Fortune's Fool (Eterean Empire Book 1)

by Angela Boord

  He looks at me for the first time. “I learned that later, of course.”

  “So, Baleria is in Dakkar.” It seems somehow an inadequate thing to say, and yet I feel I must say something. Mikelo nods.

  “In the northern reaches. That’s where we settled, my mother and I, until I was thirteen. On the day I turned thirteen, I received a missive from my uncle. We lived further back in the interior then, alone on a small homestead. My mother often told me I had a wealthy uncle who might one day call me back to Liera, and she prepared me as best she could. I learned how to wield a sword, how to read, how to write. Nothing more extraordinary than that. She taught me a few symbols that seemed peculiar—to protect myself, she said. But that was it. And this missive came.”

  “Into the interior? How old was it? How did it reach you?”

  “By bird. In a very strange manner.” He laughs a little, low and anxious.

  I smooth my skirts, remembering the raven Arsenault sent off into the beams of the ceiling with a wave of his hand. “I’ve seen that sort of flight,” I say.

  “I’m not surprised,” he says. “You seem to have seen almost everything.”

  “It’s not a life I’d have chosen.”

  He doesn’t answer for a moment. Then he dusts a piece of rushes from his leg. “My uncle called me back to Liera. He told me to go down to Mdembu, the royal city, into the garrison there. He told me I’d find my family, and it was time for me to come home and serve my House. To tell you truly, I often wondered if my mother was making him up. She chewed kacin and her habit grew worse as time went on. But we had settled into life there. I knew a girl in the village the same age as me. I had it in my head that some day I would negotiate her bride price and come to live in the village. She used to tease me about how easily I sunburned. Her skin was the darkest umber.”

  He smiles and closes his eyes. Then he sighs and opens them again, looking at me. “But all that’s behind me now. I went to the garrison, alone, to find that my family had destroyed the city and that my uncle was so wealthy, he could buy even the lives of his kin. I’m nothing but a tool to him. I’d forsake my duty to my House if my House was only made up of him, but it isn’t.”

  I can almost see myself reflected in his pupils, my tousled hair, the ruined gray dress. And Silva and Meli, awake now and watching us.

  I wonder how much they heard and what they'll do with the information. Will it put Mikelo in jeopardy?

  I push myself to my feet. “It’s a fanciful tale, Mikelo. But Arsenault always did say that the best lies contain a grain of truth.”

  Mikelo remains staring at me for a moment, his expression open, wounded. Then he sees Silva and Meli, too. Understanding gradually lights his eyes, and he begins to laugh.

  Mikelo and I speak of nothing else important for the rest of the day. Instead, our attention is occupied by the two courtesans whose room we share, Arsenault lying still unconscious on the bed, and the sounds of people settling above.

  The house changes with the rays of the sun into a nest of people, like a rookery full of roosting crows. We look up at the first creaking footsteps. Dust trickles down through the cracks in the floor and rains down on Arsenault. I curse and wipe it from his face.

  “I think it’s healing,” Mikelo says, squinting at Arsenault’s wound as if he’s dizzy. I move behind him in order to catch him if he falls, but he doesn’t. When Arsenault breathes, the flesh stretches and I imagine I can see inside him, the muscle and bone, blood vessels like blue writhing worms, the warm wet red of him. And from there I imagine I can see through him, but all I run into there is a shifting wall of gray fog, the same as it’s always been.

  Arsenault shivers and his eyes crack open. I lurch forward, hoping he’ll awaken and hoping at the same time that he won’t; the won’t wins, and I’m disappointed. He sinks into something that might be sleep, except a chill seems to have entered the room, and I wonder if he’s fighting his own battle with Erelf, if, on some green plain that shelves off into a silver sea, he wields a sword against the god…or if perhaps his weapon is only knowledge, which the god may turn against him.

  I realize my right hand is still on his chest and I stand back up quickly, pressing it to my own chest with my left hand.

  Mikelo says, “I don’t know what to do about the dent.”

  Mikelo says, “Go upstairs, Kyrra. Meli’s going; maybe she can get you some clothes.”

