Fortune's Fool (Eterean Empire Book 1)

by Angela Boord

  “If I say I want to avoid entanglements, it’s not because I think less of the women—it’s because I think less of myself. And if you think you can compare me to a householder who seduces a girl only to abandon her—”

  He bit off the rest of his words and the muscle in his jaw twitched. He was angry, really angry. But bringing up Cassis wasn’t fair.

  “How would you know what it’s like not to be considered a person but only an entanglement?”

  His face went ashen. “Kyrra, that isn’t what I meant—”

  “I don’t care what you meant,” I said.

  I shoved the silver wolf in my pocket and ran out the door.

  Chapter 10

  “So, you’re Arsenault’s girl.” Margarithe wiped her hands on a towel and looked me over as I stood in the entrance to the kitchen.

  I’d spent the night stewing in anger and guilt over my conversation with Arsenault. I’d slunk back to the barracks that morning, intending to apologize, only to find that Arsenault was gone, up at the stables putting together a team of men to lure the bandits out by another ruse—posing as a rich merchant with his gavaros. Lobardin was the one who gave me the news, cheerfully reminding me of how excellent Arsenault was at keeping his secrets, before he jogged off down the hall to join them. And it was Lobardin who told me, grinning, that I would be working in the kitchens. Lobardin liked to flirt with the kitchen girls and they with him, and if I’d had less to worry about, I might have worried about that. But instead, all I could think about was that I would now be under Margarithe’s direction.

  Her arms were covered in flour to the elbows, her dark hair wound into a plain knot at the back of her head, but it was easy to see what Arsenault saw in her. We may have been “of a size” as Arsenault had said, but she filled the same space with far more curves than I did.

  And of course, she had both her arms.

  “I’m not—” I began. But then I changed what I had been going to say. “The gavaros pay me to do their mending. But Lobardin said I’ve been assigned to the kitchens now.”

  She considered me a moment. “Do you know anything about cooking?”

  It was a fair question. I had been taught to play the harp, to dance the gavotte, and to converse with courtiers of many different nations…but as a noblewoman, I wasn’t able to dress or eat without the labor of others. Nowhere in my education had I been taught how to assemble even the simplest of meals.

  But I did know something about cooking. My mother had always supervised the kitchens when she was upset or worried, and I’d spent my youth darting in and out among the cooks in such an aggravating fashion that they’d begun to defend themselves by putting me in their offense, allowing me to pummel the bread dough into submission.

  “A little,” I said. “I can knead dough and roll it. Chop vegetables. Stir soup.”

  Or at least I used to be able to, when I had two hands. But I knew what Arsenault would say if I claimed not to be able to do those things just because I lacked an arm.

  Margarithe nodded. “There’s a bowl of dough over there ready to be rolled out for ioli. Just touch it with your fingers. Keep the bandage out of it.”

  I flinched. Her tone of voice was more practical than unkind, but after my conversation with Arsenault yesterday, she could have said hello to me and I would have read more into it. I walked over to the bowl she indicated, on the same battered wooden table where she’d been kneading dough when I walked in. A rack of smooth wooden rolling pins hung on the wall beside it. I pulled one down, then threw a handful of flour onto the table and scooped the heavy mass of eggy yellow dough out of the bowl. It took me a while to get my hand under it, and the dough stuck to my fingers because I had forgotten to dust them with flour. I tried to peel the dough away but without my right hand to help, I didn’t make much progress. Finally, I gave up and smashed the dough with my knuckles.

  The kitchen girls stared at me, their friendly chatter silenced. For a moment, the only sound was the crackling of the big fire where a kettle of broth was boiling, filling the room with steam and the smell of lamb. I found myself wishing Arsenault had left me in the boiling house, even though the work there was hard, hot, and boring.

  Then the thunk of knives on wood began again and the kitchen girls resumed their conversation as they chopped vegetables.

  Margarithe looked troubled, but turned back to her dough. She pushed both her hands down deep into the mass and leaned on them. “I guess having you work here will make guarding you easier,” she said.

  “Guarding me?”

  “Isn’t that Arsenault’s commission?”

  I had only just managed to flour the rolling pin, making a mess in the process. I pressed down hard on it, but the dough barely moved. “This is the first I’ve heard of such a commission.”

  “Oh. I thought he said…”

  “You probably know better than I do. I only mend his shirts.”

  “You seem to spend a lot of time with him, though.”

  In order to roll the dough into an even square, I had to lean down, almost onto the table, putting all my weight into it. I knew the girls were watching me, but I could see Margarithe watching me, too, pretending that she wasn’t.

  “He seems to have an endless list of chores that need doing,” I muttered.

  “Well. He’d need to keep you close, wouldn’t he?”

  “But the Mestere isn’t allowed to protect me.”

