Fortune's Fool (Eterean Empire Book 1)

by Angela Boord

  “If you want to refuse me, just say so.”

  One of her eyebrows hitched. “Did I say I would refuse you? The decision comes from here.” She reached forward and touched my chest with one of her knobby fingers, just above my breast where my heart pounded. “What puts you most at risk is what you truly wish for, inside yourself.” She leaned back, putting both hands on the handle of the poker. “I facilitate the flow of the magic—I conjure the channels that exist within you. But you are the gatekeeper. You’ve got a lot of magic already swirling inside you, but this is the magic of the body, of wishes. Some of these wishes are our hearts singing to us; some of them are just the songs of others echoing in our emptiness. Be sure which yours are before you lie down on my floor.”

  Her speech was too well done to be a serf.

  But what did I really wish for?

  I could keep myself to myself and stay out of Arsenault’s bed. He would teach me daggers and the war would come, and…what would happen then? To any of us?

  I could not think beyond that point. The future was a hazy place, like the blue strip that wavered just out of sight on the horizon. I could never reach the horizon, so why did I think I would reach the future?

  I stepped forward. The hut was small, but now I was standing in the circle of Isia’s presence, across that line that separates one person from another. “I will lie on your floor,” I said, quietly, “and you will mark me. Only tell me what price I have to pay.”

  She held my gaze for a moment, her honey eyes like hardened amber. “I will take a price,” she said. “But I won’t name it yet. If you promise to pay my price, then I’ll mark you.”

  “How am I to know if your price is fair? In all the fairy stories, the price is the child. Is that the way magic works?”

  “Who knows the way magic works. If you should ever bear a child, I won’t take it from you. Will you promise me or not?”

  I saw myself sitting in a hut much like this one, my belly swelling like a ripe pear, and the armies of the Prinze marching up the Eterean road from Liera.

  “I’ll pay your price,” I said, and knelt on the floor at her feet. “Go ahead; mark me.”

  The cold charcoal was a flame on my naked belly. It left a black burn in its wake as Isia drew her strange, looping designs. Contractions rippled over my stomach, but I only gave birth to pain.

  My right arm was on fire when I left. Isia asked me to stay the night, to recover, but I knew Arsenault would be out looking for me when he should be roping Lobardin back into line or knocking some respect back into everyone.

  I thought maybe I was beginning to realize why Jon was the man in charge. Arsenault wouldn’t have made a good prince.

  I scrabbled up onto the mare in the purple twilight, and Isia watched me go. She stood, a dark silhouette with her back to the sun before the wind-waving trees—no doubt thinking how much a fool I was to be abroad so late, when I wouldn’t reach the barracks until after dark.

  But these were my father’s lands, and I had lately begun to feel more at home with the darkness. It made me jumpy in a way that tingled my skin. The wind tangled my hair and made it hard to see, but I ran the mare anyway, less in any desire to be back quickly than for the sheer joy of running.

  I thought I would fall off at any moment. And that was part of the pleasure of it. It was almost the same as bedding the son of a merchant House on the floor of the conservatory. I wondered how much of my desire had been sparked by any sort of desire for Cassis.

  It was full dark when I finally clattered into the stable yard. After I finished taking care of the horse, I walked back to the barracks in the moonlight and slid quiet into our empty room.

  The charcoal lines were still imprinted on my skin when I clumsily unlaced my sweat-soaked shirt and worked it off over my head. They had bled black through the white fabric and I spread the shirt out on my bed and stared at their blurry outlines, in the moonlight that spilled through the open window.

  The door creaked open and Arsenault came in.

  For a moment, he just looked at me. Then he said, softly. “You went to a conjure-woman.”

  “It’s for the best, Arsenault.”

  Hesitantly, he stepped toward me. He raised his hands as if to touch me but stopped just short of it. He bent his head and let his gaze skim the lines written on my belly. My skin tingled. I felt the urge to cover myself, but I didn’t.

  “Conjure-magic is wild,” he said.

  “It’s what my mother should have used.”

  His brows pulled together. “She didn’t? It’s woman’s magic.”

  “The herb woman made me a potion. It was different.”

