by Rich Horton
“I’m afraid it’s not in the stars.” Fawkes folded his arms. “You’re a child, for one.”
Confusion with a dash of indignation parted her perfect lips. “Do I look like a child?” she asked, deliberately unpining her shift and letting it slide off with an insolent flourish.
“Not anatomically,” Fawkes admitted. “Is he pulling you away again come morning? His Regency.”
The girl looked at a loss. “I’m to stay as long as you wish it,” she said, then: “What you need is privacy in which to whet your appetites. Away from that metal monster. Your Majesty.”
Fawkes rubbed his temple. “What’s your name?”
The girl put her hands on her hips. “Eris, Your Majesty.”
“Eris, you were sent here as a pestilence,” Fawkes said. “The Illusionist knows the particulars of my ‘appetites’ very well. Your presence here is a jest on his part. Nothing more.” He saw recognition in her pretty face and went on. “I’m sorry to disappoint, if it was, in fact, your most ardent desire to satisfy the carnal urges of a criminally unwashed exile.”
Eris’s eyes flicked to Otto once more, like a thrown knife. “Is the automaton enchanted to hear as the Illusionist’s ears? Like they say?” Her voice had changed again, and she was repining the fabric of her shift with dexterous fingers.
Fawkes looked over to his gaoler. “Nothing in my experience suggests that, no.” Despite himself, he felt his curiosity piqued. “Why do you ask?”
“I’m not really here to fuck,” Eris said. “More to help you escape.”
Since she insisted it was best to speak where Otto wouldn’t hear them, Fawkes led the way down eroding stone steps to the cellar, hopping dutifully one-legged away from the automaton’s baleful gaze.
“Cut your foot?” Eris asked.
“Nothing that won’t mend itself in a couple hours,” Fawkes replied, pausing to steady himself against the wall. He felt rather guilty abandoning Otto halfway through a tournament, but this girl had become significantly more interesting than any barber. He found his lamp and set to relighting the others.
“This is where I come when the sun’s high on hot days,” he explained, as the swathes of shadow peeled back to reveal stacks and stacks of ancient books, a small army of various game pieces, and a nest of plump pillows. “Which is most days.”
“Does the automaton only truly come alive at night, then?” Eris asked quietly, tucking her feet under herself as she sat on one of the cushions. “When it . . . tortures you?” Her eyes traveled over Fawkes’s bare skin, and he had the impression she was searching for scars.
“He plays my violin sometimes, if that’s what you mean.” He paused, seeing her confusion, and decided to elaborate. “He won it from me last week. I thought I could put a rock through that high window in three throws. Otto thought otherwise.”
“Otto.” Eris’s perfect brow had darkened. “You named the automaton Otto.”
“Appellation is not my strong suit,” Fawkes said. “I go blank.”
“You’ve started to go mad in here,” Eris said. She exhaled, nodded to herself, relieved by the conclusion. “Alright. Is there water?”
“We have a well in the back.” Fawkes gestured with his thumb. “Food in the larder, if you’re hungry, though I’m afraid it’s a little lacking in variety.”
“Knew you didn’t eat sand,” Eris muttered. “Alright. Alright. Here’s what we’ll do. We’ll get as much food and water as we can carry.” She produced Fawkes’s chisel from behind her back. “Then, when the automaton’s sleeping, we’ll smash out his eyes. Its eyes.”
“Automatons don’t sleep.” Fawkes grabbed at the chisel. “And when did you take this? And why would I want to leave?”
Eris’s fingers went limp and Fawkes yanked the implement away. “To retake the kingdom,” she said in disbelief. “To slay the Illusionist.”
Fawkes dropped down onto the cushion across from her, provoking a small puff of dust. “Who sent you here? Besides the Illusionist, I mean.”
“The Coalition of Loyalists to the Stolen Crown,” Eris recited. “Crownies.”
“And you didn’t like ‘Otto’,” Fawkes said under his breath.
