Fortune's Fool

by Mercedes Lackey

  “That wasn’t what I was thinking—or actually I was.

  If we lose, I think you should go there and get these lawful Jinni to help you, help Father, because we simply can’t allow this one to keep destroying the forest with his desert.” She bit her lip. She didn’t want to think about losing, because if they lost…Sasha would probably die.

  Not only that, but she might die if the Jinn thought she was too much trouble to keep alive. In fact, she would rather be dead, because she didn’t want to think of having to go on without Sasha. The very thought felt like a spear in her heart. “But if we win, the Jinn will be back in the bottle and no matter what we did with it, there would be a chance that someone would find it and open it again.

  So I want you to take the bottle to the City of Brass and the Jinn’s own people. If anyone will know what to do with him, you would think it would be them.”

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  “Good idea,” Sergei said, brightening. I will do just that.” His ears came up. “I promise.”

  “Now, help me think, here. If you were a Jinn, where would you put such a bottle?” she asked.

  “I would want it some place where ordinary mortals couldn’t touch it. Someplace where, however, I could.

  That would be—in a fire?”

  She frowned. “Hot as it is, there are no fires anywhere around the Castle—” No—that wasn’t quite true! “—except the kitchen!” she all but shouted. “The bread ovens!”

  Sergei picked up his ears even farther. “Is it late enough for them to have been banked?”

  “Should be…can you tell if I am going to alert him by moving his bottle?” she asked. “I’ll have to take it out of the oven to read what is on it.”

  He nodded enthusiastically. “Go get the rest. I will meet you at the kitchen door.”

  “The rest” were not hard to find; all of them were sitting disconsolately around their shared room. They all must have been pinning their hopes to the throne room. When she explained her idea, life came back to all of them.

  “We’ll stand guard!” Lyuba said, as the bear-girl nodded.

  “I’ll watch for trouble coming from outside,”

  Guiliette said bravely. “If the Jinn comes, I might be able to delay him.”

  “Huh…” Klava said, and then grinned. “Oh, I have such an idea!”

  “What?” The sparkle in her eyes made Katya think Fortune’s Fool

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  that it was probably a very mad idea—and in this case, the madder, the better.

  “Come on! No skulking, no hiding! Everyone laugh and talk! We’re making cakes!” She seized Magda by the hand and hauled her out the door, laughing and chattering more than enough to cover up Magda’s astonished silence.

  “Oh yes! ” said, of all people, Guiliette. She clapped her hands and began to giggle, in a little silvery laugh, and glided out the door after her. Whatever Klava had thought of then dawned on Marina, who also laughed, grabbed Lyuba, and ran after. The rest followed, though it was clear that most of them had no idea why they were making so much noise. Still, Klava seemed certain of her idea, and both Guiliette and Marina had also figured out her plan and liked it, and that was enough for Katya.

  The mob of young women streamed down the corridors, occasionally meeting with some of the Jinn’s hired guards. To each of them, Klava cried merrily, “We’re making cakes!” and somehow this pronouncement turned puzzled and suspicious looks and even frowns to indulgent smiles.

  “You go right ahead, dearies,” said one grizzled old veteran, and “Make some for me!” cried a younger man.

  Then they ran right into the mercenary Captain, and Katya’s heart went cold. If there was anyone in the Castle who could and would stop them—

  He eyed them as they approached. “And what—” he began in a rumble.

  “We’re making cakes!” Klava cried, dropping Magda’s 360

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  hand and dancing up to him. “We’ll make some for all the men, too!”

  And to Katya’s astonishment, that hardened veteran paused, and slowly smiled. “Well now, and that’s more like it, acting like real girls and not all this moping about,” he said with a nod. “Time you brightened up. You go on, have your fun, and don’t worry if them cakes don’t come out.

  I’ll make the mess right with the cook in the morning.”

  “Thank you!” Klava cried, and jumped up to peck the man on the cheek like a child. The Captain actually blushed, and waved them all past. Katya and the others managed to gather their wits enough to chorus “Thank you!” as they passed him, and a few corridors later, they swarmed into the kitchen where Klava shut the door and put her back against it.

  “By the saints! I thought that would work!” she said, looking very well pleased with herself. “What’s more, if the bottle is in one of those ovens, now we have an excuse to take it out.”

  “What, exactly, did we just do?” Katya asked.

  It was Marina who replied. “Village girls, girls in big schools, sometimes in convents if they are not yet novices—this is something that we just do. Usually at night, when kitchens are clear; it often happens that everyone has been gossiping or telling fortunes, and everyone has gotten a little hungry, and someone says,

  ‘Let’s make cakes!’ and everyone goes and does it.”

  “Exactly,” Klava nodded. “I went to a big school for girls for a while before my wizard asked my parents for Fortune’s Fool

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  me as an apprentice. Now, we really will have to make cakes, but don’t worry, it’s easy, I know how, and I’ll show you while Katya looks for the bottle.”

  The soft sound of a hoof on the outer door made them all start except Katya, who ran to it and opened it. Sergei stood there with his ears up and his eyes wild with curiosity. “We are covering our subterfuge with noise,” she explained. “I need to start checking ovens—”

  “I can explain,” said Guiliette, “since I will be of very little help in the cooking.”

