Fortune's Fool (Eterean Empire Book 1)

by Angela Boord

  Arsenault himself rose in the ranks until he was in charge of a gavaro patrol guarding the silkworm nursery. Aside from the mulberry groves themselves, the nursery was the most valuable property on our land. As such, it was often the target of bandits in the springtime, who came to steal not silk but silkworm eggs.

  Our bandits lived in the northern hills and in other seasons made their living by preying on merchants and travelers journeying to Rojornick and Kavo and other points on the Spice Road.

  But in the springtime, the minor silk-growing Houses would often secretly hire them to attack our nursery to replenish their stores, to destroy our supply so we couldn’t compete, or to drive up the price of silk. Only the Aliente grew burgundy silk, and it fetched a high price.

  The raid came on the night of a new moon following a hard sanval, the wind that blew storms up from the south each spring. Some of the trees were damaged, and we worked hard all day cleaning up the branches, trying to salvage as many as we could for the worms. I helped strip leaves until long after dark. My hand was bloody and sore, and my arm and back ached by the time we were done and the overseers began to remove the torches.

  Arsenault rode between the nursery and the nearby groves all day. Lobardin was there, firmly under Arsenault’s authority, no matter how much it galled him. He was among Arsenault’s men that night in the mulberry grove. I remember the way the air smelled, full of earth and rain. The silhouettes of the gavaros moving through the trees, shivering the branches. Arsenault grew tenser and tenser as the day went on, sitting his black gelding and watching the hills worriedly. But the bandits still took me by surprise when they swept down upon us out of the dark.

  We only had a few moments of warning. The wind shifted and a horse’s whinny carried down to us from the northeast. Arsenault wheeled his horse and hissed at the men next to him, “Get them down to the combing house,” and the two gavaros pulled their swords and shouted at us to move, and then an enormous number of armed men seemed to explode from the night.

  Arsenault had been expecting the raid. Some of his men were disguised as serfs, but now they grabbed pikes and pulled swords and met the bandits that poured down on us on their horses. When we, the real serfs, heard the first galloping rush of men on horseback, we began to run down the hill to the combing house.

  I turned around to find Arsenault, and my hesitation caught me up in the chaos.

  Chaos was all it was. In the dark, I couldn’t tell Aliente from bandit. Horses screamed as they were skewered by pikes. The smell of rain became the smell of blood and shit and vomit. The ground turned to mud. Men screamed just like horses as they went down. Bodies slammed against each other and into trees, shaking water off the branches. Laughter rose above the din, hysterical and high-edged, and I caught a glimpse of Lobardin in the torchlight, cutting through men like a serf would scythe wheat.

  Then horses were pounding around me, and a man leaned out of his saddle and grabbed me up by the waist. He was wrapped in scratchy black wool that smelled sour and old, and all I could make out of his face was a few pale smudges and the glint of dark eyes peering out of a mask of dirt. I cried out, kicking and wriggling to get out of his grasp, but he tightened his grip and slammed me down behind the pommel of his saddle like a sack of grain.

  “Bastard!” I yelled at him. “Let me go!”

  He responded by wheeling his horse around and shoving his hand down on my back.

  Then Arsenault came down upon him with his axe.

  It whistled through the air above me, just over my head. If I had pulled back farther, it might have taken the top of my hair. The blade sank deep into the man’s chest, crunching through flesh and into bone. Blood sprayed outward, warm and soaking into my dress; the man screamed. I looked over my shoulder, through the blowing strands of my hair, and watched the momentum of the axe sweep him off the saddle and over the rump of his horse onto the ground, where another horse—dancing backward—planted a hoof in his stomach and drove him into the mud.

  I started to slide off the horse and made a desperate grasp at the horse’s mane.

  “Kyrra, ride!” Arsenault yelled at me. And then he was plunging into the fray again. I scrambled upright, ignoring the reins, clutched at the horse’s mane for all I was worth, and drove it on with my knees, out of the trees and down the path to the combing house.

  The next day, in the afternoon, Arsenault came to get me from the boiling room.

