Fortune's Fool (Eterean Empire Book 1)

by Angela Boord

  I began to think that maybe he did like boys. But one morning very early, I came upon Margarithe herself leaving the barracks, winding her dark hair up with both hands as she went. Arsenault stood watching her, leaning against the doorframe with his hair down on his shoulders and a crooked smile on his face. I had no reason for being at the barracks that day, so I don’t think Arsenault knew I was there. I felt strange afterward for wearing Margarithe’s old dress, and I wondered what he saw when he looked at it.

  But when I wasn’t seething over my crooked stitches or growling at the odd damascene carvings in the blade of his sword, which ate polish but would not swallow it, we sat together in his room companionably enough. A small brazier on the table provided us heat while a candle lit up the winter dark, and I would work on a seam while he wrote in the little leather diary he kept. He wrote or sketched in it almost every day.

  “What are you writing about?” I would ask him.

  Sometimes, all I received was a brief, murmured “Nothing important,” but other times, he would tell me.

  “The silkhouse roof was sagging from the weight of the snow. We had to shovel it off.”

  “I’m not sure that’s the kind of thing I would commemorate in my diary. It seems like just an ordinary day.”

  “It was an ordinary day. That’s why I want to remember it.”

  At that time, my memory of ordinary days was both sweet and painful. I was growing more used to my new ordinary, but unlike Arsenault, I still wasn’t sure I wanted to dwell on it.

  “Do you keep track of all your ordinary days?” I asked.

  “Most of them.” He frowned, his mouth forming a troubled, thoughtful line. “My memory isn’t always what it should be.”

  “Perhaps you’re just growing older.”

  He had not a touch of gray in his beard, but I enjoyed prodding him with the difference in our ages. I had no idea how old he really was.

  The stylus stopped scratching across the paper, then started up again. He spoke without looking up. “I imagine I’ll only be fit to sit in here by the fire soon. I’ll have to send you out to shovel snow instead.”

  I shook out the shirt I was mending and bent over, squinting to see my stitches in the dim light.

  “We’ll be a pair then, won’t we? The infirm old man and his poor cripple, both up on the silkhouse roof, trying to figure out how to get back down.”

  Arsenault chuckled. “Shoveling snow reminds me of my home.”

  “And so, ten years from now, you hope to look back on it?”

  “In ten years, I hope very much to be able to look back on it. It’s not always guaranteed, you know—a future.”

  “I suppose that’s true,” I said. And then, because I didn’t want to think about myself anymore, I added, “In your line of work.”

  He blew away the bone dust that fixed the metal from his stylus onto the page. “You know,” he said, “I once shipped on an ice cutter. We fit a metal plow onto the prow of the ship and we would ram the ice to keep the harbor open as late as we could. Twenty-four men on the oars, and eventually, the ice would take over anyway and we’d just retire to the tavern to drink away the rest of the winter. Sometimes, I think about how useless that was, what else I could have been doing.”

  “I suppose you don’t remember that winter very well,” I said.

  He chuckled again, but this time, it had an edge on it and he ran his free hand through his hair. “No,” he said. “Nor, to be honest, the following spring. I much prefer keeping up your silkhouses. Yesterday, I fixed a hole in the pigsty.”

  “Are you a gavaro or a farmer, Arsenault?”

  That got a laugh out of him, and finally he looked up and met my eyes. “Perhaps I’m a gavaro pretending to be a farmer.”

  And perhaps if our evenings had always been that way, he wouldn’t have been such a mystery to me.

  But then there was the dagger work.

  I stared at the dagger stupidly for a long time after he gave it to me, wondering why he would do such a thing.

  “Here, let me show you,” he said, and came up behind me to adjust my grip on the hilt. It was just a brief touch of his hand on my hand, his arm along my arm, the scent of his black-tea soap too close, and his presence large and warm behind me. It shouldn’t have affected me the way it did. But I tore away from him and dropped the dagger, my heart thudding.

  He bent and picked it up off the floor.

