“I like her, Kellen. She’s got fire in her.”
He climbed up into her lap and closed his eyes. My jaw was hanging open.
Tasia looked at me with a small smile on her face. “Friendly little fellow, isn’t he?”
“You have no idea,” I said.
Something eased in her at last, as if she had been holding too tightly to a heavy bundle of sticks and was finally ready to let them fall to the ground. “You said the queen sent you to me. If that’s true, then for what purpose?”
No damned idea, I thought, but decided to tread carefully. “She told me to keep you company. She said I should play cards with you.”
Tasia’s face softened. She started to speak and then stopped. I saw the beginnings of tears in the corners of her eyes. Was there some connection between the queen and Tasia and playing cards? Was it possible that there’d been no secret plans, no hidden motivations for my being sent here? Was I really here just to comfort a woman facing execution? “Do you want to play cards for a little while, Tasia?” I asked as gently as I could.
She nodded, and wiped her eyes on the sleeve of her dress. “For a little while. That would be nice.”
So we did just that. I pulled out a deck of cards and we spent the remainder of the hour playing hands of Country Harvest while Reichis lay snoring on Tasia’s lap and the afternoon sun brought a little warmth through the bars of the window.
25
Hospitality
That night I accepted the hospitality of Countess Mariadne’s keep. As northern fortresses went it was warm, elegant, and altogether inviting. A wiser man would’ve slept outside in the cold.
“You played cards?” the countess asked for what must have been the third time, finishing her meal by setting her cutlery back down on the table with the considered precision of someone who may want to stab you with it later.
The meal had been simple but plentiful, culminating with roast pheasant in a sort of winter berry sauce that I’m certain would have tasted delicious to anyone not being castigated every time they brought a spoonful to their lips. “Playing cards is what the queen ordered me to do”, I said.
“‘Playing cards is what the queen ordered me to do’,” Reichis repeated, mocking me as as he tore into the massacred remains of a second pheasant. The servants had categorically refused to feed him at the table, which had turned out to be for the best since the squirrel cat had created a battlefield’s worth of slaughter on the dining-room floor re-enacting his imagined stalking, pursuing and slaying of the “much more dangerous that you might expect” pheasant.
Mariadne went back to toying with her cutlery. A servant entered the dining room, no doubt with the intent of retrieving our dishes, only to surreptitiously back away into the outer hall when she caught her mistress’s expression. The countess, evidently aware of the effect she had on her staff yet determined not to spare me one ounce of her ire, said more quietly, “That girl is four days from the hangman’s noose. I travelled over a hundred miles to beg the queen for help, subjected myself to the depridations of that horrible court of hers, and you’re telling me the sum total of your efforts on Tasia’s behalf will consist of nothing more than a few hands of cards?”
I don’t really know what to do with righteously furious people when they aren’t actually trying to kill me. My instincts are all based on the premise that the best way to assuage their anger is to blast them out of existence. “Countess, you knew the limits of my involvement here from the moment we left the palace. It’s one of the reasons you hate me so much, isn’t it?”
She hesitated. “I thought…”
“You thought what, precisely?”
“Out on the road, when those men attacked, you fought—not entirely without skill—to protect me. Is a maid’s life worth so much less to you?”
“You want an honest answer?”
Her jaw tightened even as she kept staring at her plate. “If you think yourself capable of one.”
“I wasn’t trying to save you, countess. Had I been standing by the side of the road minding my own business when those men attacked your carriage, I’d’ve run in the opposite direction. I was saving myself.”
Her next words came out softly, almost resignedly, as if all the air were emptying from her lungs. “So you’re a coward.”
Somehow the lack of outrage in her voice only served to make me more defiant. “Had I not made that clear yet?” I got up and went to stand over her. “Who do you think I am, countess? I’m an exiled spellslinger with one good spell and a couple of dirty tricks. I have no money, no political power, and a bounty on my head in half the countries on this continent. I play cards and occasionally kill people with my one good spell, two holsters of powder and as much luck as my ancestors choose to grant me on any given day. I’ve got no friends, except a squirrel cat for a business partner who mostly steals from m—”
“Don’t drag me into this,” Reichis growled. He was standing on his hind legs, propping himself up against my right leg and was in fact, at that precise moment, pilfering a coin from my pocket.
“Shut up,” I said.
Mariadne must’ve thought I was talking to her. She rose up to face me, sending her chair screeching across the floor, glaring at me with eyes wide and cheeks flush with fury just waiting to be released.
I didn’t bother to explain. Instead I ended my tirade with, “Given everything you know about me, what precisely have I done to make you think I’m a hero, countess?”
Despite her anger with me, her response came haltingly, almost timidly. “At the royal palace, before my audience with the queen all anyone wanted to talk about was the brazen outlaw the queen had hired to be her tutor; the deadly spellslinger who turned up at court and put an end to Koresh and Arrasia—something no one else would’ve dared attempt. After the queen reacted to my plea with such callous indifference in front of her nobles, I thought… I hoped perhaps she’d sent you here to pursue some clever, clandestine course of action that would free Tasia.”
“How, exactly?”
She didn’t reply, but her eyes betrayed her. They went to the powder holsters at my sides.