  He had turned the raid into a rout, though it hadn’t felt that way in the middle of the fighting. We lost two gavaros; the bandits were cut down to a man. The attack in the mulberry grove turned out to be a distraction for a much smaller force that was sent in to burgle the nursery, but Arsenault had been using scouts to watch the area and had suspected a ruse. Utîl remained at the nursery with a well-armed patrol all day, so when the bandits arrived, expecting their distraction to call all our gavaros to the trees, Utîl and his company stepped out of their hiding places and surprised them with swords and halberds.

  I ached all over and I hadn’t slept much. Poets glossed over the blood and fear when they spoke of battles. They didn’t mention the way the screams of horses and men became the same. Or that when you were safe, you would collapse on the dirt floor of the combing house, not feeling safe because there was someone else to worry about. And then, when the doors were flung open, and he strode with those big strides over to you, to kneel in the dirt and take your shoulder in his hand and look down at you with his face smeared with blood…you would begin crying all over again. And then he would give you a shake and say, Why didn’t you run with the others?

  And you would have no answer to that. Not until later, when it was too late to tell him anyway.

  He still looked angry when he strode up to the big vat of boiling water and stood in the steam, watching me. He had a scratch on his cheek and his left forearm was wrapped in a bandage, but other than that, he seemed healthy. He glowered at me from under the hair that had pulled from his braid.

  I pretended to ignore him, my stick turning circles among the bobbing maroon cocoons in the water. I had to stand on a stool to use a stick long enough to get to the bottom of the vat, so for once, Arsenault and I were on the same level.

  “I see that you’re well,” he said.

  “As are you,” I answered without looking at him.

  “We spent the morning burying the bodies,” he said. “The dogs got the horsemeat.”

  I blinked and stopped stirring. “The dogs…” I repeated.

  He let out an explosive sigh. “Kyrra. What were you doing out there? Did you volunteer? So you could be near the fighting?”

  Yesterday morning, the thought had crossed my mind, but then I had dismissed it. I didn’t want to admit the real reason I had been caught up in the fighting, so I might as well blame everything on Master Fenn. “No,” I said, leaning the stick against my shoulder. I put my hand out, palm up for him to look at. “I knew it would be harder than stirring cocoons. Master Fenn rounded up everyone who didn’t have essential work. Do you think I would do this voluntarily?”

  Arsenault leaned down in the mist to peer at my hand. It was swollen with scratches and blisters. It hurt to hold anything, but I didn’t have time to search out bandages this morning or the desire to ask anyone to help me.

  “Kyrra,” he breathed.

  “I didn’t mean to get in your way,” I said as I started to stir again.

  “Put that stick down and come with me. I’ll see to your hand. Master Fenn!” he called. “You need another pot-stirrer! I’m taking her away for other errands!”

  Master Fenn hobbled up, eyeing Arsenault over the tops of his half-moon spectacles. He was shorter than me, and Arsenault towered over him the way a prince in a fairy story would tower over a woodland faun. “What other errands, Captain?” he said, looking up. “What can she do that’s more important than stirring those cocoons?”

  “Helping me clean up around the nursery,” he said. “You can find another stirr
er, can’t you?”

  “I suppose so, but I wish you’d all decide where she’s really going to be assigned. Hadn’t she just ought to be moved to the barracks? Do you use her in the kitchens?”

  “We’re down a girl,” Arsenault said, which was a lie. There were plenty of kitchen girls. All the unattached girls on the estate wanted to work in the barracks kitchens. “Maybe I’ll see if we can work her in. It’s a good idea.”

  That’s all I needed, to get a new job pounding bread dough for gavaros.

  “Well,” Master Fenn said. “I don’t think I can contest you, Captain, especially after last night. Which House bought that raid?”

  Arsenault shrugged. “The bandit we managed to save didn’t know much, but from what I could piece together, I’d say Garonze.”

  “The bard who came in last month said they were cozying up to the Prinze.”