  So Guiliette explained what was going on to Sergei, while Klava apportioned the tasks in cake-making, and Katya began cautiously peering into the banked ovens.

  And there it was, tucked into one side of the third oven—well out of the way of any actual baking that would go on, but safe enough from someone who didn’t know where to look for it.

  “I’ve found it,” she called softly to Klava, who was instructing a bemused Yulya how to sift flour. “How do I get it out?”

  The apprentice left her pupil and came to peer into the oven, then looked around the kitchen for something.

  “Ah!” she said with satisfaction, and went to a rack of cast-iron implements next to the fireplace. “These will do the trick, I fancy!” At Katya’s bemused expression, she laughed. “These are called tongs. Not many fires under the sea, then?”

  “Only volcanoes,” Katya replied, and watched with fascination as Klava used the scissors-like object to deftly 362

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  seize the long neck of the bottle and pull it out. She set it right in the mouth of the oven, though, where it was still very hot—

  “Let it sit there, and I’ll move it again in a little,” Klava ordered. “Taking it out right now and putting it on the floor might make it shatter, and I assume we don’t want that. I’ll come back in a bit and move it when it cools some.” She went back to the cake-making while Katya stared at the bottle, willing it to cool.

  It was not like any bottle she had ever seen before. It started with a very long, thin neck, which then widened out into a wide, squat bottom. Instead of a wooden stopper, which would in any event have probably become charcoal in the oven, there was a glass or porcelain one, still attached to the neck by a chain.

  “Klava,” she called softly, “when you saw the bottle, was it only stoppered, or was it stoppered and sealed?”

  “Stoppered and sealed,” Klava called back, interrupting her own explanation of how to b
eat nuts into the batter. “But the seal was plain wax, there was nothing written on it.”

  “The wax was probably bespelled,” the Horse observed, “but it shouldn’t have been a vital part of the magic to draw the Jinn into the bottle.”

  She hoped so. It would be disastrous to discover they were missing part of the magic because the wax had burned away.

  Klava came over to the oven with the first tray of cakes. She held her bare hand near the bottle and nodded.

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  She slid the tray into the oven, then took the tongs and moved the bottle to the floor.

  “Let it cool a bit more, then you can handle it,” she said, going back for another tray.

  But regardless of the heat radiating off the bottle, Katya was already leaning forward to try and read the writing—because what she had at first thought was only a spiraling stripe was actually a spiraling line of writing, inscribed into the dark green glass of the bottle, then filled with white enamel.

  “Fire smite thee, Zephyr blight thee, Water blind thee, Earth then bind thee,” she read, and looked up. “What does all that mean?”

  “It sounds to me as if there are supposed to be all four elemental powers involved in stuffing him into the bottle,” Klava said with a frown. “The fire power to actually fight him, the air to weaken him, the water to confuse him and the earth power to bind his power and send him into the vessel. Is there any more?”

  She bent closer. “It’s written there three times, then this: ‘Iblis Afrit En Kalael, I command thee in the Names of the Law, be bound into this vessel until released by the hand of a virgin of five and fifty years.”

  Klava began to laugh. She had to put the tray of unbaked cakes she was carrying down, she was laughing so hard. Tears began to come from her eyes, and she wiped them with the back of her hand.

  “What?” asked Magda, curiously. “What is being so very amusing?”

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  “Oh, blasted Tradition,” Klava replied, picking up the tray and inserting it into the oven, and fishing out the first one with the set of tongs. “Honestly. I suppose you have to put a condition on these things, but I would have looked longer and harder for one, personally. Like ‘Until twelfth of never’ or some such thing. Still.” She began laughing again. “Poor master! No wonder he always had a steady supply of unicorn hair!”

  “But now we know the creature’s true name,” pointed out the Horse. “Iblis Afrit En Kalael. All we have to do now is assemble the company to fight and bind him. I will return to Sasha and the dragons. But first—” He yearned toward the tray of crisp brown cakes “—could I have one of those, please?”

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  The forest they stood in was cool, verdant, flourishing.

  Five paces away, however, the land was all but dead.

  There was no sign of the trees that had once stood there; there was nothing but hard-baked earth, sand, and a little scrub. The landscape had not merely been altered, it had been erased and a new one put in its place. Not even the softening hand of night could disguise that. It made Sasha feel edgy, nervous. If the Jinn could do this, so quickly, what would he do if he had real power? “That is how matters stand,” Sergei finished, and looked from the dragons to Sasha to the Queen of Copper Mountain. “It seems that it will require some sort of magic tied to all four elements in order to bind the Jinn back into the bottle. But we do have his True Name at last. We can command him.”

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  “We are clearly Fire,” said the dragon Adamant.

  “Ekaterina is Water.”

  “Zephyr blight thee,” mused Sasha. “How can Air blight?”

  “Weaken him?” the Horse suggested. “I haven’t anything in my scant arsenal that could do that.”

