The Jack of Ruin

by Stephen Merlino

  Time to marry Harric? A tiny part of her rebelled. What the Black Moon am I thinking?

  A wave of nausea swept through her guts and her stomach convulsed. Turning, she vomited in the ferns. The trees spun around her, and the wave washed back in her belly and bunched, threatening another surge. She steadied herself against a tree and cursed under her breath. Now her head throbbed as if her brain were stuck in a vise.

  Gods take it, she’d taken ill. Must have eaten something foul. She’d tell Willard to check their rations. As she started toward Willard’s camp, a wave of dizziness made her stop and sway over her boots, and when she recovered, she struggled to recall what she’d been doing.

  Tell Willard… Tell him what?

  Tell Willard that since her father was not present, that he—as her mentor—must give her hand to Harric. The dizziness cleared, but she did not set out to tell him. Willard was particular about things. He would want to know who would marry them, and where it would be held, and she didn’t have the answers to those questions yet. Better to wait until she at least knew that Father Kogan could perform the ceremony.

  *

  Harric woke to an anxious tension in his gut, and wood smoke heavy in the air. Willard’s voice had awakened him.

  “Feed the horses and pack up,” the knight said. “I won’t bleed Molly this morning. We strike out as soon as we arm.”

  The speed of their departure left little room for interaction with Caris, but Harric watched her closely for sign of the Compulsion. In the few moments before mounting, she alternately smiled or looked ill at the sight of him.

  Swallowing his worries, Harric fell in line behind Willard and rode. It wasn’t as easy as it had been, because the smoke in the air made the horses skittish. “Riding into a fire,” he muttered to Spook, who sat in his basket, grooming. “Should have cast your lot with a smarter man.”

  Whenever a gap in the trees and smoke allowed, he looked to the northwest, where he saw lowering clouds of smoke, but sometimes glimpsed shards of orange wildfire.

  Willard pushed their pace even harder.

  To the north, where smoke hadn’t blocked the view, he caught glimpses of the Godswall. Shining faces of vertical stone flashed in the sun. Snow-capped peaks gleamed like the fabled white palaces of the Kwendi. Though still two days’ travel hence, the mountains loomed huge and seemed near.

  “We’re clear of the Yoab Maze,” Willard said, when they crossed an upthrust of granite bedrock. “Closer we get to the Godswall, the thinner and rockier the soil. Not enough soil for the beasts to eat. Less danger we meet them.”

  “I regret my map is now of less use,” said Mudruffle, still speaking through the cloth. “It is my experience that yoab paths grow infrequent where soil is shallow.”

  But while the main Yoab Highway had ended, lesser yoab trails remained. These were less direct and sometimes wandered into dead ends, but their wide, flat surfaces made travel easy for horses, so it was worth a little backtracking to follow them.

  As they picked their way through one of these runs, Harric heard Kogan say something that caught his attention.

  “A wedding?” the priest said. He rode behind Harric, with Caris. “Course I can. I’m a priest, ain’t I? Har! But only yesterday you looked like you was ready to kill the lad.”

  Harric stiffened. He turned his head slightly to better hear what the priest said, but all he heard was the sound of Caris throwing up again.

  “You with child?” Kogan’s voice shifted into a merry tone. “Puking in the morning and looking to marry quick. I know how this goes.”

  “That is not true, father, and you must not say so.” Caris’s tone was sharp.

  As the priest fell over himself apologizing, Harric’s mind whirled. Wedding? She’d asked about a wedding? His gut felt like a load of damp clay. Glancing back at Brolli, Harric saw the Kwendi asleep under his blanket, but Mudruffle met his gaze with sparkling black eyes.

  “—been too long away from ladies, you’ll pardon me,” Kogan was saying. “But you’re ill, girl. Eat a bad seed?”

  When Caris failed to answer, Harric turned back and pretended to adjust a saddle pack, so he could look at her through a fall of hair over his eyes. She was frowning, looking ill and twisting the wedding ring on her finger.

  The Compulsion. It had to be. Fink said it’d be easy to tell what the spell did, and he was right. There was nothing subtle about it. The third weave was a failsafe Compulsion to force a wedding.