  “Officially, they’re still allied with the Sere, but it might be true. Who’s to say.”

  “The price of silk is down.”

  “But they wanted the eggs,” I said. “The caterpillars. If they wanted to drive up the price, they would have tried to destroy the eggs, not steal them.”

  “If the Garonze are trying to get into the Prinze’s good graces…”

  “Do you think there will be more raids?” I asked. “Are they going to try again?”

  Arsenault’s gaze flicked upward to mine. “Probably. If there are more of them left.”

  Master Fenn shook his head. “There are always more of them left.”

  “Then we’ll have to stomp them out,” Arsenault said. “Like killing vipers in a nest.”

  “Am I really going to work in the barracks kitchens?” I asked him after we walked into his quarters and he closed the door. “Are you assigning me work now instead of offering it?”

  He’d been promoted to a larger room. His worktable fit better and he’d acquired a mirror, which sat in the corner and reflected the room in a manner I always found sinister, as if something lurked behind it, watching us. If I could do it without him noticing, I always shifted the mirror to face the shutters or the wall.

  “I had to say something to get you out of there. Let me see your hand.”

  I bit my lip and put my hand out. He frowned down at it, then retrieved his chest from the corner of the room and dug in it for a small ceramic pot. He also came out with his sewing kit and a handkerchief.

  “What are you going to do with that?” I asked him.

  He struck a spark with his flint and lit a candle. Then he pulled a needle from his sewing kit and thrust it into the flame.

  “Keep holding your hand out.”

  He bent my fingers back and punctured one of the blisters with the needle, draining it. I jerked, more in surprise than pain, and he tightened his grip before he did the next one.

  “They were causing you some pain, weren’t they,” he said.

  I made an affirmative noise.

  He let go of my hand to lay the needle down, then returned to dab it with a clean cloth, smearing the now-flaccid blisters with cloudy ointment from the little pot. It smelled medicinal in a way that immediately brought back memories of pain and fever.

  The next thing I knew, Arsenault was down on one knee next to me with his hand on my shoulder, holding me in the chair.

  “Kyrra?”

  “The herbs are strong. I didn’t sleep much last night.”

  He eyed me skeptically as he grabbed the handkerchief and tied it around my hand. I flexed my fingers. They felt stiff.

  “Am I to work in the kitchens?” I said.

  “I told you I don’t know. I was just trying to find a way to get you out of the boiling house. In case there’s another raid.”

  He stood and turned to his worktable. A leather sheath rested there with a hilt sticking out of it—a medium-sized knife, small enough to be concealed but big enough to do damage. He swept it off the table and held it out to me.

  I looked up at him in surprise.

  “Here,” he said.

  I closed my fingers slowly around the hilt, then laid the sheath down in my lap and pulled the knife, holding it up to examine it. The hilt was carved of a deep red-brown wood I didn’t recognize and wrapped in calfskin. Small, wicked teeth lined the edge of the blade.

  Arsenault made a clatter, dragging up a chair to sit beside me. “It’s a basic gavaro’s knife. Useful for many situations. But get it up and under a man’s ribs and he’s dead.”

  “Why are you giving it to me?”

  “I want you to carry it.”

  I pushed it back into the sheath. “Arsenault, my father’s laws—”

  “What if I hadn’t seen you on that horse?”

  I’d been trying not to think about that. When I lived in the villa, bandit raids seemed exciting, the bandits themselves faintly romantic. I never thought what it was like for serfs. We lost serfs to bandits like we lost sheep to wolves. But now I was a sheep.

  “My father upholds the laws. I’m not allowed to carry a weapon. ‘If we don’t have a rule of law, then all we have is a rule of passion.’ That’s what he always says, Arsenault. You’ve probably heard him say it.”

  From the look on Arsenault’s face, he had. His gaze shifted to my sewed-up right sleeve. “What if the laws are bad, though?”

  I sucked in my breath and stood up. “It wasn’t my father’s fault I lost my arm.”

  His eyes snapped, taking on that metal color they did sometimes. Then he leaned his chair back against the wall, folding his arms over his chest. “Perhaps not.”

