Fortune's Fool (Eterean Empire Book 1)

by Angela Boord

  “You’ve brought me to your room?” I said with alarm as I turned to face him.

  He didn’t say anything, just stepped back out into the hallway.

  “If you mean to abuse me, my father’s laws will prevent you, too!” I shouted after him.

  He pulled the door shut behind him. I listened for the sound of a bolt or the click of a lock, but neither came.

  It didn’t make any sense for him to trot out my father’s laws to Vanni di Forza only to circumvent them himself, but I didn’t understand what “chores” I could do in this sparely furnished room. The mystery guaranteed I would stay so I could solve it. I threw open the shutters to let in some air and light, and after a moment’s hesitation, I drifted over to the worktable, thinking that in case he did mean me harm, I could use a chunk of wood as a weapon.

  He had several projects in various states of progress but nothing was finished. A carving of unfamiliar wood striated with bands of rose and lavender in the shape of a fox. A piece of reddened cherry became the sweep of a woman’s hair, so natural it might have been real. But the woman’s face was unfinished, and for some reason that troubled me. Next to it lay a wolf fashioned of bright silver metal.

  I touched the wolf’s flank and a light frisson shivered through me. Then the door swung open and Arsenault shoved in a wooden tub with his foot, then followed, carrying two big buckets of water on either arm.

  I drew my hand quickly back from the wolf. Arsenault kicked the door closed and poured the contents of the buckets into the washtub.

  “What is that?” I said.

  Arsenault barely glanced up at me. “What does it look like?”

  “I can’t say. You told Vanni di Forza I was needed for chores.”

  “I do have chores for you. But first, you’ll take a bath.”

  “Here?”

  “If there was a better place, I’m sure you’d have done it already, Lady Kyrra.”

  His words stung, but I didn’t know how to respond to them. It was true what the other gavaros had said, that I was in danger of turning into a clay golem. But the girls in the combing house all bathed together in the stream that ran through the glade below the combing house, and if I bathed with them, I would have to show off my stump.

  I settled on calling him out for using my name. “You may not call me lady,” I said. “It is against the law.”

  He shrugged and straightened up from setting the empty buckets down in the corner. “Is anyone here to pass sentence?”

  “I don’t see how I will bathe here.”

  “I have a towel,” he said. He crossed to the far wall and opened a small chest, from which he extracted a neatly folded, undyed linen towel and a cloth for washing and laid them on the cot. “And soap.” A small bar followed, scenting the air with the kind of exotic spices the Prinze and their allies sold in the Lieran Day Market. Cloves and musk and perhaps even tea from Saien, the black leaves called sukong that the men drank sometimes.

  An earthy, male scent, completely unfitting for a woman. My soaps had smelled of lavender and citrus and roses.

  “Your soap smells expensive,” I said skeptically.

  “I’ve traveled.” He pulled a small ivory comb out of the chest and laid it next to the towel and soap. It, too, seemed out of place in the small room with his dusty boots and the nicks on his hands.

  “I’ll wait outside.” His gray eyes flickered down over me and he frowned. “I suppose you’ll have to hand your clothes through the door. To wash them, too.”

  That was too much. I knew I had fallen, but the thought of having been rescued from the taunting of Vanni di Forza only to be forced to sit naked in the room of a gavaro…

  My eyes felt as hot as my face, and I gathered my skirts in my hand and tried to push past Arsenault to the door. “I see now what chores you’d have me do.”

  He put himself in front of the door and crossed his arms. “I suppose you have a right to be wary of wolves, but just because you’re fallen, do you think it means you have to stay down in the dirt?”

  His words startled me into looking up at his face, at his arched, aristocratic black brows—such a contrast to the thick ridge in his nose where an old break had healed—and the scar that ran down his temple. In spite of myself, my eyes were drawn to that scar. It was white with age, but the cut must have laid his skin open to the bone.

  His mouth—more expressive than I would have thought for a man who seemed so hard—softened and he said, “I’ll beg a spare dress from one of the women. When you get out of the bath, put on my clean shirt and tunic. They’re hanging on a hook on the wall. I’ll knock when I get back, leave you the dress, and take your clothes.”