  I don’t want to go upstairs with Meli and leave Silva down here with Mikelo and Arsenault, but I don’t want to leave Meli on her own, either. I don’t like Mikelo giving me things to do, but I’ve begun pacing, my fingers twitching at the hilt of my sword. I pull it and examine it in the overcast light from the window.

  Silva says, “What are you going to do with that?”

  There are no dents in the sword. I think it’s made out of the same metal as my arm. If there are no dents in the sword, why is there a dent in my arm?

  Perhaps the dent is in me.

  “Nothing,” I say. I should give the sword back to Arsenault. It isn’t mine; it never was. The runes inscribed on its blade are different from the sword stances. I can’t read any of them.

  Except the one near the tang. Sanctuary.

  I run one of my flesh fingers over its lines, feeling its ridges the way I have so often over the past five years. Then I hand the sword to Mikelo. He looks up at me in surprise.

  “I’ve my knife,” I say, unbuckling the swordbelt and letting it fall to the floor. I’m still wearing the hatpins in my hair, too, though I’ve almost forgotten. “Don’t use it unless you need to.”

  Mikelo nods jerkily.

  Be safe, I wish Arsenault. Then I turn to Silva. “I won’t hurt your sister, and you won’t hurt Arsenault. Understood?”

  Upstairs is full of people, most of them asleep—rolled in blankets, tucked in next to each other. All of them look young.

  A woman with terra-cotta skin and pale eyes sits on the steps, stripping long slivers of wood from a stick the length of her arm. Her knife blade flashes as it moves in and out of the light. She doesn’t look up even when we let the cellar door close. Her black hair is braided in rows in the Tiresian manner, strung with glittering glass beads of blue and red. They clink together when she turns her head, making a kind of music.

  “Charri,” Meli says. “We’ve a visitor. I wondered if you could spare an extra skirt or shirt.”

  The woman named Charri cocks her head and looks me over for a moment. Her gaze lingers on the bloodstains that mar my bodice.

  Finally, she turns back to her carving. Her slim, hard hands guide the knife in a steady rhythm with no shaking. The curls of yellow wood spill off the end of the stick and fall to the floor in a pile. “I found some clothes down near the market the other day,” she says, without looking up this time. “They might fit you. Looked like some woman got picked up, threw out her old servant clothes. You think you could wear old serf clothes?”

  “I’ll take them,” I say. “Do you have any men’s clothing? Enough for two men?’

  “Two men?” The woman eyes Meli. “Why would you need clothes for two men, too?”

  Meli tenses. Her smile, when it comes, doesn’t have much ease to it. “Because we have two men in our basement. This is Kyrr—”

  “Kyrri,” I interrupt, trying to smile myself. “My name is Kyrri. My husband’s a gavaro. He was hired to ride with a band of Conseli and there was a robbery and he was wounded, trying to run off the bandits. But the Conseli blamed him and cast him out, along with another gavaro who stood up for him. Meli took pity on us and gave us the cellar until my husband recovers. We’ve enough skills between us so you won’t want for food; I noticed some rabbit runs in your garden when I went to the cistern this morning.”

  Charri strokes the hilt of her knife with her thumb. Smooth wood, like the wood she carves. A leg, I think it’s going to be. Or an arm.

  “So, we’ve got two gavaros in our basement and a gavaro’s woman up here, do we? D
o we want that kind of trouble, Meli?” She turns to me. “If those Conseli had enough money to hire your husband, they might want what he took enough to send out the Guard.”

  “He didn’t—”

  She waves her knife. Is it her house, I wonder? A woman could make a tidy sum if she was good enough at carving votas. Does she make small figures of Ransi that bleed real blood from the heart? She looks as if she could. It’s in her eyes.

  “All bandits say they’re innocent,” she says.

  “I tell you, we won’t be here long.”

  She sets the knife down on the step beside her and holds the piece of wood up to examine it more closely.

  “You’ll bring us food?” she says.

  I begin to nod, but I'm interrupted by a banging at the door. The sleepers awaken, and those who need to burrow down in holes find them quickly. The cellar doors lift up and slam, once—twice—three times, and I swear under my breath.