And there it was. The length and breadth of Countess Mariadne’s newfound respect for me, defined entirely by the degree to which I was willing to kill for her. “I thought you might be able to blow the wall somehow,” she said awkwardly. “If you could just get Tasia out of that awful place…”
“Sure. No problem. Blow a hole in a two-foot-thick stone wall. I could probably do that.” I was lying. In a thousand years I couldn’t break through a wall like that. Still I asked, “And after I get her out? Then what?”
A flicker of hope appeared in Mariadne’s expression. “Tasia could run. I could help her get away from Sarrix, and then—”
I couldn’t help but laugh, even though it was cruel to do so. “Guess you’ve never been pursued by the queen’s marshals service, have you, your ladyship?” I shook my head. “How can you live your whole life in this country and never have learned what everyone in the borderlands knows? The marshals are some of the best trained, most dangerous men and women on the continent. You know why people fear the Daroman empire? It’s not your armies. It’s because everyone knows that if the queen sends her marshals after you, they’ll track you to the ends of the earth. ‘Trajedam necri sodastium frigida.’ The trail never runs cold.” I should’ve stopped there, but I’d narrowly avoided death one too many times lately, and fear and frustration got the best of me. “And if none of that dissuades you from this insane course of action you want me to take, consider the fact that not only has Tasia shown no inclination whatsoever to leave her cell or cooperate with your efforts to secure her release, she won’t even let you visit her.”
I braced myself for a slap in the face. Actually, a dinner knife to the throat was more likely. Neither came though. Mariadne just turned away from me and wrapped her arms around herself. “Then it’s over. I’ve failed Tasia. The one true friend I ever had is going t
o die, and the marshals won’t even let me say goodbye.”
An uneasy feeling spread out from the centre of my chest. My gaze went to Reichis, who appeared to be searching for a place to hide the coin he’d stolen from my pocket. Would I ever leave him to rot in a cell waiting to die, even if I knew nothing good could come from trying to free him?
The squirrel cat looked up at me and clacked his teeth a few times in quick succession as he tilted his head from side to side. I’d learned that this was how one squirrel cat calls another a coward. I hate it when he does that.
26
Charades
They put us in a guest room on the top floor, in what Erras informed me had once been the countess’s late husband’s study, which gave Reichis the creeps. The squirrel cat claims his kind don’t believe in ghosts (“If they were real, we’d just kill ’em again”), but he’s got a superstitious streak. Given how poorly the meal had gone I would’ve left the keep and sought out a travellers’ saloon outside town, but Mariadne’s resentment and disappointment in me had settled into such inconsolable grief that leaving felt like an act too craven even for me.
“No making hump-hump with the bitch countess, remember?” Reichis warned. He was sitting on his haunches rather precariously on the balcony railing outside our room, holding a handful of small rocks in one of his paws.
“You have a problem with Mariadne?” I asked.
Reichis tossed one of the pebbles at a crow’s nest lodged in a small gap in the roof. It missed by a good three feet. “I don’t care about her one way or the other. What I have a problem with is you gettin’ distracted.” He tossed another rock at the nest. “And crows. I hate crows.”
Crows also hate Reichis, and I suspected by morning they would have found a whole range of unpleasant ways to communicate their views on the subject. Reichis claims to speak crow, though when he talks to them it sounds as if he’s chittering the same insult over and over again. This also seems to be the case in the other direction.
“You need a different hobby,” I said.
Reichis paused in his assault to look at me. “Why? I like this one.” He turned and threw another rock, this one landing even further away from the nest.
“Distracted from what?” I asked.
Reichis made a little “hrumph” sound that went up just a bit in pitch at the end. This is squirrel cat for, “Are you still talking? I thought you were done talking. Maybe you should stop talking.” Theirs is an economical language.
“You said I was getting distracted. What am I supposedly getting distracted from?”
Reichis let all but one of his remaining pebbles fall over the side of the balcony. “From doing the queen’s dirty work, Kellen. That’s what you signed us up for.”
I didn’t like the phrase “dirty work”, but I let it slide. “I’m here, aren’t I? Played cards with Tasia just like I was ordered to.”
“Don’t act dumber than you already look,” he said, throwing the remaining stone at me. He has remarkable aim when I’m the target. “You’re tryin’ to figure out how to help the maid. Or the countess. Or maybe how to get in bed with the countess. Or the maid. Or both. None of those are good ideas, Kellen. Whatever it is the queen really sent us down here to do, it’s a safe bet it doesn’t involve anything that makes you or anyone else happy.” He made a little growling noise. “You’re the one who decided to risk our necks for a chance that the queen can find you a cure for the shadowblack, Kellen. It’s a little late to grow a conscience. Or an erection.”
Reichis was right. I’d bet on the queen, hoping she could help me. If the ruler of the Daroman empire can’t find you a cure, then chances are no one can. Now I needed to focus on delivering on my end of the bargain. But what was I supposed to be doing here? I thought back to the day at court when Mariadne had pleaded for clemency for Tasia. Teach her to play cards, the queen had said. And then two days later we’d been attacked by Zhuban raiders intent on murdering the countess. Had Leonidas engineered that by himself? Or Marshal Colfax? He’d wanted me gone from the palace, and the queen’s orders had certainly accomplished that. Ancestors, I thought. What if it’s the queen herself who wants Mariadne dead?
