Fortune's Fool (Eterean Empire Book 1)

by Angela Boord

  “Shall I come up for you?” he whispered.

  “You’ll fall if you have to carry me down. Let me come on my own.”

  “On your own?” In the darkness, I couldn’t see his face. But I heard the surprise in his voice. I took the rope in my hands and let myself out the window before he realized I meant what I said. It was a stout rope, and my flimsy silk slippers made it easy to feel out footholds in the knobby stucco. My nightgown caught on the thorn hedge at the bottom as Cassis lifted me over it. When he put me down, he immediately caught up my hands and stared at them in the thin trickle of moonlight.

  I laughed, softly. “I’m on the ground, none the worse for wear.”

  “I expected I’d have to help you down.”

  “It’s not the first time I’ve climbed out my window.”

  He seemed to think about that for a moment, then he put his hands on either side of my face and kissed me. We ran away through the garden, scaled the cherry tree that had been my ally in so many other misadventures, dropped down on the other side of the wall, and followed the path to the stables.

  One of Cassis’s gavaros stood at the back door.

  I balked at the sight of him. Though we had often made love while others went about their business, we had always assured that we weren’t seen meeting each other.

  Cassis noticed my hesitation and took me by the hand. “Shh, Kyrra. Federico is one of my most trusted men. He won’t say anything, will you, Feddi?”

  “I’m as one who has his tongue cut out, lady,” the gavaro assured me, bowing his head.

  “But the candles,” I said. “There’s someone else in the stable. He’ll hear us in the quiet.”

  “A groom,” Cassis whispered. “Nothing more. If he hears, he’ll think it’s a gavaro tupping a kitchen girl.”

  I remained frozen for a moment, unable to take another step, but then Cassis pulled me into the stables and we climbed into the hayloft.

  My father’s prize Ipanzers were housed at one end of the stable. We chose the area above the common horses, the ones gavaros would ride.

  I didn’t hear my father’s boots on the packed dirt floor. I didn’t hear anything until he said, “Kyrra!”

  I froze, too stunned even for a gasp, my lips still pressed to Cassis’s mouth. I looked in his eyes for a moment, but his gaze flickered away, down through the opening in the loft where the ladder was.

  My father must have been visiting his horses one last time.

  His prize horses. How could I have been so stupid?

  But the gavaro should have warned us.

  My father stood in the hall below us, a riding quirt forgotten in one hand as he leaned against the ladder and looked up through the hole in the ceiling where the ladder was. The end of the quirt trembled. His face was as waxy as the candles burning in the iron sconces on the walls.

  Cassis let me go too slowly. “Mestere,” he said. “This is not the way it looks.”

  “Are you raping my daughter?”

  “Papa!” I said. “No!”

  My father’s expression changed. “Tell me this is only his doing, Kyrra.”

  I could say nothing to that. I hung my head and pulled my gown together. Tears blurred my vision. When Cassis moved away from me, I didn’t watch him. The ladder shook against the loft as he climbed down it.

  His bootheels scuffed on the dirt. “Mestere,” he began, but whatever else he might have said was cut off by the smack of the quirt against wood. I looked up finally, in alarm.

  Cassis backed away. His gavaro stood behind him, sword drawn. My father was only armed with a quirt, but he pointed it at Cassis and said, “Go back to your chambers. I’ll discuss this with you later.” His voice shook.

  Cassis closed his mouth, glanced up once at me, then turned and walked out, flanked by his gavaro.

  My father took me back to my room. When he opened the door and led me in, my maids were crying. Bella jumped up and tried to hug me, but I pushed her away. Mam hung back. My father said nothing, closed the door, and left.

  “Leave me alone,” I said, and went into my room.

  The rope was coiled up on the bed. My maids or someone else had found it. They must have shown it to my mother, because my shutters were locked with a contraption of wrought iron. I walked over to the window and rattled it with both hands, but the lock was new, thick, and hopeless, probably meant for the doors of a silkhouse. I uttered a sound that was not a laugh or a cry but contained both—a sound of desperation. Then I lay down on my bed next to the rope and started to cry. But they were stunned little dry half-sobs. My emotions hadn’t fully formed yet, and mostly, I felt numb.

