by Angela Boord
Fortune's Fool
Angela Boord
Impossible Books
Copyright © 2019 by Angela Boord
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Cover illustration by John Anthony Di Giovanni
Cover design by Shawn T. King, STK Kreations
Created with Vellum
For Andy
Thanks for sticking around.
Contents
Part I
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Part II
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Part III
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Part IV
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Part V
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Part VI
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Appendix: Major Lieran Houses
Appendix: Eterean Gods
Appendix: Glossary
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Part I
Chapter 1
My right arm is made of metal.
A man named Arsenault made it for me, but he never told me its secrets. He didn’t have time. He gave me the arm and sent me to safety, then he rode off to die.
My arm shines like silver and withstands all weather and all blows, but it isn’t a dead thing. No leather straps attach it to my stump, no belts or buckles of any kind. The metal grows right into my flesh. From the sculpted whorls of my metal fingerprints to the dimple of my metal elbow, it might be the arm with which I was born.
Except that it’s not.
That arm lies rotting in a cedar casket in the ground beneath a cork tree, an arm of meat, skin and blood like any other woman’s.
Not that anyone can tell I’m a woman. I dress like a man and work as a gavaro, wielding my sword for coin. People know me as Kyris. But the name I was born with is Kyrra. Kyrra d’Aliente, only child of Pallo, the Householder of House Aliente.
My father is dead now, and the name Aliente is no longer my own. I am forbidden to use it, upon pain of execution. I may be the last Aliente alive, but I can’t even say so.
The men beside whom I fight don’t usually want to know House names anyway. Every gavaro tells his own lies of how he came to this mercenary life. After five years of saying it, I have almost come to believe that my name is Kyris di Nada, and that I sprang full-grown, metal-armed, from the rocky brow ridge of the Irondels.
Kyris No-Name. Of Nothing, Nowhere.
The name with which I was born caused a war. Ask anyone in the city of Liera and they’ll tell you, Kyrra d’Aliente did it. Cutting off her arm wasn’t enough. They know whom to blame for the crumbling walls of their once-elegant buildings, the deep pits left by cannonballs in the stone canal moorings. The tumbled brickwork still clogs the canals maintained by lesser Houses, who can’t afford to dredge them out.
As if I might have been somehow more than incidental in the great games of the Houses. The Prinze controlled an entire fleet and a quarter of the coastline of the Eterean peninsula. Of what consequence was my arm to them? They cast it aside and trod over my family the way their horses trampled our land in battle.
I wasn’t there for the battles. Arsenault asked me to go north to Rojornick, out of Eterea entirely, and I did. Some would call me a coward for honoring that promise. Maybe they’re right.
But now I’ve come home, and answers are what I seek. About the five years that have passed since Geoffre di Prinze staged his first raid on my father’s land. About where Arsenault might be, if he’s not dead and buried. Information has become scarcer and more precious even than a black-market gun, snatched for a small fortune from under the omnipresent eyes of the Prinze.
Every new fact is like a shining flake of gold glittering in the waters of a stream. I sift through them, examining each with care. Then I tuck them away along with all my other secrets. My sex. My name. My arm.
Like a pilgrim, I come to Liera seeking truth.
A sailor’s inn, dockside.
The smell of sweat and perfume, garlic and wine. Glowing orange light and jittery black shadows on board walls, men rattling carved bones in metal cups, swilling wine, kacin smoke swirling white out of worn wood pipes. Light glints off everything: the sweat on the brows of men and women, gap-toothed smiles, silver table knives, the eel-skin wrap of dagger hilts.
“Hey, Kyris!” Shevadzic calls, waving at me from his seat at the kai dahn table. He’s been teaching me to play. His Rojornicki accent is somehow comforting even here among my own people; I got used to it during the five years I was away, and didn’t realize that I would miss it when I came home. I did a lot of fighting alongside the Rojornicki.
I’m not sure what he thinks about me or if he knows about my arm and or what I’m like in battle, but he treats me with a fatherly kind of respect. Gray salts his red hair.
I thread my way through the crowd and over to the table in time for the next game. “Kyris,” a man sitting at the corner says with a grin as I take my seat. He’s wearing Qalfan robes, but he’s pulled his headcloths down in a casual manner, revealing a thicket of wavy black hair, bronze skin above a stubbled black beard, and that long slash of a grin he’s not afraid to use. “I’m winning too much tonight, and Vadz is putting me off.”
“Vadz isn’t putting you off, Razi,” the man beside him says. The glass beads braided into his black hair tinkle when he turns his head. Nibas and I fought together in Rojornick, where he was one of our archers, but when I switched sides and went over to the Kavol, he left Rojornick and headed south, saying he was done with snow and cold and just wanted his native sunny Tiresian drylands. I was surprised to find that he’d gotten hung up here, but happy to see a friendly face.
