Fortune's Fool (Eterean Empire Book 1)

by Angela Boord

  I wear a black cloak and a black-and-silver tunic. Those were the colors of the Rojornicki boyar I fought for, and I still wear them in honor of him. Arsenault gave me the cloak, but I’m not sure he would appreciate the irony.

  But there is a familiarity to the gavaro’s stance. He’s the kind of gavaro you’d notice anywhere, no matter what he wore. Like he’s quick with his sword and knows how to use it. And with his height, he probably has the reach to do some damage.

  I push myself back from the table with my right hand, forgetting for the moment that Vadz has seen me most often use my left. Nibas and Razi know about my arm because they’ve fought beside me, but they also know why I like to keep it secret. Vadz frowns at me slightly, but my right hand looks normal enough when it’s gloved. It makes the wrong noise when I bump it against wood, though, not a fleshy sound but a slight metallic ting.

  I close my fingers against my palm and stand up.

  Vadz trades a glance with Razi and Nibas. “You know…the war’s over and you’re not in Rojornick anymore. Jobs are just jobs. You make your money and you get out.”

  I pick up my own wine and drain it while I watch the Qalfan. He sees me and straightens. Good. I set the empty goblet down and pick up Vadz’s dice. “Jobs are always just jobs, aren’t they?” I say, shaking the bones.

  “Sometimes, I don’t like that look in your eye, Kyris.”

  I tip the cup, and the bones come rattling out.

  A five in the first position again. After that, the numbers are all a random jumble, some of them lying on their sides.

  “Dread gods,” Vadz says. “I’ve never seen a throw so bad.”

  I grin at him. “Death’s my job, isn’t it?”

  The Qalfan gavaro doesn’t speak as he walks ahead of me up a narrow staircase to the room where Laudio keeps his books, not to the back room. But he flashes a glance at me before we walk into Laudio’s study. He has light eyes but not obviously blue. The way his brows pull down over them when he sees me up close is somehow familiar too.

  He hooks his indigo armband with his thumb, and the gavaros guarding Laudio’s door let us in.

  “Who are you taking me to see?” I ask as we cross the threshold of the doorway. He doesn’t answer, just keeps walking past Laudio. Laudio comes half out of his velvet upholstered chair, putting his kacin pipe down on a leather-bound book of carefully penned figures. The gavaro doesn’t raise his head until he reaches the paneling at the back of the room.

  “Tell your mistress she’ll have the Imisi rosé if she wishes,” Laudio says, sitting back down, hands wandering over the cover of the book. The Qalfan—half-Qalfan or a slave, with those eyes—looks back at him and nods.

  Laudio bends his neck stiffly but keeps his eye on us.

  Mistress, he said.

  My hopes die. A man who’s looking for me might have been Arsenault at last, but a woman…it really is about a job.

  It was probably a stupid hope, anyway. I’ve been in Liera six months now without a single lead on where he might be, except for dead.

  The gavaro pushes the paneling into the wall with the flat of his hand, revealing a swing-door leading to a secret staircase. Clean-burning beeswax candles glow on peeling blue paint, outlined in white—waves for Tekus, the Father God. We’re close enough to the water that the passage might once have led to a cave that opened into or above the sea, Tekus’s domain. The Etereans riddled the high sections and cliffs of Liera with catacombs and filled them with the bones of their ancestors. Perhaps we walk above them now.

  Once down the staircase, the hallway winds around the corner of the building, and the walls become so narrow that the Qalfan’s shoulders push against them. He glances back at me once but says nothing. Then out of the darkness ahead of us a door appears, illuminated in yellow light. He raps on it twice before pushing it open.

  Mistress.

  A woman sits there, waiting for us. The room is over-decorated with gilt and panels painted with scenes of goddesses and carpeted in blue velvet so deep, my heels sink into it. Incense laces the air with the scent of cloves, and the warmth of the fire blazing in the marble fireplace raises sweat on my forehead. My metal arm throbs with the sudden change in temperature.

