Fortune's Fool (Eterean Empire Book 1)

by Angela Boord

  Mikelo eyes me, his face pale. But it doesn’t look like he’s going anywhere, so I shove the knife back into its sheath. Maybe he’s just as curious as I am about what’s going on, or maybe he doesn’t want to test my arm. Men attribute all sorts of fanciful abilities to me once they know about my arm.

  Jon stops unlacing his boots and looks up. “I wasn’t talking about Mikelo.”

  So, Jon did know what Tonia was hiring me to do, and for some reason, he wants to keep me from doing it. But why would Jon want Cassis alive? Why work with the Prinze? Why place Arsenault in their ranks?

  “Well, that depends too,” I say. “But I have a contract.”

  “Now think. What’s going to happen if you honor it?”

  “My family might be avenged, for one. For another…” I glance at Arsenault. “I did have someone else in mind when I took the job.”

  “Who?”

  “You know who I wanted to avenge, Jon.”

  Jon grunts, but he darts a quick look at Arsenault. “Yourself?”

  I rub my cheekbone where Fish-lips cuffed me and decide to let it go for now. “Maybe.”

  “Think it through, Kyris. You take back the girl, kill her lover. Now what happens?”

  “Why do you care, Jon? Why do you want him alive?”

  “You’re going to start a war again and it will be useless. You’re not thinking beyond your desire to take revenge.”

  “Like you’re so righteous and forgiving.”

  A rare flash of anger passes over Jon’s face. Then he turns to Mikelo. “How many householders did you lose in the war?”

  Mikelo draws himself straighter. “The Caprine put some of our minor branches to the sword; I don’t know if there are any of them left. Half the Garonze. The Forza…well, there was that raid on their ancestral home, wasn’t there, after they pledged allegiance to us? If the Aliente captain had kept fighting, casualties would have been worse. He had no honor, wouldn’t meet an army on the flat, kept pulling dirty tricks. And in the city, the Caprine were getting guns somehow. Thank all the gods they were never able to smuggle as many as we had.”

  Arsenault just stands on the other side of Mikelo with his thumbs in his swordbelt, scowling but otherwise showing no sign that he remembers that he was the Aliente captain Mikelo is talking about. Mikelo doesn’t seem to recognize him either. I’m not sure how they’ve pulled this off, but Jon has some damn balls.

  Jon leans on his knees and arches an eyebrow at me. “You know what that translates into when it comes to gavaros, serfs, servants, and kinless,” Jon says. “Do you know where your family is?”

  “I don’t have a family.”

  “Psh.” Jon waves his hand. “Curse your laws. Where is your family?”

  I walk to the sideboard, yank the door open. I grab a bottle from the crystal serving set inside and pour without pausing to sniff its contents. It tumbles clear out of the bottle—imya, then. “Jon. You know that, too. Quit throwing me rhetorical questions and give me some real answers. What game are you playing, you and…”

  Dammit, if he is playing a game and I give Arsenault away to Mikelo di Prinze, he’ll have a problem. My arm begins to shake in reaction.

  “…Andris,” I finish, and take a drink. The imya burns as it goes down.

  “It’s not a game, Kyris.”

  My control snaps.

  I whirl and throw the glass at his head, but it misses and smashes against the wall, a hundred glittering shards raining down on the carpet. “I know it's not a game! I will kill Cassis!” I take a deep, dragging breath. “And you know why.”

  The room goes still. Arsenault has his hands down at his sides like he has other weapons, and Mikelo has edged toward the door, but now he stops. My right arm is singing to me and I grip it with my left, hold it until it calms down.

  No, not now, this is not the time.

  Jon rises, his gaze troubled and pinned to my arm. He’s seen me in battle. He knows what happens to me. And yet he keeps driving this spike of revenge and paranoia into me like he’s baiting Ires.

  “I’ll take the boy in the other room,” he says, unwilling to cross the line for now. “Since Andris is the one who wrecked my plans, maybe he can talk some sense into you.”

  Arsenault throws Jon a sardonic look.

  If I could stop shaking, everything would be better. I drop my left hand from my arm. “You think I trust you to take my hostage into the other room?”