“I was the one who planted the idea,” Eris said. “Because your name day was coming. I spread a rumor with a few of the other girls that someone would be picked to go spend a night with the king. Then it grew, so it was someone to live with the king as his mistress. Once everyone believes something’s to happen, it usually does. The Illusionist got wind of it from one of his chancellors, and that chancellor suggested me, because I’d asked him to, and next thing I was telling the Coalition I’d been chosen to go to the Desert Lord. To the Crowned Exile. To you.”
A moment passed in silence. Fawkes stared down at his dirty nails.
“How disappointing I must seem,” he said at last. “I didn’t know I’d become a folk figure. I would have grown a great beard.”
“Don’t you dare make another jest.” Eris had gotten to her feet. “Don’t you dare. We risked our lives setting this up. To free you.” She balled her fists at her sides. “It’s this heat. The heat’s gone to your head.”
“Why would I want to leave?” Fawkes asked. “I have my games, I have my books, and now I have a nubile young mistress eager to satisfy my every twisted desire.”
“He was your brother!” Eris shouted, and Fawkes flinched backward. “Doesn’t every, every drop of blood in you cry vengeance?”
Fawkes wiped a fleck of spit from his cheek, wincing. “Half-brother.”
“Doesn’t half your heart die to think of him stabbed in the back by the man he trusted?” Eris demanded, but Fawkes could hear a quaver in her voice. He fixed his gaze on the skin between her eyes.
“He never had much use for me, nor I him. Listen. A ruler is a ruler. Do you really think things were perfect under my brother? Always at war or at hunt while the nobles stuffed their pockets, with impunity? While the capital crumbled under his feet from corruption? The Illusionist is not a good man, but he brought stability to the kingdom in a way my brother never could.”
“That’s a filthy lie,” Eris snapped. “He—
“Let me finish.” Fawkes’s bloodline must have still carried some authority to her, because she fell silent. “Your parents were loyal to the king, and no doubt wealthy, guessing from your speech and your physiognomy, probably the middling merchant class. They lost everything when the Illusionist seized power. Perhaps they were relegated to the poorhouses. Perhaps your father was imprisoned.”
Eris opened her mouth, but he plowed on.
“So your mother, dreaming of her filched finery, filled your head with fantastical nonsense about a golden age lost and the evil tyrant who ushered it out. Of course, it didn’t stop her from selling you to the brothels he now owned.” He kept his face cold even as Eris’s flush sent a guilty dart through his stomach. “Along the way you fell in with a motley group of radicals, and their tall tales triggered some deeply instilled delusion within you, and you began dreaming their dream of revolution, which it now seems is centered around one great myth. Which would be me. The rightful heir, here in exile, planning a glorious uprising from leagues and leagues away.”
Fawkes affected a performer’s bow. No applause came.
“You’re not much of a guesser,” Eris said, voice shaking and hands clenched, too. “My family has always been dirt poor. We’re loyalists because the king put a dagger through a Northerner’s shoulder the instant before the bastard would have slit my father’s throat. Dragged him all the way back behind lines, too. Because he was a good man, a brave man. A real man.” The disdain on her face was so vivid it ached. “Nothing like you turned out to be.” She spun, stalked toward the stairs.
“You have no idea how little that stings when heard for the ten-thousandth time!” Fawkes shouted after her.
The girl turned. “You’re the jest,” she said. “Not me. I’m going back to the Crownies, and I’m going to tell them you
’re dead.”
She put her back to him and marched up the steps, shift swirling around her pale ankles.
Fawkes searched for a stinging retort and found his quiver empty. He’d spent too long with someone who couldn’t fire back.
Fawkes made a half-hearted attempt at a philosopher’s treatise before he packed the book away and emerged from the cellar to watch Eris fill skins from the well.
“Let her at it,” he said to Otto. “She’s incredibly tetchy.”
The automaton looked over at him, head cocked at a slightly skeptical angle.
“I may have been a tad insensitive,” Fawkes admitted. “I forget, sometimes, that not everyone is made of iron.”
Otto nodded impassively, and they agreed on a new game of tarots as Eris tied off the skins and moved on to ransacking the larder. Around icy silences and angry glares, Fawkes managed to extract her travel plans. She intended to leave in the night, when it was coolest, with all the water and food she could carry.
