No; not yet. But that didn’t mean collapsing like a wet cravat the first time I faced one.
“I’m afraid I find myself without any possessions but for three handkerchiefs and a ring that is, unfortunately, only on loan to me. I hope you will understand if I place my one of my handkerchiefs as my wager.”
I spoke lightly, as befit one placing one inconsequential ante beside another. A used linen handkerchief against an old belt knife.
That I had personally woven the handkerchief at the Morrowlea looms (the relative neatness of its hems showing how late in my university career I had made it), and that its monogram had been embroidered by that same Violet, was irrelevant to everyone but me.
In the exoteric language, a handkerchief was a good-natured indication that the lessons about to be taught would be willingly, if undoubtedly ruefully, learned.
Jack stared at me out of his one good eye for a solid half-minute. I did not squirm, merely continued to smile and sip my coffee.
In the esoteric code to offer one out of three items was to accept the challenge.
Chapter Five: The True and Neglected Art of Poacher
I lost, naturally, but I may say that I lost well.
Our game, initially the object of a flurry of bets and interested commentators, soon sent the stranger men muttering away in boredom.
We did not play with any of the usual gestures, comments, bets, flash. You do not need to, past a certain level. By the time we were at Setting the Scene only Ben and the Hunter in Green were still watching.
Poacher is a game of nerve and chance, of swift calculations and topsy-turvy odds. Neither Jack nor I looked much at our hands, though I’m sure he was counting what cards had come and gone as much as I. The dance of Fish and Happenstance and skill and luck, which like an allegory reveals even as it hides the souls of the players.
I’d been in games of Poacher that lasted ten minutes, and one that lasted four hours. This one took perhaps forty minutes from the first warning to the last stand.
Quite how it happens I don’t know. How is it that a man can reveal his soul so well picking up a card, discarding another, creating a story by what is taken and what is left that is almost always not the one described at the end? I don’t know. I only know that of my last three games of Poacher with a skilled stranger, one had left me soiled, one with the conviction that my opponent was the most dangerous person I had ever met, and this one ...
I sighed with regret that the game had to end as it came time to turn over the Emperor card and see what alchemy it wrought on one’s hand. I knew that the Emperor card was the Holy Grail; I also knew that excellent though my hand was, Jack’s beat it.
“Well?” he said.
“Friend, Local Boy, Vengeance, and the Salmon of Wisdom. I hope you find the last, sir.”
There was a perfect silence. Then Jack started to laugh. He turned over his cards to show they were the ones I had named. “And here I wondered what you could possibly do with Two Fat Carp, A Mysterious Letter, A Stranger, and A Storm.”
“You forget the Holy Grail, sir.”
“Oh, indeed not,” he said, and exchanged one of his deep glances with the visibly nonplussed Ben. “That’s how you play the game, Ben.” Jack offered me his hand. “Thank you, lad. It’s been a long time since I enjoyed myself so much.”
I shook his hand, wishing for a way to ask how I might—well—learn more? Sit at his feet? Help him with his mission? Why at every moment I wished for something I could not even begin to say?
He smiled crookedly. “Time for some food.”
“IT’S RARE TO FIND SOMEONE so young so skilled,” Jack said once we’d sat down again with the bowl of stew one of the strangers had given us. Venison stew; the more usual result of the game in real life. “Hardened gamester, are you?”
Rough though his voice was, I could now hear the approbation in it. One could be a bad man and a fine player of Poacher, I knew, but my father had told me, and life so far had not disproved, that past a certain level the the faults of the soul were on display quite as much as one’s wit. The Tarvenol duellist who remained the most dangerous person I had ever met puzzled me because the danger had been matched with iron honour; but then again we had not finished the whole game on that occasion.
Jack did not think me a hardened gamester. They did not tend to play Poacher; they bet on other people’s games instead.
“My father taught me as a boy.”
