Fortune's Fool

by Mercedes Lackey

  It leaches power from anyone that has it to save his own.

  I’m sure it would much rather take more powerful people to leach from, but it decided to take over the Katschei’s castle, so young women are all that The Tradition will let it capture. Still, it must keep us alive so we can recover more power he can steal again. It means we are generally safe.”

  “Unless, of course, he can use us as bait to lure in other things. Princes. Sorcerers.” Katya shrugged. “Why do you keep calling him it?”

  “I—don’t know,” the young woman confessed. “I suppose because it didn’t show any interest in…” She blushed.

  “I had as soon couple with a donkey.” The brass-toned voice made them all start, and the Jinn faded 182

  Mercedes Lackey

  into view, looking down at them with scorn. “You are mere animals, for all that you talk. Your conversation is like the chattering of apes. You irritate me. Go to your quarters.”

  Yulya, the swan maiden, shrank back the moment the Jinn appeared; she went absolutely white and, like her sister, she trembled in every limb. The snow maiden and the apprentice, however, though pale and frightened, stood their ground, at least insofar as not falling to pieces in front of him. The snow-maiden took Katya by the hand and led her off toward a doorway in the wall of the courtyard, while the apprentice took Yulya’s hand and tugged her insistently away, breaking her out of her paralysis.

  The thick stone walls of the castle, built to withstand the assault of any foe the Katschei could imagine, give immediate relief from the desert heat. The snow maiden sighed involuntarily as they penetrated deeper into the corridors, with Yulya’s quiet sobs making a melancholy counterpart to their footsteps.

  “I’m Ekaterina—Katya,” Katya said, into the uncomfortable silence. “Marina,” and “Klava,” the other two volunteered. Yulya just whimpered.

  The room that Marina brought them to must once have been one of the Katschei’s audience chambers—although it was possible that this chamber might have once held the Katschei’s own collection of captive girls.

  Although there were no windows, it was illuminated brightly enough, with glowing lanterns spaced at intervals along the walls. The light that came from them was Fortune’s Fool

  183

  a cool blue, which made all of them look just a touch cadaverous. It was furnished very simply, with heaps of pillows and low cots. There were books here, neatly arranged in a bookcase that looked out of place. Yulya went straight to one of the cots and lay down on it.

  Marina went to a chest and rummaged around, coming up with an outfit just like her own, in green. Taking the hint, Katya changed into it, and realized that no matter what it looked like, it was very cool and practical.

  Wardrobe taken care of, the three of them arranged themselves on pillows as far from Yulya as possible.

  “I don’t suppose you’ve tried to escape?” Katya asked.

  Klava rolled her eyes. “Marina is a snow maiden,” she pointed out. “Even if we could escape, she wouldn’t last very long out there in the desert.”

  Katya nodded. “Still,” she persisted. “Did it ever even look like there was a way to escape?”

  “Nothing that I ever saw,” Klava said, after a moment of thought. “Some of the Katschei’s servants were still here when the Jinn took this place, and they simply accept him as the new master. Some of them came back. And the Jinn has servants of his own, and a lot of them are human. You didn’t see them, but he has lots of soldiers.”

  Katya pondered. “Does he stop you from exploring this place?”

  Marina shook her head. “That’s how we got all the books. He doesn’t bother with us as long as we don’t try to kill ourselves or try to escape in any obvious way. And 184

  Mercedes Lackey

  don’t worry,” she added, “I can tell when he’s about, invisible. Right at the moment we can talk about anything.”

  “Right,” Katya said, and set her chin. “Then let’s talk about how we are going to get out of here.”

  10

  When three days went by without so much as a word, Sasha began to worry. When a week had passed, he became certain that Katya was in trouble. And when a fortnight had come and gone—

  —that was when he decided that he was going after her.

  He sent only a short message to his brothers and father.

  I will be traveling and am not certain where. Unlike Katya’s duty, the tasks of the Fortunate Fool had never yet involved an emergency. With luck, nothing would fall apart in his absence.

