The Traitor Game

by B. R. Collins

  He doesn’t say anything. When I look back, he’s still watching me, as if he’s waiting.

  I swallow and say, as carelessly as I can, ‘You speak Mereish?’

  ‘Not really. Only some of the swear words.’ He narrows his eyes thoughtfully. ‘And he’s a ryglyng,’ he adds, for good measure: a man with only one testicle. It makes me laugh; a helpless, jolting, uncomfortable sob of laughter, like crying – but a laugh, all the same.

  He smiles back. For a moment we look at each other. Then he bends to pick up the nub of poison. I expect him to give it back to me, but he puts it carefully on the wide stone ledge of the window. He turns back, then, unexpectedly, he bows to me. It’s a proper, courtly bow, with his right hand over his heart, not the sketchy flourish I’ve seen the Evgard courtiers give to each other. It takes me completely by surprise; I catch myself looking over my shoulder to see who he’s bowing to. He says, ‘Columen, of the house of Nitor, at your service.’

  I suppose I should bow too, but I’d only look stupid. In Marydd we nod to each other and offer both hands. I say, ‘I’m Argent.’ And because I can’t think of anything else, I add, ‘From Skyph.’

  ‘I know who you are.’ Columen walks to the window and picks up the poison. He tosses it into the air and catches it again. With the other hand he pours wine from a green-glazed jar into two heavy silver cups. His movements are so smooth it looks like a performance, but I don’t think it is. He turns to face me, the black stub of poison held between his finger and thumb. ‘You won’t need all of this.’ He holds it over one cup and rubs it with his fingers. A few dark flakes fall into the wine. Then he does the same with the other cup. He puts the poison down, picks the cups up, one in each hand, and takes a gulp of each in turn. There’s something theatrical about the way he does it; as though this is an Evgard custom I don’t know about, as though he’s making a point. I suppose I’m looking blank, because he grins and inclines his head towards me. ‘Just so you know I’m not poisoning you, Argent.’ Then he holds one out to me. ‘There’s only a tiny bit in it. Less than I normally take.’

  The cup’s cold and heavy and must have cost as much as our entire reed-harvest. I hold it in both my hands, wrapping my fingers round the smooth silver. I don’t drink until Columen takes a gulp from his cup; then, very slowly, I take a sip and let the wine sit in my mouth for a moment before I swallow. My throat’s tight: I don’t know what he’s given me, I don’t know whether I trust him. Maybe he’s built up a resistance to it; maybe I’ll go mad or die in agony. But I don’t have any choice. If he wants to kill me he will. And it’s just – just – possible that he’s as honest as he seems.

  The wine tastes of salt, and something else, an elusive fragrant hint of spice or leaf mould. It doesn’t taste wrong, the way seaberries do, or bad meat . . . I take another sip, suddenly daring. Columen watches me drink it, deadpan. ‘Why the Evgard name?’

  I shrug. ‘My mother was from Thornwell, near Petra Caeca.’

  ‘It suits you.’

  ‘I’m Mereish.’

  He’s just taken a sip of wine, so he has to swallow, shaking his head, before he answers. ‘I know. That wasn’t what I meant. The name. Argent. Silver.’ He peers at me. ‘Your eyes are silver, actually, aren’t they?’

  I look away deliberately and take another mouthful of wine. I don’t need him to tell me what I look like. I’ve heard it from every man in the castle: pisciculi albus, fish-belly white, when they were being kind; color seminis, when they weren’t. There are more words for freak and weird and disgusting than I can translate. I know I’m not a freak. I just look Mereish. But I’m starting to see Ryn in my head – darker eyes than mine, but clear pale skin and bright colourless hair – and wonder how I thought she was lovely. I look at myself in the mirror and think, They’re right, I look like something that’s crawled out from under a stone. Except now, of course, there’s a bruise down half my face. The Duke laughed at how pale I was and pretended to be anxious. Then he hit me. ‘That’ll bring some colour into your cheeks,’ he said.