  The woman reclining on the mahogany settee makes the room look tawdry in her simplicity. Her pewter silk gown shimmers in the candlelight, modest and yet somehow revealing the way it clings to her body. A pair of ivory combs secure curls the color of black-cherry wood in a fashionable sweep atop her head. She wears no jewelry but a lustrous pearl choker, probably worth more than five years of my pay. Her blue eyes are the color of gathering storm clouds. She narrows them on me.

  I know this Sere. Her name is Tonia, and she used to be Caprine before she married. I can only hope she doesn’t recognize me.

  “Kyris di Nada,” she says. “My Qalfan was right; it is you.” She smiles at me, a cold, fake smile, one I saw often enough on my mother’s lips as she welcomed our neighbors into the conservatory for tea. My mother fought her own wars, not of swords but of teacups, waged on sunlit afternoons with women who filled their husbands’ ears with secrets when they went home.

  The Qalfan slips behind her to sit on the floor, legs crossed, head bent.

  Tonia notices me looking at him. “He’s no matter. I trust him to keep information where it needs to be kept.”

  His silence begins to bother me. “Is he mute?” I know he’s watching me from under the wrapped cloths of his urqa, but I can’t see his eyes.

  “Falin? No. But he’s smart enough to keep his mouth closed. And he’s handy enough with a sword to keep you from getting ideas.”

  I eye her warily. “My friend said you might have a job for me.”

  “They told me you liked to get to the point. Yes, I have a job for you. But surely, you’ll let me entertain you first. Will you have some wine?”

  Warily, with my hand near the hilt of my sword, I edge over to a chair covered in claret velvet. I sit, and she pours wine of the same color—not the rosé—into a crystal goblet.

  “I do have a job for you,” she repeats. “But I must know that you’ll say nothing to anyone of what is said here. I’ve heard, through various channels, that you’re good at keeping secrets, but I need assurance. You must not speak of what transpires tonight. Is that clear?”

  Her gaze meets mine again.

  I set my glass down on the table between us. “Do you think I’m that stupid? You’ve brought your assurance. If I refuse to accept your offer, you’ll have me killed before I leave the tavern.”

  Tonia arches an eyebrow. “You can always leave now. Before you hear what I have to say. But there’s a great deal of coin involved.”

  I’m only too aware of my purse hanging limp inside my cloak. But this won’t be a simple matter of guarding a few bolts of silk. Not if Tonia di Sere is in charge of it.

  “Coin’s not all I care about,” I say.

  “I’ve heard that you like to take jobs based on ideals… of a sort.”

  My right hand twitches and my fingers clack together, softened by the leather of my glove. I clench it into a fist and pick up the wineglass with my left hand. “I wonder who you’ve been talking to.” I drink quick, the way a man might. When I set the glass down again, only a small puddle of red swirls in the bottom, the color of blood.

  “I have my sources.” She adjusts her legs under her skirts and smooths the fabric over them. “I also hear that this job may appeal to you on a somewhat baser level.”

  She sips her wine and watches me over the rim.

  Something in the way Tonia looks at me makes me think she knows who I am. And wants to use me.

  I have been used before.

  I stand up. “You can keep your gold and your wine and your Householder intrigues. It’s a mess to get involved.”

  “Don’t be a fool. You must have known what was at stake when you learned I wanted to meet you in the back room. You did know where my Qalfan was taking you, didn’t you? Or h
ave you been gone so long that you’ve forgotten the ways of Houses?”

  I was right. She knows who I am.

  She knew I wouldn’t be able to resist a job handed out from the back room of Laudio’s, and maybe she also knew the kinds of questions I’ve been asking. But a job based on the tangled skein of loyalties lying in wait for me here in Liera…

  “Keep your House ways,” I say. “I’m in for something more honest.”

  I start for the door. The Qalfan rises in one quick motion, but before he can reach me, Tonia blurts, “Cassis di Prinze is at the Aliente hunting lodge. And I want you to kill him.”

  “Cassis di Prinze?”

  Is my voice steady as I say his name?

  Tonia flicks her hand at me. “Go ahead. Walk out that door. My gavaro won’t kill you. Maybe you can even see what Cassis does to my family this time. You once had Caprine ties, didn’t you?”