  Sasha closed his eyes for a moment in thought; so much of what he did depended on knowing The Tradition and trusting to Luck, but this was not the time to trust to Luck. Was there anything he could do as a Songweaver? “I am not a fighter,” he said, slowly, “but I could sing the strength out of him.”

  “Music is Air,” Sergei agreed. “So that is three of the four. But the key one, the one that imprisons him, Earth, must be the strongest of all.”

  The Queen frowned, but said nothing.

  Why is she so reluctant to join us? Sasha repressed anger at her recalcitrance. It would do no good to get angry with her.

  After the silence had gone on long enough to be awkward, the Horse coughed. “How goes the tunneling?”

  “One blow of a pick and my men are through,” the Queen said shortly. “You need only say the word.”

  The four friends exchanged a look. “With or without Earth,” Sasha said finally, “we must go now, and hope that something turns up.”

  “I concur,” said the Horse. The dragons nodded.

  “All right, Sergei,” Sasha said, swallowing. “Go and tell Katya to get the girls into the head of the tunnel. I will Fortune’s Fool

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  send the bird as the sign we’re going to break through.

  I’ll come through in the tunnel itself and join her.”

  “We’ll come down out of the sky,” Adamant said. “The bird should bring the Jinn, and we’ll trap him between us.”

  “It’s as good a plan as we’re going to get,” Sasha sighed.

  It felt incomplete. Well, of course it felt incomplete. It was.

  “I will tell my miners,” the Queen said abruptly, and stalked off. Rather than one of her elaborate gowns, she wore a slim, calf-length green skirt, a tunic cut away at the neckline and shoulders in a fanciful pattern, and green boots.

  Sasha would have preferred to see her in armor. But then, he had hoped that coming out to see the devastation first-hand would turn her more fully to their side.

  Alas, it appeared that such was not to be.

  “Have I left any argument out?” he asked the others, feeling obscurely like a failure. He should have been able to persuade her, shouldn’t he?

  The dragons shook their heads. “You pointed out that the Jinn is not likely to permit a rival power on his doorstep. You noted that although he might be a power of Fire, he is not going to find going underground any sort of hardship, and that he could very well call forth the Earth-fire in the form of volcanics and lava and never have to personally leave the surface to attack her. Her own advisers told her how she has lost or is losing half of her allies. I can’t think of anything more that you could have said.”

  He sighed. “Nor can I.” Encourage them, Sasha. They 368

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  need to think that you think we can all win. He smiled weakly. “Well, my friends, dawn approaches. Let’s get into place. Sunrise will tell us if Fortune favors us or no.”

  The ten captives were assembled in the kitchen, with the door to the root cellar open. Katya looked to the nine young women who had spent a fundamentally sleepless night until the arrival of Sergei. Her stomach was a knot, her nerves wound up tight. This was going to be, literally, the fight of her life. And she was not a fighter. She couldn’t let these girls know how frightened she was, though, or the good saints only knew what they would do. “You all heard Sergei,” she said quietly. “Get down into the tunnel, and wait. And I will, I hope, see you again when this is over.”

  They looked as if they wanted to protest, but bit their objections back. Klava stepped forward, looking more determined than Katya had ever seen her. “I’ll take care of them, Katya,” she promised. “I’ll make sure everyone gets out. You fight the Jinn. You can beat him, I know you can.”

  Katya smiled, and it wasn’t an insincere or weak smile.

  “Believe me Klava, that, all by itself, will make a big difference. If you all can get away, you take the power he is counting on with you. The weaker he is, the better chance we have to bind him.”

  Klava turned and went down into the root cellar.

  “I wish that I was an eart
h-spirit,” Marina said, bitterly.

  “I cannot even hope to help you. One touch from him, and I am gone.”

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  Poor Marina! Given how fragile she was, it was amazing how much she had done in these past days. Her courage was amazing. Katya embraced her. “You have been more help than you think, and I am counting on you as our second line of defense if he defeats us. To do that, you have to flee. Get home. Be safe. If we don’t win, warn others, tell Father Frost. He may be able to do something where we can’t.”

  “I will,” Marina promised.

  Magda merely traced an odd pattern in the air, nodded soberly, and turned away, taking Marina by the hand.

  Blessing? Protection? Both? And when the gypsy had started to tell the future with those cards of hers, what had she seen?

  The Wolf and bear maidens stood uncertainly together, and Katya turned toward them. “You two can do something no one else can,” she said firmly. “You are both neutral creatures and you both lived in the forest that was destroyed. The Queen may listen to you when she listens to no one else. Muster your pleas and present them if you see her. If you can bring her in, we will win!”

  “We will,” they chorused, and took themselves down into the cellar after the gypsy.

  Yulya embraced her, and Katya heard a stifled sob, but when the swan maiden let her go, there was no sign of tears. “You will bind him,” the young woman said fiercely. “You will win, and they will tell wonderful stories about this. And I will tell my sisters that they must be more like you.”

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  She turned and fled down into the darkness. Katya looked after her, touched and just a bit bemused.

  The small dark girl, and the one who spoke to animals, merely nodded and left. Katya sighed; she still didn’t know their names. Now she might never learn them. But they had been steadfast companions, and she was glad to see they were escaping.