Fortune's Fool

by Mercedes Lackey

  “Not anymore,” came the grim reply that sent shivers up her spine. “He may be gone, but something else has taken his place. And whatever that something may be, it is not of the local Tradition, it is very powerful, and altogether evil.

  Something, perhaps, has learned from the Katschei’s mistake and is moving to take advantage of his absence.”

  She bit her lip, but he was not yet finished. “Whatever is there has taken one, or perhaps two, magical maidens.

  A swan maiden was taken right from under the noses of her sisters, and they came to me to ask for my help.

  There is a Snyegurochka, a Snow Maiden, missing, and she has not melted. I should not think twice about this except that she was walking in the cool of evening in the same area where the swan maiden was taken, and she did not return. The place where both vanished is very near the Katschei’s castle.”

  “Have you sent anything to spy there?” she asked, knowing she would probably not like the answer.

  170

  Mercedes Lackey

  He nodded. “Yes. And there is the trouble. My spies were seabirds and they have not come back. Your sister’s magic cannot pierce the dark veil about the place. You are the only one I have that can go to the Drylands with impunity.”

  She nodded gravely. “Then that is what I must do,” she replied. She thought fleetingly of going back to Sasha and asking for his help—but the Katschei was not in his Kingdom, and he could not in good conscience leave home to help her. Right now, this was a concern only for the Sea King. The swan maidens had asked him for help, not the King of Led Belarus.

  “Though your fighters cannot come that far onto land, I can get help should I need it with my paper bird,” she continued. “And if need be, you can trade future aid for me against aid from your allies. Besides,” she added, smiling slightly, “I have allies of my own.”

  The Sea King nodded. “Then go with all speed, daughter. I feel great foreboding when I turn my mind in that direction. Whatever it is must have plans beyond the kidnapping of a maiden or two. The swan’s sisters are awaiting you on the shore at the point nearest to the castle.”

  Somberly, she saluted him, and left. As she went to the stables to find another dolphin-helper, she tried to imagine what could have gotten wind of the Katschei’s absence and also known enough to subvert all her father’s formidable powers to keep him from discovering what was afoot.

  For that matter, even vacant, the Katschei’s castle had some nasty protections on it. The Katschei had never Fortune’s Fool

  171

  been one to leave a door unlocked behind him. So whatever it was that had taken it—

  Must be as powerful, or more powerful, than the Katschei itself.

  The swan maidens were inconsolable.

  There were five of them left, all told, and they huddled in their feather cloaks on the shingle and wept, and in between bouts of tears, told her their history.

  They were all sisters, and there had been seven at one point, but the youngest had been claimed by a mortal husband, who had won her freedom. She they saw from time to time—but this!

  Patiently, Katya tried to unravel their tale; she appealed to the eldest as being, perhaps, the most sensible, sitting beside her and trying to make sense of what she was saying through her sobs.

  “I can’t help you if I can’t understand what happened,” she said, trying not to sound impatient.

  “You have to tell me exactly, from the beginning, precisely what happened to your sister. Every detail. Details are important and tell me much.”

  That elicited a wail from all of them. Finally the eldest managed to choke down her tears long enough to blurt out, “It was just like every morning! We went to the lake where the hot spring is to bathe and play in the water!

  Even when the Katschei was in his castle, no one bothered us there!”

  “We thought it was safe!” cried another—Katya had 172

  Mercedes Lackey

  stopped trying to tell them apart; really, between their floods of tears and identical swan cloaks, it was like trying to distinguish among a flock of real swans. And, sadly, they seemed nearly as bird-witted as real swans.

  That called forth another spate of sobbing.

  “All right, you went to enjoy yourselves. Why did your sister leave the rest of you?” she asked.

  “We wanted to sun ourselves, but Yulya wanted to sleep in the shade,” wept a third. “So we—we—we—left her! Alone! And we heard a scream and a loud wind, and she was gone!”