Reichis glanced up at me, fuzzy muzzle contorted into an expression that I assume was meant to convey disgust at my troubled ruminations. “Why don’t you use your—” he tapped a paw against the twisting markings around his left eye—“enig…um…eniggy…enigmarismitipitopystupidism?”
“I think you mean ‘enigmatism’.”
One corner of his lip curled up into a snarl. “That’s what I said.”
“Right, sorry.”
It wasn’t as if I hadn’t thought of that, but no matter how many times I tried to make the shadowblack markings around my left eye twist and turn to unlock the visions that would reveal the secrets I was trying to uncover, I just couldn’t seem to find the right question.
“All right,” I said at last, sitting down on the smooth stone of the balcony floor. “Let’s play a round of Lousy Rotten Bastards.”
“Lousy Rotten Bastards” was the name Reichis had chosen for the method we’d once devised for figuring out why other people were screwing with us.
He hopped down from the railing and ambled over to sit across from me. “Fine. Who am I?”
“The queen.”
“Okay, who are you?”
“Unfortunately I’m me.”
He shook his furry head. “No, no point. We don’t have anything to go on.”
“All right. Who am I then?”
“The countess,” he said. “Try not to enjoy it.”
I let the comment slide. “Fine. I come to you to—”
Reichis put up a paw. “After an entire year.”
“So you’re offended?”
“Of course I’m offended. I’m the Daroman queen, you ungrateful sow. You come see me on a regular basis or else—”
“Or else what?” I asked.
“Or else… I don’t know. Maybe it makes me think you don’t care about me as much as you should.”
I thought about that for a moment. Peevishness might be the reaction of an eleven-year-old girl, but a two-thousand-year-old monarch? I remembered the fiddling with her collar and the cuffs of her dress when we first played cards, showing me the burns and bruises. Why had she put her trust in a shadow-black outcast over everyone in the palace? Was she really that alone?
“The tutors,” I said, momentarily falling out of character. “Maybe the queen thought Mariadne could have helped her with the tutors.”
Reichis sniffed. I’ve noticed that he does that sometimes when he’s trying to remember something he’s been told, as opposed to seen himself. It’s weird, I know.
“You should have fought for me,” he said. “You’re supposed to be my ‘beloved cousin’, so why didn’t you protect me?”
“I didn’t know,” I said. “How could I know?”
“Right… No, wait. Tasia knew. She said so in her cell. So you had to have known.”
I shook my head. “Tasia never told me.”
“Rabbit droppings!” Reichis chittered. “You expect me to believe that the maid who’s willing to kill a military commander and go to the gallows on your behalf keeps secrets from you?”
“All right. She told me. What the hell was I supposed to do?” I thought about it more. Mariadne’s right on the northern border. Her husband’s dead and she’s dependent on the military. Leonidas is pressuring her into marriage—a marriage that’s not likely to be fun for anyone but Leonidas. What happens if Mariadne goes to the capital and starts sticking her nose into the affairs of powerful nobles and tutors who can’t be prosecuted? I shook my head. “I can’t risk helping you. If I try, chances are my life is over. You’re supposed to be some all-powerful monarch with the wisdom of a hundred generations, but you put all this on somebody else? Someone who’s in just as much danger as you? Solve your own damned problems!”
Reichis chortled. “Sorry, are you the countess
now? Or are you back to being you?”
“I’m the countess. I’m your favourite cousin. So why haven’t you come to help me? Or why haven’t we figured out how to help each other?”
Reichis sat back on his haunches. For a second I thought I might have stumped him. But then he raised a paw. “Because we can’t trust each other.”
“Why not?”
He got up and started pacing around. “Because… Because if I’m this weak at the palace, it means somebody’s betraying me—somebody’s sold their influence. How can I know it’s not you?”
It was my turn to get up and stretch my legs. “Why shouldn’t I suspect the same of you? Why haven’t you gotten Leonidas off my back?”
Reichis shook his head. “Can’t. He commands the northern border army.”
“And why do you care so much?”
“Because those stupid skinbag Zhuban raiders creep across the border every second day.”
Reichis climbed up onto the wide balcony railing and started pacing back and forth. Try to imagine a short, slightly tubby lump of fur ambling along earnestly on his rear legs, periodically scratching his ear with one paw, and you’ll understand why I had trouble not snickering.
But he was right. With all the problems going on, the queen couldn’t risk pulling Leonidas. It would weaken the northern border, and that could mean Darome being invaded by the Zhuban. The queen seemed like a sweet girl and all, but in the end a monarch’s job is to protect the realm. For all its military might, Darome hadn’t fought a war in decades, while all the Zhuban ever do is prepare to do battle in the name of their bizarre philosophies. The queen would have to be very careful of how she managed her army right now. So Mariadne’s problems would have come second to her own…or maybe it was even worse than that. Crap. “And how do I know that you aren’t already trading away my freedom for some kind of deal with Leonidas?”
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