Fortune's Fool (Eterean Empire Book 1)

by Angela Boord

“You...bit him? Where?”

  I couldn’t lie. Lobardin’s face bore my mark, and he wouldn’t try to hide it.

  “Lip,” I said.

  Arsenault swore. He let go of me and walked across the room and took his swordbelt down off the wall.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To find Lobardin,” he growled. The raven on the worktable beat its wings and Arsenault glared at it.

  “Be gone with you,” he said. “It’s no business of yours. You’ll be back to take a letter later.”

  The raven clacked its beak and spread its wings. They seemed to stretch forever, and in a moment of black vertigo, I watched the ceiling spread apart, and the raven took flight through it, up into the blue afternoon sky. I staggered and bumped against my cot.

  “Magic,” I whispered.

  Arsenault said nothing. He belted on his sword, then jerked it from its scabbard and stood in the shimmering afterglow of the raven’s passing, inspecting its blade. The runes etched into the steel gleamed faintly. When Arsenault looked at me, his eyes were the color I would later associate with gun barrels.

  He jammed the sword back into his scabbard and started for the door. “Stay here,” he said.

  I lurched after him, grabbing at his shirt though it hurt.

  “If it were a man and a man, you wouldn’t handle it like this. Haven’t you been teaching me to take care of myself?”

  He half-turned and looked down at me. I had never seen him so angry. “He forced you, didn’t he? Threatened you so you wouldn’t tell me?”

  “No!”

  “Dammit, Kyrra.” He tore away from me and swung open the door.

  I followed. “Arsenault! Murder is a hanging offense. My father won’t bend the law!”

  “I’m trying to protect you,” he said, grinding the words out between his teeth. “That’s all I have ever been trying to do. To keep you safe. But instead, you think I’m treating you like that bastard Cassis—”

  “I want you to trust me with the truth,” I said. “The last thing I need is a man who thinks he’s my bodyguard.”

  He glared down at me. Then he whirled away, yanking his sword from its scabbard with a high-pitched scream that made me want to cover my ears. He brought it down, two-handed, in a brutal overhead stroke into the oak table that sat beside the wall. The table was stacked with empty water buckets. The sword passed through the wood as if it were butter. The table split into two pieces and buckets clattered everywhere, rolling across the dirt floor.

  Arsenault’s blade quivered like a guitar string but otherwise looked none the worse for wear. He jammed it back into its scabbard.

  “Fight your own battles, then,” he said as he stalked away. “I can’t protect you if you don’t want me to.”

  Chapter 18

  My whole life has been a series of bad decisions.

  After I left Razi at the hospital, I walked for a while, hoping for the gavaro to follow me but dreading it, too. I didn’t want to find out if it was Arsenault or that it wasn’t him and that my arm and its magic had led me into the kind of dangerous paranoia that got other people killed.

  Or lost them limbs.

  But now I owe Vadz and Razi a debt to solve this mystery and take care of it. So, I’m crouched on a rooftop, hunched in the cloak the nurse gave me and watching the sun rise over the bay, waiting on Jonawak dom B’ara, the Dagger of Dakkar, to show up and give me a gun he’s smuggled from the family that killed his and destroyed mine.

  We ought to be allies. He ought to be a man I can trust above all others. But Jon plays a long game. Until I know what it is, he’s still a player on the board.

  A group of ravens settles on the roof next to me.

  “Go spy on someone else,” I say, and wave my right arm at them. They hop down the roofline, squawking and beating their wings, but they don’t leave.

  You know this is going to go badly, a voice in my head whispers. You don’t need Sight to tell that.

  Shut up, I tell the voice. I get the gun, I leave. No one followed me from the Quarter. There’s no one down there but kinless children looking for food.

  But what might have happened when you slept?

  I twine my hands together and bump them against my chin as I think. I only slept for a short time in the deepest hours of the night, huddled against the warm bricks of the chimney. Maybe something did happen while I slept, but I couldn’t stay awake any longer.

  What if you missed something? Do you really trust Jon Barra? Do you really think he doesn’t know anything about Arsenault?

