Fortune's Fool (Eterean Empire Book 1)

by Angela Boord

  If the Prinze made any attempts at us, I don’t remember them.

  But I remember our arrival at the lodge. Night had fallen already, but we’d pressed on. I woke to moonlight and the song of nightingales in the trees, and Arsenault humming an artless little tune above me. When I looked up at him, his eyes were focused straight ahead and gleamed with an odd, hard light. The moon picked it all out.

  And the moon picked out the lodge, too, when we stopped on the ridge before it. The pale white glow made the whole place seem like something out of an old story, a fortress where Eterean ghosts roamed. I wondered, in a new way, how many had died there, in attack or defense. As Arsenault clucked to the horse and we started down into the valley between the black volcanic buttes, I even imagined I could see the ghosts, thin and silver as old blades.

  Arsenault tightened his arm around me.

  “Don’t heed their call, Kyrra,” he murmured. “It’s only that you’re so new.”

  I looked around, wide-eyed, at the shades that scuttled in the grass, wrapping themselves around the tall stalks bending in the wind. Kyrrakyrrakyrra, the grass seemed to say as it rustled against itself. I watched as a man passed under the horse, knife in his mouth, then disappeared into the night.

  I closed my eyes, feeling sick. “Was I dead?” I asked.

  Arsenault was silent. Then he let his breath out, a puff of air over his lips. “Perhaps. For a moment.”

  “It wasn’t long enough to suffocate,” I said.

  “No. It wasn’t.”

  “Was it my neck, then?”

  Another pause. “Yes.”

  “How—”

  “Later,” he said, looking around us like a wolf scenting men. “I’ll tell you everything later.”

  He lied, of course. He didn’t tell me everything. Only enough.

  We clattered into the courtyard, and I managed to hold myself on the horse while Arsenault dismounted and led it to the stables. Then he pulled me down and set me outside the stall so he could see to the horse. When he was done, he came out and lifted me in his arms.

  “Put me down,” I said. “Let me at least try to walk.”

  He smiled, briefly, a flash of white teeth in the darkness. “There’s some spirit left in you after all, is there? I was beginning to wonder.”

  “Arsenault.”

  “You’re not well enough to walk, and you know it. I’ll put you down on a bed inside. Then you can ask me as many questions as you like.”

  I bit my lip. He was right and I did know it, but it felt odd to be carried. I had spent three years proving to myself and everyone around me that I was not weak. And now he carried me across the threshold like the bride I would never be.

  The lodge was empty, its hearths full of ashes. A year before, my father had pulled back the servants who’d seen to the running of this house. Somewhere in the night, wings flapped and an owl hooted in the emptiness.

  Arsenault cursed the dark as he carried me down the great hall, trying to find a suitable room. His breathing had a strain in it, and I wondered—probably for the first time—what he’d done to save me, how much of himself he’d spent.

  “Did you kill Cassis?” I asked.

  “I thought I told you to wait to ask questions.”

  “Is it a gun in your cloak?”

  “Would that I had a gun. But no.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “Kyrra—you aren’t as light as you look.”

  “You could let me down. I could try to walk.”

  “You’re not ready yet.” He took a deep breath. “Shall I take you to your chambers?”

  “They’re upstairs.”

  He cursed. “I can hardly see where I’m going.”

  “Put me down in the drawing room. It shouldn’t be far—to your right.”

  A draft billowed a tapestry. Its fringe rustled against the stone like the susurrus of the windblown grass outside. Arsenault hissed and jerked away from it, so fast he nearly lost his balance, and I had to grab tight onto his shirt.

  “Arsenault,” I whispered. “It’s only the wind.”

  “I know,” he said raggedly, in the kind of tone that said he did not know but was trying to convince himself. He took a deeper breath and adjusted the arm that supported my knees as he carried me into a doorway that yawned beside us, dark as a cave.

  I shivered.

  “Kyrra?” He stopped.

  “I’m all right. There’s a chair; put me down.”