  Columen puts his hand on my chin and turns my face back to look at him. It’s as though I’m some object that he wants to get a decent look at. It’s not how the Duke would touch me; it’s the way you’d look at a carving. I do exist, you bastard, I’m here. I push Columen’s arm away so hard that he takes an involuntary step backwards. His hand goes to the dagger sheathed in the small of his back. Mine goes automatically to the same place, where my own knife should be; but they took it away the day they captured me. For a moment we’re caught there, ready to jump, watching each other’s eyes for the smallest flicker. Then Columen shakes his head as though he’s trying to clear it. He runs both hands through his hair and steps back. He’s dropped his wine. Mine’s still in my hand, my knuckles round it white as ivory, white as milk or ice, white as my skin. I make my fingers relax. He goes silently to the wine-jar and pours himself some more, grating the poison into the cup with his fingernail. He doesn’t look at me. ‘I’ve never seen someone like you before.’ He stands very still, his head bent, with his back to me. ‘You look . . . extraordinary. Different.’

  ‘The colour of semen, you mean?’

  He laughs, suddenly, as though he can’t help himself, and turns to look at me, still grinning. ‘I was going to say beautiful.’

  I think I’ve misunderstood. Maybe my Evgard isn’t as good as I thought . . . or it’s a special, idiomatic use of beautiful that I don’t know. It must mean something else. But he’s looking at me as if to say, No, that was what I said, and suddenly my heart’s pounding. I think he’s laughing at me, but I’m not sure. I drink a long draught of salty, earthy wine, dipping my nose further into the cup than I need to, clenching my hands on the metal; but when I look up he’s still watching me. The unease comes back in a wave, sucking at the ground under my feet. Beautiful . . . I put the cup down and start walking towards the door, slowly, as though he might not notice.

  ‘Relax, Argent. I’m not my father.’ I look straight at him and he shakes his head, very slightly. I stand still, wanting to trust him. There’s so much sympathy in his gaze that I have to swallow. Then he drinks his wine, all of it in one go, and puts the cup back heavily on the trestle. He picks up the poison and slips it deftly up his sleeve. Then he goes to the other end of the room and opens the door there. I catch a glimpse of the room beyond: hung with dark green silk, glowing in the light from a fire. He’s about to leave me on my own. That’s it. Whatever he was trying to offer me . . . Somehow I’ve blown it, and all I can do is go back to the Ghist Tower and try again to screw up the courage to jump. But as I feel the misery come flooding back he beckons to me. ‘Coming?’

  His privy chamber’s warmer than the first room, and darker, full of green tarnished-copper shadows and surfaces that gleam like gold. Before I was captured I’d never seen wealth like this: linen and silk and heavy furs on the bed, woven wool on the floor, carved chests and chairs and a screen of painted vellum across the window. But Columen ignores it all and sits on the floor in front of the hearth. He gestures to the chair next to him. I sit down obediently but it feels odd; in our house in Skyph the adults got the stools and I always ended up sitting on the floor. And I don’t like being told where to sit – although I’m not stupid enough to argue, not any more. Stupid enough, or brave enough . . .

  Columen looks into the fire for a few moments, holding out his hands for the warmth. He doesn’t hold them out flat to the flames, the way I would, but with his palms together, as though he’s swearing allegiance. Then he looks up at me. In the light from the fire his face is almost his father’s. It makes my gut twist with something that’s not quite fear.

  ‘Do you know trecho, Argent?’

  ‘Trekko?’

  ‘A game. Like shek. The traitor game.’

  ‘I know shek. I played that in Skyph. The priest taught me.’ And I was good at it, although I don’t say that. I could see patterns that most people couldn’t, all the separate possibilities
stretching into a web that you could catch the other person in. I understood how it fitted together. ‘But not – whatever it was. I don’t think so, anyway.’

  ‘I’ll show you.’ Without waiting for me to answer he reaches for a carved box at the side of the fireplace. I feel an irrational pulse of anger that I don’t seem to have a choice; then I want to laugh, because if someone had said an hour ago that the worst the Duke’s son would do to me was teach me to play a game, I’d have been weak with relief. Columen upends the box, so that a pile of wooden pieces falls on to the hearthstones, and then flicks a catch somewhere and unfolds the box into an elaborately carved board. He sets the pieces out carefully in two triangles, black and white, facing each other. I bend forward, curious in spite of myself, but I can’t see properly. He looks up, faintly mocking. ‘You don’t have to sit in that chair, you know.’