  For the first time all afternoon, I realized he wasn’t wearing his tunic, just a burgundy armband tied around his bicep. He’d been off duty when he faced Vanni di Forza.

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “Why are you doing this?”

  He watched me for a moment. I could almost see him sort his words. Then he said, “You look like you need it.”

  Maybe I should have been insulted. But in truth, I wouldn’t have been able to stop Vanni di Forza myself, and I did need that bath badly, for more than one reason.

  Arsenault walked out and firmly shut the door behind him. After he left, I discovered it could be locked from the inside, so I did. Then I closed the shutters, wrestled my clothes off, and sank naked into the cool water in the washtub.

  I tried not to look at my stump. Unlike Arsenault’s scar, my scars were still pink and livid. The muscles of my upper arm had shrunk until even the portion of limb that remained looked wizened. Useless. Ugly.

  I tried also not to think about my last bath, the night before I left to stand before the Council. That tub was large and copper, and my chambermaids warmed the water with heated bricks. Mam washed my hair and teased out the tangles while Bella soaped my back. Then they rubbed my skin with lavender-scented oils and wrapped me in a thick cotton robe that smelled of rose petals, and Mam oiled my curls and braided my hair.

  The memory itself was like a scar, and the worst part of it was not the hot water or the lavender oils, but the way Mam braided my hair.

  I couldn’t braid my hair on my own now. That was why it was such a tangled mess. The girls I slept with and worked around all wore their hair in braided crowns. Sometimes, they helped each other, but no one wanted to help me, because they didn’t know how much help could be given without breaking the terms of my sentence, and I was too ashamed to ask for anything. Once, a girl named Gia tried to help me—picking up the comb from the floor where I’d thrown it in frustration—but Ilena laughed and asked her what kind of combergirl she was, if she was headed out to comb the guardian dogs with their matted hair next. Gia was a shy, kind girl and blushed so hot and red that I couldn’t find it in myself to let her help me again. So, I gave up on combs and steeled myself to all the barbs Ilena threw my way, about how maybe I ought to be guarding the sheep instead.

  The tangles still wouldn’t come out, no matter how much I lathered them with Arsenault’s soap. I was still scrubbing when Arsenault rapped softly on the door.

  “No,” I called out. “Not yet.”

  “I thought you didn’t want a bath,” he said through the door.

  “I’ll be done soon!” I answered. But even though the water was cold and the tub small and cramped, my muscles and my mind had begun to loosen. I didn’t feel so much like an animal anymore, ready to scratch and bite.

  Maybe I wasn’t so eager to get out of the tub.

  When I felt as if I couldn’t scrape another fleck of dirt from my skin, I got out and dried myself with Arsenault’s thin towel, then wrestled on his extra shirt and his tunic over that. The hems of both fell past my knees, granting me a basic decency, though they left my calves exposed. When I unlocked the door and let him in, he laid a bundle of clothing down on the bed. I caught a flash of red rolled up in a brown skirt and walked over to sort through it.

  The girl he’
d found had given him everything—drawers, stockings, chemise, the sleeveless guarnello that all the girls in the villa wore, this one with a red bodice and brown skirt embroidered with yellow flowers. To my relief, the strings of the bodice had been laced already; I thought I could loosen them enough to get into the dress without having to unlace them. I had learned to tie a simple knot with my one hand, well enough that I wouldn’t be too embarrassed by the looseness of my dress.

  “Margarithe is of a size with you, I think,” Arsenault was saying. “She’s one of the kitchen girls. I hope…”

  His voice trailed away and I realized he was staring at me.

  My cheeks fired and I tried to tug the tunic down further. “Ser,” I said.

  He cleared his throat and looked away. “I gave you a comb, didn’t I?”

  He hadn’t been looking at me at all. He’d been staring at the disaster of my hair.

  Now my cheeks were red for a different reason. I tried to seem aloof.

  “I used it,” I said.

  His mouth hitched up at the corner. “Which edge?”