  “Show me the place,” Katya demanded. They looked at her doubtfully.

  “It is dangerous,” said one, and “It is a long way away,”

  said another. “We can fly. You can’t,” said a third.

  “This lake drains by the river here, yes?” she asked, suppressing her annoyance. “I can swim up the river as fast as you can fly. Show me the place.”

  As they continued to hesitate, timorously, she lost all patience. “I can see you do not want my father’s help,”

  she snapped. “I will return to him and—”

  They mobbed her, clung to her, wept all over her, begging her not to go. Finally, after far too much dithering, the eldest agreed to show her where they had left Yulya. With a sense of relief, Katya pulled loose from the others and dove into the river.

  Though swimming upstream was generally an effort, the current was slow and the river placid—exactly the sort of stream that swans preferred—and Katya was at the Fortune’s Fool

  173

  lake only a little behind the eldest swan maiden. The girl was waiting on the bank, every feather in her cloak trembling as she shivered with fear.

  Good heavens, Katya thought, with no little disgust. As timid as these girls are, I am amazed they ever leave their father’s palace. Perhaps it was nothing more than the force of The Tradition, for every swan maiden tale that Katya had ever heard involved one or more of the maidens being taken, or seduced, or hunted beside a lake far, far from their home. Perhaps they had no choice.

  Perhaps it was The Tradition itself that forced them into leaving home.

  If that was the case…

  Well, she could sympathize even while it made her impatient with their timidity.

  She leaped out of the water like an otter, startling the girl, who jumped and squeaked.

  “So, where was your sister when you left her?” Katya asked, looking around at the lush forest that surrounded the lake. She was not surprised that the swans came here.

  Not more than a few feet away, a hot spring bubbled up out of the ground and cascaded down a gravel bed, steaming, to end in the lake waters. The grass at the verge of the forest presented an attractive place to doze in the shade. And, she presumed, there were good places for sun-basking not far from here. Traditionally speaking, swan maidens, like her father’s mermaids, must spend a great deal of time sunbathing and combing their hair.

  Don’t they ever get bored? She’d have gone mad.

  174

  Mercedes Lackey

  Well, evidently not. Perhaps The Tradition ensured that all swan maidens were born as brainless as the birds themselves….

  That’s unkind….

  “Here,” said the girl, shaking in every limb, pointing to a spot where the feather cloak still lay.

  But true. “You didn’t take her cloak with you?” she asked, a little stunned.

  “No. Should we have?” The girl blinked at her.

  “What happens if someone who isn’t one of your sisters puts on the cloak?” Katya demanded.

  The girl blinked again. “They become a swan like us, I suppose….”

  Katya did her best not to smack herself in the head in frustration. “And it didn’t occur to you that someone could put on the cloak, become a swan, and follow you back to your father where he—or she—could then enchant you and put you all in his power?”

  The girl’s eyes widened, and she dropped to the ground, crying. “Oh no—oh no!” she sobbed
“Oh this is terrible, dreadful—”

  “Oh for—” Katya strode over to her and took her by the shoulders and shook her hard. “It didn’t happen! The cloak is still here! Get control of yourself, for pity’s sake!”

  Startled, the girl stopped sobbing.

  “Now, take your sister’s cloak and go,” she ordered.

  “Leave this to me.”

  She didn’t have to give the order twice. In the blink of an eye, a swan stood where the girl had been. It picked Fortune’s Fool

  175

  up the cloak in its beak and flew off, white feathers streaming behind it.

  Katya went back to examining the area where the swan maiden had been taken. And she was not too terribly shocked when she found a patch of moss in the deepest shade where the temperature was considerably colder than anywhere else. And beside that patch of moss, a cluster of snow-drops was blooming.

  So, now she knew that both girls had been taken from the same place. What else did they have in common?