  I feel the side of my face that isn’t bruised go red. I lever myself awkwardly out of the chair – my ribs are still stiff down one side – and sit on the floor opposite Columen. He sets the last piece in place and smiles at me.

  ‘It’s like shek, really – it’s the same kind of game. The main difference is . . .’ He picks up a black piece and turns it over so that I can see that the base is hollow. Then he reaches over to my side of the board and pulls a little white peg out of the corner. He slides the peg into the base of the piece he’s holding. ‘There’s always a traitor.’ He holds it out to me and I take it, not knowing whether I’m supposed to understand what he’s talking about. ‘At the beginning of the game, you see, you choose one of my pieces and you put your marker in it. That makes it a traitor. And I do the same with one of yours. You still control yours and I still control mine. We don’t know which one it is. But we know it’s there. We know one of our pieces can’t be trusted.’ I nod. ‘There are three ways to win the traitor game. One, you can win the way you’d win a game of shek, by checkmating my king.’ He points to the piece at the apex of the triangle, which has a crown running round the rim of its top edge. ‘Two, you can win when your opponent loses, if they use the piece you’ve marked, the traitor-piece, to occupy one of these squares –’ he points to a band of darker squares across the middle of the board – ‘or to checkmate your king. Are you following so far?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘And three, if you guess which of your own pieces has been marked. If you guess wrong, you’ve lost. But that’s the best way to win.’ He smiles, and for a brief, brief moment he’s got the Duke’s lupine grin. Then it fades into something warmer.

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Just the look in your opponent’s eyes.’ He picks up one of the white pieces and turns it over in his hands. ‘It was designed to make shek more interesting, to introduce an element of chance. Just like rolling a die. If you wanted to gamble you could try to guess the traitor, but the odds were thirteen to one against you. But then people realised there were tactics you could use for that, too. If you know your opponent well, it’s often quite easy to read them. You have to get good at lying.’

  ‘I can see why it caught on.’

  His eyes flick to my face as though he doesn’t know whether that’s a joke. Then he relaxes and laughs. ‘The best way is probably to show you.’ He holds out his hand for the black piece and puts it on the board. It’s got a tiny hand carved into the top, and as I look more closely I realise that all the pieces have their own emblems: a star, an eye, a knot, a ship . . . Except one. Columen follows my gaze and points to the blank piece. ‘If you choose the blank as the traitor you have to declare it, but then you can move that piece behind your enemy’s lines as though it was one of yours. My grandfather invented that rule. But people don’t do it much any more.’

  I nod. It’s easy to see why. Intrigue comes naturally to these people. As far as they’re concerned, honesty just isn’t as much fun.

  Columen leans forward and starts to tell me how each piece moves. I watch him, trying to listen, trying to concentrate, but all I can think is, What will happen if I’m no good? Will he send me away in disgust? Do I want him to? And suddenly I’m sleepy. I want to let my head drop forward and close my eyes, but I feel like I’d never wake up. I force myself to focus on Columen’s finger, noticing the way it gleams in the firelight, like pale gold. Every time I take an in-breath I feel like I’ll never need to breathe out. I mustn’t let myself go to sleep. I dig my nails into the palm of my hand and blink again and again.

  A door opens behind Columen, so that the draperies billow out in a flood of green, and a draught of cold air hits my face. For a second it’s a relief: that should help me keep awake . . . Then a girl steps into the room, and the relief changes into a sort of heart-stopping, wonderful fear. She’s beautiful. She’s fair, for an Evgard girl, but with a lambent quality to her skin that’s completely different from mine; her hair is like dark copper or red bronze, in a heavy cloud round her face, a dark halo. And her eyes are like embers. I know I should drop my gaze, but I can’t. It’s as though my eyes have a will of their own.

  Columen looks up, over his shoulder. ‘Iaspis.’ He curls one finger at her, and I realise he’s beckoning her over, nonchalantly, as though she were of no account. I want to stand up, or bow, or kneel, but it’s hard to move. Columen looks at me. ‘Argent, this is my sister, Iaspis.’ He turns his head and smiles at her, without warmth. She looks at him silently. He raises his eyebrows. ‘As far as I’m concerned, Argent is our guest.’ It’s an order.