  Charri and Meli trade glances and then Meli goes to open the door.

  A brown-haired man wearing blue and silver, the trident crest of the Prinze embroidered on his breast, waits there. A dark slate-blue sky frames him as he stands on the brick steps.

  I fight not to put my hand to my absent sword. Instead, I move slightly away from the door and begin unbuttoning my bodice as quickly as I can. Butchering chickens or rabbits wouldn’t lay this much blood on me, and bigger animals—if we had them—are men’s work. The fingers of my right hand are stiff, though, and it’s hard to push the little white buttons through the holes.

  My chemise lies beneath, and I can only hope that it won’t seem strange in a house such as this to see a woman with her bodice hanging open and the scalloped neck of her underdress showing.

  “Ser,” Meli says. “What can we do for you?”

  Her voice sounds all right, but her face is ashen and her lips are tight.

  The gavaro bows. “We’re looking for two men who might have passed through here.” He unrolls a sheet of parchment. Lines of pen and ink reveal a face nearly like mine, but more male. Below the sketch of me there is one of Mikelo, but surely, he’s never looked that young.

  I’m almost done with the row of buttons. Eyes stare at me from the darkening gloom in the corners of the room. The wind gusts, rattling the parchment and swirling through our hair, bringing out gooseflesh on my bare neck.

  Sanval.

  Charri frowns at the gavaro and Meli glances at me—one quick glance, then down at the floor. But the gavaro notices all the same. He looks straight at me.

  The lines of the rune slide through my head, shining the way they do on the sword. Sanctuary. One straight line knotted with two loops. I can trace their formation with my thoughts the same way I do with my finger and watch the glow spread…

  My right arm thrums suddenly. I try not to wince.

  “Have you seen these men?” the gavaro asks.

  “No, sir, I haven’t,” I say.

  “Are you sure?”

  “If I’d seen them, I’d be sure to tell you, wouldn’t I?”

  He looks surprised at my manner. Then the surprise turns into fluster, and a wicked gust of wind slams against the house, tearing the parchment from his hand and hurling it at the beams of the ceiling. The paper bobs and dips like a cork at sea, and the gavaro swears and grabs at it, but the paper eludes him. The wind sends it spiraling up the staircase, into the upper story of the house.

  “Damn everything,” the gavaro mutters, and runs up the stairs to catch it. His ironshod boots shudder the whole staircase.

  The wind whistles through the doorway with a vengeance. The hole in the upstairs creates a natural draw up the staircase like the flue of a fireplace. The wind tugs at the ends of the gavaro’s hair as he comes clomping back down with the parchment in his fist. He ducks beneath the lintel as he comes to the bottom of the stairs and squints at the sky.

  “I think I’d rather spend the afterlife in eternal torment than face that storm,” he says as if he’s talking to himself, then gives us each a forced smile. “Thank you. I’ll be away now, I think.”

  “Hurry out of the rain,” Charri says as he inclines his head again and runs for the horse tied in the street. Leaves, green and brown, skirl around him, and dust hazes the air. He mounts his horse and rides away in a clatter.

  “It was you,” Charri says softly at my back as I stare out the doorway after him, the wind snatching my hair and throwing it in my face. “Wasn’t it. And one of your gavaros.”

  Can I deny it? “The Conseli,” I say, trying a middle ground.

  But the footing there is treacherous. “A magic was worked,” she whispers. “Complicated. Dangerous. I could feel it.”

  I turn to face her. “I didn’t steal anything,” I say. “And neither did either of those gavaros in the basement.”

  “Magic is like the sanval,” she says. “Wild. Be glad it sided with you just then.” The wind lifts her braids, and the beads sound like chimes. “I want you out as soon as the storm lets up.”

  “Fine. But I still need those clothes. I’ll pay you for them.”

  She pushes the door closed, then sits down and picks up the vota and her knife again. She makes one long cut down the length of the wood and holds it up so I can see it. It’s an arm with a fist at one end.

  She throws it at me. I put my right hand up in reflex to catch it. My arm creaks and the dent twinges, a faint frisson of pain. My fingers spasm shut around the wood anyway. But my sleeve pulls back and in the gap between the cuff and the bottom of my glove, a thin strip of silver gleams in the burgeoning storm light.

