Fortune's Fool (Eterean Empire Book 1)

by Angela Boord

  The Qalfan dragged the tip of one of my blades down the glowing length of it, and I started to cry.

  “She holds on to it still,” he said.

  “I know,” Arsenault replied, as if he was breathing hard.

  “Then why do you want me? You can see for yourself and there’s nothing I can do.”

  “Nothing at all? Jon said you’re a surgeon. That you’ve grafted skin.”

  “Immediately after the severing. And nothing as big as an arm.”

  “But with the blades.”

  The Qalfan spat. “Foreign magic. Inferior. Nothing will bring back an arm.”

  He got up and walked away. I saw him go, passing out of the room the way a reflection disappears when the angle of the light changes. Everything in the room shimmered. Perhaps I was the one in the mirror, looking out.

  “Arsenault?” I said, struggling to get up. “He’d put a dead girl’s arm on me?”

  They said it was half-magic, what Qalfan doctors did, that they would sometimes slice the noses off corpses and attach them to the faces of men whose faces had been mutilated in battle. The price for that was carrying the corpse’s ghost on your back for the rest of your life.

  I carried one ghost with me already. I didn’t need any more.

  Arsenault pushed me back down. “Hush, Kyrra.”

  “Arsenault, it’s my arm!”

  “Hush. It’s all right.”

  “He can’t give me my arm back? There was a chance?”

  “No chance,” the Qalfan said from somewhere I couldn’t see him. “No chance at all.”

  “You said he was a chirurgeon, Jon. I’ve seen what Qalfan doctors do and so have you. She’s kept the line of her arm; you see it too, don’t you?”

  “So do you, Arsenault. And you see those blades on the floor as well?”

  “A dead girl’s arm, Arsenault!” I shouted, clutching him by the collar. “Was there a chance?”

  “Gods,” Arsenault said. “Kyrra, lay back.” He pushed me down again and let go of me, then rocked back on his haunches.

  “I see the blades,” he said. “I’ve seen them fall that way before.”

  “Darkness in all four quarters. How often does that happen?”

  “You can’t take action based on that kind of fuzzy information. You don’t know if the cast was for past or present or future.”

  I heard Jon sigh. “We’ve argued philosophy before, my friend.”

  “She hates the Prinze.”

  “It was a stretch of an idea. She’ll have to remain armless. Perhaps you’re only trying to exonerate yourself, eh?”

  “I’ve given up on that, Jon. I’m just trying to do my job.”

  “Going beyond the call of duty, as usual. I wonder why?”

  I tried to speak. I looked up at them with my eyes wide open. But I had gone past words. All that passed my lips was a string of meaningless sounds—uh uh uh—like a woman who has lost her tongue instead of her arm. I flailed out, and Arsenault caught my arm and pressed it into the pillow. He stared at me for a moment, Jon frowning over his shoulder, and then he sniffed and wiped his nose with his sleeve.

  “Damn kacin. Muddles me.”

  “One day, it’s not going to muddle you so much that your gods can’t find you, you know.”

  Arsenault smiled—a cold smile, bleak. I thought it was a trick of my eyes. “We’ll hope it’s not this lifetime. How far do you trust your chirurgeon?”

  “About as far as the door.”

  “He hasn’t left yet, has he?”

  “I hired a man to take care of it.”

  “You trust your man?”

  “He needs something from me. The chirurgeon doesn’t.”

  I stared upward in the glassy silence, unable to move. I could have been dead. I wondered if they would know it if I died.

  “There must be other ways,” Arsenault said. “Beyond grafting on a new arm.”

  Jon rose, knees creaking. “I’m sure there are. I’ll leave it to you to decide whether or not to take the chance. We’ve more important things to worry about.”

  Arsenault remained squatting beside me, hands clasped between his knees. His eyes were red. He reached up to rub his right one, the one next to his scar, then he dropped his hand and looked at me.

  “Right,” he said softly, and rose. He pulled my cloak off its peg and covered me with it. He got his and covered me with that one, too. Then he brushed a strand of hair from my face and tucked it behind my ear.