It was difficult to talk about my father. It was very close to the anniversary of his death, and I had started to wonder if he had been murdered, and he seemed to be present all around me. All the past fortnight, since I slew the dragon, I had been dreaming of him. It had been years since the last time that had happened.
“He was very good.”
“Yes.”
I remembered the evenings spent learning the cards, how he would spend an hour, sometimes the whole evening, on each. How they’d made their way into the decks we now used, why they were pictured as they were, the obvious, coded, deeply hidden, and wildcard meanings of each both separately and in all their many conjunctions.
The early mornings spent literally fishing or tracking or meeting the other inhabitants of the decks of Happenstance and Fish. My father had taught me how to shape a fly, bait a hook, how to find the holes where the great pike lurked, how to lay ground bait for a school of bream.
And while we waited, the wide-ranging conversations, instructions, stories, tall tales, always circling around the game he loved so well. He had taught me to understand the world through two decks of cards and a few not-so-simple rules. He had shown me my soul ... and his.
I ate stew until I felt composed. Smiled at Jack, who had been eating his own meal in thoughtful silence. “May I ask what your plan is? Against whom are you seeking vengeance?”
He looked startled. Scratched his beard. “Those were the cards I was dealt, lad.”
I arched my eyebrows at him. “Naturally.”
Ben, who’d been sitting quietly beside us, snorted. “Got you there, Jack.”
Jack grinned. “Not buying it, are you?”
“When I have had the honour of losing to one of the masters? I was not taught that the game is one of reacting to what one is dealt, sir.”
“Point.” He let out a noisy breath. “You were playing the carp.”
I regarded him solemnly. If he knew that my uncle was devoted to his fish ponds and their fat golden carp—well, and so what? That might mean nothing more than that he had a friend who was interested in fish and knew the names of those who shared his passion. It was common enough.
“He’s the acting chief magistrate this session,” I said. “While out for a run in Ragnor barony, I was seized and delivered to Yellton Gaol under a false charge of murder designed to create as sensational a trial as possible. He has reasons to dislike me.”
I stopped, jarred by flash of memory streaking across my mind like a meteorite. It was gone as quickly, leaving only the briefest flash of illumination. I had seen something—but what?
What, indeed? I wondered. And what did it have to do with my uncle?
The Hunter in Green came over to our table. “Done your stew?” he asked, accent as nearly-impenetrable as before. “Good, good. We’re clearing out. Watch the ways south, there’s plenty looking for trouble along your route.”
“I am well acquainted with the dangers of the southern Arguty Forest,” Jack said in a brittle tone.
The Hunter in Green nodded. “Merry hunting.”
“Merry hunting,” Ben replied.
“Merry is not the word I’d use for it,” Jack said in a low voice.
I could not think when I had ever seen another human express such emotion, unless it was the look on my mother’s face when she saw my long-reported-dead father come through the door of her new husband’s house.
Ben obviously saw it, too, and perhaps he knew what emotion it was (which I did not), for he spoke with urgent cheerfulness. “We’
re safe enough to sleep till the morning, anyhow.”
Jack said nothing, face settling into grimness.
I lay down on one of the bunks, far away from Jack. I was exhausted, and despite my congestion fell asleep quickly.
My night was full of dreams in which all three iterations of my father’s death figured prominently.
I AWOKE DISGRUNTLED, a feeling which the dull weather did nothing whatsoever to mitigate.
Jack had made some sort of porridge, which was filling. I yearned for some of the fabled Noirell honey to spoon across it, but quite apart from the lack of such amenities in the hideout, the bees had been cursed until a fortnight ago and there was no expectation of honey for this year. After the meal I completed my toilet as best I could in the washbasin, which wasn’t very.
“A few more days and you’ll have the beginnings of a respectable beard,” Ben said encouragingly.
I glanced at his scurfy facial hair, which went every-which-way, and decided (not for the first time) that a bow was always better than words you might regret. He grinned.