  It was the gold chair. He set me down gently and I sank into its cushions, closing my eyes and wondering how I could be so tired when Arsenault had done all the work. I tipped my head against the chair’s back and thought of how my father had often sat in this same chair after a hunt, in this same manner. Head tilted back, eyes closed, feet stretched out before him, while the servants stoked the fire and brought him hot apple cider on a tray.

  Something hit the table with a thunk. I startled and opened my eyes. It was Arsenault’s cloak.

  “Damn,” he said. He leaned past me and took a wrapped-up lump from the cloak—a bag, since I heard the flap open. He hunched at my feet, fumbling in it, and then with a scraping noise, light flared.

  A match. I remembered them, from the house in Liera with Jon. Arsenault touched it to the wick of a candle, then shook it out, set the candle in a holder, and looked up at me.

  I hadn’t seen his face clearly before. Now I did. Dark circles, not just shadows cast by candlelight, cupped his eyes. Lines of strain fanned from the corners.

  For the first time, I realized I didn’t know how old he was. And I hadn’t known how much it cost him to save me.

  I started to cry. It embarrassed me, but I couldn’t stop. I reached out and touched his face.

  His eyes lit up in alarm. He put a hand on my arm and tensed as if he might stand.

  “It’s nothing,” I said, letting him go and shaking my head, wiping my eyes and my nose with my sleeve. “Nothing. I’m not myself. I’ll be better soon.”

  He shifted onto one knee and leaned forward to run his hands down my arms—both of them. “You were never as brave as when you stood up there. But it wasn’t your time. Even if it had been, I couldn’t let you go.”

  “I did it for my father,” I said, willing the tears to dry up. “He asked me to. Ilena—”

  “You were trying to protect me.”

  Tears suddenly changed to anger. “Yes,” I said, leaning forward, “and you ruined that, didn’t you? You should have let me die, Arsenault. Now Geoffre knows who you are!”

  For a moment, there was a hurt glint in his eyes, then he chuckled and began to smile. “So, it’s all my fault?”

  For some reason, my mouth wouldn’t smile with him. “It would have been better if you’d left me dead, Arsenault. Then Geoffre wouldn’t know about you, and you could kill him in his sleep.”

  The humor on Arsenault’s face snuffed out. He rubbed his brow. “I know,” he said. “I know that.”

  I waited for him to say more. Anything more. When he didn’t, when he just sat there with his hand shaking on his brow, his head bent toward the floor, I let my breath out. I took his hand and lowered it.

  He looked at me in surprise.

  “I sent you away at the cave because I didn’t want you to hurt Verrin. And I wanted to spare you my death.”

  “Nothing could have spared me that.”

  “I wouldn’t have returned for anyone else.”

  He stared at me for a moment. Then he lurched forward and caught me up in his arms. “We’re both fools,” he said, his voice muffled in my shoulder. “The biggest fools.”

  I couldn’t speak. I clutched him to me, as hard as I could.

  And over his shoulder, in the candlelight, I saw the glint of silver in his open bag. I stretched a little to see what it was.

  A hand gleamed back at me.

  I drew in my breath. Arsenault raised his head and his eyes searched my face. “What is it?”

  “What is it?” I
said angrily. “In your bag.”

  “You saw the arm.”

  “Why did you make me another one? You said the last one was dead. You’re going to try and leave me here, aren’t you?”

  He rocked back on his heels and stood, then ran his hand through his hair. “Kyrra, you’ve got to think for once.”

  His words stung. “All I want is to do what is honorable and right for my family—”

  He rounded on me. “But your family kills for honor, Kyrra. They kill their own. And that isn’t right.”

  “To save my House,” I said in a strangled voice. “He only asked me to do it to save our House.”

  “Did he?” I had never heard as much viciousness in Arsenault’s voice before. “Saving your House by killing your daughter? I saw my daughter sent away with strangers, but at least she was alive. I’d rather let my House burn.”