  “We won’t escape. You have my word.”

  “Your word is worth nothing.”

  He reaches into his sleeve to remove the smallest gun I’ve ever seen. “It’s worth a life.”

  I don’t know why I ever believe Jon. I tell myself that I believe him now because he could have killed me and taken Mikelo back himself and he didn’t. He has every reason to betray the Prinze and no reason to ally to them in the first place, unless it’s to get close enough to Geoffre to put a knife in his back. But Jon has always been willing to throw away even the most valuable card in his deck if it gets him what he wants.

  The gun he hands me is a work of art. Smooth-sanded mahogany inlaid with mother-of-pearl forms its stock, its wheellock mechanism and both barrels forged of hard watered steel. No fussing with fuses and matches. The gun is primed and loaded, the wheel already turned, which means that Jon could have blown a hole in my head sooner than I could sink my blade into Mikelo’s throat.

  He was right; it’s worth much more than five thousand astra.

  After Jon leads Mikelo into the adjoining room, a girl brings us food, and I drag the chamber pot into the closet so Arsenault won’t see me use it. When I come out, Arsenault has cleaned up his face and is sitting on the bed with his boots off and his feet up, his dirty blue cloak slung over a chair upholstered in yellow silk, Prinze tunic thrown carelessly on top of it. In his left hand he holds a roll stuffed with pieces of meat and cheese, and in his right, a metal stylus. The nib scratches over a piece of gritty paper he has spread out on a board propped on his knee, leaving brief glowing tracks of magic that soon turn a deep reddish-brown, almost burgundy. My arm hums with it, but it winks out when he sees me. He puts his knee down, then rolls the paper up and shoves it into a wooden tube that rests on the bed beside him. The tube disappears into his pocket along with the stylus, and the board slides upright against the side of the bed.

  If I had any more questions concerning his identity, they have just been answered.

  I wash my face and my hands in the basin as calmly as I can and dump the dirty water into the chamber pot. Then I sit down on the other side of the bed and take off my boots.

  There are courting rituals less complicated than this.

  The tray of food rests on the bed beside Arsenault’s knees. I make up my supper from the variety of cured meats and cheeses fanned out on the wooden board. A small jar of sweet-spicy preserved fruit and a basket of hot rolls sit next to it. I pick one up and sink my thumbs into it, releasing the steam inside, and them jam as much meat and fruit as I can into it.

  “Where is your book?” I ask, licking sticky purple liquid off my thumb.

  Arsenault looks up in the process of making himself another sandwich—avoiding the fruit. “My book?” he says.

  I seal my sandwich by pressing the edges together. “You used to write in a book. A diary, I suppose. Do you still have it?”

  “I imagine it’s been lost or destroyed by now.”

  “You imagine?”

  “Hard to say, with the wars.” He folds the bread over the top of his neatly layered meat and cheese. “Almost everything has been lost or destroyed, hasn’t it?”

  The last bite of my sandwich drips onto the bedspread and I shove it in my mouth and chew viciously. Beside me, Arsenault eats his tidy, dry sandwich like a foreigner, lying back against the pillows.

  I pick up a couple of pieces of cheese and cast myself back on the pillows, too.

  “Why are you working for the Prinze, Arsenault?”

  “Jon could
answer that better, probably.”

  “I don’t want to hear it from Jon. I want to hear it from you.”

  “Jon brought me to Geoffre, though.” He looks over at me, finally, just a turn of his head. “You are going to start a war, you know.”

  “Who will the Prinze war with this time? The Sere? They’re more powerful than we ever were.” I fold a piece of cheese and chew on it thoughtfully. “But Tonia was right. I can’t leave another woman to Cassis. Unless he’s finally grown a pair of balls, he’ll still be dancing to Geoffre’s tune, and who knows what Geoffre is up to. Though why I should care what these asses do to kill themselves off, I don’t know.”

  Arsenault snorts. “I don’t know that you do. Really. Do you?”

  I turn my head toward him. It’s so strange to see him lounging there, so close and familiar that I want to touch him…and still so far away that I can’t.

  “How did you find out what I was doing?” I ask.