  So hear me, my Luck. Let nothing fall apart in my absence.

  He took the message with him out to the innkeeper, who had sent messages on for him before. The man looked at the folded, sealed piece of paper, then at him, and nodded. “Tinker just came in this morning. Heading to Vasilygrad.”

  186

  Mercedes Lackey

  “Perfect,” he replied, and handed over a half-dozen silver coins. The innkeeper would keep one, give one to the tinker, and promise the rest when the tinker returned with proof of delivery. The man would do as he promised of course. The innkeeper was a good judge of men.

  Then again, you didn’t cross someone married to a witch. It was pretty obvious now why no one ever stole things from this inn.

  Sasha had no real idea of where he needed to go, but that had never stopped him in the past. Now, if ever, was the time to rely on the Luck of the Fortunate Fool, the Luck that would put him in the right place, at the right time, without fail.

  He went straight to the innkeeper’s wife after sending on his message. As she was the local witch, she would be the best place to start.

  “Your betrothed is long away,” she said shrewdly, the moment he walked into her fragrant kitchen. The door stood open to let out the heat, and the air was full of the scent of perfectly baked bread. “I sense this was not planned.”

  “My betrothed answered the summons of her father, and it has taken longer than either of us thought,” he replied.

  “But I do not think it is her father that is detaining her.”

  The witch nodded, and bent to remove loaves of rich, dark bread from the oven. “I do not, either, though I have no real word to give you. Whatever has gone amiss, it has a land-feel to it, not a sea-feel.”

  He did not even have to think what his answer would Fortune’s Fool

  187

  be now. If Katya’s father was not the problem, then she was in trouble; and if she was in trouble he would find his way to her. “I was already going to go to her. Is there any help you can give me at all?”

  “These.” She nodded at the bread. “I dreamed you would go, though I did not know why—I only saw you taking to the road and the road stretching on before you farther than I could see. I began my baking for it last night, when I woke from the dream. Other than that—” She shrugged, and then looked up at him, a rueful expression on her face. “I am not very powerful.

  My abilities lie mostly in seeing what is to be seen here in the village, some healing, a little advice, once in a while, a dream. And bread.”

  “Then I will have that, and your blessing, little mother,” he replied, and bent to kiss her hand, a little rough with honest work, and so very different from the hands he usually had to kiss.

  “Oh get on with you!” she said, blushing, as she snatched her hand away. “Take my bread and my blessing, and bring your love back.”

  So when the Fortunate Fool rode out a short time later, it was with the blessing of the Witch of the Jolly Sturgeon, a pannier full of rich bread wrapped for travel, and only the vague direction that the troubles had a “land-feel” to them.

  But Sasha was not stupid. He knew The Tradition like few in this kingdom. He knew his land and its people.

  And he was accustomed to looking at the vaguest of hints and turning them into answers.

  188

  Mercedes Lackey

  Sasha had only just ridden the boundaries of the kingdom. He knew
where the trouble spots were and he had dealt with them. So whatever had happened, whatever it was that Katya was to look into, there were two things he knew for certain. The place had to border the sea, or the Sea King would not be concerned about it. And it was not inside Led Belarus.

  So. The logical place to start would be to follow the coastline northward, to cross the border into wilderness claimed by no Kingdom. There were plenty of nasty things there, lurking in ancient, be-spidered and be-haunted forest. There were no few things he had sung out of Led Belarus that could have gotten stronger since he removed them. There were also rumors of very, very powerful Old Things. If one of them had decided that decades, centuries of quietude were about to end, then things could be very interesting indeed.

  So northward he went. As it happened, there were a few creatures he could ask for advice on the way, and it would be in the true Tradition of the Fortunate Fool to do so.

  He pressed his horse as much as he could to reach his first destination by nightfall.

  The woods to the right were still haunted-looking, but nothing like as sinister as the last time he passed this way.

