Fortune's Fool (Eterean Empire Book 1)

by Angela Boord

  In the middle of a fight, the space blinks out and you just act.

  He leans down over me and I have the shard sticking up through the fingers of my right hand. When he gets close, I kick his feet out from under him and I shove the shard upward with a flick of my thumb.

  He cries out in surprise as he’s going down, but his cry ends in a high-pitched, gurgling scream when the shard pierces the skin under his chin. Blood pours down over me in the instant before he collapses, kicking and thrashing for a moment before pain and blood loss rob him of consciousness. Then I heave him off with a twist of my shoulders and wriggle out from under him.

  There’s blood everywhere. I can’t see it, but I can feel it and I can smell it. The tunnel smells like a battlefield with the gun smoke still lingering in the air.

  I feel for my discarded shard on the floor. It slides out of my fingers when I try to pick it up. Tallou moans, then makes a choking, gurgling, whistling noise that lets me know he’s dying. I struggle to my feet.

  “Why couldn’t you have been scared of the damn ghosts?” I whisper as I take his knife. He had wide doe eyes. Somebody probably loved him.

  I vomit all over the floor and then I start walking.

  The old prison used to be a tumble of sheared-off slabs of black basalt and big stone pillars standing like the stumps of lightning-blasted trees. But now there are walls, built up out of re-chiseled basalt blocks. I don’t know why anyone would spend so much work on a prison.

  The passage comes out near the smokehouse and the slaughtering pen. I stick to the trees and manage to stay hidden. But I don’t know how I’m going to get into the prison.

  Four guards on the door, and all I have is Tallou’s utility knife. I managed to cut my ropes, but it’s still just me and my arm in this damn silk dress that’s soaked with blood.

  Well, and the manacles.

  I make a decision and take a deep breath, stumble out of the trees and into a run. I make a lot of noise. The guards turn around. One of them says, “Hoy! What are you doing there?”

  I throw myself onto the ground, trying to make it look as if I tripped. It’s not too hard. I fall to my knees and then down into the mud.

  “Well, you better go see who she is,” another guard says.

  “Probably a camp girl somebody used up.”

  “Dammit, why do I always lose the flip?”

  The guard who yelled at me comes walking cautiously across the yard. He doesn’t pull any of his weapons. “Where did you come from?” he says in a tense voice as he comes to loom over me. “Well, quick—answer!”

  Instead, I wrap the chain of my manacles around his ankle and give it a good yank.

  He windmills as he falls backward, then hits the ground hard on his hip. I lunge forward, knife out, which I drive into his throat.

  I leave the knife and pull the sword from his swordbelt, just as the other three guards run up to me. A quick slash at the nearest drops him, but the other two have time to get their own weapons out. A blade clangs against my right arm.

  “Fucking hells, it’s her!”

  A fist crashes into my jaw.

  Damn that head wound Lobardin gave me.

  The sword falls from my hands and I drop to the ground.

  A middle-aged man with crow’s-feet and dark hair hauls me to my feet, and my head spins.

  He grins. “If you thought you were going to find your man here, you’re going to have to look harder. They’ve already taken him down to the wall.”

  Inside, the prison is dark and cold. Smoky torches burn in iron sconces every few feet. Light shows through the chinks in the walls where the stone is ill fitted. You can tell they were built in haste.

  The commander drags me down the hall, his sword out. Two of his subordinates walk behind me, the points of their swords against my flesh. I struggled once, and the man with the crow’s-feet sank the tip of his sword into my left arm. Not enough to do damage, but enough to hurt. Enough to know what he’d do to me if I were to run.

  “We’ll put you in here,” he says. “That way, we can watch you better.”

  “Why are you so worried about me going anywhere? If Arsenault’s already gone, I can’t do much here, can I?”

  He grins. “Just keeping you for the executioner.”

  I decide I don’t like him.

  “I’ve been killed once already,” I tell him. “I came back.”

  “Maybe the second time will do it, then.” He opens the cell door and shoves me inside, not gently.