Jack had gone outside while I ate. He returned, blowing on his hands. “Cold wind, I’m afraid. Let’s hope all the sensible people stay indoors.”
“I presume we are not to be counted in that number?”
He cocked the eyebrow over his eyepatch at me. I could not help wondering how severe the injury to his eye was, really.
“I have not known you long, lad, but very little of what I’ve seen you do falls under the heading of ‘sensible’.”
“Point.”
“Here’s one you might find more useful.” I turned, confused at the pun until I saw that Ben was pointing at several weapons he’d laid out on another table. “The—our friends said we might arm ourselves. We’ve chosen our weapons, so you may have your pick.”
So Jack had seen something trustworthy in me, playing Poacher. Not sensible, mind. The comment stung a little, for I usually considered myself a sensible, practical sort of man, reining in the wilder extravagances of my friends.
Nevertheless it had to be said that neither Hal nor Mr. Dart had ever found themselves breaking out of gaol with two ex-soldiers of uncertain current profession (revenge presumably not paying one’s regular bills) after being accused of murdering Fitzroy Angursell in the form of a dragon.
Lady preserve me.
I focused on the weapons. Three swords; four daggers; an axe.
Not the axe. I’d never learnt more than to chop wood with one—though that, thanks to Morrowlea’s views on sharing the work, I could do better than most young gentlemen.
This was a test.
One sword was adequately-made but flashy. One was made of something only slightly better than pot-metal. And one was ... superb.
I picked up the third. Smallest, lightest, plainest, dullest in appearance. But like Ragnor Bella, vaunted least interesting town in all of Northwest Oriole, it had its secrets.
“Are you sure this isn’t someone’s?” I asked Ben, watching Jack watch me. “This is too fine a blade to be someone’s cast-off.”
Ben and Jack exchanged one of their glances. Jack rumbled, “Not everyone has your eye.”
“Surely—” I stopped myself, attending instead to the feel of the blade. Surely anyone could tell? Even Hal would be able to tell.
“Your father teach you this, too?” asked Ben.
“A little. One of my professors at—at university used to be an armourer, and he taught me what to look for.”
I was still reluctant to identify myself as Mad Jack Greenwing’s son. Why, I wasn’t quite sure. I did not really think that Ben and Jack were wicked, and they had already made it clear they respected my father’s memory, but ... but I felt I had exposed myself too much in that game of Poacher, in the dark tunnels, in these past few minutes looking at the weapons. I did not want to hand them all the keys to my heart in one fell swoop.
“May I take a dagger as well?”
“Please.”
The daggers were none of them so fine. One fit best in my hand and had a belt to go with its sheath, so I took it. Belted, I felt a little less ramshackle; fussing to get the rapier’s scabbard in position felt good and right and almost inevitable, although to tell the truth I’d never gone about armed before for longer than the length of a class.
The rules were different in the Arguty Forest.
Rules were always different in the green, I thought: in the Woods Noirell, where magic waited around every tree and thicket, and in the Arguty Forest, where the perils were mundane but very definitely still mortal.
And in all the very many layers of metaphor the word green could bear?
Chapter Six: Cutting Counter
I had been deceived in the weather by forgetting we were underground, I found when I followed Jack and Ben outside. The door had seemed obvious last night; this morning a curtain of dying vines hung down over the entire face of the cliff, obscuring all evidence of human work from the outside and most sunlight from the interior.
I wondered for a brief moment how the Hunter in the Green’s men had done the trick. Not releasing the vines down from the top of the cliff, which only required one person up there, or failing that a long rope; but getting them up there in the first place to be so released. Jack set off at a brisk pace to the southwest, so I left that enigma to stay with all the many other small mysteries in my life and set off after him.
Mrs. Etaris, my employer, had told me that we never do find out the whole story, whether of an adventure or of a life. I was finding it hard going to resign myself to that fact.