  “My father did what he had to,” I said, and cursed my bottom lip, which wanted to tremble. “Geoffre left him no more choices. And now you—”

  Arsenault’s jaw worked. He paced away from me. “I’ve been giving him choices. For three years. But has he ever listened to one of them?”

  Quicker than I could see, he loosed something from his hand. It flew across the room to the hearth, a blur of silver, and buried itself in the wood of the mantel.

  His dagger.

  He ran both his hands through his hair and stared at the still-quivering dagger. “I thought when he sent me to spy on Geoffre that I would be an assassin, but the orders never came. I could have killed Cassis—more than once. I could never get close to Geoffre, but maybe…once or twice…though I probably would have died doing it…” He took a deep, ragged breath and faced me. “That’s why I didn’t tell him about Lobardin. Jon and I thought we could do something with him ourselves. If that didn’t work—well, then, we’d think of something else. I’d slink back to Liera and use my own knife, if I had to. Then your father sent Lobardin away and I got word you’d killed Ilena and he had you shut up in the caves and wouldn’t tell me anything. When he wouldn’t tell me anything, I knew he meant to kill you. I knew he meant to show Geoffre just how debased he was.”

  “You make him sound like a coward,” I said. I sat stiff in the chair. As if by doing so, I could provide myself some defense against Arsenault’s words.

  “There’s more to it than that, though. Your mother told me his plans. Plans he didn’t see fit to share with me.”

  He paced to the mantel and levered the dagger out.

  “Your father planned to trick Geoffre into seeing that he no longer favored you at all. To lure Geoffre into believing that the Aliente had switched alliances to stay alive. He knew the Prinze wouldn’t care, that they’d go through with their attacks if they were expedient—which they are, Kyrra, in more ways than you know. Your father’s land is important, not just for its silk. I told your father that, but...”

  He toyed with the dagger in his hands. He was wearing the same black gloves he wore when he had Fixed the silver rod to treat his leg wound long before.

  “Your mother convinced him that Geoffre would try for the land no matter what they did. I wanted to kill the lot of them, with stealth, but the Mestere said that if such an assassination were discovered, the Aliente would be the target of all the Prinze allies and the heirs to the Householdership. Killing Geoffre wouldn’t matter.”

  Grudgingly, I said, “He might have been right, Arsenault. A House isn’t a snake. If you cut off its head, the rest of it’s still dangerous.”

  “At least we’d have stood on better ground. The pieces would need to regroup after we cut off the head. They might have lost their monopoly on guns, and we’d be better prepared. Your father wanted to plan out the whole war right there when he was already losing the battle.”

  “Maybe he was just farsighted.”

  “Tripping over the snare set in front of him?” Arsenault held my gaze for a moment, then snorted and shook his head. “No. None of the other candidates for Householdership is capable of half the damage Geoffre is. Not even his sons. Especially not Cassis,” he added as he caught my look. Then, more softly, he said, “He’s still alive. I didn’t kill him.”

  “Did you have the chance?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “You were more important.”

  I flushed and looked away from him. “What did my father plan to do?”

  “He planned to enter into a merchant agreement with Geoffre. The Prinze would carry and sell Aliente silk, and the Aliente would receive a portion of all profits. He knew it wouldn’t matter to Geoffre, but set up that way, he’d have the legal backing of the entire Circle when Geoffre did attack.”

  I chewed a nail. “So, when he struck the betrothal agreement with Claudia d’Imisi…he was hoping to invoke their distant kin ties with the Prinze?”

  “I imagine.”

  “But my father couldn’t have known that I would kill Ilena.”

  “Of course he couldn’t. Initially, the plan was just what I’d told you before—he would exhibit you to the Prinze as a downtrodden serf. But then you killed Ilena, and it was as if the fates had signed sanction to his plan.”

  I bristled. “And my mother told you all this?”

  “As soon as she heard you’d been taken to the caves, she suspected your father. She came to me and told me about the negotiations he’d been carrying out with the Prinze. Then she arranged with Isia to have a horse on the trail to the lodge. Verrin came of his own accord.”