  Instead of oppressive, endless shadow beneath the trees, there were will-o’-the-wisps, not dancing off into the distance, mockingly, but hanging quietly in one place or at worst, drifting about a little. The scent of the place was Fortune’s Fool

  189

  of fallen leaves, cool, old—not of death and decay. Still unnerving, but not terrifying.

  The trees, though they stirred without a breeze to move them, and made ominous creaking noises, did not reach out to grab him or his horse as they made their way down the path. The path did not grow holes, or roots, or stones to trip the horse. It did not suddenly seem to squirm in a different direction. In short, it remained an ordinary, common path.

  So far the Rusalka was keeping her promise.

  He arrived at the lake as the moon was rising, and looked around. The atmosphere was little changed, but, nevertheless, it was changed. Again, the scent was subtly different; not rank with a hint of corruption, but cool, a bit damp, and ever so faintly scented with waterlily.

  There were still wafts of fog on the surface and wreathing around the verge, but they didn’t go above waist-high, and the moonlight illuminated the area quite brilliantly.

  There were no evil little silver slivers of fish in the clear water. Just an ordinary carp nosing about the bottom, a few tiny sticklebacks darting past, and a perch dozing just under a lily pad. And frogs were singing all around.

  He dismounted from his horse, took the first loaf of bread from his pannier, laid it on a stone near the edge, and waited.

  He didn’t have to wait for very long.

  A head shot up out of the water, shaking long, silvery-

  190

  Mercedes Lackey

  blond hair out of her eyes. “Bread!” the Rusalka exclaimed. “Do I smell fresh bread?”

  “From today’s baking,” Sasha replied. Rusalkas, although technically ghosts, still ate. It was a contradiction that Sasha had never been able to reason out, and so he had never bothered to try. “A bargain for a little information. Sorry I don’t have butter.”

  The Rusalka jumped out of the water and seized the loaf of bread, sitting right down on the stone to tear a chunk off and start eating. She paused with the bite halfway to her mouth. “What sort of information?” she asked.

  “Is there anything you know of that might be stirring to the north that would attract the attention of the King of the Sea?” he asked.

  Frogs punctuated the silence. “Hmm.” She ate her first piece while she thought.

  “Just guesses would be fine,” he said encouragingly.

  “Well…I would have mentioned Katschei the Deathless, except that he didn’t manage to live up to his name,”

  she said, smirking. “His castle is vacant, but I doubt that anything would have moved into it. He was a vile thing, and would have left it completely filled with traps of all sorts.” She shook her head. “It is not a place I would venture into, no matter what treasures are there.”

  He made a mental note of that anyway. If something was strong enough, clever enough, to get past the traps, it would certainly be strong and clever enough to capture Katya. “Anything else?” he asked.

  “Baba Yaga roams up there.”

  Fortune’s Fool

  191

  He bit his lip over that one. Baba Yaga never was, and Traditionally never would be, the sort to stir up the kind of trouble that would get the Sea King’s attention. Not that she didn’t stir up trouble! And not that she wasn’t absolutely deadly! But she didn’t ever involve herself in the matters of Kingdoms. He suspected that she just didn’t enjoy the sort of impersonal misery that conquest and subjugation created. She performed her evil one person at a time.

  So, probably not Baba Yaga, though it was entirely possibly that Baba Yaga could have ambushed Katya on the way to her goal. “Anything else?”

  The loaf was half gone. The Rusalka must have been starved for the taste of bread. He made a mental note to see that she got it more often. “They say Chernobog is seen there.” She looked up then, and shivered, eyes going opaque.

  He didn’t blame her. Chernobog was said to be a god, though who knew? It was impossible to say. Whatever, the Dark One was very, very powerful, and was interested in the lives of mortals, and was entirely arbitrary so far as Sasha could make out. You could not tell what he would and would not do. Like many ancient spirits, he acted only as he pleased, and in tune with some balance and some logic that only he and The Tradition understood or could predict.