  He doesn’t look at me. “Jon has an informant placed with Tonia di Sere.”

  I curse softly. “That Qalfan gavaro. I knew he was a weak point. Jon said he didn’t send anybody to kill me, but…”

  “No one tried to kill you."

  “Someone did. Twice. Once wearing Qalfan fighting robes. But instead of me, he killed a friend of mine and shot another.” I search Arsenault's cheek again for the cut, and once again see nothing but the evidence of our most recent fight. “I nicked him with my throwing knife, though, last night.”

  “If Jon sent anyone to kill you, I don’t know about it.”

  “Mmmm. Why have you forgotten me?”

  My question startles him enough to make him turn toward me. I find myself studying his face, trying to find a memory in it the way I search for the lines of his scar. My scrutiny must make him uncomfortable. He looks away, turning the half-eaten sandwich over in his hands.

  “I’ve forgotten many things,” he says—to his sandwich. He doesn’t even pretend to look at me. “Most things, maybe. If I knew you in the wars…”

  “It wasn’t the wars, Arsenault.”

  He frowns. “That name. I think a woman might have called me that. Long ago.”

  “Do you remember what she looked like?”

  “Dark hair. Brown skin.” His mouth curves a little, almost a smile. “She liked to run barefoot in the ocean.”

  My heart squeezes like a fist.

  Not me.

  Not Margarithe, either, though.

  I sigh. “It’s not your real name, is it.”

  “Doesn’t matter. The man my parents named died long ago.” He touches his now-unscarred temple briefly, then lets his fingers fall away as if unaware of what he’s doing. “And you. With your metal arm. Can I see it?”

  He waits for me. I think of all the stories he told me of his homeland, of ice and snow. In his eyes I can imagine a sea choked with ice, though I have never seen such a thing. Desolation, ships locked in port. I sit, turning toward him, and push up my ripped sleeve, exposing the metal beneath.

  He touches the flat sheen of my forearm, then lifts my arm until his reflection ripples over its surface. The brown and red in his hair are muted in this light so his hair looks black, like it should.

  “Jon found me in an alley,” he says abruptly. “He says his gods told him where I was.”

  “Perhaps it’s so. Jon always says he has no magic, but I think he lies.”

  Arsenault glances up at me sharply, his hands still on my arm. “Magic. That’s a word. Let me see the rest of your arm.”

  I push my sleeve up the rest of the way so he can see the way the metal joins the flesh. “No hinges?” he asks.

  I laugh, startled. “You smithed this arm, Arsenault.”

  He stares at me.

  “No,” I say. “No hinges. I think there’s more metal now than when you fitted it to my stump.”

  That makes him frown. He runs his thumb up my bicep to the place where metal meets flesh. My arm was cut just above the elbow, but the metal now runs almost to my shoulder. His fingers skim the join and I catch a whiff of musk and black tea mingled in his sweat, and I can’t tell whether it’s his touch or his magic that makes me shiver.

  He catches the movement and looks up at me. His hand leaves my arm and hesitantly, his fingers settle on my chin. He turns my head to the side to look at my profile.

  When he speaks, it’s almost in a whisper. “Kyris isn’t your name either, is it.”

  I shake my head.

  His thumb tracks down the side of my jaw.

  “You’re a woman.”

  How did he not know?

  He makes a noise and pulls away, but I catch his hand in my metal fingers. He tugs his hand out of my grip and rolls so that his feet hit the floor, and now he’s standing.

  “Kyrra,” he says. “Kyrra d’Aliente.”

  But he doesn’t say it like my name. He says it the way everybody else says it, like it’s an accusation, only he’s gripping his half-eaten sandwich in his hand so tight, his fingers sink deep into the roll, and he doesn’t seem to notice.

  Carefully, I unfold my legs and slide off the bed to stand. On the other side. Far away from him.

  “What do you remember, Arsenault?”

  “I remember burning,” he says. “At Kafrin Gorge.”

  This is all I’ve been able to learn about Kafrin Gorge:

  A year and a half ago, the Prinze boxed the main Aliente force in the Gorge and set it on fire.