  He was quiet a moment. Then he said, “It’s not my province to ask after such things.”

  “It would be your child.”

  He wetted his lips. “Did you not want—”

  “That wasn’t why I did it, Arsenault. But now is not the time for me to bear children.”

  “I shouldn’t have taken you to bed.”

  “Do you think this whole affair depends on you? Lobardin says you’ve sworn yourself to the Prinze and have only been seducing me; is that the way of it?”

  Anger rolled over Arsenault’s face. “Do you honestly think—”

  “Of course not.”

  He closed his mouth hard on whatever he’d been going to say. The anger eased, but tension still strung his shoulders.

  “Your name should have something to do with nettle, Kyrra.”

  Then his shoulders slumped.

  “Jon put Lobardin up here so I could keep my eye on him, and Pallo sends me back into Liera for two months. Lobardin ought to hate Geoffre, but…” He turned slightly away, as if embarrassed to say what came next. “Geoffre has a way of using people.”

  I sat down on the bed and wrapped the shirt around my shoulders. “And how did he use Lobardin?”

  “I don’t know all the details. But I worry…” He brought his gaze around to hold mine. “Geoffre is coming for Fortune’s Night and your father’s wedding feast. I can’t be here when they are.”

  I stared at him, unable to comprehend the words he’d just spoken.

  “Geoffre is coming here?”

  He nodded. He didn’t come to sit on the bed next to me. I sat there alone, staring at my charcoal-blackened fingers resting in my lap, the mass of black thorns that adorned my belly.

  “Did my father invite him?”

  “He couldn’t refuse him.”

  “Who is Geoffre bringing with him?”

  “His wife. Devid, Devid’s wife. Their oldest daughter.” He paused. “Camile. Cassis.”

  I rubbed my black fingers together. Then I laughed. A worn-out laugh, without much breath behind it. “I should have known.”

  “I’ll be gone, Kyrra. You could be too.”

  “Where will you go?”

  “You could be farther away.”

  “You’re lying. You’ll be there, in disguise.” I glanced up at him. “Will you kill him?”

  He sighed and sat down beside me. The bed shifted with his weight and his thigh brushed mine. “Geoffre or Lobardin, do you mean?”

  I pulled my shirt tighter around me, staring at my boots. “Either, I suppose. I expected you to kill Lobardin a long time ago. What does Lobardin have that is so valuable? Didn’t he tell Jon all he knew?”

  “Lobardin has a certain…value to Geoffre. Call him a hook. Or maybe bait. Our greatest danger is that he will wriggle himself off.”

  I looked up at Arsenault in confusion. “Geoffre took Lobardin as a lover?” I asked. I’m sure the bewilderment showed on my face. Not that Geoffre wouldn’t take a kacin-addled gavaro for a lover, but that anything might hinge upon it.

  “Not precisely. Geoffre’s main interest these days lies in the magical.”

  Arsenault rose and paced to his worktable, where he bent to pull out the bottle of brandy from his chest. He uncorked it and drank, then held it out to me. I rose and took it from him.

&nbs
p; The shirt slipped down my shoulders and I couldn’t catch it while holding the brandy. I had almost forgotten I was naked. But I remembered when Arsenault’s brows lifted and his gaze tracked warm down my body.

  I lifted the bottle to my lips and drank anyway. The brandy burned sweet and hot as it slid down my throat and into my belly. Trust Arsenault to favor a liquor that felt like molten gold.

  I put the bottle on the table. Arsenault handed me the shirt and I adjusted it over my shoulders again. “So, Lobardin might betray you to gain his own escape. That’s what you’re risking, aren’t you. You need to be here to see that Lobardin does what you and Jon want, and not what Lobardin wants.”

  Arsenault’s silence stretched out a long moment. He turned away from me and stared at the shutters that barred the window.

  I’d remembered.

  “You could leave tomorrow, Kyrra,” he said. “You could use the wooden arm.”

  “You said yourself that arm is dead. Will you let Jon treat me like Lobardin?”

  He took my chin in his hand, tipping it upward so I had no choice but to meet his gaze.