  Some time before dawn, I fell asleep and dreamed that Cassis came back for me, but ravens filled the stables and I couldn’t get to him, though I slashed at the birds with my father’s quirt. And I dreamed that my father hit Cassis instead of the stall, and Cassis pulled his sword and cut my father before I could stop him.

  The turning of the doorknob woke me in the morning. I opened my eyes to see my mother standing in the doorway, her hands white with flour, dressed in a plain linen skirt and blouse, a towel at her side. She’d been supervising the kitchens. She did that when she was upset.

  “What will you do to me?” I asked.

  “I’m not going to do anything to you, Kyrra,” she said in a tired voice. “But I do wonder if you’ve forgotten how to think.”

  “He’ll marry me, Mother. It won’t be a problem. He came here to court me.”

  “Cassis left this morning.”

  For a moment, her words made no sense. I remember it clearly, the way the sounds seemed jumbled up and the methodical way I had to sort through them. Yet even after I understood, I refused to believe.

  I clambered up onto my knees, still on my bed. “No,” I said, shaking my head. “Cassis loves me.”

  “There’s a difference between love and lust. I thought I taught you better.”

  She looked so sad. I jerked my head toward the window so I wouldn’t have to look at her. But the window was still shuttered and locked.

  “I suppose Papa will cast me off now that he’s sent Cassis away?”

  “Your father did not send Cassis away. He was of the same opinion you were, that a match with the Prinze might be good for all of us.” She sat down heavily on my bed, rumpling the linens, and began methodically rubbing the flour from her fingers with the towel.

  I stared at her. “It was you, wasn’t it? You finally convinced Father that Cassis must have a knife up his sleeve, that his will couldn’t be good—”

  “And it wasn’t, was it?” My mother leaned over toward me. “He seduced you, a girl of sixteen—”

  “He came to court me, Mother! He said so!”

  My mother’s blue-gray eyes were as brittle as a winter sky. I have been told I have my mother’s eyes, but the people who said so never saw her behind a closed door, in the privacy of our chambers.

  “Then he lied,” she said. Her voice was as precise as the blade of a knife. “Didn’t he?”

  I laughed. It has always been my way to laugh when I should cry. I put my hands to my mouth. “No,” I said through my fingers. “No.”

  My mother rubbed her brow. Her floured hands left faint white stains on her forehead. “Think, Kyrra. If he charges you with seduction, it will impugn the Aliente name, and a marriage even to a minor Caprine will be out of the question, regardless of whether or not the Caprine suspect fraud. They can’t afford the association. Our alliances will never be powerful. But what if he’s gotten you with child? What will happen then?”

  She gazed at me, eyebrows arched, one hand on her knee.

  I tried not to see the sense in her question.

  The candles had been lit. The gavaro should have warned us.

  Reluctantly, I said, “I’ll be cast out and the Prinze might lay claim to our lands through the child.”

  My mother rose. “We’ll continue our negotiations with Felizio di Caprine for your hand. We may b
e forced to bend to the Imisi or the Forza, though. Maybe we can pass off your loss of innocence as a seduction on Cassis’s part and have the whole affair written away—although if it’s Geoffre di Prinze’s intent to break our name, we won’t have the wealth or the power to counter his influence. We’ll have to go back in stores to get the money; it’s been a dry year—”

  “Cassis will marry me!” I shouted. “He loves me and will save me from Felizio di Caprine. I won’t marry Felizio, Mother—not while there is a chance that we can still negotiate with the Prinze!”

  “Kyrra!” my mother hissed. “You’ve jeopardized all negotiations for your hand—don’t you realize that? You must stand in the Circle to be guaranteed in marriage. Do you think the name Aliente so powerful that we could circumvent the entire League? There is no magic that will give you back your lost virginity!”