  She sits there with her knife in one hand, looking at me for a while.

  “No payment,” she says. “You ruined a vota, and it’s yours now. If you pay me, that means I accepted something from you, and then I’ve got a link between you and your magic I don’t want. I’ll get you your clothes for free. But you leave soon, hear?”

  I nod dumbly, looking at the piece of wood in my hand. Something seems to be curled in the fist, but I can’t tell what it is.

  It looks like it might be a heart.

  A thick red stream begins to ooze from it. It drips down the square-cut fingernails, the tendon-outlined wrist, the forearm. It drips on the floor and spatters on my boots.

  Downstairs, the cellar is a panic. The sound of milling voices fills the stairwell as I heave open the cellar door. I haven’t stopped to button up my bodice again, and the damp air of the cellar chills the nervous sweat on my chest.

  Meli follows me, pulling the door shut over her head. “There are many, many more people here than you said,” I whisper at her.

  She lifts her chin. “I didn’t say how many people were here, did I? It changes day to day.” She picks up a tallow candle from an indentation in the wall and sweeps past me, her skirts gripped tight in her other hand. The light from the candle jitters on the stones as I follow.

  I’m still carrying the vota in my right hand. It seemed wrong to leave it on the floor upstairs. Maybe I’ll bury it in the garden. Or throw it in the river, the way other people do. I don’t know how to get rid of the ill will of a piece of wood.

  Three new people are standing in the basement when we get to the bottom of the stairs: three boys, too young to have soldiered in the wars. Mikelo stands with Silva next to Arsenault’s cot, and Arsenault is on his hands and knees beside it.

  The hilt of his sword lies under one of his hands, pressed into the dirt.

  I throw down the bleeding vota and run across the room.

  “Kyrra!” Mikelo says. “What happened? These three came downstairs and—”

  I fall down on my knees in the dirt beside Arsenault and put a hand on his shoulder. “Arsenault.”

  Gods, his skin is pale. His hair hangs down in sweat-soaked strings.

  “Kyrra,” he says, his voice barely a breath.

  “You’re going to hurt yourself. Get back on the cot. Lie down.”

  “I thought there was a guard upstairs,�
� he says, a little louder but still strained. “Something. The knot.”

  He means the rune.

  “A Prinze gavaro came to the door. But he’s gone now. You should have stayed on the cot.” I force the words out, like walking in a direction I don’t want to go. But let the truth be told now, and we can find out where we’ve fallen, if he’s forgotten everything again or if, perhaps, he really did switch sides.

  He shakes his head, then his lips curve in what might be a smile. “A talent for desperation you have. Always.”

  I wonder if the language is escaping him. Past and present seem mixed up. Or… I lean down and look in his face. “Who are you, Arsenault? Do you remember?”

  He laughs—a wheezing laugh, but a real one. “I’m the man who got knifed in an alley by a table-boy,” he says. “And yes, I remember. Gods, you— I remember.”

  Chapter 26

  The storm rages for five days, beating rain and wind against the high-up window in Charri’s cellar and leaking water into all the cracks in the walls.

  I have a lot of time to sit and watch Arsenault as his body grapples to incorporate this new flesh, this new memory of an old body. While he heals, I sit and remember too.

  The month that followed the announcement of my father’s impending nuptials and Arsenault’s return passed in a flurry of activity that encompassed not only the serfs and house servants but the gavaros as well, since they were often sent on errands into the city, to acquire luxuries my father didn’t keep on the estate, or as escort to my mother, who rode out often as well.

  It was a cruel twist of fate that, as manager of the household, she had to plan my father’s wedding feast. That it would be held on Fortune’s Night only made her job harder. Fortune’s Night was Ekyra’s yearly festival. Much care was always taken with the festivities, to ensure good fortune for the next year. There were traditional decorations to make and foods to eat and greetings to trade, and the guests would expect an even more lavish outlay than would normally accompany a wedding—the rarest wines, silk table cloths, roasted boar and stuffed peacock…