It was cold and clear, and frost rimed the branches where the sun had not yet touched them. My spirits raised. I was back in my own clothes, I had a magnificent sword belted on my hip, and all the puzzles of my current predicament seemed this morning as answerable as any poem or riddle. I had merely to determine what code or key lay below the surface, and which below that if necessary, and then it would all make sense.
Easy as pie.
We walked carefully, Jack again in the lead, Ben behind me. They were more alert than the previous day, which infected me with wariness. I did not have the experience what to look for, but I did my best not to let my mind wander.
The Forest did not feel dangerous, not in the crisp November air, even with the occasional bitter gusts of wind. Little was stirring: a few titmice in gay blue and yellow plumage, a handful of robins, a rabbit or two. Then we flushed a flock of grey jays.
The jays screamed alarums, their cries echoing through the cold woods, against unseen cliff-faces, returning garbled to our ears.
“Loosen your sword, lad,” Ben said in my ear. “Everything with ears knows we’re here now.”
“We’ll cut counter,” Jack said, a phrase I puzzled over eve as it clearly meant leaving the path we’d been on and haring away from the screaming jays. We left them behind, but it soon became evident that we’d left Jack’s knowledge with them. He slowed his pace and moved his head after landmarks that, from his accompanying scowl, he did not find.
Half an hour or so after we’d left the jays, he left the trail we were following to guide us into the heart of a thicket of junipers. They were scratchy and resinous and I got tangled with my unaccustomed sword, but the centre was out of the wind and roomy enough for us to sit upright on our bedrolls.
Jack and Ben looked at each other; Ben shrugged. Jack sighed. “Do you know the Forest, lad? You’ve not said, but we’ve not asked, either.”
“I’ve never been far from the road or the southern fringes, I’m sorry to say. When I was a boy we never went in too far, and since the Fall it hasn’t been safe.”
Another meteorite flash of memory, or—not a memory, but the inkling of a memory, that something I said was important—but what?
Jack grunted. I wanted to say that over the last month I’d run nearly every road, lane, bridleway, and footpath between the Woods Noirell and the Forest, all the Vale of the Rag between East and South rivers. Ask me who had
dogs, overgrown stiles, early-crowing cocks, late crops of kale, cabbages, parsnips, or mangels—ask me where the ruts were worst or the mud deepest or the odd patches of saffron crocus that Hal was trying intermittently to map before they all withered—ask me who else was out early in the morning as the late autumn sun rose—
I blinked. That was it. I’d generally been running before work, sometimes again in the early evenings, though more often Hal and I sat in our little parlour talking, reading, having our lessons on magic or noblesse oblige. That morning I had gone for my run, a twelve-mile circuit of the barony, north to the White Cross first to pay spur-week respects to my father’s unhallowed grave.
And there I’d seen someone who shouldn’t have been there.
Who eluded me. I twisted the ring on my finger, wondering. It was not the first time this year that magic had caused me to forget.
Jack shared out some sort of hard biscuit sandwiched together with beef dripping. It was surprisingly tasty.
I thanked him. “I’m new to the business of adventuring; I’d forgotten the need to bring refreshments.”
Ben chuckled softly. “Soldiers learn to sleep and eat and be prepared at all times.”
“I was planning to go for soldier, before the Fall.”
“Your father?” Ben asked politely. Jack stirred, but only to rearrange items in the bundle that had contained the biscuits.
I very much did not want to talk about my father there in the Arguty Forest where he had either committed suicide or been murdered. I nodded shortly. I was glad to be interrupted by another outburst of grey-jay alarums and warning cries, and was far slower than Ben and Jack to realize what the distant cries indicated.
Something else was out there to disturb them.
Or someone else.
THE ARGUTY FOREST IS known for its dangers.
Along with sizeable component of highwaymen and other scofflaws, wolfs heads, and people at the lower fringes of society, it also contains bears, boars, wolves, deceptive terrain, sudden sinkholes, and somewhere or other, the Magarran Strid.
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