  “I will never betray you to Geoffre di Prinze,” he said. “Or anyone. I have made that mistake before.”

  I was a startled bird he held in his hands. I wanted to ask what mistake he’d made, when he had made it—if he had made it with a woman. Jealousy flared inside me, irrationally, turning the charcoal lines on my belly to glowing embers.

  He put his mouth down on mine, and his kiss swallowed all my thoughts and fears. His hand swept over the flesh of my stomach, and the black lines rubbed off on his hand. Every touch of his fingers became a pinprick of desire.

  But still I wanted to know—what mistake?

  Whom had he betrayed?

  Chapter 24

  Mikelo and I walk the road to Karansis for four days, joining now and again with small groups of pilgrims. Every face seems to be Arsenault’s before I look at it closely, every crunching footstep his boots on the path until I turn around. But the world goes on as it always has. Spring unfurls around us as we walk. By the time we arrive in Karansis, groves of wild plums wave pink flowers at the ends of their slim branches, and bowers of white cherry blossoms lose petals in the wind like snowflakes.

  It would be easier to enjoy the beauty if there weren’t so many people. Karansis is like a spider with roads coming out of it like legs. Down them ride jangling groups of men on horseback—householders from Liera, Amora, Consel, even as far away as Onzarro—to seek vitality in this, the season of youth. Mikelo flips his hood up, and I wish I had some of Jon’s magic, whatever it is that lets him slide by unnoticed.

  The town of Karansis sprawls at the headwaters of the river Ransi. Ransi’s story begins as a youth, when he caught the eye of Tekus, father of the gods. A beautiful youth with hair the color of a raven’s wing and eyes the silver-green of olive leaves, Ransi’s destiny was unfortunately to be the object of everyone’s infatuation. When Tekus saw him, he turned himself into a spring and swept Ransi away, down to his undersea realm, where he hid the boy from his wife. Of course, this situation could not go on forever. Tekus’ wife Ahra was experienced in her husband’s bad behavior and soon discovered Ransi. She had him cast out naked on the beach, where he was stolen by pirates and sold to a jealous merchant who became convinced that Ransi had betrayed him with his wife. The merchant killed him on what would later become known as Murderer’s Ridge, within sight of Ransi’s home. The hill is covered in big, black basalt murder markers, for Ransi and all the youths who lost their lives at the hands of jealous lovers.

  Now the murder markers stand for battles fought and lost. The area surrounding Karansis saw heavy fighting, since it borders both Aliente and Caprine holdings. Arsenault might even have fought here, though I don’t know for certain that he did. But it’s possible that the town is full of men who might recognize him, who fought not against him but on the same side in the wars.

  Ransi’s own story had a somewhat better ending than that of my family. Bereft at Ransi’s death, Tekus bestowed on him eternal youth, in the form of the thin ribbon of silver water which tumbles from the base of the hills. From here, the Ransi flows down crags and through gorges to hurl itself spectacularly into the sea from the cliffs at Iffria. Men come to bathe in its water, here at the source and in the fall at Iffria, asking the god to grant them Ransi’s vitality, and then they go home to make children with their wives. The women who come to Karansis are mostly looking for work, but there are a lot of men, and a lot of jangling metal and horses.

  The night before we come into Karansis, I trade my silk dress to a serf girl for her plain gray clothes, and we enter the village in a big group of Conseli householders wearing cloaks with patches of sienna, gold, and emerald. We keep our heads down and the men don’t notice a young man and a serf girl on foot. They can’t see my sword. It’s under my cloak.

  “Could we at least have a bed tonight?” Mikelo asks once we’re in the city.

  I finger the coins sewn into my skirt. “Supper, I think. And new supplies. But I’m afraid the bed will have to wait.”

  “Does it do us any good to sleep on the road? We’re not getting there any faster.”

  “I’ll see if I can find some horses.”

  The marketplace is full of horses. They crowd the narrow paths between the stalls and tents of lesser merchants, jostling each other, turning the courtyard into a slick mess of trampled dirt and manure. Not a gelding among them, and certainly not any mares. This is about male vitality, not sensibility. Stallions are foul-tempered and bite and kick at the slightest provocation. Two men begin shouting at each other over the behavior of their horses. I expect to see steel drawn, but one of the men makes a rude gesture at the other and rides off through a hole left in the general mass.