  “Kyrra.” He moved as if to come closer, then stopped when I backed away. “I only want to show you something useful. As a trade. You’ve paid Margarithe back, and I’d like to keep you on. I can pay you coin for your work, but I know that you used to fence and I thought...maybe you’d rather have knowledge? Skill?”

  He’d only known me a matter of months and yet he already knew me so well.

  “But I’m not allowed blades,” I said, trying weakly to force myself back into the position to which I’d been consigned by law. To try and be dutiful, as a penance to my parents.

  “It’s good to know how to use a knife. Even if you don’t own it.”

  He made it sound so natural to take the hilt. So I did.

  One morning, he came to the combing house early to get me. Most of the combergirls were gone, back with their families for the season, but I remained for Mistress Levin to shepherd. I washed the soot from the floor and walls of the big room every morning, toted in more wood for the fire, made tea in a cast iron kettle, and washed our cups when we were done. After I finished my chores, Arsenault would be knocking on the door, bending low to walk in the doorway and waiting for me to wrap myself in my not-warm-enough cloak spun from the leftover wool of our sheep.

  The cold never seemed to bother Arsenault. Not like it bothered me. The ghost of my arm throbbed in the cold. Sometimes, I would wake at night, crying out, my left hand closed on the space that should have been my right forearm. I could do nothing for the pain, and bad nights made for bad days.

  That morning, I came out of the combing house rubbing my stump, sloshing through the icy mud in my thin shoes. Patches of snow lay on the land like old scars, and the sun shone a weak and watery yellow in a white sky. The wind rattled tree branches and whipped my hair into my face. I hooked it behind my ears and looked up at Arsenault.

  “Here,” he said, pulling an ugly green-and-brown knitted scarf from inside his cloak. “Put this on.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because you look miserable. And we’re going to Liera.”

  He put the scarf in my hand. I stared at it for a moment, slowing almost to a stop. He kept walking and I had to run to catch up. Mud splashed the hem of my dress and my worn brown cloak.

  “I can’t,” I said.

  “Can’t what?”

  “I can’t put on this gods-cursed scarf myself, and I can’t go to Liera.”

  Now he stopped. “Why not?”

  “Because I lack an arm, and I think it’s against my sentence. Serfs don’t leave the estate.”

  “Only because they’ve no one to take them. You have someone to take you.”

  “The scarf is going to drag in the mud while I try to wrap it.”

  He took the scarf from my hand, tucked one end into my cloak, and wrapped it twice around my neck. “There,” he said. “Now you have no reason not to go to Liera.”

  He started walking again without waiting for me.

  “Arsenault!” I shouted, and jogged after him. The cursed man took one stride for my every three, and he was wearing a good black wool cloak that I had never seen before. His feet were shod in sturdy leather boots, too, while my shoes lacked proper soles and leaked.

  “What?” he said when I came to walk beside him, breathing hard in the cold air.

  “Stop that. I’ll come to Liera with you if you tell me why you’re taking me.”

  “I need to go to the market. I thought you would like to come.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “But why?”

  “Because I thought you would like to c
ome. Do I need another reason?”

  “Yes. That’s not a proper motive.”

  Arsenault’s eyebrows rose. “We’re not plotting an assassination, Kyrra.”

  “Why me, though? Surely, one of the other gavaros would be more useful to you—Verrin, perhaps.”

  “Would you rather I asked Verrin?”

  No, I didn’t. It suddenly came to me what Arsenault’s offer meant—a chance to be away from the combing house, to go into the city without a retinue or a list of social calls or my mother. A chance to walk the docks, down on the side where ladies didn’t go.

  But it was Liera. I might see an old acquaintance, and beyond the fact that I wasn’t sure I was allowed off my father’s estate, I didn’t think I could bear being recognized. Let them think the fevers killed me or left me senseless and mad. Let them think my father had put me on a boat to a cripple colony, where I lived in my white robes at the mercy of the sea, feeding myself on fish and shriveled oranges. Let them not think I had become a whore to a gavaro, that I was the woman the Prinze claimed me to be.