“Ridiculous.” Fawkes directed it toward Otto as he flipped his cards. “Without a lodestone, she’ll be lost before dawn.”
Otto nodded, then tip-toed his fingers jerkily across the board, pantomiming walking in pain.
“And those feet,” Fawkes agreed. “Not a single callus. She’ll burn them to stumps.”
Otto turned his head, to watch Eris now bundling her supplies into a less-than-sturdy sling. Fawkes refused to do the same.
“Not to mention the brigands,” he said, still to Otto. “The marauders. The sandeaters. They’ll eviscerate her forthrightly and leave her bones to the buzzards.”
“I can hear you,” Eris snapped.
“Let her go, then. See if I care.” Fawkes shook his head. “Deluded little girl.”
Eris ignored him; Otto flipped his cards.
“It’s my name day, apparently,” Fawkes remarked. “What do you make of that?”
He lost the game a few moments later and hopped his way back down to the cellar in a sulk while Otto went to tally his win.
Fawkes didn’t hear the shriek of the desert wind anymore, no more than he heard his heartbeat or his lungs, so the scratching of feet up above the cellar was enough to rouse him from an admittedly tenuous sleep. He stared into the thicket of shadows above his head, charting her progress to the cathedral doors, imagining her slipping through the arched entrance, trudging over the crest of the nearest dune, out of sight and out of mind.
He might be able to forget she’d ever existed—Otto certainly wouldn’t bring her up in conversation. It wasn’t as if Fawkes remembered the name of that barber, either.
But the barber hadn’t wandered off into the desert to die.
“Damn it all,” Fawkes ordered the ceiling, wrapping woven blankets around himself like a cloak as he staggered to his feet and up the stairs. The air had turned bitingly cold, and starlight spotted the sandy floor of the cathedral, leaking from its various cracks and holes. Fawkes scarved his face against the blowing grit as he hurried toward the doors. Otto looked up at his passing but made no remark.
By the time Fawkes was outside, Eris was wading her way up the first dune, hunched against the wind. “Hey!” he bellowed. “Hey! Hey!” The call was stripped away the instant it left his lips. He hesitated one moment longer, then dashed after her. Starlight also seeped into the pale sand, making it gleam like teeth, and it stuck to his skin when sweat began to bead. He hadn’t run in years.
He caught her on the crest, lungs ragged and aching. She spun away at his touch, producing a knife Fawkes thought he’d hidden better, then stopped when she recognized the red hair and hooded eyes.
“What?” she demanded.
“Wait,” Fawkes moaned, doubling over. “Just wait . . . ” He took a deep breath that was half sand, choked, and spat mucus. “Until morning,” he finished. “Wait until morning. I have an idea. Maybe Otto could go with you.”
“Why would I want that big hunk of metal following me?” Eris asked, but she’d tucked the knife back into her makeshift sash.
“He knows the way,” Fawkes said. “He knows the way, he knows the desert, and nobody will give you trouble if you have an automaton at your back.”
Eris snorted. “You really do trust him.”
“He always keeps his word. And makes me keep mine. So, yes. I do.”
Eris looked out across the swooping dunes, and Fawkes could see the distance shrinking her. The desert was vast, an ocean of bone; the sky was vaster, an inky cavern pierced only by foreign constellations. He could tell she felt infinitesimally small, as he often did.
“The stars are different here,” she said. “Didn’t realize it before.”
“Everything is different here.”
“Why would he give his word?” Eris asked.
Fawkes straightened up, still breathing hard. “He has a gambling problem. I’ll explain. Inside.”
Eris took one more look across the desert, then nodded her dark head. They made their way back down the slope of the dune, wind bowling at their backs, and Fawkes saw Otto framed in the entry of the cathedral, tall and skeletal and very still. For a moment he looked more threatening than concerned, but it was always hard to tell with Otto. Jealous, perhaps.
“I’m back,” Fawkes said, once in earshot. “Don’t be such a clucking hen.”
