The Jack of Souls

by Merlino, Stephen

  She frowned and glanced up at him, an unspoken question in her eyes, then turned and climbed the stairs to the porch and peered at the carriage. Whatever family crest it was, she recognized it, and quickly retreated into the doorway of the inn.

  Harric exhaled. Two strokes of luck: she’d evaded sighting, and he’d evaded the impossible task of hiding his twentieth con.

  “Simple as a mule-kicked dog,” said Rudy, nodding at Caris. The stableman had barged between revelers on the porch behind Harric’s cart. He leaned his bare and ample belly against the rails and flashed a yellow grin. “But simple don’t bother Harric,” he announced to the porch at large. “He’s a whore like his mama, so he’ll bed a dog if there’s coin in it!”

  Rudy’s cronies laughed, and Rudy beamed like he’d won a game of wits.

  The revelers watched Caris lingering in the doorway, and Harric wondered if they saw what he saw. Tall, serious, stronger than most of them, she was also shapely, something curiously amplified by her men’s garb and the plain horsetail of her hair. By the looks on several of the men’s faces, he judged he wasn’t alone in admiring.

  “She’s horse-touched, not simple,” Harric returned. “So I’ll wager what bothers Rudy is that she’s so good with his horses she makes him look simple. Or maybe he’s worried she’ll tell us of his nighttime visits to the fillies in the back stalls.”

  The porch erupted in laughter, and Rudy’s face distorted with rage. “Shut up! Shut up all of you all!” He turned on Harric. “Know why I’m drinking early, lord-boy? I’m celebrating because this is the day your crazy momma said we’d be rid of your fancy-talking skinny bastard ass. Think I don’t know you drammed my whiskey last night? I’m gonna see you swing from the gallows tower, boy.” He gestured past the gate toward the four-story gibbet on the Hanging Road. “Be the best thing ever happened, when they string your whoreson carcass up.”

  “Get the stable master another whiskey!” a reveler called. “He’s busting a gut!”

  “Go hang yourselfs!” Rudy snarled.

  The revelers laughed and redoubled their heckling, until Rudy whirled and barked in reply, his pimpled back pressing through the rails. That was when Harric recognized a new face among Rudy’s cronies—one of Lyla’s ex-master’s bodyguards. The man sat drinking, coolly watching Harric. A chill of dread in Harric’s stomach. There could be no coincidence the man found Rudy, Harric’s oldest enemy, in the outpost. And Lyla’s master had kept three bodyguards; if one were here, the others were near.

  The carriage creaked to a halt before Harric, making his heart jump. The distraction of Rudy and his new muscle had kept him from studying it for last-moment clues about the occupants. Worse, Rudy remained. Had the stableman got wind of Harric’s games, and come to expose him? Harric clenched his teeth, trying to smile as the driver hooked his reins and clambered down to the running board to open the door for his master.

  Calm down. Trust your initial read.

  The driver opened the carriage door and bowed as a pampered-looking gentleman emerged from beneath the lintel and stretched to his full height in the doorframe. He breathed deeply through thin, well-plucked nostrils, as if to take in the fresh mountain air, but the stink of the market struck him in the nose like a fist.

  The lord pressed a lacy handkerchief to his nose. “Gods leave us, what a place.” He spoke to the driver through the scented fabric. “We’ll stay only as long as we must.”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  A lady ducked her head out the door beside the lord, wrinkling her nose but peering eagerly at the tumult of the market. She was strikingly lovely, with heavy-lidded green eyes and a crop of ginger hair in the Queen’s latest fashion. Harric risked a direct glance, only to find her unabashedly assaying his parts like a housewife judging dainties at the butcher. What he hoped she saw was a young man of average-to-slight frame with fine hands and features—handsome, but better suited for comfort than for land clearing in the north. He made sure his green bastard’s belt was visible, displaying a gentle blood equal to hers while hinting at all the romance and rascality of bastardy. And if she saw only a bastard slave-in-free-clothing…well, he could work with that too; it just wouldn’t be as fun.

  “Leave soon?” she said, evidently pleased by what she saw. “I think there might be something here worth staying the night for.”

  Harric bowed. If this is my doom, I could do a lot worse.