  “Maybe a bad seed,” she murmured. “It’s nothing. But what is your fee for a wedding, father?”

  “Fee-ee?” Kogan said. “I don’t fee. I marry peasants, and what peasant can afford a fee when they can’t afford to eat?”

  “But you’d marry a—someone who isn’t a peasant?”

  “Never did yet, but I’d be honored.”

  Harric snorted. No you wouldn’t, father. If the priest knew of the magic wedding ring on her finger, he’d refuse outright. In fact, if Harric wanted to scuttle any chance of the priest wedding them, he’d only need to reveal the ring to Kogan. It was a tempting thought, but the wedding ring was Caris’s secret, not his, and there was no telling how Kogan would react. Even in the best of circumstances, the hairy giant was a wild card.

  Upon hearing Kogan’s agreement to wed her, Caris groaned as if he’d socked her in the gut. Harric watched in alarm as she leaned from her saddle, dry-heaving.

  “You sure you’re well, milady?” Kogan said. “You want I should stop Geraldine and get you a mouthful of curds? Nothing like ox curd to calm a stomach.”

  Unable to speak, Caris shook her head.

  Harric’s gaze snapped back to the road ahead. You’re cobbing kidding me. Though he couldn’t be sure, his gut told him that in addition to forcing her feelings, the Compulsion was spurring her toward a quick resolution by making her physically sick if she resisted it.

  He stared, and as the brutality of the weave sank in, his course of action finally became clear—he would leave her. Waiting for Missy was no longer in the cards because Caris needed his help now, and Fink said the ring’s weaves weakened the farther he got away because the ring could no longer pull many of Harric’s strands to it. That much he could control: he’s strike out on his own, put distance between them, and the Compulsion would leave her alone.

  The thought did nothing to ease the ache in his chest, though. On the contrary, it made the break feel more complete, for once he left, he might never see her again.

  He slipped his hand into Spook’s basket to stroke the little cat.

  Fink would be upset when he learned of Harric’s decision. He wished now that he hadn’t agreed to let Fink invite Missy to look at a way to remove the ring. The more he thought of Missy’s horrible hooded skull and the cold emptiness of her presence, the less he trusted her, even if Fink thought he could control her. Harric’s gut was beginning to tell him that having Missy look at Caris’s spirit might be worse than never getting the ring off.

  Cob it. I never should have agreed. But he hadn’t been thinking clearly, and Fink had been so persistent. Hopefully Missy’s reaction wouldn’t be worse than Fink’s. She would be…what? Angry? Vengeful?

  He swallowed. So be it. Let her exact her price from him, if that was how it must be. As long as Caris was free, he’d pay it.

  Caris’s voice penetrated his meditation again. “Then all we need is a Noble House to have the wedding. Once we get back to the river…I don’t know if there might be one this far north. Maybe Mudruffle’s marked it on his map…if so, we could have it there.”

  “A Noble House?” Kogan said the word noble like it meant latrine. “You don’t need a fancy house to get married. All of Holy Nature’s your house! Noble House is hot and crowded with puffed talk and ragleaf and perfume and never enough light in the place. About the least holy place you could find.”

  “The house in my father’s country was a restful and spiritual place.”

  “Oh, pah,” Kogan said. “Never s
een a Noble House wasn’t hot as any cave in the underworld, and all them liars put together in one spot—more spirit-less places I never seen, unless it were inside a noble’s skull, and I seen a few o’ them, too, so I oughta know.”

  It took Caris a few moments to respond. “I didn’t ask for a sermon against nobles.”

  “No, I gave you that free,” said Kogan, without irony. “But I can give a wedding, all right—don’t take me wrong—and anywhere you likes. Maybe you wouldn’t mind a Common House? Sure to be a Common House or two once we’re back on the Free Road, though I still say a field or a bit a forest is hall enough, for the true wedding’s in your hearts, or what’s the use of marrying?”

  Harric stared ahead into the morning gray, his mind spinning through scenarios in which Kogan convinced Caris to marry right there or at the first farmhouse they found.

  Another reason to leave that night.

