Fortune's Fool (Eterean Empire Book 1)

by Angela Boord

  He had to touch every part of me, and I him—every nick and scar, every evidence of past hurt and sorrow. He lay back on his bed and carried me with him, and there was a moment when the end of my stump brushed the soft, curled hair on his chest and I pulled away.

  “No,” he whispered, drawing me back. “See yourself as I see you.”

  He ran his hand down the phantom outline of my arm, and it lit up in spirals of red and blue light. As the light spread from my missing arm to the rest of me, the red shaded out of it, leaving only blue and then a bright white. When he touched my phantom fingers, the light flared and lit the room, then faded to a soft glow he held in his hands.

  And for a moment, a few hours of darkness, tangled there in the sheets with him, I was as whole as I had ever been.

  Chapter 23

  I woke to the sound of pottery on a tabletop and the strong light of a well-developed morning. Outside, birds and insects chittered in the trees. Distantly, blades clashed and someone shouted, Move your ass, greenie, unless you want a ride on this pole!

  I barely remembered Arsenault easing his arm from around me as he rose. Now he sat on the bed dressed in his regular clothes and his burgundy armband. His black hair gleamed wetly in the morning sun, the light streak a tidy strip that pulled back from his temple and hooked over his ear.

  He smiled. “I brought you breakfast.”

  He’d set a plate of food on his worktable for me. He must have been to the big house, because the plate was full of buns, figs, and nectarines. Next to the plate he placed a steaming mug of coffee.

  I pulled the sheet up over my breasts and tried to wrap it around me as I sat up. “Didn’t the kitchen girls wonder why you were taking such a late breakfast back to your room? I’ll be behind on my chores, and Utîl will be looking for me.”

  “You’re due a day of leave.”

  “What did you tell Utîl?”

  “I told him I was back, and he didn’t ask any questions.”

  It was difficult to wrap yourself in a sheet one-handed. Arsenault leaned forward and took the end from me, finishing the wrap and tucking it in at my side. I looked up at him and he at me, and I blushed and felt awkward.

  Were we still the same people after a night together? What did one say to a man upon awakening in his bed?

  Cassis and I had never made love in a bed. Only in secret, illicit places, as quickly as we could. We’d torn at each other’s clothes, bruising our lips with the force of our kisses, fucking each other with the reckless abandon of the young and rebellious. But that’s all it had been: fucking. Maybe it was something we’d both needed, until Geoffre persuaded his son to navigate our relationship into more treacherous channels. Or maybe it was just my own version of running away like a princess in a fairy story.

  But this was Arsenault. He wasn’t a boy, and though a small voice in my head urged caution, knowing he was a spy working the murky depths of loyalties, I refused to listen to it. Not with the sun spilling through the beech trees, dappling the floor with patterns of light and dark.

  He remained watching me, a hopeful yet half-afraid expression in his eyes.

  I laughed anxiously. “I hardly know what to say to you now.”

  A smile, somewhat embarrassed, flitted across his own lips. “It does seem…different,” he agreed.

  I took a slice of fig from the plate. “Surely that isn’t the way of all relationships. As soon as a man and a woman take a tumble, they cease to talk to each other as if they were the same people. They’ve instead got roles. Lovers. Man and wife.”

  I slid the piece of fig into my mouth and picked up the coffee, regarding him over the rim of the cup.

  Arsenault frowned thoughtfully as he carved a nectarine into pieces with his knife, then leaned against the wall to eat one of the dripping slices. “No. I remember my mother and father having many long conversations. They were friends more than anything. I think they grew more pleased by each other’s company as time went on, not less.”

  “Was their marriage arranged?”

  He shrugged. “I think so. But we came from a small place. They’d known each other since they were children.”

  “Tell me about them, then. Did you grow up in a great house or a hut? Did you have nursemaids, or—”

  He snorted in the middle of eating his nectarine, then laughed. “Nursemaids. Dear gods, no. Our house was small by your standards, but my father built good ships. Men respected him. He had men who worked for him. My mother was able to hire a cook.”

