I smiled and picked up the cards with my right hand and started shuffling them, feeling them to see if Harrex had a trick deck or the occasional bent card to help him cheat. It was a Daroman deck, which I wasn’t used to. Ferius had taught me dozens of games of chance and strategy, but we’d rarely played with a sixty-five card deck: four suits, each with an ace, nine numbered cards, five court cards, supplemented by five coloured jokers, which in a Daroman deck were called, appropriately enough, outlaws.
“Well, Your Majesty, it’s interesting that you’d choose Royal Court—”
“Because I am royalty?”
“No, though that would make sense too, I suppose. But the reason it’s interesting to me is that most players believe that Royal Court used to be a much older game called Four-Card Borderlands.”
“Why is that relevant?”
“Well, Your Majesty, Four-Card Borderlands was a game that came from the old continent, on the plains of a little place called that used to be called Daromis, many, many centuries ago, before her people crossed the sea.”
A murmur rose from the assembled nobles. Even the tutors seemed curious.
“Hey, that’s right,” Harrex said from behind me. “I think I heard that too.”
I dealt the cards. Four each, with another four face down at the edge of the table.
“The four corner cards are the ‘court’,” I said. “The game is simple. The more of one kind of card you have, the better. We take turns drawing one card each from the deck. Every time you draw a card, you have to discard one face up from your hand onto one of the four corners of the court. No corner can have more than four cards, so the game ends when each of the corners is filled and there are four cards left in each of our hands. You can choose to play your hand, take one of the corners, or do both. But if you take both then you have to turn it into two separate hands and both of them have to beat my hands. You have first claim on the corners nearest you, I have first on the corners nearest me.”
The essence of Royal Court was those four corners: you watched the other player to see how they reacted to what was in each one, and tried to use those observations to guess the contents of your opponent’s hand.
The queen examined her cards as she fanned them out. “Ah, I see. So if the cards in the corner complement the ones in my hand, I might be able to make two stronger hands than if I just used a single set of cards?”
I nodded. “Right, but you can just as easily get stuck with one great hand and one terrible hand, which means you’re likely to lose. So there are a couple of different strategies. You can play it simple, or you can stack a corner with cards you’ll want later, but then you risk me taking control of that corner by stacking it with bad cards.”
“Ah, so it’s just like in real life. If I were to ‘stack’, as you say, one part of my court with too much influence, I’d risk someone else taking control of it by ‘stacking’ it with some of their own people.”
I bit my lip. “You learn fast, Your Majesty.”
The queen smiled, seemingly pleased with my praise. “Thank you, master card player. I believe I shall take a card now.” She picked a card up from the deck.
“Now you’ll want to take some time to—”
She immediately pulled one of the middle cards from her hand and threw it face up against the corner closer to me and to my right.
“Or, I suppose you could just do that.”
I looked at the card she’d thrown. It was the knight of chariots.
“That’s a pretty high value card to be throwing away,” I remarked.
The queen said nothing but looked at me placidly.
I picked up a card from the deck. I’m not going to tell you my hand because, well, that’s a bad habit to get into. Suffice it to say things were looking all right for me. I discarded to my left corner.
“My turn again?” the queen asked.
I nodded.
She picked up a second card, then tossed another knight—this time the knight of arrows. She threw it on the same corner as before. A dangerous move unless she planned to pick up that corner. But it was on my side of the table, so I would have first rights to it. “When you were playing cards with the man you fought and killed, were the stakes very high?” she asked, her tone betraying barely any interest at all.
“In truth it was a small matter, Your Majesty. A dispute over a mare.” I dropped my card, the three of blades, on the corner she was building up.
“And what was the nature of the dispute?” the queen asked, picking up another card.
“I felt that he was riding the mare too hard. Shame to waste a good horse. So I offered to buy her. He thought she was worth more, but we came to an agreement for either a much larger sum if I lost, or no cost at all if I won.”