  He laid one hand over his breast in a show of gallantry that also kept his surplus charms beneath his shirt, while letting the seven he’d chosen for the carriage swing out in plain view.

  Several maids-in-waiting giggled in the carriage, eyes flashing flirtatiously through the rear side window. But a second lady within sat rigid in the forward sofa, with none of their spirit. Her wide brown eyes fixed in horror upon the gallows still visible a mile back on the road, its half-dozen corpses swinging gently in the breeze. Even from here it was clear the corpses were Iberg; their olive skin and outlandish clothing cried it as loudly as it labeled them witches.

  “Terrible, isn’t it, my lady,” said Harric, leaning toward the window so his witch charms caught her eye.

  The moment she saw them, she rose to the lord’s side and whispered in his ear.

  He dismissed her with a sneer. “Out of the question. Those charms are rubbish.”

  “Please, my lord!”

  The lord turned to her, exasperated, as if the subject were a persistent and vexing part of their journey thus far. He pointed at the gallows. “You see those Ibergs, my love?”

  “They’re witches, my lord! Ibergs are all witches.”

  “Indeed, love, they are. But they are dead witches. Dead Ibergs cannot hurt you. The fine people of this lovely settlement hang them all for your benefit, and not a one gets by.”

  “It’s true,” Harric said, as if trying to help. “And they’re not after you anyway, my lady; they’re after the magic the Kwendi have in the north. They say the magic’s something the imperial magic schools of the Ibergs have never seen before, so they’re crazy to steal it. They come creeping over by the dozen, trying to slip by, but I am certain we catch most all of them. It’s hard for an Iberg to go unnoticed.”

  The lord made a show of strained tolerance of a bastard’s interruption. “You see there, my love? These witches haven’t the faintest interest in any of us.”

  “But the Kwendi are witches too,” she said, taking the bait Harric had dangled. “And they hate us for settling their land in the north. What if we clear our land, and they come for us with magic?”

  “We’ll fight them, of course, and win it our way. Without magic.”

  The green-eyed lady laughed, a sound like tinkling chimes. “Brother dear, your lady wife is fairly dying for a witch-stone. Why don’t you be a kind husband and ask the bastard if he’ll sell you one of his. He appears to have stones enough to serve us all.”

  His sister’s brash tone finally caught the lord’s attention. He followed her gaze to Harric and sneered. “Really, Sister, you get more desperate with every mile from court. Or have you lost your sense of smell entirely?” He turned then to Harric, signaling the end of the discussion with the women. “We will buy twenty of your barley sacks, Bastard. Your prices are as marked?”

  Harric tried a new angle, slipping out of his frontier accent to his purest accent of the court. “Indeed so, Your Grace. It will be my greatest pleasure to serve you.”

  The lord raised a plucked eyebrow. “You speak as one of the educated.”

  “Raised for court, Your Grace.”

  “And he don’t let us forget it!” Rudy heckled from behind.

  Wonderful. Rudy was listening. The lord hadn’t yet noticed the stable master amidst the clamor of the market, but to Harric he sounded louder and drunker than usual. Harric stepped nearer the lord to screen his view of Rudy, and to make it harder for Rudy to hear Harric’s words. “My mother was a courtesan in the first years of our queen. She educated me herself.”


  “Oh, how lucky of us to meet him!” said the green-eyed lady. “For this rustic bastard presents to you a very mirror of how you shall look after a year of clearing land.”

  The lord snorted, clearly unamused. “Gods leave me, I fear you say true. Tell me, Bastard: how does one of your breeding stand to live in this sinkhole of piss and vomit? Tell me your trick, for it will be as gold to me in the northlands.”

  Harric laughed as if the barb were a jest, and called a stable boy to load the grain.

  As Harric leaned down to take coins from the driver, the seven witch charms swung out again from his neck, and the lord snorted. “I expect you and your mates are selling that rubbish to the ignorant? Not a very honorable sport, Sir Bastard.”

  “You mistake me, Your Grace; I’m not selling mine.”

  “Not selling? Surely you don’t mean that you keep them for protection?”

  Harric dropped his eyes as if embarrassed. “I used to sell them, Your Grace…but then when the witches started showing up—”

  “You forgot your education.” The lord slapped his knee as if to emphasize the point to his watching wife. “See how a court education is undone by superstition!”