“Sure, he is,” Razi says. “Or else I’d have enough coin by now to head upstairs and find some company.”
“Maybe I should thank Vadz for keeping you out of trouble. Every time you go upstairs, I end up hauling your ass out of some fight.” Nibas turns to watch Vadz roll the bones and swears. “Vadz. You’re a whore. Look at that shit you just threw.”
Vadz chuckles as he takes the handful of trinkets—no coin yet—that the men have laid out on the table. “Shit only stinks when you’re downwind,” he says, grinning.
The men swear while I study the bones he cast. Kai dahn is a complicated game of interpreting number combinations. Vadz’s bones have carvings of women on them, too, which give them meanings I’m still trying to remember.
“Do you understand why I won?” Vadz asks me.
I finger the first bone, which lies on its side, showing both a 5 and a woman sitting astride a horse. “Five was in the first position. A lucky number, especially when seven an
d nine are in the second and third position and twelve is last. The five can therefore be read as a porpoise, a fortunate animal.”
“Very good,” he says, nodding. “You have a head for this game.”
I shrug. “It’s just rules, luck, and a little bit of mathematics. There isn’t any strategy.”
“On the surface, perhaps,” Vadz replies calmly, sweeping his bones back into the cup with the side of his palm. “The trick is to know more about the game than your opponent. There are different interpretations. I could call your attention to the three at the sixth position, which alters your reading slightly. The five is not only a porpoise but a woman underneath: a mermaid.” He grins.
I pick up the bone and squint at it. The woman on the horse is naked, covered only by the fall of her hair. “Five’s a woman, I understand, but why the horse?”
“Kai dahn is a game Eterean sailors stole a long time ago, from one of the lost tribes of the Saien. To these tribes, everything had two sides. The other numbers in this cast make the five a lucky number, a most fortunate number. But cast in a less auspicious way…” He shrugs, a little shrug. “Five can be the worst number. It causes a lot of arguments, on ship. Interpretations differ.”
“But the horse?”
“Love and death, she comes the same.”
I frown, staring at the bone in my hands. Those lost Saien tribes have hit a little too close for comfort tonight. I had the day off and spent it playing cards on the Talos, the street where our contracts are traded, hoping to hear just one mention of Arsenault that gave me hope. But all I heard were the same old war stories.
“Hey, Kyris, you look like you could use some wine,” Razi says. “You’re off duty, yes? Time to have a little fun.”
“I would if I had any coin.”
“Vadz—float him a loan, get him some wine. He’s going to ruin our night with that face.”
“It’s more likely to be your fault if the night gets ruined,” Nibas tells Razi. “Stop blaming Kyris.”
Razi shoots Nibas a sour look, then turns to me. “Live a little every once in a while, Kyris; that’s all I’m saying.”
“Eh, leave him alone,” Vadz says. “He probably did more work than you did today, Razi. At least, I hope he did, because he owes me rent.”
He eyes me hopefully.
I sigh. “Haven’t gotten paid yet, Vadz, sorry.”
Nibas picks up his own cup of wine. “You still working that job guarding that Caprine girl?”
“That…ended,” I say. “A fortnight ago.”
Razi laughs. “What he’s not telling you, Nibas, is the girl decided she liked him. Probably all that yellow hair.”
Nibas gives me one of the small curves of his mouth that passes as a smile. “That true, Kyris?”
I shift uncomfortably. “Maybe.”
“And her father tore up his contract right there.”
Vadz crosses his arms over his chest and shakes his head. “When were you going to tell me, Kyris?” Then he sighs. “I suppose I can float you another loan. But no more after this. What about that other job you’ve got?”
“Right,” Nibas says. “Weren’t you looking for a gavaro? The Aliente captain?”
He means Arsenault. I nod carefully. I’ve invented this job because I need the information, and it would seem odd and dangerous for me to ask for it outright. I’m definitely not getting paid for it, and I’m not sure how many times I can put Vadz off. “You got any information for me tonight, Vadz?”
Vadz shakes the bones in the cup. “Everyone in Liera would like to find that man, Kyris. But he’s probably dead. Most of the Aliente gavaros are.”
“You still think he died at Kafrin Gorge.”
Nibas was in Rojornick with me during the wars, but Razi and Vadz fought in Liera. Both of them heard the stories of Kafrin firsthand. Razi looks uncharacteristically serious, and Vadz shudders and makes a sign against evil in the air before him. “Yes, I still think he died at Kafrin. If I was betting, no one would bet against me. You know what happened.”