The queen dropped her card, this time a king of trebuchets, on the corner near my left arm. She really didn’t seem to be very good at this.
“I’m not sure you’re fully understanding the rules of the game, Your Majesty. Would you like me to explain them again?”
“I believe I understand them well enough, thank you.”
I shrugged and picked up my next card. Two of chariots. Nothing special. I realised I should probably spend more time worrying about my own hand.
“And so,” the queen continued, “when this man, Merrell of Betrian, tried to cheat you in a card game with nothing more at stake than the price of a mare you didn’t really want, you killed him.”
“To be fair, Your Majesty, I did go to the trouble of goading him into a duel. He just wasn’t very good at it.” I tossed the king of arrows on the corner to the queen’s right. I doubted I’d be getting a lot of them, and thought it better to remove them from contention by spreading them around.
The queen looked at me. “Is this what you would call ‘bluffing’, Mister Kellen?”
The question surprised me. “No, Your Majesty. You see by preventing the kings from accumulating, I—”
“No, no. I mean you lying to me about your game with Merrell of Betrian,” she said casually, picking up another card. “It wasn’t a mare that you fought over, was it?”
I thought about how to respond for a moment, but then I just answered. I really needed to focus on the cards, not the game. “No, Your Majesty, it wasn’t really a mare.”
“It was a woman.”
“Yes.”
“The man’s wife, in fact.”
“Yes.”
“But you’re still lying to me, aren’t you, Mister Kellen?” the queen said.
“Respectfully, Your Majesty, I don’t see how this—”
“She wasn’t a woman either, was she?”
I put my cards face down on the table for a moment. I knew what I had in my hand, I knew what was sitting on the corners, and I was pretty sure I had a sense of what the queen was holding. She had played well—almost masterfully in fact. Better than an eleven-year-old girl who’d only just learned the rules had any right to, that’s for sure. But not well enough. We were down to the last card each, and I knew I could take the game. “No, Your Majesty. It might be more accurate to call her a girl.”
“She was twelve,” the queen said.
I nodded, wondering how she’d managed to find this out.
“A year older than I am now.”
“Yes.”
“You killed a man for cheating at cards because you knew he was going to continue…what was that charming euphemism you brought into my court? ‘Riding his mare too hard’?”
“How do you know any of this, Your Majesty?” I asked.
It was her turn to either play her hand or one of the corners or both. But she wasn’t moving. “And you didn’t tell this to my magistrate because—”
“Because it wouldn’t have made any difference.”
The queen nodded. “Because the law is the law, and in Darome twelve is old enough to be married if the parents consent, no matter how old and brutal the husband might be.”
“That’s right.”
“Because g
oing to the marshals wouldn’t have stopped the abuse so you played the cards you were dealt. Since you knew the facts wouldn’t help you in court, you decided to be clever instead.”
I shook my head, growing irritated at being peppered with questions by a child. “No, I told you, that’s—”
“You told them it was a dispute over a mare, because in the eyes of the law it didn’t matter if it was a mare or a twelve-year-old girl. She was still his property.”
“I had to—”
“You… What’s the term? You ‘folded’.”
She wasn’t letting me finish a sentence. “Damn it. I checked the law books, there’s no—”
“You don’t trust anyone or anything except yourself, do you?”
“There’s no one else to trust,” I said, shouted really.
“You just play the cards you’re dealt.”
“That’s all I can do!”
“That’s all any of us can do, isn’t it, Mister Kellen?” the queen said, her voice suddenly soft and quiet again. “Now look at the table, and play… your… cards.”
Our gazes met, locked on each other. What was she doing? What was the point of all of this? The nobles were quiet as death. The tutors had murder in their eyes. I had started this whole thing with a simple, stupid, impossible plan and now I wasn’t sure who was playing whom.
The queen closed her eyes for just a moment. “We’re out of time, master card player. I am due for my lessons and cannot keep my tutors waiting much longer. Look at the table, and make your decision.”