  “So, your mother…she was responsible for raising you?”

  “When my father was at sea. In order to cut timber for ships, he had to sail to the mainland. There weren’t many trees on our island. He and his men would lash the logs together into rafts and drag them back. But in the winter, ice locked us in and he stayed home and built boats. And we went ice fishing.”

  He got a faraway look in his eyes and smiled. “Gods, that was cold. I remember huddling around the fires with my spear in the dark and thinking my toes would shatter if I tried to stand up. The men kept themselves warm with liquor, but I was too young for that.”

  A shadow of regret passed over his face, so quickly had I not been watching him, I never would have seen it.

  “Why did you fish at night?” I asked.

  That hook of a smile came out on his mouth, and to my relief, the sadness disappeared. He chuckled. “We didn’t. Or—in the north, winter is night, and night is winter. The sun goes to sleep a little more every day in the fall until midwinter, when it only peeks above the horizon for a brief moment around midday. But this time of year…” He smiled and leaned past me to purloin another slice of nectarine. “The sun never goes to bed. It’s just one long, never-ending day.”

  I wrinkled my nose. “That sounds exhausting. Think how much work there would be to do.”

  His smile grew easier and his laughter a little deeper. “My mother used to say the same thing. I think she was joking, but then we all noticed that some nights, she hung the curtains very early. I always remember her wielding her spoon like a sword.” He demonstrated with an imaginary spoon, making feints at his worktable. “To bed, you heathens! Little humans are not bears; if you stay up all summer, you won’t be able to make it up in the wintertime.”

  He leaned back against the wall again, smiling ruefully. “You can’t imagine the bitter wailing we set up. People were still talking and laughing outside the window.”

  I laughed too. “How many of you were there?”

  “Five. Three older sisters. And—” His voice stuttered suddenly, and when he recovered, the happiness had gone out of it. “One brother. A younger brother.”

  His eyes looked hollow. He put the slice of nectarine in his mouth slowly. A cold wind seemed to have reached in the window, in spite of the summer sun.

  I set my coffee cup down. “You know, I only meant I want you to treat me the same as you’ve always treated me. I want to wear trousers in the hall and keep learning to use a sword.”

  He looked up at me as if I’d pulled him out of a dream. His brows lowered in puzzlement. “Why wouldn’t you?”

  I’d never seen him look as baffled.

  I started to laugh. “Forgive me, Arsenault. Truly, it’s good to have you back.”

  The baffled look gave way to a smile. Not the familiar, slight hook of his mouth but a true smile. It transformed his face, crinkling the corners of his eyes, easing the violence of his scar. I watched him in fascination, but looking at his mouth only made me want to kiss him.

  So, I put my breakfast down and crawled over to him and I did.

  He wrapped his arm around me and reached up to fumble the shutters closed with the other. And then he laid me down amid the remains of breakfast, and we allowed the day to grow later together.

  Afternoon saw me dressed in my trousers with the leather sheath of my knife cold against the skin of my hip, riding past the edge of my father’s property to see a woman about some conjure-magic.
r />   Her name was Isia, and Verrin’s woman, Etti, told me about her. Etti always walked into the barracks wearing a toddler on her back and a baby in a sling on her front, leaving her hands free to hold on to the older two, a boy and a girl. When they caught sight of Verrin, they would bolt away from their mother and leap into his arms.

  One day, I was standing in the hall when she came in, and while Verrin allowed his older two children to climb him like a tree, I helped Etti get her toddler down.

  “Ohh,” she said, as she put her hands to the small of her back and stretched. “He’s getting so big. I’ll have to let him walk soon, but I don’t have enough hands!”

  I bounced her little boy on my hip and made a funny face at him. He giggled and threw his head backward, his black curls bobbing like springs, and then snapped it back up so I would make the face again.

  “One of the older two could hold on to him,” I said, wrinkling my face up at her son again. “You could make a chain.”