  “Once,” I say, dropping my hand from the doorknob. “But your father sat on the Circle that voted them away.”

  “And given the chance you’d exact your revenge on him rather than Cassis? Cassis has taken my sister to the Aliente hunting lodge; Cassis oversees the Forza and the Aliente estate. You’d walk away from that?”

  No. I can’t walk away from that.

  A long time ago, I fell in love.

  Many ladies had run themselves through on this spear before me, but they hid their wounds in lesser marriages or else moved through the temples, the cripple colonies, silent as a winter chill. I paid them no attention. Instead, I played my scales and worked my embroidery obliviously, hating the frivolous poems my tutor made me memorize about birds and chaste women.

  What I wanted was passion.

  The summer I turned sixteen, I thought I found it. He walked in like the scent of orange blossoms, immediate and beautiful. His mahogany hair, the same color as his eyes, was caught at the nape of his neck in a silver clasp, and he wore a silver-hilted sword at his side. Here, I felt, was a man who could do what women whispered about over my mother’s teacups, whose touch could burn away the chaste bonds that kept me stiff as brocade.

  His name was Cassis. The son of a family that had no business treating with mine.

  Prinze.

  I move slowly back to the chair with the empty wineglass next to it. I sit down and curl my hands around the ornately carved wooden balls at the end of its arms.

  “All right,” I say. “I’ll listen.”

  “Cassis has sequestered himself on the old Aliente hunting lands,” Tonia says, rising to pace. “And taken my sister with him. He says he means to have her as second wife.”

  “And you believe him?” I ask.

  “If I did, would you be here?”

  “His father will never allow it. But it might be good for you. You’re Sere now. Why should it matter to the Sere if a Prinze marries a Caprine?”

  Tonia glares at me. “Second wife,” she says. “If he stoops to that. I am a Caprine by blood and birth, of the main branch, and the wife of a man who lies at the bottom of the sea because of the bloody Prinze; have you forgotten that?”

  I haven’t. What Lieran could forget how Ricar di Sere died, leaving the Prinze with the sole claim on the gun trade?

  I wonder what game Tonia is playing. I’ve been too long away from the ways of Houses. “If Driese were to marry Cassis, there would be kin ties. The Caprine could buy guns.”

  Tonia waves my statement away. “At what prices? My father would never debase himself so, and he will never consent to Driese becoming a man’s second wife when she could have her pick of suitors otherwise.”

  Except that the pool from which Driese might choose a suitor has diminished. The loyalty of the Sere, Tonia’s in-laws, is somewhat vague, and there are no Aliente anymore. Or at least, I haven’t found any yet.

  “She could have her pick of suitors,” Tonia says again, as if she can read my thoughts. Her expression grows troubled and she starts pacing again.

  “I want you to rescue her,” she says, without turning around. “Bring her back and kill Cassis.”

  Do I want to kill him? It’s a ridiculous question. Almost rhetorical. The issue has never been whether I want to kill him but how. Slowly, with poison? Dramatically, running Arsenault’s sword straight through his heart? Or perhaps ironically—using only my right arm to bash his skull in?

  The options I’ve entertained over the years have been endless but never more detailed than in the past year. I’ve acquired much more experience in killing people, for one thing, and for another, it’s not just myself I’d be avenging now. Not just my family.

  Because if Arsenault is dead, there’s no one who had a hand in it more than Cassis did.

  But I don’t want to look too eager. If I’m to take this job, I need to keep my head.

  “Perhaps your sister doesn’t want to be rescued. And what will happen when Geoffre di Prinze finds his son dead? Who else knows about this?”

  “My sister is a fool,” she says, “and doesn’t know the import of what she does. Would you tell me to leave her?”

  “Perhaps not. But you didn’t answer my other questions.”

  Tight-lipped, she says, “No one else knows. Driese and Cassis escaped in secret. She met him at a crossroads, but it won’t take long for either of our houses to discover their subterfuge. As for what will happen after Cassis is dead...I expect that you will be sufficiently discreet that the murder is not traceable to me or the Caprine or the Sere, and that no one discovers that Driese was there at all.”