  I gave Arsenault what I imagined to be a stern glance. “You know I’d do anything to get out of the combing house.”

  Arsenault smiled. “I thought so.”

  “No,” I said. “You knew so.” Struck by a sudden thought, I eyed him skeptically. “This is just another way to get me to do something I think I can’t, isn’t it?”

  “I hadn’t meant for it to be, but it does seem to be turning out that way, doesn’t it?”

  I glared at him. He gave me that maddening hook of a smile and quickened his stride, so I could no longer talk and keep up with him. We walked all the way to the stables like that, and when we got there, he stopped with one hand on the stable door’s iron handle and reached inside his cloak with the other. He came out with a small leather pouch and handed it to me.

  “Keep it safe,” he said.

  “What is it?” I wanted to open the bag and look for myself, but to do that, I would have to pry open the knotted string with my teeth. If it had only been Arsenault and me in his room, I wouldn’t have hesitated, but here, where someone might see, I paused.

  Arsenault leaned against the door and tugged the bag open for me, just enough to catch a glimpse of glinting metal, razor edges, and a collection of moons, stars, and spiky writing etched into the flats.

  “Blades,” I breathed. “Arsenault!”

  “The rules against blades only extend to your father’s lands, don’t they?”

  “No. Anywhere. Arsenault, if I’m caught with blades…they could take my other arm. Or my life.”

  He pulled the bag closed again. “Well, keep them out of sight, then. But they’re not weapons.”

  “What are they then? They’ve an edge to them, don’t they?”

  “They’re just blades. They’re not meant for killing.”

  “And why are you giving them to me now?”

  “I’ll need them when we get to Liera. Keep them safe for now.”

  He twisted the handle, pushing the door open with a creak, and I had no choice but to tuck the bag into my pockets and follow. The smell of horses, straw, and liniment immediately assaulted me and, with it, my old life.

  I hadn’t been to the stables since I’d lain in the loft with Cassis, and I was unprepared for the tears it brought to my eyes. My woolen mitten scratched my face as I rubbed them away. When I looked up, Arsenault had already walked down the line of gray Ipanzers to where the tease mares were kept. The breeders used them to incite the passion of the Ipanzer stallions, to prepare them for breeding with an Ipanzer female. But the tease mares would never bear a foal of their own.

  Householders didn’t ride tease mares. They rode Ipanzers.

  Serfs walked.

  Arsenault draped his arms on the stall door at the end of the aisle and clucked softly at the plain bay mare who nudged his shoulder with her nose. She was the antithesis of the Ipanzer, the lithe gray warhorse that had borne generations of Lierans into battle. Ipanzers were fine animals, sleek, almost silver in the candlelit stables, with thin velvet black nostrils and small, trim ears that swiveled at the slightest sound.

  Arsenault reached inside his cloak and drew out a carrot; the bay mare lipped it, then clamped down with her big yellow teeth and swallowed it in jerking bites. He scratched her forelock and stroked her behind the ears, and she whiffled his shirt with her nose.

  “She’s calm enough,” he said. “I think you could handle her.”

  I stood there for a moment before his words sank in. “You expect me to ride?” I said. “On my own?”

  “Unless you’d rather ride with me. But my weight’s enough for any horse.”

  “Aren’t we going into Liera for supplies? Shouldn’t we be taking a cart?”

  “The road’s too muddy for a cart, and anyway, the supplies we need will fit into saddlebags. I thought you might appreciate riding on your own again. The groom assured me you enjoyed it once. He even said you were good at it.”

  The mare stretched her neck out to sniff me, too, and I backed away from her. “Which groom would that have been? The one who testified against me at the trial?”

  Arsenault rubbed the bridge of his nose. “No,” he said. “That groom has moved on to other pursuits, along with your chambermaid. Are you satisfied?”

  I hadn’t heard. I wondered where Bella had gone, if she’d married the groom after all. I sniffed and looked at the floor. “Nothing will bring my arm back.”