  I could only stare at the ceiling for a long time after he left, the stump of my right arm twitching at my side.

  In the morning, it was very cold. I woke to the creak and thud of boots on the plank floor. There were no windows, so the light couldn’t cut into my eyes, and that was good. Everything else did. The whole world was sharper, as if it had grown edges. I put a hand to my brow and squinted at Arsenault standing over me holding a steaming crockery cup.

  “Good morning,” he said.

  I ripped off the cloaks and lurched to my feet. “Good morning? Why is it a good morning? You brought me here so that a Qalfan necromancer could make a ghost of me and now it’s morning and I still have only one arm? There is nothing good about this morning!”

  My stomach started rolling before I finished yelling at him. I clutched my mouth and closed my eyes.

  Arsenault said nothing.

  “I’m going to retch.”

  “Do it in the pot, then,” he said, and I heard a clang. When I opened my eyes, a dull tin chamber pot sat next to my foot.

  “Bastard.” Then my stomach clenched and I fell on my knees and vomited up my entire dinner from the night before.

  After that I shook, and Arsenault made me leave with him for the market anyway. On our way out, we passed the remains of the chirurgeon and I retched again, all over the steps.

  He was dead in the street, leaned up against the wall of the house with a bottle in his hand. His urqa hung down below his chin and was stained with blood. He smelled, even in the cold. Like meat gone bad after slaughter. The blood had dried black all down his robes.

  Arsenault cursed. He walked over to the Qalfan and pulled up his urqa to hide his face. Something shuffled beside him like a rat, but Arsenault lurched to the side and pulled his sword.

  A small lean-to built of scrap wood huddled against the other side of the alley. It looked like a pile of sticks, but a man came out of it. He wore a black cloak pulled close around him, and a black scarf pulled up over his chin and the bottoms of his ears, but his head was uncovered. His hair was so black it looked wet, blue-black as raven feathers, and he had high brows that arched over dark eyes. He wore black gloves and black boots. When he saw me watching him, he grinned, the corner of his mouth pulling up, crooked and cynical, above the frayed edges of his scarf. In that moment, the fact that he wore black seemed not so much a harbinger of death as a dangerous sense of irony.

  “You knew him, did you?” he said to Arsenault. “Pity. I’m sure his knowledge was considerable.”

  “Did you do this?” Arsenault said.

  The man tilted his head and looked at him. “All I’m willing to say is Jon shorted me on my supply. Tell him to give me the rest of what he owes me, and I’ll convince the Qalfan gentleman to take his leave elsewhere. Otherwise, he’s got a new job as your doorman.”

  He sniffed and rubbed his nose with his sleeve. His dark eyes were glazed.

  “Jon paid you what he owed you,” Arsenault said. His face took on a hard look I hadn’t seen before—a careful, masked look that was different from the expression he gave me when he didn’t want to answer a question. Arsenault had his hand on his sword, but the other man stood before him, picking at his teeth with a wooden stick as if he was oblivious to the fact that Arsenault was ready to cut him down where he stood.

  “I don’t think you’ll draw your sword right here in the street, will you? I want to talk to Jon.”

  “Kyrra,” Arsenault said, without looking away from the man, �
��go back inside.”

  I hesitated, and Arsenault glanced at me quickly, a rapid sideways movement of his eyes. “Kyrra.”

  I grabbed up my skirts and hurried behind him, clattered up the steps and inside. The door slammed after me, but I could hear their muffled voices.

  The other man laughed. “Obedient wench, isn’t she?”

  “She’s no business of yours.”

  I bent and pushed the door open just enough to allow me a tiny sliver of a view, in time to see Arsenault step forward into the other man’s space, his hand on the hilt of his sword and the blade partially visible above the edge of the scabbard. “You’ll dispose of the body like you were asked, or you’ll join him.”

  People will say it’s a cold feeling, when you realize the danger in those you thought you knew, but it wasn’t for me. Instead, it was just a moment of feeling everything around me, all the way through—my shaking hands, the queasiness in my stomach, the scaly frost on the inside of the door, the rickety wood that separated me from two men complicit in a murder.