  “I suppose we’ll have to.” Etta sat down on a bench and began unlacing her guarnello so the baby could nurse. “My moonblood’s back, so I imagine Verrin and I will have to have a discussion soon. The midwife thought I ought to have a little extra time after Zellie. Her birth was so hard. It took me a while to get around again.”

  I let her little boy down to run to his papa. “What will you use?” I asked.

  “Use?” she said, cocking an eyebrow at me. “I’ll tell Verrin he has to stay away from me for a while, is what I’ll do. And then I’ll do my best to watch my cycles after that until I feel stronger.”

  “Isn’t that risky, though?”

  “Well,” she said, and I noted the way she darted a glance at my empty sleeve, “everything has its risks, doesn’t it? I’d rather risk having a child than the effects of those herbs or conjure-magic spells. I mean, a child isn’t really a risk, is he? A risk is just a fear and a child’s…a child.”

  “And you’re not afraid…”

  She sighed. “Well, of course, Kyrra. I’m tired and it was a hard labor last time. Sometimes, it goes badly. But you can’t live your life assuming it will go badly, can you?”

  “I suppose not.”

  She laughed. “You sound skeptical.”

  I didn’t want to tell her how frightening my miscarriage had been, how I had lain in bed and prayed for the potion not to work and to work at the same time. How was it possible to want such opposite outcomes simultaneously? Perhaps I had once lived my life as boldly as she did, but no longer.

  Etti rearranged her guarnello over the curve of breast the baby had exposed when she moved.

  “Some of the girls in the shop see Isia,” she said. “She lives just beyond your father’s boundaries on the high road. Her magic seems better than most, but it’s still twisty. Better off if you’ve a reliable man who’ll give you an oath.”

  She gave me a hard glance, and I knew she was talking about Arsenault.

  It had been easy to ignore her when I wasn’t sharing his bed. But when Arsenault left me to dress, the worry I’d been shoving away suddenly overtook me. I had been lax in counting days when I lay with Cassis, only sixteen years old and expecting to be married to him. Since I had become kinless and knew worse food and more work, my courses had grown more irregular and it was harder to predict which part of my cycle I was in. But usually, my courses came within a week of the full moon.

  How many more days would I have to wait to know if I was pregnant with Arsenault’s child? And what would I do if I was?

  I didn’t want to think about it. I didn’t want to avoid his bed after this, and if I was being honest, I knew that if I was pregnant this time, it would be different.

  But war was pressing down on us. Just thinking of Etti and all her little ones brought a pain to my heart, and I resolved to tell her—or Verrin—that she ought to think about packing up and moving on if she could.

  I didn’t know how Arsenault would feel about what I was doing. So, I didn’t tell him.

  The shadows had begun to lengthen along the road by the time I reached the stand of trees at the edge of our lands. I slid off the bay mare I’d ridden to Liera, and looped the reins around the forked trunk of a hawthorn. A door banged and a woman came out, shading her eyes with her hand and looking in my direction. I waved to her and started up the path, and she put her hands to her hips.

  I had expected an ancient, warty strega of the kind who turned up in stories to cast love spells for maidens locked in towers. But this woman was my mother’s age, her thick black hair streaked with long, wiry gray strands and pulled back in a knot at the nape of her neck. She wore a clean, cream-colored apron stitched with red birds and green tree branches, and a simple brown dress beneath it. Only her hands showed that she might be older than she looked. Her fingers were bent, knuckles protruding like the mountain ridges that loomed behind us in the summer haze.

  “Bona giurn,” I called out. “Are you Isia?”

  She eyed me cannily, out of eyes the color of clover honey, and I began to feel as if I were naked and she could see through me.

  “Bona giurn,” she replied. “Who are you?”

  It had been a long time since I’d been around anyone who didn’t know me. I never had to say my name since becoming kinless except for Kyrra, and whoever had asked me could generally fill in the rest.

  “Kyrra,” I said. “Kyrra No-Name.”

  “Everyone has a name, Kyrra No-Name, and so do you.”

  “But I’m not allowed to use mine.”

