, so just trust me, okay?”

  Never hurts to give the poor sap a shred of optimism to carry with them into the afterlife.

  Despite the fog filling my senses, I couldn’t help but admire Torian’s ploy. Had she sent me some seemingly innocuous invitation or made a show of seducing me, I’d’ve been on my guard. Instead she’d had me arrested, same as always. Escorted me down to the palace cells, as always. Offered the usual insults, made the same veiled threats. Repetition. Ritual.

  That’s why I’d let Reichis run off. In a few hours, he’d sneak down to the cells expecting to pick the lock and break me out like he always did. Had I suspected anything different, I would’ve signalled him to trail us instead. The moment I’d begun to succumb to the poison, he’d’ve ripped Torian’s face off—“purdy eyes” and all.

  But the marshal had suckered me like a pro, and now I was screwed.

  You know those old romantic adventure tales of the clever hero or heroine who just happens to have spent years building up an immunity to the specific
poison his enemies had intended to paralyse him with?

  Doesn’t work.

  Don’t believe me? Just try it. Go ahead. Poison yourself with, say, a few leaves of weakweed or a pinch of winterbloom. Now… Well, now you’re dead. Small doses of poison, taken over an extended period of time, tend to accumulate in your internal organs until enough builds up to kill you.

  But let’s say you manage to survive. Well done. Once you’ve recovered—assuming recovery is even possible and you haven’t condemned yourself to spending the rest of your days in perpetual agony, trapped in a delirious, semi-conscious daze as you drool over yourself while desperately trying to find some way to communicate to your loved ones that you’d really much rather be dead, thank you very much—go out and try the poison a second time.

  Whoops. Same result.

  Now, it’s true that there are some forms of liquor and smoke whose effects become less pronounced over time, but that’s just the fun stuff, like getting drunk. The bad part? The gradual assault on your liver or lungs? That just keeps churning along until you eventually cough yourself into an early grave.

  That’s why “… and then they poisoned the young, would-be hero” is never the opening act to a daring escape.

  Except…

  Except that during our travels together, I’d witnessed Ferius Parfax shake off the effects of paralytics faster than anyone else alive.

  “It’s not fair,” I once told her, groggily stumbling around in between bouts of vomiting all over myself.

  “That so?” she asked. Her hands shook just a little as she drew a smoking reed from inside her black leather waistcoat. She lit the reed with one of the matches she kept hidden in the cuff of her travelling shirt—next to her lock picks.

  The rising blue smoke reawakened my nausea. “Oh, ancestors, please don’t…”

  Ferius offered not one scrap of sympathy. “Never could teach good taste to you Jan’Tep savages,” she said. On her second puff she let out an impressive pair of interlocking smoke rings. “Besides, after all these months on the road together, gettin’ jumped more times ’n either of us can count, you tellin’ me that you’re still moanin’ about some fella tryin’ to poison us so’s he can collect that bounty on your head not being ‘fair’?”