  Magic, she decided. The likelihood that it was any other common denominator was vanishingly small. The snow maiden was a peasant, the swan maiden was a princess. One was born of magical blood, the other made by magic. One lived in a simple hut in the forest, the other in a palace East of the Sun and West of the Moon. One was hardworking, the other pampered.

  Well, there was one good way to test this theory. And Katya didn’t think she was going to be able to get into the Katschei’s palace any other way.

  But first, she needed a disguise.

  Bereginia. She would disguise herself as the riverbank maiden. Magic enough, but not too much magic, and surely exactly what this kidnapper was looking for.

  She waited for The Tradition to notice her, waited to feel it focusing on her. I must be a bereginia, she told it. This thing that hunts maidens does not belong here. I will make it go back to its place. But I must be a bereginia to do so—

  She felt the magic of The Tradition gather around 176

  Mercedes Lackey

  her, she pulled it to her, and felt it settle on her like a heavy cloak—

  The sunlight gathered around her and dazzled her eyes. Then it was gone.

  And there she was, dressed from head to foot in brown and green, green as the reeds and the rushes, green as the grass and the river water. Brown as the mud of the bank and the stones. She felt something on her head, touched it, and realized she was wearing a crown of water iris and plaited rushes. Her shift was of filmy brown linen, light as gossamer, with huge sleeves that swept the ground, embroidered in green. The sarafan, the over-gown, was green, and embroidered in a hundred different colors of green and brown. A green half cloak, slung over the right shoulder and under the left, was also embroidered in green and brown.

  She was enchanted. She had never actually seen a bereginia; she’d no idea what they looked like or what they wore; she had only been hoping that it wasn’t entirely hideous, some strange primitive thing of rawhide and rattling bones.

  She didn’t get much time to appreciate it though—

  She heard a strange sound above her head, and looked up.

  There was a whirlwind in the sky above her, descending rapidly down onto her. Her first instinct was to run—but of course, that was not what she needed to do. She stood her ground as the sand-colored, top-shaped vortex homed in on her, whining a high-pitched note that set Fortune’s Fool

  177

  her teeth on edge. Of course, this thing had waited until she was alone.

  She ducked as it hit her, and used those long sleeves to screen her face; a good thing she did, or she would have been blinded by the debris in the wind. She was in the center of a whirl of hot, dry air full of sand and dust that engulfed her and almost stole her breath away. And then she felt her feet lose contact with the ground.

  Despite her best intentions, she screamed. It did no good of course. She felt it take her, and with a sickening lurch, felt it hurtle up and sideways with her suspended in the middle of it.

  All she could think of at that moment was Sasha….

  It seemed to take forever, but the time between when the whirlwind picked her up and when it deposited her on the battlements of the Katschei’s castle could not have been very long at all. It had been mid-afternoon by the sun when she had called on The Tradition to disguise her. It was still mid-afternoon, though perhaps just a bit later, now.

  But when the whirlwind dissipated and she could see again, she got a tremendous shock. The Katschei’s castle had once stood in the heart of a bleak, oppressively dark and overgrown forest, one where all the trees were droop-branched pines, more black than green, where the ends of the branches dripped endlessly, where fog wreathed the landscape and the space between the trees was host to unwholesome-looking mushrooms and briars with thorns as long as a finger.

  178

  Mercedes Lackey

  Not anymore.

  Now the castle stood in the heart of a desert.

  In every direction, all she could see were sand dunes and little patches of scrub. The sun beat down on her like a hammer on an anvil, and the sky was like an upturned enamel bowl, glaring and pitiless.

  “Hmpf.”

  She turned, hearing the sound behind her, and stared.

  He was twice as tall as she, and barely half-clothed.

  His skin was the color of beaten bronze, his eyes black and slanted, and his head mostly bald except for a topknot of black hair as coarse as a horse’s tail, bound at the base with a gold ring. He wore baggy silk trews of an eye-watering scarlet color, and shoes that matched with pointed, upward-curling toes, a pair of gold bracelets around his biceps, and nothing more. He looked down at her, arms folded over his hairless chest.