  I knew the sword at Arsenault’s side wasn’t for show, but for some reason violence seemed much tidier in stories.

  The man smiled wide at Arsenault and put up his hands. “I’ll dispose of the body if that’s what you want. But I’ll be talking to Jon.”

  Arsenault jammed his sword back into its scabbard and stepped away. “You’ll dispose of the body,” he said, then when the other man didn’t move, he added, “Now.”

  A flicker of heat flared in the man’s expression. “You’re mad,” he said. “With all the crowds in the Talos.” But he dragged the chirurgeon away from the wall all the same.

  Arsenault shrugged. “It should have been taken care of under cover of darkness.”

  The man wiped his nose again. “And what would Geoffre di Prinze say if he found out there was a house of sorcerers in this street?”

  “In this street?” Arsenault said, looking around. “I don’t see one in this street.”

  The man shrugged, his hand on the dead Qalfan’s shoulders. “I hear Cassis di Prinze may be interested in buying my contract. As he’s interested in buying the contracts of very many gavaros these days, particularly ones from…shall we say, more foreign shores? Shores that may dabble a bit?”

  Arsenault scowled. “And where would you be from?”

  “Me?” The man waved his hand. “I’m Amoran. Fallen from the enemy’s hands, as it were. But you know, we Amorans have a greater talent at divination.”

  “You lied, then,” Arsenault said.

  “You know what the Talos is like. Its talons rip everybody sooner or later. I’d sooner they ripped the Prinze.” He grinned, then sobered abruptly. The change was complete; it was as if the kacin-addled blackmailer had fled, leaving something metal in its place. This man had the look of a gavaro. “Cassis di Prinze is being forced into something he’s very little knowledge of. I’ve seen what goes on in your house. It’s something Geoffre would pay well to learn.”

  “Is it, now?”

  “And may the gods help all of us if he does. You know that as well as I. I’d rather not have my contract bought by Cassis di Prinze.”

  Arsenault shifted so I couldn’t see his face. Instead, all I saw was the wind snatching at his braid, his cloak snapping against his calves, the other man’s face over his shoulder. “And why is that?”

  “Because Geoffre knows things. Things a man would sooner not tell him. I’ve my secrets like any man, only I’d rather keep them, eh? And you…well, you down here in the Talos…maybe it won’t matter that I’m dragging a dead Qalfan chirurgeon out into the street on the same day the Prinze patrol is in town.”

  “You’re a man who likes to have it both ways, aren’t you? Are you trying to tell me that you’ll tattle to Geoffre or that you foresee a time when Geoffre will overstep his bounds and step on the backs of people like you?”

  The man laughed. “Oh, I’m sure he’d step on me. I know my place.”

  “Something I’m happy to hear, you can be assured.”

  The man’s eyes narrowed. “Come to think of it…I might have seen you around once or twice. As an accompaniment to Devid?”

  Arsenault cocked his head. “You might have seen me in the same establishment. Liera can be a small city.”

  “And now I wonder where your commission is. Was that girl missing an arm”

  Arsenault moved so quickly, I wasn’t prepared for it. All in an instant, he clenched the man's shirt in his fist and shoved him sprawling into the sticks of the lean-to, which collapsed in a clatter against the stone street. Arsenault pulled his sword, but so did the man; my heart pounded and I pressed against the door.

  Steel hissed and clanged. The swords tied up, then slid free of each other, and in the end, Arsenault stood with his foot on the other man’s chest, the tip of his blade hidden inside the man’s scarf, resting at the hollow of his throat.

  The man’s hands were empty. He stared up at Arsenault for a long moment. Then that grin split his face again and he chuckled weakly.

  “Pardon,” he said. “I didn’t know she was yours.”

  “You’ll not threaten her,” he said. “That’s all. I can be patient with you over the Qalfan, but I won’t tolerate threats to her.”

  “I shall treat her as carefully as if she were my sister.”

  Arsenault leaned forward, putting more pressure on the blade and more weight on his foot.

  The man on the ground lifted his open hands. “No threats!” he gasped. “You’ve made your point. Get me a commission away from the Prinze and I’ll take care of your Qalfan and leave Jon’s cheating be. That’s all I ask. And Geoffre will never find out what goes on in that house.”