  It was late autumn and tinder-dry. The fire roared up the walls of the Gorge and into the trees beyond, lighting an inferno. It spread through the ancient oak groves and up the pine-scrubbed hillsides and almost took the house. It burned the stables and the barns and some of the silkhouses. Half the mulberries turned to ash. But the main force of the Prinze, arrayed at the mouth of the Gorge, remained upwind of the fire and had already dug in with firebreaks and mostly escaped.

  After that defeat, the few remaining Aliente gavaros fled. The new Householder—my father’s third cousin—and his entire family were knifed in their sleep by a group of Amoran assassins hired by Geoffre. Any Aliente who remained within reach of Liera and did not immediately take ship for Vençal or Onzarro or Tiresia died somehow; the Prinze rounded up a group of my relatives from up north and put them to the very first firing squad ever used in Liera. My father’s serfs and servants were allowed to remain on the land, their contracts transferred to Vanni di Forza’s father.

  I received the news months after it happened, when Lieran gavaros began to filter north. By that time, so many gavaros were deserting on both sides that the Houses had come to the point of signing peace accords. Some of the gavaros who came to Rojornick and Kavo were Aliente.

  Our gavaros had been strangely loyal. Most of the men I’d known from my years as a serf were dead, and it was only after Kafrin that the rest gave it up as a bad job.

  A young gavaro hired after I left gave me the strangest piece of information, the one that sent me back south. By that time, I was serving in Kavo, hunting down the Rojornicki boyars who betrayed my first employer, a Rojornicki noble named Markus Seroditch. I remember when the gavaro walked into the dining hall of the barracks, still wearing his burgundy Aliente cloak and the stunned look of one new to warfare. I sat him down with a glass of imya and kept refilling it until both he and I had broken down weeping and I had wrung every last scrap of information out of him.

  He told me that my father had ridden into the Gorge with his main force, but Arsenault wasn’t with him.

  I knew that Arsenault had risen high in the ranks. I knew that my father depended on him.

  And I knew that Arsenault would never have ordered that many men into the Gorge.

  So, where was he? How long had he been gone? A few hours? A day? A week?

  Three months. He’d disappeared after a battle with the Forza on our western border. It was a minor battle, really a raid, at night in the trees. The Forza had thought to flank us, but somehow Arsenault foun
d out and led a small force of fifty gavaros to sabotage their cannons and rout them out at night. The mission was a success; the Forza lost all their cannon to spectacular explosions, their leadership were killed in their tents, and the majority of the force threw down their weapons when it became clear they were surrounded.

  But Arsenault never made it back.

  In the morning light, the Aliente gavaros searched the remains of the Forza camp as well as the surrounding wood. They sent alerts back to the big house.

  Nothing.

  His body was never found and nothing else was ever heard from him. The gavaro I talked to assumed he’d died in the explosions or the Forza had taken him prisoner when they retreated and then killed him afterward.

  But I knew Arsenault. When the Kavol decided to stop killing enemies and start killing friends, I took the option on my contract, packed up what little I owned, and began the long journey back to Liera.

  And now he says he was at Kafrin.

  “How?” I ask. “No one saw you—”

  “Do you think I don’t ask myself the same question?” He runs a hand through his hair. “But all I remember is the fire. I’ve pieced together enough to know I must have been there with the Aliente force—”

  “Must have been?”

  “Supposed to— Dammit, I don’t know!” He takes a deep, shaky breath. “I remember the flames. The sound they made. I remember… That’s all I remember. The burning.”

  The gavaro told me there were rumors, never proved…that Arsenault had been seen with Cassis di Prinze around that time, either just before or just after.

  “How did you walk out of that, Arsenault?”

  He turns hollowed eyes on me. “I don’t know. The next thing I remember, it was quiet. The sky was blue. I was walking down the Eterean road. The fire hadn’t gotten that far. I stumbled into someone’s house and they gave me water. Let me sleep and bathed the burns.”

  “You’ve no scars. Not even the one you used to have. At your temple. That was a knife scar, though.”

  He touches his temple and his eyes flicker closed, just for an instant. “No,” he murmurs. “I don’t think it was a knife.”