  “No. You’re right.” He swung the stall door open, and the hilt of his sword bumped against the stable wall. “Nothing will bring your arm back. And nothing will bring back your old life, either. It’s time you got used to the idea.”

  “I don’t need lectures from you,” I said. “Don’t you think I deal with the reality every day?”

  He took down a blanket from a peg next to the mare and settled it on her back. “I think you mostly live in a world you’ve created, not the world as it is.” A saddle hung next to the empty blanket peg and he took it down, placed it securely on the mare’s back, and bent to tighten the girth around her belly. The mare stood calm. She whickered at Arsenault, and he patted her and straightened up.

  His eyes were calm too but laced with a metal edge. It made me angry. “If my company irritates you so, why do you want me to come with you?”

  “Get on the horse, Kyrra.”

  “You haven’t bridled her yet. I can’t—”

  “Get on the horse.”

  I looked down. There was a stepstool at her right side. I gathered my skirts in my left hand and walked into the stall, stepped up on the stool, and let my skirts fall as I gripped the mare’s mane. I tangled my fingers in tight. The mare stood for me, placid. It had been months since I’d mounted a horse. But I should be riding an Ipanzer, and all I had now was a little brown tease mare, who bowed her neck and waited for me.

  A cripple’s horse was what she was.

  “I won’t,” I said to Arsenault. “She’s not a real horse, just some stupid mare without any spirit, and you’ve only brought her here for me because she’s easy. I won’t have you feeling sorry for me.”

  “Kyrra, get on the thrice-cursed horse. You’re not riding to war; you’re just going to Liera. You’ve lost an arm, but you’re still alive. Your life might even be more interesting.”

  “More interesting? What right do you have to say so to me?!”

  “Perhaps none. But what prospects did you have before?” He leaned forward, facing me over the mare’s neck. He never raised his voice, but it felt like the inexhaustible well of his patience might finally have run dry. “What did you look forward to? Being bred like an Ipanzer mare to produce more heirs for someone else’s family? Conservatory afternoons full of negotiation with other women? Would you have gone gentle into that life? Or is that why you’re here, because it didn’t suit you?”

  I was breathing hard. I still had my hand wrapped around the little mare’s mane. Passion I had wanted, and pa
ssion I had gotten. But not the kind I thought.

  “I can’t guide the right rein,” I said and cursed my voice for trembling. “I’ll pull her left too much.”

  “Use your knees,” he said.

  Tears muddied my vision. “Damn you. You said this wasn’t about doing something I thought I couldn’t.”

  “It’s not. You can still ride.”

  “Why do you want me to bring the blades?”

  “Get on the horse, Kyrra.”

  I yanked the horse’s mane as I stepped into the stirrup and swung myself up on her back, crying. I pulled up too hard and overbalanced and stretched out my right hand to cling to the mare’s neck and lurched forward because I only had my stump and almost slid off the other side and onto the floor. Arsenault caught me by the shoulder and pushed me upright in the saddle.

  “See?” I said. “I can’t do it by myself!”

  He didn’t say anything, just took down the bridle and buckled it around the mare’s nose, adjusting the bit in her mouth. I sat on her back, choking down the rest of my tears, feeling her breathe with my legs. Seeing the world from that height again.

  Arsenault ducked under the mare’s neck and came up beside me. He had a pair of boots in his hands. “The groom didn’t give me these,” he said, “but I don’t think anyone will miss them.”

  I stared at him. His face wavered in my sight with the last of my tears.

  He waited on me.

  I levered my shoes off with the stirrup bars, and he put the boots on for me.

  We splashed down the path away from the stables, following the Aliente road past the bare gray mulberry groves and the fields where shorn stalks of wheat poked up through the snow. It wasn’t long before my thighs hurt and the muscles of my left arm cramped from holding the rein too tightly. My mare kept slowing until I finally learned to relax. I had been a good rider once, and now I clutched at the rein like a girl who was just learning.