  It’s been five years. Do you really think Arsenault would honor his promise to you anymore?

  These voices in my head. I can’t tell which god it is anymore, or if it’s just the whispering of the magic itself, trying to take me over, to fill me up like a hollow in the ground.

  My arm absorbs magic. A long time ago, I was only human. But now there’s no way to keep the magic out. It’s a part of me.

  I stand and beat the grime out of my cloak. It’s time to go meet Jon.

  Jon steps out of the shadows when the first orange curve of the sun appears above the horizon. He walks me down the quayside past one of his ships, which has begun offloading long teak boards onto the dock. The wind off the sea slices knife-sharp against my skin. I huddle into my cloak, keeping my head down, struggling to keep up with Jon’s long strides.

  “I had a few problems after I left you yesterday,” I say, struggling to keep my voice unconcerned.

  “What kind of problems?”

  “You have any Qalfan gavaros working for you now?”

  “I’ve had too much experience with gavaros,” he says. “Now I just employ my countrymen. They don’t usually switch sides.” He gives me a glance I think I’m supposed to read something into. I guess he means when he worked for the Rojornicki. Maybe he didn’t approve when I left to work for the Kavol, even though I did it for loyalty’s sake—loyalty to my employer, who was betrayed by his countrymen.

  “You know anybody with Dakkaran experience who’s switched sides lately?”

  “To which side?”

  “Prinze.” I stop and look at him. “Either that or you’re trying to kill me.”

  “Kyris. Why would I want to kill you?” Then he pauses a moment with a slight slowing to his long stride and looks down at me. “Somebody’s trying to kill you?”

  “Me and anybody with me. Figured you might know something about it.”

  “I’m flattered, Kyris, that you think I know everything that goes on in this city, but I don’t. I didn’t send an assassin after you. Is this why you need the gun?”

  “No. But I wondered if you wanted me out of the way. Or wanted to scare me out of it.”

  He laughs. “Kyris, I have often wanted you out of the way, but if I set an assassin on you, Arsenault’s shade will haunt me into the afterworld.”

  “Arsenault’s shade. It’s funny you mention that.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m probably imagining things. But I bought a Sight Stone. The gavaro used magic. And he had a gun. Do you remember Razi? The Nezar Nibas fights with?”

  “Your Tiresian archer? I remember him.”

  “The gavaro followed me to Erelf’s temple and shot Razi. He lost his arm.”

  Jon falls silent for a moment. For a moment, I think I see a real emotion on his face. “I thought you said the gavaro was trying to kill you,” he says quietly.

  “He keeps getting closer. And he seems…familiar.”

  “Then you are imagining things. It’s that arm, Kyris. It invites paranoia. It’s not natural.”

  I rub my metal elbow. I’d like to tell Jon he’s wrong but he’s not. “It keeps me alive.”

  “One day, maybe it’s going to kill you. I don’t know why you want this gun, but I’m going to tell you again—if it’s getting people around you killed, you don’t need it. Arsenault would tell you the same and you know it.”

  “Arsenault wanted to be my bodyguard.�
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  “He wanted to be more than your bodyguard. May the fila preserve me, but why else do you think I’ve looked out for you these years?”

  I laugh. “Looked out for me? Jon. I don’t think you can call it—”

  “I rolled the cowry for you just this morning. They came up dark, bad luck in four Houses. Which Houses do you think they were?”

  “You don’t roll our Houses.”

  He shrugs. “Does it matter whose Houses they are? I’ve been fighting among you whiteskins for so long, maybe the fila have gotten confused. You don’t need this gun.”

  “You’re just trying to rattle my nerves now.”

  “The fila don’t lie.”

  “Maybe they haven’t been among Lierans long enough.”

  The buildings are beginning to bother me. I like moving around the city by rooftop, where I can see. The farther away from the docks we get, the more the buildings become like canyons, blocking out the sun. Up on the rooftops, you’re next to the sky and the stars, up in air you can breathe. But down here, we’re deep in the realm of the kinless. Beggars and lepers, thieves without hands, men with branded mouths, armless women hawking the only thing they can sell anymore—the only thing they could ever sell, though when they were whole people, they might have called it “alliance.”