  I tightened my arms around myself and turned away from her.

  She made an exasperated noise between her teeth. The scritch of her hands on the towel told me how furiously she wiped them. “Cassis abandoned you. Geoffre di Prinze will never compromise his standing by accepting a tainted woman, particularly one his son has already discarded. I’ve heard rumors he’s arranging Cassis a marriage with Camile di Sere. If you’re pregnant, you’ve given him an excuse to claim our lands after your father’s death without the inconvenience of allying himself to us at all. Without paying anything.”

  Tears blurred my vision, but I kept them from spilling onto my cheeks, hot as they were. “Cassis would never be so cruel.”

  For a moment, the room was still. I couldn’t bring myself to turn around and face my mother, not with those tears in my eyes. Her skirt swished faintly over the carpet as she walked up behind me and placed her hand on my shoulder.

  “Let us hope not,” she said. Her hand drifted down my bare arm so she could take my fingers in her own. “For your sake. And for all of us.”

  My body eventually betrayed me.

  I missed my courses that month. My usual time came and went, but there was no blood. Frantically, I checked my marking sticks to see if I had made a mistake in counting, the knowledge that I hadn’t sitting in my heart like the stone of a fruit. I felt ripe and gravid, but not with the seed Cassis had planted inside me; instead, it was this information, this evidence, that would grow and metamorphose like our silk worms.

  Like a fool, I thought I could keep it secret from my mother. But I could not keep it secret from my maids.

  My mother surprised me in my chambers again one night, two months on, while I was embroidering by candlelight. Doing my stitches was mindless work, and I needed that because otherwise, I felt as if I were drowning.

  She brought me a cup. I thought it was wine. “Mam told me you weren’t feeling well,” my mother said. “Drink this.”

  “I don’t know what lies Mam has been spreading, Mama. I feel fine.”

  “Kyrra. Take the cup.”

  And then I finally understood. I stared at her—her eyes, the slate in them crumbling in desperation; her face, ravaged with worry lines I had never seen before.

  I looked down at the cup. A long time. Then I took it up with shaking hands and drank.

  It was not wine. It was foul and sulfurous, spelled with some awful, unnatural magic, and I can still taste it sometimes before a battle, at any important moment. I drank it as quickly as I could, but at the end, nausea claimed me and I vomited a mouthful between the fingers of my hastily raised right hand. The red liquid dribbled over my knuckles and spotted my white nightgown like drops of blood.

  “I’ll help you into another gown,” my mother said as she came to take the cup from me and placed it on the table. “You should rest now.”

  I closed my eyes and nodded. Then my mother’s hands were at my sleeves, and I let her undress me and put me to bed as she seldom had when I was a child.

  In the morning, Cassis’s child died in great rivers and clots of blood.

  Awakening to this, I thought I was still in a nightmare. I knew what must be happening, but none of it felt real. It was as if I stood outside my body and looked down at someone else—some other stupid girl fooled by a pretty smile who was now paying for her actions with the life of her child.

  Then the cramps seized me and I screamed.

  Mam and Bella ran into my room. Mam hugged me and sent Bella for my mother. Then she pulled off my bloody gown in her gentle way, and she washed my thighs while I held rag after rag to my crotch. After I was dressed again, my mother finally arrived and Bella stripped the bloody bed, and I lay down and bit my pillow when the cramps came too hard. It lasted for a long time and soaked many rags, many sheets.

  For days, my thoughts tumbled in a blood-tinged haze. I remember thinking, if only I could travel backward in time and tell myself to stay out of the conservatory. If only I asked the right god, maybe everything would be erased as a frightening dream. If only I could hide in the cupboard, the way I had as a child.

  I had always been able to escape any requirement laid upon me. By slipping out my window. Climbing the cherry tree. But I could not escape this.

  My mother had liberated a fair amount of gold to pay for the potion and the silence of the herb-woman who made it. But an herb-woman who would brew such potions and take such bribes was vulnerable to selling her silence to the highest bidder. The rumors began quietly, but by late fall, they raged like the brushfires we all feared at that time of year.