  “And what are you?” he asked in a strangely accented voice.

  She didn’t have to act to get her voice to tremble. As it happened, she knew what this was, because she had heard about them from her father, in his tales of his family’s war with Drylanders of the Southern Kingdoms.

  It was a Jinn. And most Jinn were evil. “A bereginia, sir.

  A simple dweller on the riverbank—”

  “Enough.” He cut her off with a gesture. “Go down and join the others. You serve me now, whatever you are.” His voice rang in her ears, with overtones like a brass gong.

  Fortune’s Fool

  179

  She looked where he pointed, down into the central courtyard of the castle, which was, at least, still a garden.

  She saw three other young women down there, one listlessly reading a book, one picking at embroidery, and one sitting and staring at nothing.

  She glanced back at the cruel, scowling face of the Jinn and scuttled down the cut-stone stairs from the battlements to the courtyard, feeling entirely too much like a mouse in the gaze of a cat that is not quite hungry…

  …yet.

  She entered the garden not sure of what her reception was going to be. The first thing she noticed was that all the young women were wearing a very different set of garments than the ones she would have thought they’d have been captured in. Instead of blouses, skirts and vests, or shifts and sarafans, or even the brocaded silver-white gowns the swan maidens had worn, they all had on a variation in color and embroidery of the same outfit; filmy, baggy trews of the sort that the Jinn wore with a short skirt over that, an equally filmy blouse with very short sleeves, and a vest. Most of them had their hair braided and wrapped around their heads, for coolness, she thought. Katya entered the garden near one dressed all in white and silver, who had been the one staring listlessly at nothing. The girl gave her an indifferent glance; Katya recognized in her features the stamp of her sisters.

  This then must be Yulya, the missing swan maiden.

  “You had better get a servant to show you the way to our quarters, and change out of that, if you don’t want 180

  Mercedes Lackey

  to roast,” the swan maiden said indifferently, then went back to staring at nothing.

&n
bsp; “Never mind the servant, I’ll show you,” said another in blue, the one who had been embroidering, making a dismissive gesture at Yulya. “And never mind her, either.

  She’s terrified, so terrified it’s made her go all numb.” The girl managed a shaky smile. “So am I, but it hasn’t made me go all numb. I almost wish it would. That bronze fellow says his magic will protect us but—” she glanced up at the sky with a shuttered look of terror “—I keep expecting to melt at any moment.”

  So this would be the snow maiden.

  The third girl, all in red, looked up and nodded solemnly. “It’s a Jinn, you know,” she whispered. “It’s trying to do what the Katschei did, only much more cleverly. It’s trying to come here, where The Tradition doesn’t know how to cope with it. It took over the Katschei’s castle, though, so The Tradition is making it do what the Katschei did—collect girls.”

  “He doesn’t like it, either,” said the snow maiden.

  “Every time The Tradition makes him send out one of his whirlwinds, he gets very irritated.”

  “It doesn’t like being forced into anything,” the other said, closing her book. “It was like that all along, of course, but being confined to a bottle for two hundred years has made it very…” she seemed to be searching for the right word “…angry.”

  “How do you know all of this?” Katya asked, eyeing the other doubtfully.

  Fortune’s Fool

  181

  The girl sighed. “Because I was the first one it took captive, before it even came here. I was an apprentice to a hedge-wizard, and he was the one that let the Jinn loose. He bought the bottle from a sailor—he thought it was just some odd magic potion. He broke the seal and opened the stopper on it to analyze it—now, of course, I know that the stopper and the seal were part of the spell that kept the Jinn confined—and the Jinn came boiling out and destroyed him. Then it began wrecking his tower. I was down in the cellar decanting things and heard the noise and hid. By the time the Jinn got down there, its anger had cooled somewhat, and it decided to take me captive to serve it.” Katya noticed at that point that the girl looked very, very tired. “Not like a servant.