  “He had no idea what I’d agreed to.”

  “I should have known you’d do it voluntarily.”

  I shoved myself out of the chair and wavered, standing. Arsenault shot to my side, but I pushed him away. “What else was I supposed to do?” I said, out of breath already. “Any other answer and I would only have been a coward. How do you know that his plan wouldn’t have worked?”

  “Because it involved killing you!”

  I steadied myself on the arm of the chair, praying my dizziness would leave me. “It’s all so much clearer.”

  He made a frustrated noise deep in his throat. I made myself look up at him, and he looked as if he wanted to throw something again. The dagger was still in his hand. He shoved it back into its sheath.

  “I told you,” he said, very quietly, “that I would not betray you. I would do anything to rid the world of Geoffre di Prinze. But I will not give you up. Do you understand?”

  When I looked into his eyes, I did.

  “Why do you want to kill Geoffre?” I asked. My voice was barely a whisper. “Why do you fight our fight?”

  He stared at me for a moment. The anger and determination blanked out of his eyes to be replaced by a momentary surprise, as if he had expected me to say something but not that. He reached out and took my arms, gently. “I fight Erelf. Always.”

  It startled me to hear him say the god’s name. I must have swayed, because Arsenault’s grip on me tightened again. He pushed me back down into the chair, and I wasn’t strong enough to resist.

  “You said I could ask as many questions as I liked,” I said, cursing myself for sounding like a child after all of this.

  He let out his breath. “I did. But I must sit down if you won’t.”

  He lowered himself to the floor in front of a couch next to me, then crossed his legs and leaned back against it, closing his eyes. “You want to know about Erelf,” he said, without me even asking.

  “I do,” I replied. “I want to know why you fight him. I want to know—”

  I want to know who that man was on the beach in my dream is what I wanted to ask. But the words sat awkwardly on my tongue and Arsenault was rubbing his scar.

  “Gods strive for territory, the same way humans do. They wage wars with each other because it gives them something to do. They think of humans as their playthings—like they’re arranging us on a board in order to win games with each other. Even in the best god, there is darkness. But in some gods, the darkness has grown.”

 
“Erelf killed his brother,” I said. “Is that the reason for Erelf’s darkness?”

  “Not the reason. The result.”

  “Then why—”

  “Maybe knowing such darkness is in him has driven him a little mad. Having given himself over to it.” Arsenault rubbed his thumb along his temple. “In my homeland…before you are allowed to use your magic, you must first go to see your reflection in a huge cliff of clear glacier ice that we call the Wall. It shows you back all the good and terrible things you’re capable of—no one knows why. If magic is like water, maybe the Wall is a place where a spring bubbles up to the surface. The people of my land are often born Fixers, and they discovered the Wall and its use long, long ago. In order to control such a power, we go through apprenticeships. We learn our art, and then we See ourselves. If we can’t deal with what the Wall shows us, if we succumb to the kind of madness it can provoke, then we aren’t allowed to Shape, to become Artisans.”

  He licked his bottom lip nervously, a brief flick of his tongue. I narrowed my eyes at him.

  “How not?” I asked.

  “The masters kill the weak. Because to be weak and in charge of a great power is a dangerous thing.”

  There was something torturous in his eyes. “The body on the beach,” I said, without thinking about it. The words popped free of my mouth like chicks hatching from an egg.

  For a moment, there was silence. In it I heard again the sound of beating wings from somewhere far away. Then Arsenault said, “A body… what are you talking about?”

  I pushed myself against the back of the chair. “I had a dream,” I said. “When I was in the cave. A painting of a deer turned into a man. He showed you to me, and a body on a beach.”

  Arsenault went pale. I had never seen him so affected by anything. “Just one body?” he said.

  “Were there supposed to be more?”

  “A man or a woman?”

  “A man. He looked like you.”

  “My brother,” he said, turning away from me to face the empty hearth. “You See so true and yet you can be so blind.”