  I stumble, then whirl around. But the door’s already closed.

  “Damn,” I mutter. “Damn!”

  My voice echoes off the stone. The cell is no bigger than the cave my father held me in and filled with moldy straw.

  I kick the door. “Damn!” I say again, louder this time, almost a shout. It does me no good—just makes my head spin and hurts my bruised toes. I sit down on the floor in disgust.

  Something scratches inside the wall behind me, and I stand up in a hurry, thinking of rats. But then a voice whispers through the gaps, “Kyrra?”

  “Mikelo? Is that you?”

  “Me or my ghost,” he says in a low voice, then laughs. It’s a bad laugh. His voice is hoarse, too.

  I bend down near the wall. There’s a hole in it, almost big enough to put my fist through. “Why are they keeping you here?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine. I thought I might be for ransom, but...I think he’s going to kill me.”

  I chew my lip. “I would. If I were in Cassis’s place.”

  “That’s comforting, Kyrra. To know that.”

  “You know what I mean, Mikelo.” I pause. “Have they—”

  “No,” he says. “I’ve not been treated well.”

  I can hear it in his voice. The hoarseness can only have come from screaming.

  He coughs. “Arsenault’s gone. Jon came and got him.”

  “They put you together?”

  “I think they were trying to break him. But I don’t know why he would be so important to Cassis.”

  I rest my face against the cold stone wall. “He’s not important to Cassis. Or he’s only important for the worth he holds to Geoffre.”

  “What worth would that be?”

  I rub the fingers of my left hand down the smooth metal fingers of my right. “It has something to do with the god Geoffre worships and Arsenault’s magic. I think Jon wants him to draw Geoffre out.” Then, reluctantly, I add, “Perhaps to fight him. If Arsenault remembers...”

  “If Andris remembers who Arsenault was, you mean,” Mikelo says. “He’s a Fixer.”

  “Yes. Geoffre held him captive for a while.” I hesitate a moment, then I ask, “What did Geoffre want from you?”

  “From my magic, you mean? I’m not exactly sure. I studied a lot of anatomy. He had me do…dissections. And I spent some time learning how to heal small cuts and injuries on…” He stumbled. “On animals. But we had not yet come to the most important part of my training. He said.”

  I let my breath out. “The scrying. You haven’t passed your test yet, have you?”

  “He never mentioned scrying. I’m not sure what that is.”

  “Arsenault says all Fixers must be able to look into themselves and face what they see. Their darker corners. You haven’t done that yet, have you?”

  Thick, impenetrable silence from the other side of the wall.

  Finally, I hear him take a long, ragged breath. “I think,” he says, so quietly I can barely hear him, “that scrying was what—was— Gods, Kyrra, the things I saw in that mirror, the monsters, the demons—”

  “Hush,” I say. “It won’t do you any good to dwell on it now. We have to get out before they kill us. I need to get Arsenault. I can’t let him die. He’ll let Geoffre kill him again and again, for Jon or whoever asks.”

  Mikelo takes another long breath. “All right,” he says. “I’m with you. If you want to kill my bastard of a cousin—”

  “I don’t know if t
hat’s the fight anymore. There may have been some worth in what Jon and Arsenault wanted, to let him live until Driese conceives...”

  “I want my revenge.” The viciousness in his voice surprises me. “I want my revenge against Cassis.”

  It’s like looking in a mirror, hearing those words. How often have I said them? How often have they seemed to form the core of me?

  Except they were false, all those years. But it’s only now that I see how incidental Cassis was. Is. He’s like an arm. Sever the arm and the body still lives.

  All these years, the man I’ve wanted revenge against most is Geoffre.

  Fifty thousand astra be damned, but I want Geoffre.

  “Kyrra?”

  There is a hesitant, almost childlike quality to the way Mikelo says my name. I’ve heard it before, out of men older than him. It’s that seeking for someone in the dark.

  “Are you strong enough to use your magic?” I ask him.

  “If I have to be. What do you want me to do?”

  “Is it only flesh you Fix?”