  I glared at him. “Try to braid your own hair without two hands. The tangles won’t come out and I can’t do anything to fix them.”

  The slight smile at the corner of his mouth disappeared. He cocked his head thoughtfully. “You have no one to help you?”

  “The combergirls? Why should they want to help me?”

  “I don’t know. Have you given them reason to want to help you?”

  “If you mean have I laid myself down at their feet—”

  “No, Lady Kyrra, that isn’t what I meant.”

  “What did you mean, then?”

  He looked at me with those odd gray eyes again, long enough that I had to resist pulling the tunic down further.

  “Come here,” he said.

  “I’ve already said I won’t do your chores.”

  “Is that all you think about? I was hoping you’d help me with my shirts and polish my boots.”

  “Your laundry?” I raised my stump. “I can’t even braid my own hair; do you think I can do something as heavy as your laundry?”

  “Yes, eventually,” he said, and instead of waiting for me to come to him, he came to me. With a swift, silent motion, he twisted my hair into a tail with one hand and pulled his dagger with the other. I jerked forward but he held on tight, and in an instant, the blade sliced the tail cleanly off. My curls sprang up to the bottom of my earlobes, and my scalp felt freer without the weight of all that hair pulling down on it.

  He cast the sheaf of matted, dun-colored tangles onto the floor.

  “Now you’ll be able to take care of yourself,” he said.

  “You’ll have to pay back Margarithe’s dress. We had to burn yours,” he said after I had dressed. “Come back tomorrow and I’ll set you some chores to do.”

  “Your laundry?”

  “I’m not sure you’re ready for laundry yet. I’ll have you polish my weapons.”

  I had been expecting any number of chores, but polishing his weapons wasn’t one of them. He was wearing his sword right now. It had a plain cruciform hilt, a dull silver pommel, and a grip wrapped in dark, worn leather. Most householders hired their swords and had no need of wielding their own. In contrast, Arsenault’s looked used.

  “You jest with me. This is an idiom, a way of saying something unspeakable in your own language.”

  He laughed. “Is that what you Lierans call it? Maybe you can work on my mail shirt, then. That’ll keep you busy a while.”

  “Your mail shirt?”

  “I took an arrow down in Onzarro not long ago. Good thing the mail slowed it down, or I might not be here talking to you.”

  I frowned. I had spent a long time fighting off fevers after my arm was severed, and I often ran into situations in which I discovered that the world was not what I thought it was. “Are they fighting in Onzarro again?”

  “Aren’t they always fighting in Onzarro? I picked up a short-term contract with a spice merchant trying to protect his overland trade.”

  My frown deepened. “From the Prinze, you mean. They’re trying to take that trade by sea.”

  Arsenault brushed something off his sleeve. “The Prinze are trying to take a great many trades these days,” he said offhandedly. “I had a horse shot out from under me.”

  By the Prinze, I thought, and then—I realized I had heard the story.

  “You weren’t fighting for a spice merchant,” I said. “You were fighting for the Camerani. Onzarro’s ruling House. That’s who the Prinze butted up against. And the Camerani had a gavaro—a captain—who led the charge against the flank and forced the Prinze marines back to their boats. The Prinze ships were manned by archers and the Camerani captain was hit but fought on, down the beach. That was you, wasn’t it?”

  “You seem remarkably well-informed for a serf girl.”

  “The bards,” I said. “They give us our news, then Ilena embellishes it for the benefit of the other girls. I believe she said your black hair gleamed in the sun and you were wearing plate and silks, and when you fell, you said something like, I will fight on if I have to run barefoot down this beach.”

  There might have been a faint blush on his cheeks as he glanced up at me sideways. He cleared his throat. “‘If I have to run barefoot down this beach’?”

  “Ilena can tell a good story.”

  “I believe what I said was Get this gods-cursed horse off me; I’ve been shot. But it does sound better the way she tells it.”

  In spite of myself, my mouth tugged upward. “Did you fight on down the beach?”

  He nodded. “That much is true. But I wasn’t wearing plate—or mail, either. I got out of that shirt as quick as I could in case we were forced to fight in the water.” He cocked his head. “I did manage to keep my boots on.”