  “What is that supposed to mean? My father had nothing to do with my arm! It was Cassis—the Prinze and their backhanded plotting. By the time the Council sent their representatives to our door, he had no choice. Did you expect him to lose all his holdings just for me? To start a war just to save my arm?”

  “Do you think he’ll be able to avoid a war?” Arsenault got up so quickly from the chair, I had to take a step back. “Dammit, Kyrra, the Prinze are going to have war no matter what he does or what you do, trying to fit in with all these damn laws! You did what you did and you took your punishment. Anyone with eyes can see you regret the crime, and now you ought to be allowed to get on with your life and protect yourself!”

  I stared at him.

  No, I thought. Not just anyone with eyes can see that. Only you.

  I looked down at the floor. “If the bandits had taken me,” I said, almost in a whisper, “so much the better.”

  He was silent for a moment. Then he moved closer, so that I had to look up.

  “Well,” he said. “You might make a decent bandit princess, at that.”

  Anger surged through me, that he would mock me this way…but then I noticed the worry lines around his eyes.

  Was he was provoking me on purpose so I’d let it go?

  I forced myself to smile and tossed my hair. “I’d enjoy being a bandit princess. I’d carry a cutlass and wear a vest full of knives, and I’d prey on rich householders. The serfs would worship me.”

  His lips twitched with the ghost of a smile as he leaned his hip against his worktable and crossed his boots at the ankle. “Is there a bandit prince in this story?”

  Certainly not the man who grabbed me last night. I tried not to shudder. “I suppose so. There’s a bandit prince in every story, isn’t there?” I said.

  “Most of them.”

  “I know—I’ll find myself an exiled outlaw. A prince accused of a crime he didn’t commit. Together we’ll rule the rest of the bandits and be the scourge of the Houses.”

  Arsenault’s smile lengthened, but for some reason, his eyes looked hollow. He picked up the knife again.

  “Take it,” he said.

  I laughed. “It’s just a story, Arsenault.”

  “I made it for you.”

  It caught me by surprise. “You made this blade?”

  “I did. I told you I’ve a way with metal.”

  “You said it was a long story.”<
br />
  He smiled again but the easiness had gone, leaving it tinged with bitterness and regret. “It is. Not as interesting as the story of the bandit princess.”

  The silver wolf stood at the edge of the table. I picked it up instead of the knife. The oil from my skin dimmed the shine of its surface, and feeling I’d somehow marred it, I tried to wipe it on my skirt. But my thumbprint still glared at me.

  “You made the wolf, too, didn’t you?”

  A shadow passed over his face. “A long time ago.”

  “And the woman. Where is the woman? Did you finish her?”

  I was unprepared for the pain that appeared in his eyes. It flashed to the surface and then disappeared behind that careful, neutral expression that always drove me mad.

  “Which woman do you mean?”

  “Which woman? Arsenault, don’t tell me that you make it a habit of carving statues of women?”

  I had the satisfaction of seeing him put off balance. He straightened up, going pale. “What? No. That—” He ran a hand through his hair. “You meant the basswood.”

  “Why would I have meant anything different?”

  “Forgive me, Kyrra. I’ve probably had even less sleep than you.”

  “Who did you think I was talking about? Do you have so many women, Arsenault?”

  “Of course not. I try to avoid entanglements.”

  “Entanglements.” I let the word stretch out on my tongue. Then my treacherous tongue betrayed me. “Is that what Margarithe was?”

  “Margarithe…” he said slowly. He colored along the line of his beard. “I suppose I shouldn’t ask her to take you on as a kitchen girl.”

  The heat that scalded my own cheeks was so strong and sudden, it felt as if it would char me. “Why not?”

  “Because— How did you know about Margarithe?”

  It was either beat a hasty retreat or admit what I’d seen. “You aren’t the only one who has eyes around here. But I’m happy to know that’s how you think of your women, Arsenault. Fodder for your carving, perhaps? Metal to play with and then to discard?”