  The whole place stinks of horseshit.

  “We’ll hide better if we stay away from the inns. The road from here out belongs mostly to shepherds. People say the dead walk the other sites.”

  Mikelo makes a face. “I don’t fancy waking any ghosts,” he says as he scans the rowdy glut of vibrantly painted stalls in the bazaar, lit by the flare of torches in the deepening twilight. A queasy conglomeration of smells blows past on the wind—horse and manure, sizzling lamb, roasted onions and garlic, the faint whiff of bread.

  He looks back to me. “Where will we ‘find’ these horses?”

  “There might be a bargain at an inn’s stable.”

  I shift my pack and slide my arm around his to keep him close in this milling crowd, pressing down on his forearm with the fingers of my right hand. He places his hand absently atop mine.

  “Where did they all come from?” he asks.

  “Three main roads lead to Karansis; ours is only one of them. Some follow the river itself. There’s a path along the ridgeline big enough for a line of horses if they ride single-file.”

  “I suppose you know the inns, then, if you’ve been this way before?” He watches the ground with concentration to avoid the horse droppings. At the edges of the throng, shovelers wearing Imisi green and yellow toss the day’s load into wheelbarrows to carry off as fertilizer for their olives.

  “They’re all near the spring.”

  “You’re an only child,” he says thoughtfully, clearly trying to understand why my family would visit Karansis.

  “Yes. My mother had pregnancies, though. She wasn’t truly barren.”

  “So, the spring helped your father?”

  “As much as it helps anyone, I suppose. My mother had four miscarriages.” I pause. “And one stillbirth. A boy.”

  “Are you first or last?”

  “First.”

  My mother said I must have spoiled her womb. The midwife pulled me out in a torrent of blood. It stained the tiles of her bedchamber so badly, my father had to have them cut out and replaced. She was confined to her bed for weeks with fever.

  “I’m my mother’s only child too,” Mikelo says.

  The inns crowd to
gether where the dirt of the marketplace gives way to brick roads and red-tiled roofs. I choose the one on the end, farthest away from the inn where I stayed as a child. The Beautiful Youth looks as if it might cater to a somewhat lesser clientele.

  I let Mikelo walk up the rickety wood steps first. He opens the door and I step past him into the room.

  Two big windows on the far wall give a good view of the midden. The spring is invisible in the dim light except for the bobbing of candle flames like fireflies that mark its course. Votas of Tekus and Ransi line the common room, for sale if you’ve got the coin. The little statues seem to be keeping watch over the patrons.

  Three of five big trestle tables are occupied, and the men who eat there joke noisily with each other and the “beautiful youths” who serve them—both male and female.

  Mikelo leans down and murmurs, “Shall we choose another inn?”

  I smile because the innkeeper has seen us—a middle-aged woman in a modestly cut scarlet wool dress, wiping her flour-speckled hands on a towel. “No,” I say. “This one will do.”

  He stiffens, but smiles tightly when the innkeep approaches us.

  “Loosen up,” I whisper.

  “Have a seat,” she says, giving me a skeptical smile as she eyes my clothes. “We don’t see many women in here, but I’m sure if the lady and gentleman prefer—”

  “We won’t be needing a room,” I say. “Just supper.”

  She raises her eyebrow. “Well, then, you’re free to sit wherever you like. But I’d ask you not to dawdle if we fill up. If you’re only having supper, we may need the room.”

  “Fair enough. But…” I hesitate for a moment as if unsure of myself, rattling the coins in my pocket. “We should both like to look.”

  “Ah.” She smiles, more genuinely. “Then you can see that, in spite of our humble surroundings, I only employ the finest-looking youths in Karansis. Some families trace their origins all the way back to Ransi.”

  “Of course.” I tug at Mikelo’s arm. “Come, brother. Let us enjoy our dinner.”

  I lead him over to a table. He sits down and leans forward, whispering at me, “What do you think you’re doing? Couldn’t we eat in a respectable establishment?”