  At a wide spot in the yoab runs, Caris overtook Harric to ride ahead and draw up beside Willard. Harric urged Snapper to trot after her, but he was still too far behind to hear everything she said. He caught the words “wedding” and “Kogan,” and saw the knight look up from the depths of his meditation to give her a long, trancelike stare. Puffs of ragleaf gusted from his helmet when he cast a look back at Harric. Harric pointed emphatically at Caris, then at his ring finger, and made whirling motions beside his head with his other hand, to indicate the ring took her out of her mind.

  Willard’s eyes narrowed, and he turned back to Caris.

  “No Noble House this far north,” Willard said, and Harric caught a few phrases that followed: “…more appropriate… Kwendi palaces.”

  A wave of relief rinsed away some of Harric’s dread. Willard was making a play for putting the wedding off as long as possible—until their arrival in the Kwendi capital, where their enchanters could remove the ring before she forced the wedding. Caris seemed to consider this.

  Score one for the old strategist. Maybe meditation was restoring some of Willard’s sanity.

  Spook looked up and yawned—probably from boredom in the basket, as much as drowsiness—and Harric gave him a rub under his chin. “Gods leave it, I’d love to have as few worries as you do, Spook.”

  “I got songs I sing at weddings,” Kogan called ahead. He’d ridden Geraldine up close behind Holly and Idgit. “It’s called ‘Throw Me Down on a Bed of Hay.’ Want to hear it?”

  “Not fit for a lady’s ears,” Willard called back. “And I daresay you know none that are.”

  “Course I do, Will.”

  “Name one.”

  “Name one?”

  Harric glanced back to see Kogan sitting straight as a pole, chin thrust forward, as if Willard had questioned his ability to move in polite circles.

  When Willard returned his attention to the trail ahead, Harric asked the priest, “Do you know ‘The Gravedigger’s Song’?” Kogan returned his gaze with a blank but urgent stare. Harric translated: “‘The Ditch Digger’s Ditty’?”

  “‘The Ditch Digger’s Ditty’!” Kogan bellowed. “Real old and fancy words, too. Just right for a lady.”

  And before Willard could object, Kogan sang.

  O, the battle’s done, the army’s passed,

  The graves all filled with flesh,

  So I bucked my trowel and spade and set,

  to find the battle fresh.

  Beside the track I paused to piss,

  in dimsy dullness wrapped,

  And found a knight, full on his back,

  in rusting armor trapped.

  Quoth he in desert, cracking voice,

  “Fetch drink, thou varlet knave!

  A drop of beer or wine or blood!

  I’ve naught but dew for days!”

  My breeches down, my cob in hand,

  I froze and shook with dread.

  Had he not spoke, unknowing I’d

  have drained it on his head—

  “Cobs and pissing are fit topics for ladies?” Willard glared back, and Harric had to bite his lip to not laugh. As he expected, Caris’s concentration appeared to be upon Rag, not the song, and judging by her wrinkled brow, that task wasn’t easy an easy one today.

  Kogan noticed none of this, and bulled along at the top of his lungs.

  Quoth he, “My name is Rivenstaff.

  A knight I am, and bold.

  Fast fetch me drink, thou varlet knave,

  Or fast I’ll see thee sold.”

  At this his noble blue blood boiled,

  and rattled well his plates,

  Which rust had welded each to each,

  as fast as men to mates.

  ’Twas then I knew he did not rest,

  but captive lay in steel,

  Nor could he budge a fingerlet,

  nor lift his head or heel.

  “I have nor beer nor wine nor mead,

  dread lord, but I have tea.”

  “Not hot, but warm,” quoth I. Quoth he,

  “Then look thou give it me!”

  Then freely, glad, I loosed my stream

  down through his visor slot,

  And there he drank the stinging brew

  my kidneys two had wrought.

  I left him sputtering, that lord,

  and whistled as I went.

  For that’s the only gold a lord

  should ever get in rent.

  O! For that’s the only sort of gold

  a lord should get in rent!

  Kogan beamed like he’d won a singing contest. “Didn’t I say I could sing? How’d you fancy it, lady?”

  Caris looked back gave the priest a quick smile and a nod. Willard noticed this, and to his credit, the old knight said nothing and kept his gaze forward, quietly shaking his head.