The automaton turned and walked away as soon as they entered. Fawkes knew reproach when he saw it. He led Eris back down into the cellar and set about adding more fuel to the brazier. Her hands were tinged blue, so he let her sit closest.
“You can still tell them I’m dead,” he informed her, stoking the flames.
“I was still planning to,” Eris said flatly, pulling her feet under herself. Fawkes saw the flash of purple ink again and remembered.
“I didn’t recognize that tattoo on your ankle at first,” he said. “The eyeball. From the alchemical cultists. ‘The Hanged God watches every step.’ I didn’t take you for a devotee.”
Eris frowned.
“Having blue blood, even half, is the same way,” Fawkes said. “Always watched. Always judged. Every little thing magnified. Always compared to your betters.” He looked across the brazier at Eris. “There are no eyeballs out here.”
“You’re hiding.” Eris’s nostrils flared. “You’d be here even if the Illusionist hadn’t sent you.”
“My brother’s supporters didn’t want me then, and they don’t need me now. I’d be useless in any sort of rebellion. A figurehead at best.” Fawkes found he was using his wheedling voice. “Don’t you understand why I won’t go back to that?”
“Symbols have power,” Eris argued. “Not just the magical kind.”
Fawkes ran a hand through his hair. “I’m no king, Eris. I’m just a silly man playing silly games and waiting for sundown.”
There was a long silence, in which Eris tucked her hands under her armpits and rocked backward. Forward. She stared at the brazier, and then, finally: “Didn’t you love your brother at all, then?”
“Half-brother,” Fawkes corrected by rote. “And I did. Or I thought I did.” He paused. “He took me to a brothel once, on my name day. Brought a dozen different whores in. I wanted to please him, so I picked one.” Fawkes swallowed. “Couldn’t do it.” He rubbed at his face, staring at nothing for a moment before he spoke again. “He made me try another, and another, and in the end he brought a boy in and sat there watching while I fucked him. Laughing. Like it was a jest.” Fawkes managed half a laugh himself. “That’s the man who was king. And the man you think should be king, there with him. Do you really think either of them any better than the Illusionist?”
Eris shook her head. “You don’t know what he’s done. Maybe the king was no saint, but kings aren’t meant to be. The Illusionist is a fiend from hell.” She exposed the purple eye tattooed against her anklebone. “I didn’t choose this. It’s the alchemists’ guild mark. They own the brothels now. They own half the capital, now. The Illusionist gives them leave to dig up graveya
rds. Take children off the streets. You remember the cultists, don’t you?”
“Exaggerations,” Fawkes said. “Scapegoating. And even if it were true, there’s nothing I could do. You simply refuse to realize that.”
“But you’re a royal,” Eris protested. “That counts for something. You’re educated.” She scrambled upright, running her hand along the spines of his library. “Look at all these damned books . . . strategy . . . tactics of war-at-sea . . . infiltration . . . ” She paused. “Gods’ blood. You have been thinking about it, haven’t you?”
“Of course not,” Fawkes protested. “It’s only for the games. That’s all.”
Eris looked at him for a long moment, eyes burning. “Fine,” she said at last. “Only for the games. Is that how you plan to get Otto’s word, then?”
“More or less,” Fawkes said, breathing easier once more. “If I win, he’ll escort you back to the capital. If I lose, he gets something he wants very much.”
“Which is?”
“Go to sleep,” Fawkes said. “So I can get ready.”
Dawn arrived far too quickly, finding Fawkes weary-eyed and buried in books. He’d slept intermittently, and would’ve gladly taken another few hours, but he felt that now, with all manner of obscure rules and maneuvers thrumming fresh through his head, was the time. He roused Eris with a shake of her shoulder.
“Time for the game,” he said. “You can watch, if you’d like. Sort of boring to the uninitiated.”
“I’m going to watch.”
Fawkes climbed the cellar stairs, finding Otto sweeping the floors with his broom of bundled twigs. The automaton looked up at him, then behind him, to see Eris unknotting her dark mess of hair. He returned to his sweeping with a resigned air.
“Best of mornings to you, Otto. My creaky companion. My iron . . . intimate.”