  They stare at each other, and for a second I can see how alike they are: the hair, the firelight eyes. Then Iaspis looks at me for the first time and I’m dazzled. She holds my gaze insolently, and curtsies like ice deigning to melt. ‘Iaspis, of the house of Nitor, at your service,’ she says, and I can’t even imagine what she’d sound like if she meant it. I wonder if I should reply. The thought of it makes me want to wince in advance. But she doesn’t wait for me to say anything before she turns back to Columen. ‘Are you teaching him the traitor game? How appropriate.’

  ‘I assume you’re trying to teach him manners,’ Columen says coolly, and one of her hands clenches on the silk of her dress. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I have a favour to ask.’ Her voice is low and quiet, but it has an edge to it that makes me think of a knife.

  ‘To hear is to obey, my sister,’ Columen says. I can almost taste the sarcasm in his words, like grease. He sounds exactly like Ryn bickering with her cousin.

  But Iaspis ignores it, inclining her head as though he were being sincere. ‘I need some – I mean, do you have any somnatis?’

  Columen sucks air in through his teeth as though it’s a monumental request. ‘I’m not sure. How much can you pay for it?’

  She gives him a long look. ‘How much are you asking?’

  Columen’s face is grave, but somehow I can tell he wants to laugh. He frowns innocently. ‘I’m not sure,’ he says again. ‘How much can you pay?’ This time Iaspis doesn’t say anything; she just puts her hands on her hips and looks at him coldly, her chin tilted. He screws up his face and nods. ‘All right. I’ll go and look.’ As he gets to his feet and goes into the antechamber he glances at me, so briefly I wonder if I’ve imagined it. Then I’m alone in the room with Iaspis.

  ‘Get up.’ I stand, automatically. She walks round me, looking me up and down. I want to look back at her, but she’s so beautiful I don’t dare. Instead I watch the hem of her dress swirl hypnotically round her feet, kingfisher-green. She’s walking in a spiral, closer and closer to me. She’s regarding me as though I’m a statue, and I feel like one: a clumsy, melting snow-carving, or a rough-hewn bit of wood. I can smell ambergris, rich and sweet. ‘Lift your chin.’ Suddenly I’m staring into her eyes. I’m breathless from the colour of them, like autumn leaves, the intensity of it. She frowns and peers closer. Then she turns away, snorting delicately. Whatever the test was, I’ve failed.

  Columen comes back in, tossing a little phial from hand to hand. ‘No somnatis. But there’s this. Aq
ua quietis. Just as good – unless you’re thinking of trying to poison someone.’

  She looks at him contemptuously. ‘Given the last of it to your guest here, have you?’ She flicks her finger at me as though she’s trying to get something sticky off her fingernail. ‘Have you seen his eyes? He can hardly keep them open.’

  ‘I don’t see how it’s any of your business.’

  She shrugs. ‘It isn’t. But Father wouldn’t like it.’

  Columen looks at her sharply and lets the phial fall through his fingers. Quicker than thought she reaches out and pulls it from the air beneath his hands, as though it was just hanging there, like an apple. Columen watches her slip it into a pouch at her belt. Then he says softly, ‘I’m not sure about that.’

  She tilts her head to the side; a soft coil of hair swings delicately past her ear. ‘Shall we put it to the test?’ She turns to go, as though that’s the last word, as though she knows he won’t argue.

  ‘All right.’

  She turns back to look at Columen for a moment and then laughs, keeping her mouth closed. ‘Oh. I’ll tell him, then, shall I? Daddy, did you know Columen took your little Mereish slave to his room and drugged him out of his mind?’ She looks at me. ‘You know what he’ll do, don’t you? It won’t be just a bruised face. You know what he’ll do to your little pet –’ She uses a word I don’t know.

  ‘Shut up, Iaspis.’ And to my surprise she does shut up. Columen sits loosely on the end of his bed and looks up at her. ‘You should wash your mouth out. But no, to answer your question, you needn’t tell him, because I will.’ He turns to me. I stare back, because I’m not sure I understand what he’s saying. He meets my gaze without smiling. I don’t know if he’s even seeing me, or whether he’s just staring into the middle distance.

  Iaspis makes a little noise of disbelief. ‘You’ll tell him you gave him somnatis?’ She shakes her head incredulously. ‘I mean, do you even know how much that costs?’