  Rudy blustered something like “superstition my pocky ass!” so Harric drew yet nearer to the window and directed the lord’s attention to the gallows far behind on the road. “That witch on the end cursed four of us one night. One of my mates fell dead and another keeled over with a plague, but my third friend and I didn’t feel a thing.” Harric gave his witch-silver charms a solemn pat. “These charms saved us. I’ve thought about it many times, and I’m sure of it.”

  Harric avoided the eyes of the frightened lady in the carriage, but it was to her he now played. “You see, the friend that died had no witch-silver at all—”

  “Bollocks!” Rudy cried.

  “—and the friend that got sick had a charm of inferior quality,” Harric continued. “But I had these very pure nuggets, and my friend had one too, and we both survived without a mark.”

  “Lies,” said the lord, “or pure coincidence.”

  “Oh, please!” said his wife. She clung to his sleeve and went limp at the knees. “Buy one, my lord. Just one for me. Please!”

  Her ladies in waiting clamored for the same, and the lord paled, apparently sensing his peril too late. “My love, he isn’t selling, so that’s an end of it.”

  “But he has so many!” Her lips went thin and pale as lines of chalk. When her chin began to quiver, the fight seemed to leave him. His shoulders sank, and he sighed as if realizing that if he did not buy them he would face this fight at every gallows they passed.

  Blushing, he leaned out the door. “I’ll give you twenty-five silvers for them,” he muttered.

  “Your Grace? I’m very sorry, as I said, I do not wish to sell—”

  “Fifty, then.” He made a wry smile. “You said your friend had only one of these, which proves you need only one to protect you. Keep one, and I’ll take the rest.”

  Harric stammered, as if cornered by the logic, and Rudy bellowed something, but this time the revelers shouted him down, and sounds of a scuffle broke out on the porch behind.

  “Here’s fifty silvers,” said the lord, handing Harric a purse and snatching six of the charms from Harric’s neck. Harric acted almost too bewildered to take the coins with one hand and close the other around one remaining charm for himself.

  The lord beamed in satisfaction as he withdrew with the charms into the carriage. The driver secured the door and clambered back to his seat at the reins. “A pleasure reasoning with you, Sir Bastard,” said the lord from his window. “Gods leave you. And I wish you the best of luck in regaining your sense of smell.”

  Harric hid his jubilation in a bow of humble acceptance. He glanced at the cliff above and saw a tiny sliver of sunlight on the highest outcrop.

  The sun had yet to set. He had twenty cons.

  He’d done it. And the moment he realized it, something cold and hard uncoiled from around his heart and left him. A darkness left him that he’d known so long he’d forgotten it was there. His mother’s curse, evaporating like morning fog. Gone. He’d done it. He was free.

  Sweaty arms bear-hugged Harric from behind, pinning his arms and crushing the air from his lungs. “Wait, Your Worship!” Rudy yelled, as the carriage began to roll away.

  Harric struggled in the embrace, twisting and kicking, but Rudy knew his tricks. It wasn’t the first time they’d struggled. A blow to the back of Harric’s head sent spots across his vision. Head butt. Rudy’s specialty.

  “Leave him be, ye fat guts!” a reveler called. “Ye’ll spoil the party!”

  “He shamed His Worship!” Rudy shouted. “Your Worship, see for yourself!”

  The carriage halted before it had gone a pace. As Harric refocused his eyes, the lord appeared in the open window. Laughter from his recent triumph still lit his face. “What is this noise?”

  “Your Grace,” said Harric, “this man’s a notorious drunk—”

  Another head butt sent Harric’s ears ringing. A sticky hand clapped over his mouth.

  “Worship, he’s been having you on. You look and see. He gots twenty of them charms under his shirt and they’re as cheap as dog teeth in these parts. When you leave he’ll bring ’em out and the whole porch will have a laugh.”

  “That’s how he served my master,” said one of the saffron grooms. “Cheated at cards and stole away a prime slave.”

  The lord’s smile faltered. His eyes flicked from Harric to the faces on the porch, and whatever he saw among the revelers made him flush with color. He rapped on the door and the driver descended to open it. The lord stepped across the gap to Harric’s cart, where he stood eye to eye with Harric, smoldering.

  The porch fell silent.

  “Is this true, bastard?” said the lord.