“But no one could place him there. And his body was never found.”
Vadz shrugs. “Doesn’t mean his body didn’t burn up in the fire. There were lots of bodies and all of them unrecognizable, down to cinders and ashes—not even bones left. Haven’t you heard the stories the Prinze gavaros tell?”
I’ve heard too many stories from too many people. There aren’t that many firsthand accounts, and I’m ashamed to say that part of me is relieved when I don’t have to sit through one. Listening to those stories is like having a chirurgeon dig at a rotten wound.
But I make myself shrug. There are things Vadz doesn’t need to know. “I’m wearing a green armband. I don’t get a chance to talk to many Prinze.”
“Well, they’d be happy if I could lead them to the Aliente captain, too, wouldn’t they? They’ve still got posters up for him. Ten thousand astra on his head, dead or alive. I’d be a rich man if I turned him in.”
“As if you would give the Prinze anything, Vadz. I know what happened to your men in the war.”
Vadz leans forward on the table and points at me, ready to elaborate on his favorite complaints yet again. “The Prinze had no call to fire on that ship. We were hauling grain.”
Nibas shifts in his seat. “Come on, Vadz. How many times can you tell this story? You were hauling guns.”
“But they didn’t know that, did they? They fired even though I’d begun to run up the white flag. The guns were all hid in the grain. They’d never have found them, and we were carrying injured, too, up to the Qalfans in the Quarter.”
“So, why would you turn Arsenault over to men like that?” I say.
“I just wonder why you’re so persistent in your search for him. What can he matter to you?”
“I have employers who’d like to know, that’s all.”
“Caprine? That would make a pickle of the peace accords, wouldn’t it?”
“If anyone found out. But my employer isn’t Caprine. So, you don’t have to worry on that account, Vadz.”
“Dakkaran, then, maybe,” Vadz says sagely. “Didn’t your captain have some link to Dakkar? Guns? Kacin?”
The Dakkarans used to hold the monopoly on the guns they smithed and the powdery white drug made from berries from their jungles, a long time ago. But that was before the Prinze stole both from them.
“There might have been some kind of link,” I say, hoping I’ve kept my voice noncommittal. “Guns, I think.”
“Whoever your employer is, he doesn’t pay you very well,” Vadz says skeptically.
“He’s paying me for information, isn’t he? I haven’t brought him much.”
In truth, I’ve found hardly anything at all. It’s as if Arsenault has disappeared from the face of the earth. Probably, that does mean he’s dead.
Maybe.
Vadz sighs. “Well. If you could use another job, there’s been a man in here. Looking for you.”
I’m still holding the bone. I lean the chair up so the front legs rest on the floor again, and put the bone down. “What kind of man?”
Again, the little shrug. “A gavaro; how am I supposed to know? Qalfan. He looked hard.”
Razi perks up and scans the room.
“Did he say why he wanted me?” I ask.
“He told me to tell you his employer wanted to talk to you about a job.” Vadz gestures with his cup. “In the back room.”
My eyebrows lift. If you have business you want to keep hidden, you can rent Laudio’s back room, but you’d better pay him well and hope he walks away.
“The gavaro was Caprine, then?”
“Not Caprine,” Vadz says. “Sere. He wore an indigo armband.”
I stiffen. Sere are almost as bad as Prinze, except that they’ve managed to retain their neutrality, with ties to both Prinze and Caprine, the two rival families around which the lesser families flit, hoping to sip of their nectar. Lieran politics are a morass of kin alliances, but when it comes do
wn to it, the most important question is Do you stand with Prinze or Caprine?
The major feat of the Sere is that they’ve avoided becoming attached to either House and instead have grown their tendrils into both.
Nibas gives a low whistle. “Working for the Sere would put you in coin.”
“And is this employer in the back room tonight?” I ask Vadz.
He glances at me out the corner of his eye. “Do you see that man standing just to the left of the Marquis painting? He’s the one who’s been asking.”
“Found him,” Razi says. “If he’s working for the Sere, I don’t know who he is.”
I try to look up without looking up. The Marquis painting is a painting of a Vençalan nobleman in his boudoir with a courtesan, while Cythia, the goddess of love, looks down on him in approval. Laudio probably got it cheap.
The Qalfan gavaro looks out of place beside it.
In contrast to the lush greens and oranges of the painting, he is one lean, angular expanse of black. Black—from the leather boots that show beneath the hem of his allaq, the body robes that are usually white, to the urqa he wears wrapped around his face and head. From this distance, I can’t even see his eyes, the slit in his urqa is so narrow.
Black isn’t a color you see often in Liera. It’s the color of ravens, of carrion-eaters—of death.