I looked down at the cards. The queen had placed the rest of her hand on the table, face up. Three tens and a knight. A respectable hand, but not the right one. She could’ve taken the jacks and won right there, but she’d put them on my side, where I had first right to take them. Something about the layout of the cards bothered me. The four corners, I thought. They don’t make sense.
The queen had put two jacks in the same corner on my side of the table—as far away from her as she could. A stupid move. I was closer to them and could take them first. She’d dropped the queen of trebuchets near herself. But she’d also placed low cards—a two and a seven—on top of it, weakening the corner. No power there. The jacks had all the power. I glanced at her for a second. She knew I was holding the outlaw of blades. She had to, since it hadn’t appeared anywhere else. In some games outlaws were wild, but not in Royal Court. The three kings on the table were distributed across three different corners. Nothing to play there. All I had to do was take the corner with the other jacks and I’d win. It didn’t make sense. She clearly knew the game—a lot better than she’d let on—but she was playing a master’s strategy and then leaving it open for me at the end. I’d have to be a fool not to win. Was she letting me win? Why? What possible reason could she have?
I looked up from the table and into the queen’s eyes and, like clouds coming out to block the blinding sun, the tears I saw hidden there made the whole table visible to me for the first time. That, and the fact that I’d just remembered something Ferius had once told me on one of her drunken benders, that the jacks in a Daroman deck represent hidden knowledge and scholarly pursuits, which is why they used to go by another name.
Tutors.
For all the seeming casualness of this procedural interview, the queen knew who I was—had known it the whole time in fact: an outcast spellslinger with a bad reputation and a long list of enemies. Dead if I walked into Berabesq, under a spell warrant from the Jan’Tep, unwelcome in Gitabria and unworthy of the notice of the Daroman empire until I made the mistake of going after a man who wouldn’t stop battering his twelve-year-old wife. My day-to-day survival was contingent on a few tricks, a propensity for dirty fighting and a willingness to gamble on the foolishness of people smarter and more powerful than me. This eleven-year-old queen had just tricked me into a game of cards that was nothing more than a way for her to show me what was really happening in the Daroman court.
Did this two-thousand-year-old monarch hold the wisdom of eighty generations of rulers? I couldn’t say. But right then? At that precise moment? She was a terrified eleven-year-old who was getting beaten and burned by her tutors and knew she didn’t have long before they did something worse. She was surrounded by weak men. Twos and sevens who either wouldn’t or couldn’t do anything to protect her. The strong ones—the jacks—had no intention of letting the queen reach her thirteenth birthday, when she’d be free to rule as she saw fit.
“It’s time, Mister Kellen. You must make your choice now.”
She’d set me up to win, no question there. It was as if she was trying to show me that I could trust her. But then where would that leave her? Was she really asking me to give up a winning hand—give up my chance at life and freedom—to trust her back? I had come here to kill this girl on the off-chance it might save my own hide. My life was already in her hands, but now she wanted me to put it there willingly. I looked down at the corner with the jacks. They were the tutors. Pick them up, and I’m siding with them. She wanted me to pick up the corner with the lonesome queen.
Damn, I thought, reaching for the corner cards, Ferius warned me about the dangers of gambling with anything other than your coin purse.
“The queen wins!” Marshal Harrex declared when I tossed my combined hand on the table. Nothing there worth anything except a lonesome queen and an even lonelier outlaw of blades.
The crowd cheered. Loudly. Their young queen had just played her first hand of cards and had beaten someone who gambled every day of his life. The nobles were so proud of themselves they could’ve pissed themselves and still would’ve walked around with smiles on their faces. The queen didn’t waste any time basking in their goodwill. “Well, this has been most diverting,” she said, standing. “I have decided that, while Mister Kellen was clearly wrong about the importance of cards, they are nonetheless a fine way to pass the time. I would hereby ask my united court to approve him as my tutor of cards.”