  Arsenault stepped back and sheathed his sword. “I’ll talk to Jon,” he said. “Now get this body out of here before it starts to smell.”

  He turned around the way a wolf might when he’s shown himself leader of his pack. I bit my lip, sure the other man would go for his sword, but instead, he sat up and hung his head between his knees for a moment, then collected his sword, sheathed it, and rose to drag the body across the paving stones.

  “My name is Lobardin,” he said, “and I expect you will talk to Jon.”

  Arsenault made a noise that could have meant anything, and put his foot on the first step. It shuddered beneath his weight.

  I pulled away from the door, looking around the dim room in fright. I ran toward the far wall, my boots pounding on the wood floor, but there was nowhere to go. When Arsenault opened the door, it threw a little more light into the room, but then the door slammed and I was in the dark again, staring at Arsenault.

  He stopped just in front of the door as if he were surprised. “Kyrra?”

  “You were going to kill him,” I said. “You and Jon—you had that Qalfan killed. You’re a smuggler.”

  He shook his head. “No.”

  “That gavaro murdered a man for a handful of kacin!”

  The stucco nubs of the wall pressed into my back. I put my palm against them, as if I might feel my way to freedom. But whenever I sought freedom, it seemed to end up like this—just a more dangerous trap.

  Arsenault frowned. “He’d already rendered service to the Prinze. Would you let him go to tell what he knew?

  His words left a bitter taste in my mouth. I hesitated. “What did the gavaro mean, about Cassis buying contracts? And Geoffre? What do you have to do with that?”

  With a troubled glance at the door, Arsenault said, “As little as possible. Geoffre has become obsessed with magic. We keep ourselves to ourselves here in the Talos. I didn’t want to see you compromised.”

  “Compromised. What do you mean by that, Arsenault? If Geoffre found out I was violating my sentence, I’d be dead!”

  He looked troubled but he didn’t say anything.

  “I heard what you and Jon talked about last night. I saw my arm. Were you going to let the Qalfan mate a dead girl’s arm with my stump?”

  He
moistened his lips. “It wasn’t supposed to be a dead girl’s arm.”

  I laughed, more in horror than anything else. “What—the arm of a live girl, then? Another girl like me?”

  “It was supposed to be your arm. Your mother had it embalmed using Qalfan techniques. If it was done properly, your arm is still whole and untouched. They sealed it in a cedar coffer, didn’t they?”

  None of his words made sense. When I opened my mouth to ask him what he meant, all that came out was more laughter like a flock of frightened starlings.

  “You jest with me.”

  He sighed. “It doesn’t matter. The Qalfan said it couldn’t be done.”

  “Do you have my arm here?”

  He laughed in surprise. “That would be a little…morbid, wouldn’t it? To carry an arm all the way to Liera?”

  “You must have planned to do so some day.”

  That sobered him. “I suppose I did.”

  “How did you find out what my mother did with my arm?”

  “I asked her.”

  “And she didn’t think it odd?”

  “She told me anyway.”

  “What are you going to do about that gavaro? Lobardin?”

  “Depends on what Lobardin does. It’ll probably be Jon’s decision, anyway.”

  “Who is Jon? Who does he work for?”

  Arsenault looked away from me, ran a hand through his hair, and scratched his beard before he answered.

  “Jon is…Jon. He’s a Dakkaran merchant. He has connections to a number of people and he’s here to maximize his family’s interests. That’s probably all you need to know.”

  It wasn’t all I wanted to know, but I knew it was probably all I was going to get out of him. I could draw a few more lines on that sketch myself. Since the Prinze were trying to muscle the Onzarrans off their trade monopoly with Dakkar, it made sense that Jon would step light around them, and I could erase Arsenault’s word merchant and pen in smuggler well enough.

  “You should have told me what you were doing.”

  “If you’d agreed ahead of time, it would have been against your sentence. But if I brought you down here unsuspecting...I thought there might have been a chance.” The smile faltered. “Well. I suppose I’d understand if you didn’t believe me.”