  Though if it was Chernobog, the Dark One would not be acting directly, but rather through someone else. He had no interest in being a king himself—for a spirit as powerful as he was, that was a distinct demotion—but 192

  Mercedes Lackey

  oh, how he loved to meddle in the lives of mortals!

  Meddle, then stand back and watch and laugh. No use appealing to him either; he let you get yourself out of whatever situation his meddling had put you in.

  The Rusalka finished the last of the bread, and licked her fingers bare of crumbs. Nearby, a nightingale began to sing, adding his voice to the frogs.

  “I cannot think of anything else,” she said. “Although there are plenty of evil things there. Plenty. More than enough to give your Katya a nasty surprise.”

  He nodded. “But that is a start. Well—” He looked up at the moon. “I should go while there is light to ride by.”

  She shook her head. “No. Stay.” At his askance look, she smiled. “I have no designs on you! I scent the Sea King’s daughter about you and I have no desire to challenge her! No, you can safely sleep here. I will guard your rest.” Then she added, softly, “You are a good man, Sasha.”

  He flushed. He did try to be. Even if he didn’t know The Tradition as well as he did, he’d have been the sort to share his bread with an old beggar woman….

  “Thank you,” he said, just as softly.

  Then she laughed. And shook back her hair, and winked at him “And you are a Fortunate Fool! Such are always finding help in unexpected places!”

  And so, somewhat to his own bemusement, Sasha un-saddled his horse and left it tethered to graze on the verge, while he rolled himself up in his cloak and slept through the night to the sound of frogs and a lovestruck nightingale, beneath the protection of a Rusalka.

  Fortune’s Fool

  193

  * * *

  Katya scanned the battlements carefully from her place in the Jinn’s garden. The other girls—and there were more of them now, for the Jinn had added a fifth maiden to his collection—were all in their rock-walled room. The new one might be very useful. She was a Wolf-girl, the opposite of a werewolf, a young Wolf-bitch who could take the form of a human at will—legends said it was by taking off her skin, but Katya had watched her, and she merely shape-shifted. She was very like the bear-people in that way, or a real werewolf, a
s opposed to the swan maiden who was human to begin with and took the form of a swan by putting on the feather cloak. As a Wolf, the girl was able to sniff out things that the others could not see nor sense. Like drafts or fresh air where neither should be. Katya had her exploring the cellars and dungeon as much as she could without getting caught.

  The garden had never been all that lovely when Katschei the Deathless had lived here; he had been much inclined to dark and poisonous plants. In his absence though, most of those, needing nurturing, had died. So the weeds, and what good plants that once had flourished here and had somehow survived, had taken over.

  And then, just as the garden was at its most tangled, someone had taken a clumsy hand to it.

  The Jinn, she supposed, was the one who had ordered some of that cleaned up. The fountain flowed clear, bushes and even trees had been cut back, and paths 194

  Mercedes Lackey

  were newly graveled. But the Jinn clearly could not tell weeds from flowers, and the weeds were slowly choking out the flowers, in all but a few places. Granted, some of the weeds did look very lush and green, but stinging nettles were not what anyone would want in a garden, even if they did look like mint.

  She sat next to one of those places where the flowers were winning, a bed of primroses that had completely taken over whatever else had been in there with them.

  The delicate pink blossoms, only faintly scented, spilled out over the cobbles containing them, looking cool and lively in what to her was dreadful heat.

  The heat was enough to flatten anyone used to the climate of the north as she and the other girls were. The devastation this Jinn could wreak here if he spread his desert was appalling. The heat alone would kill many animals—and people, too.

  She was here, not because she wanted to be, but because she was both testing something and waiting for her moment to finally act to get some help.

  What she was testing was her own ability to tell when the Jinn was moving about invisibly. After a good deal of observation she had realized that like the snow maiden, she, too, could tell when the creature was spying on his captives and his own men invisibly. There was a kind of hum in the back of her mind, like the buzz of a fly that would not land, whenever he was about. That hum did not go away when he was invisible. And the more she thought about it, the more certain she became Fortune’s Fool