  My brow furrows. “Won’t Cassis’s retainers know? Or Driese’s maids?”

  “Driese has gone in disguise,” Tonia says. “She sneaked out with the help of one of her maids under cover of darkness, and my parents are trying to keep the news contained to prevent scandal. I assume Geoffre is doing the same thing on his end.”

  “How do you know where Driese is, then? If Driese took such pains to avoid notice and your parents and Geoffre are hushing it up?”

  Tonia brings her head up like a nervous horse. “I have my sources. You don’t need to know more.”

  How often have I heard those words? I spin the wineglass with my right hand and watch the way it throws the light back at the room.

  “I’m not a philanthropist,” I say. “I lost an arm because of Cassis di Prinze. I’d rather not lay my life at his altar, too. How much will you pay me?”

  Some of the color comes back into Tonia’s face and she smiles.

  “I am a Sere,” she says. “The regent of my husband’s estate, with all his gold at my disposal. I think we can decide upon a reasonable amount.”

  “Fifty thousand astra,” I say abruptly. “And we’ll have a deal.”

  The gavaro against the wall jerks his head up. But Tonia never even blinks. She sits back down on her settee and stretches out like a lioness back from the hunt. Triumph flashes in her eyes.

  “Done. Bring Driese back to me safe, and proof of Cassis’s death, and fifty thousand astra will be a small price to pay.”

  I’d do it for free, but I should have asked for more. To kill the son of the most powerful man on the Eterean peninsula?

  Tonia pours me more wine. I drink it all at once and it goes to my head.

  Just like revenge.

  Chapter 2

  When I leave Laudio’s back room, Vadz’s kai dahn table is full. He rattles the bones in the cup and spills them across the table.

  Five in the first position again, the mermaid. Razi is surrounded by other men and a wreath of smoke. He smiles wide as he scrapes a pile of silver and brass buttons toward himself. “You were born in a fortunate moon, Vadz. You never let me down.”

  Fortune, I want to tell him, is hardly that reliable.

  “Vadz,” I say, while he’s grinning and piling up his own winnings. “I need to talk to you.”

  He looks up at me with an expression of mild surprise. “Now?”

  “There’s money in it.”

  A faint glimmer of int
erest lights his eyes. He scoops the bones back into the cup. “Table’s closed. I’ve business to attend to.”

  “Just like that?” Razi says. “I was winning!”

  “Better to quit while you’re ahead.”

  Nibas rises and taps Razi on the shoulder. “Come on, brother. Time to go upstairs.”

  “Ah,” Razi says, smiling. The smile falters when it lands on me, though.

  He pauses as he walks past me, and leans down to speak in my ear. “If that Qalfan gives you trouble, tell me. I hear working for the Sere can be dangerous.”

  “You’re not my nursemaid,” I whisper back at him.

  “No. But there’s something strange about his stance.”

  I frown, considering this. But then Vadz rises and cracks his back. “I take it your journey to the back room was a fruitful one?”

  Razi and Nibas are gone, and I step a little closer to him, so I can talk without being overheard. What I have to ask isn’t something I want passed on. “I need a gun.”

  His salted auburn eyebrows shoot upward. “What?”

  I study his face. This is a chance I’ve taken, that I can trust him.

  I know someone else I could see about a gun, but dealing with him could be far more dangerous.

  “You do know where to get one, don’t you?”

  “You’ll hang if the Prinze catch you with it. They enforce those smuggling laws when they can. Weren’t we just talking about my ship? It’s at the bottom of the bay because the Prinze thought I was smuggling.”

  “They’d have to catch me. Can you get me one or not?”

  He looks troubled and surveys the room. “Maybe. But it’s not safe to talk here.” He reaches down for the threadbare green cloak hanging on the back of his chair. “Are you sure you want this? It’s deep water.”

  “I can swim,” I say. My hands seek out the hilts of my weapons of their own accord. I always feel better with steel in my hand. Metal seeks its sister.

  Vadz studies my face for a moment. “Well, come on, then,” he says. “If you won’t be persuaded.”