  “I don’t know. I’m untrained. You said it yourself. I don’t know what I can do.”

  I chew on my lip again while I think. In states of siege, I’ve gnawed my lip bloody.

  “You could try to make us a hole out through the rock.”

  He doesn’t say anything. Then: “Can I do that?”

  “I don’t know. But you could try.”

  He laughs, a soft outflow of air laced with bitterness. “Gods. It might have been that easy.”

  “I don’t know if it will work, Mikelo. The walls are basalt—they might revert to molten rock.”

  “Then we’d be scorched by lava,” he says. His voice is grim. “What are our other options?”

  “The door is wood. I don’t know what its true nature might be. I don’t See into things, only people. The tree it once was? Something dead? If it was something dead, it might fall away into rot—except we’d have to deal with the guards. There are two of us now, so it would be easier, but—what kind of shape are you in?”

  “After I use my magic? Probably not good.”

  I want to pace, but if I do, Mikelo won’t be able to hear me. I shift my feet in the straw and it releases a fetid stench into the air.

  “You could try to Fix the guards,” I say slowly.

  “How?”

  “Fixers have talents, like any other artisan. Arsenault’s talent is for metal.”

  Mikelo lets out his breath. “And he Fixed you.” He pauses. “But you’re flesh. How could he—”

  “He forged my arm. Then he turned the part of me that was”—basest, a voice in my mind says, but I clench my jaw against it—“strongest,” I say, “into metal. Into a thing.” I sigh. “Don’t ask me to explain it. I’m not really made out of metal, but there’s metal in me. And that’s how my arm is a part of me now.”

  For a moment, he sits in silence. I fight down my impatience. He has to think this through or we won’t get anywhere.

  “I saw myself Fixing men,” he says finally, in a low, strained voice. His words stick in the hole between us, and I have no time to absorb what he means.

  “Then this is what you must do. This is how we’ll escape.”

  “But, Kyrra, I saw myself twisting them.”

  “Mikelo, Geoffre has a god on his side. And Arsenault will die. And then he’ll come back and he won’t remember. If he falls in with the wrong people, they could convince him of anything.”

  “Is that meant to cheer me?”

  “It’s meant to light a fire under you, dammit! Do you want your uncle to win?”

  Quiet for a moment. Then he says, “No. No, I don’t.”

  I let my breath out. He’s with us now.

  “Wait,” he says. “I’ll have to get the key to your door. How will I do that?”

  “You’ll think of a way. I can’t tell you how to Fix, only how to See. You learned that, didn’t you?”

  “Yes,” he says. I hear him take a deep breath. “We’ll be dead in a few hours anyway, won’t we?”

  “If you fail,” I say.

  He laughs. “If you’d have said anything else, I would have begun to suspect you. You’ve been far too nice to me.”

  I blush. I don’t know why, and I’m glad Mikelo can’t see. “Just do it,” I whisper.

  The scratching of grit against stone lets me know he’s moved. I put my ear to the wall to hear better. Straw rustles. I can’t tell what he’s doing.

  In a moment, though, a series of thrashing, fevered kicks beats against his door. I rise in alarm. Purposeful kicks are more rhythmic; this sounds like a struggle.

  Then the guards start yelling.

  “What’s going on in there? We’re not going to open the door—”

  “Curin, gods damn you, it sounds like there’s something wrong; get the key out— Now, Curin, now!”

  The door screeks open. Boots impact with flesh; one of the guards cries out, “Dread gods!”—then scuffling, rustling fabric, straw rattling, the sound of flesh against stone...

  I don’t hear Mikelo at all.

  And then someone screams.

  I’ve never heard such a scream before. I try to bring my hands to my ears to shut it out, forgetting my hands are chained together. So I have to listen to it. Its shrill, inhuman wail. Until abruptly, the scream dies.

  A man sobs.

  “Unlock the door,” Mikelo says. “The other one. That one—now, now, now!”

  A key slides into my lock. I move back from the door and put up my hands, ready to fight. The door flies open and light spills in.