  My fingers drift toward the hilt of my knife. Jon’s gaze flickers down to my hand and he sighs.

  “And see here, you’re proving me right. Jumping at shadows. But you’ve never wanted to listen to anyone’s advice, have you?”

  When I protest, he motions me quiet. We’re approaching a tumbledown warehouse. A group of children stands in front of it, dressed in the drab brown rags of those born kinless with no hope of ever gaining a House.

  One of the children looks up. He’s chewing something, and from his pinprick pupils, it looks like kacin. Smoking requires a sophistication these children don’t have yet. “Jon,” he says. “We watched it for you. Where’s our money, eh?”

  Jon frowns. “I see what you spent your last pay on. You remember what I said before?”

  The boy looks down at his bare feet and spits on the sandy ground. He’s missing most of his small toe, likely to frostbite. “We watched it good,” he mumbles.

  “No pay unless you watch it sober. You could have bought shoes with those coins, and now what have you got? You think you’re warm, but you’re not. You chew that kacin, you feel safe, but you’re not safe. Not as long as you have that pleasure feeling, you’re not thinking. Anybody could gut you.”

  The boy actually seems to be taking account of Jon’s words, flushing, but Jon glances over his shoulder at me one too many times while he’s talking.

  It’s the gun.

  Do you really trust Jon Barra?

  In spite of the discussion we’ve just had, the answer is no.

  I tighten my hand on the hilt of my knife. Jon sticks a key from his pocket in the rusted iron lock binding the doors. It rattles around and then he pulls the chain down with a clatter and throws them open.

  Jon Barra is smuggling guns from under the Prinze monopoly. And I am staring at a group of Prinze guards arrayed in silver and blue, all of them bearing dikkarros.

  Prinze guardsmen seem suddenly to be everywhere. I run down the boardwalk as fast as I can, cold air knifing in and out of my lungs. A dikkarro fires behind me with a low thud. I throw my arms over my head but keep running. The shot splinters wood, but thank all the gods that the dikkarro is hard to aim. I veer into an alley inhabited by a beggar in rags.

  “My corner!” he shouts. “My corner!”

  He shoots out a foot and trips me. My knees smack the cobbles, and my right hand splashes into a puddle of piss. I scramble to my feet and swipe my hand against my cloak, and the beggar whacks my shins with his cane.

  “Old man,” I gasp, stumbling back out of his way, “I am not here for your corner.”

  I pull myself up onto the sill of a half-gutted window before he can hit me again.

  I climb as high as I can and wriggle into a gap in the second floor, where a hole has been patched with boards. It’ll be a good-enough place to hide, if the house isn’t already crawling with guards. Where have they all come from? They seem to cover the quayside.

  Thumping comes from downstairs, but upstairs is quiet except for the scurrying of rats. Fire-blackened kacin pipes and empty wine bottles litter the uneven floor. I slide on its smooth-worn surface as I run toward the door, looking for a way out in the boarded-up darkness. The whole house cants sideways.

  “Upstairs!” a guard shouts. “Andris!”

  “Andris?” Jon bellows. “You’re not even supposed to be here! Cover the outside door! Dammit—Andris! You have other orders!”

  I smack against the boards in the small back room with my shoulder—another patched hole. The boards shudder but don’t give way, so I smash them with my metal arm. That makes a little more headway, but booted feet already rattle the stairs.

  Daylight shines through, but I still can’t make it out the hole and it’s a long drop to the ground. I batter the wood with my arm again and prepare myself to attempt it anyway.

  “Halt! Halt!” someone shouts. “You!”

  I jam my elbow through the hole and try to wriggle myself out. The jagged boards snag and rip my clothes, raking my stomach as I hang half in the room, half out, and stare at the ground.

  It’s a long, long drop.

  I’m saved it by a hand on my legs, yanking me back in.

  I kick backward. My boot connects hard into flesh and bone—a man’s face, probably. He lets me go with an angry, muffled cry.

  I bring my leg up into the hole and prepare to jump. But then he lurches forward and grabs my arm.