  “So, you weren’t fighting barefoot in the water?”

  He smiled, wryly. “I try to avoid fighting barefoot in the water if I can. But it didn’t come to that. The saboteurs holed the hulls. We sank three ships that day.” Then he sighed. “It won’t matter in the end, though. The Onzarrans can’t hope to keep a monopoly on the spice trade. It’s far easier and faster to get to Saien and Hamari by ship than it is by the Spice Road, especially now that the Rojornicki boyars are trying to murder each other. If the Prinze can round Thunder Cape, they’ll have the trade from Dakkar, too.”

  I looked at him with new appreciation. So, he had fought the Prinze and he had a grasp of geography and politics. Perhaps my father did have plans.

  Or perhaps… the Prinze weren’t just invested in taking the spice trade. They nearly owned it anyway. Perhaps what they wanted now was silk. Silk to trade for spice.

  Abruptly, the feeling I’d had, of having an easy conversation with someone, departed.

  “I should get back to the combing house. The girls will be wanting water, and I’ll need to sweep, too.”

  Arsenault kicked himself away from the wall. “Sunset tomorrow, Lady Kyrra. Don’t forget.”

  “Sunset!”

  “After your chores are done. Then you can do mine.”

  “But—”

  “You’ll need to pay back Margarithe, won’t you?”

  He stopped on his way to open the door and looked down at me. I swallowed the rest of my protests and made to walk past him. But he stopped me with a hand on my wrist. Just a brief touch, enough to make me look up at him again. “Here,” he said, holding out the comb, “this is yours.”

  I didn’t know what to say. So, I didn’t say anything. I took the comb from him and fled.

  Ilena didn’t let my hair go unremarked, of course. It was the first thing she noticed when I walked into the combing house that night.

  “Are you finally in mourning?” she asked, as she wove her own hair into a single broad plait over her shoulder. “Or did you go to the grooms for a trim?”

  I pulled my new dress off over my head and stood in my chemise as I laid the guarnello down on my ma
ttress and folded it slowly. “Careful,” I said. “I might bite.”

  Ilena rolled her eyes and the girls around her tittered. But it was easy to see that the change in my appearance made them all nervous because they couldn’t explain it. I couldn’t explain it either. Maybe Arsenault had only cut my hair to make it easier to comb, but I felt as if part of my past had gone with it. Was I in mourning? What was mourning supposed to feel like? I just felt dry and beaten down inside, like the dirt of the courtyard.

  “Where did you get that dress?” Ilena asked. “And the comb?”

  I thought of Ilena and her stories of plate armor and silk and the reality of Arsenault standing in his small room with the blush on his cheeks and the worn sword at his hip, and I didn’t know what to say. “A gavaro gave it to me.”

  “He’ll want something out of you if he hasn’t got it already,” she said. “No man gives something for nothing.”

  Chapter 6

  I think Arsenault liked to solve problems, and my daily life presented an endless stream of them. We found no way for me to mend his mail shirt with only my clumsy left hand and a single pair of pliers. Instead, he set me to mending and making clothes. Once, as he was repairing the padded leather doublet he wore beneath his mail, I was struck dumb when he laid the needle down and picked it up again in his left hand.

  I watched as he fumbled the long strip of leather through the needle’s eye and secured it awkwardly in a slip knot with his thumb and index finger. Frowning in concentration, he began slowly to push the needle through the leather and padding in a row of crooked stitches. At the end, he flipped the shirt, attempted three or four times to make the knot, then lifted the shirt so he could pull the end of the thread tight with his teeth.

  “I believe you’ll just have to go slowly,” he said, “until your left hand learns what you want it to do.” Then he leaned back in his chair, kicked his feet up on the table, and switched hands to do the rest of his shirt.

  By winter’s end, my left arm had grown hard and wiry, and my left hand, while not nimble, was at least usable. But I was no closer to knowing why Arsenault wanted me for his chores. He never expected any of the favors a woman could give, even after I paid Margarithe back for the clothes, and he always asked, never demanded, if I would come back for more work.