  Mikelo stands there, silhouetted in orange. And one of the guards.

  Except you can’t tell anymore that it’s a guard. I stand back for a moment, staring, because it’s all I can do. The guard is bent, shriveled, shrunken, like a golem from a story. Humps stick out of his spine. The flesh has drained from his fingers, leaving them skeletal and dry.

  “Kyrra,” Mikelo says, through gritted teeth, in a voice with tears in it. “Kyrra, come.”

  He did this. This golden-haired boy.

  I start to walk forward, a little hesitantly.

  “I did what you wanted,” the guard lisps, in a voice like the rattle of dead branches. “I opened the door. I did what you wanted.”

  I give him a wide berth as I step around him. But in passing, I can’t help but look down at his eyes.

  Black eyes, with crow’s-feet. In their depths I can read his greatest wish and that is Kill me.

  It’s the guard who caught me. I glance up at Mikelo in—astonishment? Horror? I don’t know what he sees on my face.

  “Do it,” Mikelo says.

  His own face is set. He’s talking to me.

  I look at him, then at the stooped, misshapen guard. I nod, a slight dip of my chin. I move forward as if in a dream and take the guard’s knife from the sheath at his hip.

  When I find the gap in his ribs where his heart lies, he doesn’t even scream.

  Chapter 35

  I am tired of watching people die.

  During my time at Ilichnaya working for Markus Seroditch, I learned a few things about Sight and Fixing. Mostly because Markus wanted to curb my impulsivity and thought six weeks of guard duty for his dying wife might do it.

  The Lady Serodnaya suffered a wasting disease that might or might not have been the result of a curse. The lady saw evil everywhere. I don’t think her Sight ever left her. She was constantly on the lookout for threats to her husband—of which there were many. By the time Markus brought me to her bedside, her magic was eating her alive.

  She told me that most Fixers only work objects. In her eyes, I was an abomination and what Arsenault had done to me was a crime. I learned that when a Fixer alters a thing, he picks and chooses among the qualities he sees within it. The Lady said that Arsenault had remade me into an image of me that was not truly myself but only a reflection of what I might be. She told me that the runes glowing on my arm were what ma
de me into the killer I became, all because Arsenault wanted me to live by any means necessary.

  Before she died, after I attended her for six weeks day and night, out of her sight only when I pissed or she slept, she finally managed to exonerate me in her own mind. It wasn’t my fault that I drew death to me like flies to meat, she said; it was Arsenault’s. Her only wish was that I draw death away from Markus, and I tried. I tried my best.

  But in the end, he was in his bed, up in the house, and I wasn’t on guard shift. An Amoran assassin, hired by the Rojornicki Grand Prince himself, somehow infiltrated the serving staff and poisoned Markus.

  I never made it to Vençal the way Arsenault wanted me to. Instead, I got caught up in Rojornick, trying to repay Markus for his kindness by hunting down his killers.

  But now I’ve had enough death.

  And I’m tired of playing the prince with Mikelo. Forcing him to do crimes that the Lady Serodnaya would would have called abominations and worse.

  He Fixed the guard. Not with love, as Arsenault Shaped me. With hate and fear.

  “His servile nature,” Mikelo says as we stand, looking down at the bleeding, shriveled body. “The man never questioned his orders. He was cruel. I pulled it out and made it flesh.”

  Mikelo’s face is a desert, bare of emotion.

  He pulled something out of himself, too, something that was good and kind. It’s lost now, perhaps forever.

  I’m struck with a sudden longing to be far away from here, to awaken from all of this as if from a dream. But the dream nears its end now, and I must see it through.

  “You only did what I asked,” I say.

  Mikelo doesn’t answer.

  “I’m going to take his swordbelt.” I watch Mikelo’s face carefully all the while. “And his boots. Find a hammer—something hard and heavy—and you can break my manacles.”

  He nods and strides away almost angrily. Stronger than I would have thought.

  I bend down and take the swordbelt without looking at the man’s face. It seems wrong to call it a man. It seems wrong to call it anything.