There was some laughter and a few cheers from the nobility. Arrasia wasn’t amused. “No! This is an insult to the royal tutors.”
“Oh, give it a rest,” someone shouted.
“Your Majesty,” Koresh said, icicles hanging off his words, “the court has the right to debate and test any tutor and vote on their suitability.”
The queen played her biggest bluff of the day. She turned around and looked at the crowd with a theatrically weary expression. “Royal Tutor Koresh is correct. If the assembled court wishes, it may indeed delay our lunch a while longer to debate the relative merits of appointing Mister Kellen to teach me cards. Or, if the four-fifths majority agrees, we may bypass debate, appoint Mister Kellen as tutor of cards, and the court shall be free to leave for their repast.”
There was a surprisingly resounding chorus of “Aye!” in the room.
Arrasia started to say something but the queen interrupted. “Magistrate Chapreck, in your learned opinion, would you say the ‘ayes’ constitute four-fifths of the court?”
Chapreck stepped forward, miserable but resigned. “I would say they do indeed, Your Majesty.”
“Then it is decided,” the queen said, her voice no longer the soft, calm breeze I’d been listening to for the past half-hour. Now it was strong, strident and victorious. “Mister Kellen is hereby appointed tutor of cards to the Daroman court, with all the rights, privileges and protections afforded his station.”
She turned to me and in a quieter voice said, “Though I do believe I would grow weary of those markings around your left eye, Mister Kellen. If your service to me continues to be as diverting as it was today, I may choose to use some of my considerable resources to seeking to have this ‘shadowblack’ of yours removed… That is, if you would find such an alteration acceptable.”
I tried to read her eyes but they were flat as still water. Your Majesty, you’re either really two thousand years old or else you’re the craftiest eleven-year-old the world’s ever seen. “I believe I could learn to live with such
an outcome,” I said.
She smiled and gave a slight nod. A contract of sorts had just been made between us, but only one of us knew the exact terms. The queen turned on her heels and walked towards a passageway in the eastern side of the room, attendants in tow. The royal tutors stayed behind.
“I wouldn’t start celebrating any time soon,” Koresh said to me, quiet enough so the audience, who were milling out of the room as quickly as their legs could carry their hungry stomachs, wouldn’t hear.
“You won’t last here long, ‘tutor of cards’,” Arrasia mocked. “You have no friends at court, no base of power. You’ll be back on your knees in a week, and the queen’s lessons will resume with especial fervour.”
Koresh was looming over me, waiting for me to cower. For a moment I was fifteen again, strapped to a workbench in a darkened study, my father standing over me, dipping his needles into molten metals as he burned counter-glyphs into the bands around my forearms, forever denying me the chance to be a true mage. There had been a self-righteous fire in his eyes that night, not so different from the one I saw in Koresh.
Ferius says that the most dangerous moment in a person’s life is when they’ve just escaped death; the rush of beating the odds overcomes you and makes you reckless. I suppose that’s the only excuse I have for what happened next. I looked briefly at the blonde woman, who’d spoken little during the entire affair. “Do you have anything to add?” I asked.
She looked up only briefly before her eyes retreated back to the marble floor. “I… I serve at Her Majesty’s pleasure.”
“And who are you?” I asked.
“I am Karanetta, Mister Kellen. I teach the queen mathematics and astronomy.”
“Hmm.” I nodded. “The queen ever get bruised or burned in her mathematics and astronomy lessons?”
The woman looked up, a little horrified by the accusation. “No, no. Her Majesty is a most able student. A remarkable mind. She—”
I raised a hand. “That’s fine,” I said. “You can stay.”
Koresh pushed my shoulder with his hand and I took an involuntary step back. He was a big man who could probably take me in a fair fight. As if I’d ever let that happen. “What do you mean, ‘You can stay’?” he asked.
Queenslayer Page 6