  She squinted at me. “Ah. Well. You’ll have to find another. I know who you used to be, but some of us live more than once. Why have you come to see me?”

  I flushed, suddenly embarrassed to say the nature of my errand. “I come to see you for the same reason many women see you.”

  “Do you, now? I’d have thought you’d have learned your lesson.”

  The flush in my cheeks became a flame. “I have learned my lesson. I’ve learned not to leave myself in the hands of herb women. Anyway, I’m already fallen and I can do what I like. Nobody’s going to fight over the bastard of a gavaro.”

  “Depends on the gavaro, I imagine,” she said, her mouth twisting. “Are you with child?”

  “I hoped you could tell me.”

  She cocked her head. Then she bent and put one gnarled hand on my belly, just above my navel. Warmth stretched through me, like the tendrils of a plant growing toward the sun. I squirmed and she lifted her hand away.

  “No. You’re not pregnant. You’re due for your moonblood in the next few days. An auspicious time for stupidity.”

  “Stupidity?”

  “You can’t go around making yourself miscarry every time, you know. Regardless of what it does to the child, think of what it does to your heart. And one day, a babe will latch on like rose thorns and refuse to give you up. You’re still fertile.”

  I balanced myself as if I was ready to deliver a dagger thrust and gazed straight at her. “That’s why I came to you,” I said. “So that I would no longer have to worry about my fertility.”

  Lines appeared on her face, making her look as if she’d aged before me. She twisted the edge of her apron in her hands.

  “That’s why they all come to me, isn’t it?” She turned back toward her hut and shuffled toward the door. Without turning around, she said, “Well, come, if you’re that eager for it. I’ll not ask twice.”

  The hut had no windows. The only light flooded in through the door when she opened it. The grass smell of the thatch roof mingled with the scents of drying herbs and dirt floor to make the room smell like a meadow. A stone fireplace was built onto the far wall of the hut, and in it lay cold black ashes. She took a poker down off the wall and nudged the pile. Hot red embers turned over with the rake of the hook. She pushed them away, then bent and picked up a piece of charcoal. Dust crumbled from it, sprinkling the hearth like pepper.

  “This is not something to enter into lightly,” she said, gripping the charcoal.
She leaned on the poker, and its point sank into the dirt. “This is not like drinking a goblet full of a potion.”

  “It’s not easy to drink a potion, and I won’t do it again. If that was all you were offering, I wouldn’t be here.”

  “But do you know what you ask?”

  “Etti said you could make me barren. For a while. So no seed could take root in the first place.”

  “Magic isn’t precise. It reworks us in its own fashion. Sometimes, we can’t predict the outcomes, so I don’t know if your barrenness would be ‘for a while’ or instead ‘forever.’” She leaned closer to me. “If I write these marks on your body and invite the magic to move through you…there is a possibility that you will never have a child. Ever. And there may come a day when you’re older, that you will long for the touch of a small hand in yours and a fuzzy head tucked under your chin.”

  “Maybe one day I will,” I said. “When that day comes, maybe magic will move me the other way. But for now…I’m picking up a warrior’s life, and a warrior’s life is no place for a child. There will be battles, and—” My throat burned as I realized that in spite of myself, I would go wherever Arsenault wanted me to, if he asked it of me. I swallowed. “Well, you see how I’ve performed my duties to my House. A gavaro’s life will suit me.”

  “You think becoming a gavaro will leave you no consequences? That you’ll develop no ties? No loyalties? It’s to be you and you alone, is it?”

  “A child needs more than I can give. I haven’t the knowledge or the ability to take care of a child, and you said yourself it’s only a possibility that I’ll be barren forever.”

  She waved her hand in the air. “Possibilities, possibilities. They flutter here and there, like birds. You must know what you risk before you risk it, Kyrra. I tell everyone the same. Maybe you weren’t fit to be a lady, but how can you ever be a man? Just because you wear trousers and carry that knife?”

  The blood drained from my face. How was she able to tell that I carried a knife? I had made sure my trousers were baggy enough to hide it.