  The only remaining mystery was why the Prinze remained silent for so long.

  The first snowflakes were falling when the Prinze made their formal accusations, and my father was busy supervising the weaving and dyeing of silk. In such a dry year, there wasn’t much. Our revenues would be down. And then me.

  My father countercharged Cassis with seduction. But, as my mother had predicted, the Prinze had too much power in the Circle. And the charge that I had killed a babe in my womb was true.

  If only my mother had killed the herb-woman who made the potion. Emotion had no place in the games Houses played; that lesson I learned well.

  It was a lesson driven home to me when Cassis testified in front of the full Circle. Representatives from all the Lieran Houses major and minor alike were there, seated on the hard wooden benches that curved along the walls of the Dome of the Gods. A statue of Erelf, the god of knowledge, stood in the center, and Cassis knelt before it when he testified. The ravens on the god’s shoulders watched me over Cassis’s head.

  Carrion-eaters. Not like my hawks. Should I have been surprised that they failed in their service to the truth?

  “I was bewitched,” Cassis said. “Kyrra d’Aliente spoiled her mother’s womb for sons, and she has taken a great hate to all men. She seduced me so that she might also kill my son. Everyone knows that the Aliente grow desperate for new outlets in which to sell their silk, and new ships in which to carry it. But my father wouldn’t deal with them, and this is how they take their revenge.”

  Was there anger in his face, that I had killed his son to save my House? He never looked at me once.

  Hate kept me unmoving while three women made me lie on a table in the center of the Circle and proved I was not a virgin, and hate kept me from hearing the words of the sentence all the way through: “Kyrra d’Aliente is hereafter disowned by her father and cast off forever as an unchaste woman. From this day forward, she has no right to either the Aliente property or the Aliente name. If she should be caught using this name, she shall be executed on the whim of the Circle. For deliberately causing the miscarriage of Cassis di Prinze’s child, the Houses are in agreement that Kyrra d’Aliente’s right arm shall be severed from her body above the elbow.”

  And so, they took me outside and made me kneel and lay my arm on a wooden block, and then the executioner tied a leather strip around my bicep and brought an axe down on my arm while Geoffre di Prinze and his son stood to one side of me and watched.

  The blade whistled in the air as it came down. Then there was a thunk, and my a
rm lay on the block, still twitching, while they dragged me away to stanch the blood pumping from the ragged stump.

  I didn’t faint until I had a good look at my arm lying there.

  I wanted to remember it.

  Chapter 5

  I met Arsenault almost a year later.

  It took a long time for my stump to heal, and then I worked in the silkhouses and slept with the girls who combed the silk. They were all unmarried, about my age, but came from families who had lived and died and worked on Aliente land for long ages. Combergirls grew the nails of their index fingers long and notched them, one, two, three, sometimes four times, making their own hands into the most delicate of combs, honing the tines of their nails every night with emery files.

  I stirred the big pots of boiling water filled with cocoons, and the combergirls combed them out and fed the raw silk thread onto spindles. Since my ancestors had stolen the first silkworm eggs, silk production in Eterea had flourished until there were several grades of moth raised up and down the peninsula. We raised various species ourselves, but our most-desired silk, the kind for which we were known, was spun by giant moths the size of hummingbirds. When we boiled their cocoons, the thread turned a deep, shimmering burgundy, the color of our House. It turned the water red as blood and stained the combergirls’ nails and fingertips. After all the thread had been spun, the dead worms sank to the bottom of the pot, and it was my job to fish them out with a strainer and take them to the compost heap, where they would decay and eventually feed the mulberry trees.

  With the heat in the boiling house, I sometimes felt as if I had been sentenced to a life of labor in the underworld.

  The only break in my day was to bring water to the gavaros, whose job it had once been to serve me. And all around me every night, girls tended their perfectly matched hands. I preferred it when the girls left me alone, and most of them did. Except for Ilena, the girl who slept beside me.