  Rudy squeezed the voice from Harric. “Open his shirt, Your Worship, and you’ll see it’s true.”

  The lord tore Harric’s shirt to expose a dozen additional charms on strings against his skin.

  As if to confirm Rudy’s claim, a gust of laughter burst from the revelers.

  Harric twisted his face from under Rudy’s hand. “These charms are of inferior quality—” he began, but Rudy bear-hugged the breath from him and left him mouthing the air like a fish.

  The lord lifted the stones from Harric’s chest and examined the nuggets. His lips flattened in a tight line. “They are identical to the ones I purchased,” he said, very softly. Harric met the lord’s eyes, and in them he saw the game was up. The lord snatched back his purse of silvers.

  One of the revelers guffawed. To the man beside him he said, “Pay up! It’s sunset, and he made twenty.”

  “No, indeed,” said the other. “The fat man buggered it.”

  “See there, Your Worship?” said Rudy. “They all knows it.”

  Tears stung Harric’s eyes even as a ludicrous grin overspread his face. Had he triumphed over a death curse only to be hanged as a common jack by the likes of Rudy?

  A stinging slap from the lord failed to wipe the grin away.

  “You dare shame me, bastard?” The lord drew near, his voice barely a whisper. “As a full blood of your rank I can mark you. Yet you dare?”

  “It isn’t you I gamed, Your Grace,” said Harric. “It’s my mother. It’s complicated.”

  The ginger-haired lady clapped her hands. “Oh, mark him, brother! Do mark him.” She rose with a pot of green slave paint and held it out the window to her brother. “This is turning into such fun. I hope we meet other bastards we can paint. But don’t mark his hair, dear brother. He has such fine hair.”

  The lord took the pot and plunged the brush deep in the bright green paint it held. “I thought to mark our new peasants with this, bastard, but since the Blood Purity Laws allow me to mark a bastard…”

  Harric struggled in the stableman’s arms. “The Queen abolished the Purity Laws.”

  “This is the frontier.
There are no laws.”

  “The Queen’s frontier.”

  The lord smirked. He drew so near that Harric could see every pore in the skin of his high, sharp nose, and feel the warmth of citrus-scented breath on his cheek. “The Queen is weak, Bastard. Her reforms weaken. Maybe you haven’t heard up here, but she grows old and has no heir. There is many a strong lord ready to lead us back to the Old Ways when she goes. Indeed, in some parts the Old Ways and Purity Laws already rise again.”

  “Your Grace—” Harric began, but Rudy clapped a hand over his mouth. The lord lifted a great glob with the brush, which he slopped in the hair of Harric’s forehead.

  The ladies squealed in delight.

  “You are marked for judgment,” the lord announced, loud enough for the porch to hear. “You will stay here on public display until the mark dries. And this fine man”—he nodded to Rudy—“shall be my deputy until a gentleman of greater than green blood arrives to carry out justice for the crime of”—the lord swirled the brush in the hair, leaving an algae-colored cowlick where Harric could see it—“the crime of lying to a lady.”

  A pulse of shame struck Harric at the thought Caris might be present. A glance found her easily at the rear of the crowd, head and shoulders above the others. On her face he saw a look of hurt and confusion, as if it were her he’d conned. She turned for the inn too late to hide a grimace of pain on her face. The sight stabbed deep into Harric.

  Rudy was stammering, “Won’t you give justice yourself, Your Worship?”

  “That is for one of higher blood than mine, sirrah. But fear not,” he said, raising his voice for the market to hear him. “Before nightfall, I promise you this: a waterwheel shall land with more lords of high color than this cesspit’s ever seen. Indeed, you shall find a Phyros-rider among them. One of the Old Ones, I believe?”

  A murmur of shock rippled through the market. Several merchants near Harric began packing up their stalls. Emigrants behind the carriage agitated to squeeze past and win clear of the crowded gauntlet, which would be a trap to them if a Phyros should come.

  The lord beamed with pleasure. “You will be great sport I’m sure, Sir Bastard. I would stay to see the famous Gallows Ferry gallows in action, but an Old One can be…unpredictable. Caution bids me go.” He tore most of the additional charms from Harric’s neck, and returned to his carriage, where he showered the stones upon the delighted ladies.