  Kogan seemed disappointed with the reception. “I remembered another whiles I was singing,” he said. “It’s called ‘The Longest Lance of All.’ Have a listen—”

  “Thank you, father, that is enough,” said Willard. “The knave has had his jest.”

  Harric let out a long breath and shrugged. “We needed something to smile about.”

  “Liked it, did you?” Kogan grinned.

  “It was a good song, father.”

  But in truth, it only diverted Harric for as long as Kogan sang. The cold weight of clay guts returned, and no amount of sighing relieved it.

  *

  When they stopped at midday to rest beside a brook, Harric picketed the horses in his string in a patch of dry grass, but left the saddles on in case they needed to ride on a moment’s notice. As he rose from checking Snapper’s rear hooves, Willard stood before him. Startled, he had no time to speak before the knight’s enormous hand seized Harric’s collars and shoved him back against a tree.

  “What—?” Harric winced against the rough bark jabbing his back.

  “Did you get her with child?” Willard said. His eyes—only inches from Harric’s—shone with violet fury. “Is that the morning sickness in her?”

  “With child?” Anger flared like resin fire behind Harric’s breastbone. “To do that I’d have to touch her, your Holy Righteousness, and I carefully avoid that. And not because you forbid it, but because I forbid it.” Furious, he still managed to keep his voice to a fierce whisper, so Caris would not hear him across the clearing. “It’s your god-touched ring, Sir Willard. Like I tried to tell you.”

  Willard held his glare for several long moments, breathing loudly through his nostrils. Harric tempted fate to speak so openly to this blue-furied Willard, but he couldn’t stop himself. His grief and self-hatred boiled over.

  Willard released Harric and stepped back. “If you take advantage of that ring…”

  “The ring you were supposed to be protecting? The ring you gave me without telling me it was magic?” Harric stepped forward to look up in Willard’s face. “You’re the one who’s hurt her, not me. I’m doing right by her.”

  “Sir, shall we go?” Caris called.

  Willard held Harric’s glare a moment
longer, then snorted and gave Caris a curt nod.

  “We just dismounted. I thought we were resting the horses.” Harric looked from Willard to Caris and back. “You mean you’re leaving us again?”

  “Yes.” Willard’s ragleaf breath assailed Harric. And with that, he left Harric and mounted Molly.

  “You’re stopping everything so you can get another mouthful?” Harric said, once the knight had started Molly away. He couldn’t keep the dismay and anger from his voice. “Is it no matter that every hour of daylight we lose is an hour Sir Bannus gains on us?”

  Willard rode away without acknowledgement, and Caris fell in behind him. She glanced over her shoulder, eyes unmistakably amorous, and it punched a spike of guilt and helplessness through Harric’s chest.

  Turning away, he strode toward Idgit, where Brolli slept in his saddle.

  “Time for some answers, ambassador,” he muttered.

  “Hope you don’t mind, Master Harric,” said Kogan, as Harric passed. The priest reclined against Geraldine, who lay in the grass, chewing cut. “Your cat was mewing something pitiful, so I took him for a bit of Geraldine’s milk.” Spook looked up from a cup where he’d buried his face, white flecks in his whiskers.

  “Thank you, father,” Harric said.

  “You going to tell him about Willard going off?” The priest nodded toward Brolli.

  “No. I…” Harric almost said, I don’t trust him, but wasn’t sure Brolli was truly asleep or listening. “No.”

  Kogan nodded. “I’ll have a talk with Will, and he’ll see sense. It ain’t like Will to let the Blood make him sloppy like this.”

  “You?”

  Kogan tossed a twig at Harric. “You’ll see, you puppy. He’ll listen to me.”

  Harric shrugged. “Better than me trying, that’s for sure. But maybe work out what you’re going to say before you say it?”

  Kogan closed his eyes and stretched back to enjoy the sun. “Never did before. Probably jinx it if I do.”

  “Right. What could go wrong?”

  Harric left him and strode up to Idgit, where he stripped from Brolli’s head the blanket that acted as his artificial night. “I’m sorry to wake you, ambassador,” he said, not bothering to veil his agitation, “but I need to know if you know anything else about that wedding ring.”