  We both tumble back into the room, a tangle of kicking, grabbing, punching arms and legs. I slam my right arm into his face. Blood gushes from his nose. Guards haul me upright and away from him. He lies there panting on the floor, blood smeared across his face.

  A big man. Dark hair. Gray eyes.

  Is this the man who’s been chasing me? If it is, he looks like Arsenault, but then again, he doesn’t.

  No scar, no metallic streak in his hair.

  I curse myself but manage to keep my mouth shut.

  He lies there staring at my arm. All the guards in the room are staring at my arm. The splintered wood ripped my sleeve and now the metal glints through.

  One of the other guards, an old man with yellow-gray hair and lips too big for his face, gives me a shake. “You’re under arrest.”

  “What for?” I ask. “I’ve done nothing.”

  The guard laughs. “Coming into an illegal arsenal like that? Do you take me for a fool?”

  I can’t help pulling against his hands. “I was duped.”

  “You look like a dupe. Where’d you get that arm?”

  He eyes it appreciatively but with trepidation.

  I clench my jaw and refuse to answer. That earns me a cuff on the face—not too hard, but hard enough. “Here, now. I asked you a question.”

  “Leave him,” the man on the floor says.

  “Andris, shut up,” Jon hisses.

  That voice. I know that voice.

  It’s him. By all the gods, it is him.

  “Arsenault!”

  I rip my right arm out of the old man’s grip and lunge toward him, stopped only by a barrage of guards who grab me by the shoulders and throw me down. My head slams into the floor; silver sparkles swim in my vision.

  It’s his voice, but why doesn’t it look like him? His hair has sunburned brown streaks in it. His face—beneath the blood from his nose—it’s too young, isn’t it? Is it just that he shaved his beard?

  But where is his scar?

  He frowns, up on one knee now, staring down at me. His brows pull down over his eyes—those same brows. The same eyes, but…murky. His bewildered expression is more frightening than a whole contingent of Prinze guards. There is no recognition in it at all. Just confusion.

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nbsp; The other guards laugh. “Know this one, Andris?”

  The man they call Andris slowly wipes the blood away from his face, his fingertips brushing the clear skin on his right temple where his scar should be.

  “No,” he says. “But I wager he’ll be singing come nightfall.”

  Part IV

  Chapter 19

  Dear gods. This is what he meant when he said magic ate his memories.

  But I don’t know that, do I? Maybe he’s running a ruse. Maybe he didn’t know it was me. Maybe…

  There are too many maybes.

  The guard with the fish lips and muddled eyes slaps a pair of manacles onto my wrists, and a pair of guards stand at my back with their dikkarros out. Then the guards take me down the stairs and out into the alley. The beggar who knocked me in the shins watches the whole spectacle with an addled expression, and then he starts to laugh. It’s an edgy sound, too high. I turn away from him, but then I’m left looking at Arsenault.

  None of the guards want to touch me, so the old guard makes Arsenault do it. He holds my arm just above the elbow. Feeling in my right arm is distant; a tight grip usually feels as light as the tickle of insect feet. His fingers feel closer and tighter, but maybe that’s because my hip bumps his every once in a while, when he pulls me off-balance, and I can sense him there, big and warm beside me—real and alive.

  When I dart a glance at him out the corner of my eye, all I can see is the way his cloak falls back over his arm, how his sleeve lies over the hard curve of his bicep— the wet black bloodstain on his tunic. I can’t help chancing a look upward—again and again—but every time, I’m met with the same mix of the familiar and the strange.

  It can’t be him. I’m imagining the resemblance.

  But he still walks with that same long stride. And his mouth pulls down at the corners like I remember. His hair—even though there’s no silver streak—slides out of its tail and into his eyes the way it always did, and he twitches it out of his face with his old quick, irritated jerk. Every now and then, his gaze wanders in my direction until he sees me watching him, and then he looks forward again, a muscle twitching in his jaw the way it used to. His eyes are shadowed, and not just because a big black bruise is already forming beneath them, spreading from the bridge of his nose. They’re as hard to read as the surface of the sea.