  “I’m just telling you what Arsenault said. When he asked me for my extra dress.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “For the dress. Arsenault said he paid you back.”

  I tried to shake the sticky dough off my fingers so I could use a cutter to slice the rolled-out dough into squares to stuff with cheese, but it clung stubbornly. I wiped my hand on my apron and some of the dough rolled off onto the floor.

  “He bought me a lovely guarnello when he was in Liera last, and a scarf made of rose silk. It was quite thoughtful,” Margarithe said.

  I wondered when and why he had gone back to Liera. Or maybe I was just trying not to think of the rose silk scarf and the lovely guarnello. That he had bought her as a gift.

  Probably because it suited her eyes.

  “I’m glad the debt was paid,” I said, reaching for the utensil crock though I knew my hand would leave little bits of flour and crusty dough on all the other kitchen tools.

  But Margarithe grabbed the cutter and handed it to me before I had the chance. She smiled tightly and then turned away, mercifully allowing me to blush without watching me do it.

  Why hadn’t Arsenault just left me in the boiling house?

  “It must be difficult for him, trying to juggle all the different roles the Mestere wants him to play,” Margarithe said. “Do you know where he is now?”

  I cut a long track in the dough, concentrating hard on it. “Lobardin said they were headed out to take care of the remaining bandits.”

  “Arsenault’s quite a swordsman. I’m sure if anyone can take care of those bandits, he can. You’ve watched him at practice, haven’t you?”

  Of course I had. I’d practiced daggerwork with him, too, in a little grotto behind the barracks, where an armless statue of a nymph stood guard over a spring bubbling out of the hillside. He moved through his strange foreign forms with the ease of molten metal.

  But it wasn’t the way he swung his axe that had defeated those bandits. It was his ability to outthink them.

  Why hadn’t Arsenault just told me that my father hired him to protect me? Why would he need to fool me into thinking that he was treating me like he did because it was his own choice and not a commission?

  Unless Jon had put Arsenault there to use me, the way he had sent Lobardin there with Arsenault. As fodder for some plan that Arsenault refused to talk about.

  I stopped cutting tracks in the dough and looked at Margarithe. She was concentrating on her task, pushing the dough out with both her hands, a dusting of flour smeared white on what was possibly the lovely
guarnello, a dusky rose color that did indeed suit her olive skin and deep brown eyes.

  Well, it seemed that Arsenault had fooled both of us, hadn’t he? So, at least I had company.

  By the time Arsenault’s party returned a week later, I had made so many ioli, I felt like I folded them in my sleep. I was sitting on an empty barrel in the corner of the dining hall, nibbling on one of the last fried ioli, when the big doors were thrown open and Lobardin strode into the room grinning, with his arms outstretched.

  He was wearing a wine-colored cloak so dark, it was almost black, with a long rip down the back like someone had taken a knife to it. His silk shirt and trousers were smudged with dirt, and a big purple bruise spread across his cheekbone.

  “Brothers!” he said. “Let us rejoice, for we are victorious! The banditti are no more, and the Mestere has allocated us all a few extra barrels of wine in appreciation!”

  I nearly choked on my ioli. But the other gavaros set up an immediate whoop and began pounding their knives on the tables for him.

  “Tell us the story, Lobardin!”

  “How did you defeat them?”

  “Was there a battle?”

  “Patience!” Lobardin called out, laughing. “Get me some food and a glass of wine and a woman, and I’ll tell you soon enough. The rest of our party will be in too, and you can mob them with your questions.”

  A clatter at the door made everyone look up. A few more gavaros entered, looking just as dirty and abused as Lobardin but less brash about it. They wore burgundy Aliente tunics, one of which had an alarming slash down the front, and black felt hats that looked like they’d been smashed into the dirt.

  I slid off the barrel and stood on my tiptoes, looking for Arsenault.

  Behind the group of gavaros in tunics, two more gavaros were dragging him in.

  Margarithe came to stand beside me and put a hand to her mouth when she saw him. The hall went quieter, and Lobardin turned around with a piece of bread in his hand, which he raised in a salute when he saw who it was.

  “Ah,” he said. “Our fearless leader. Behold our captain, the architect of our victory.”

  Arsenault grunted. He was wearing almost as much black as Lobardin had in the alley in Liera. He had on his black hat and his black cloak. When his cloak fell open, the strange, foreign-cut shirt he wore under it shimmered black and gold. He wore his regular black trousers, but his left thigh was wrapped in dirty white bandages. The two gavaros in their burgundy tunics helping him didn’t look much better; one of them, a young blond gavaro named Saes, sported a gash above his right brow, and the other, a man with curly black hair and a broad chest named Verrin, had the sleeve of his brown shirt ripped cuff to elbow, and a blood-crusted cut winked in the gap.

  But they were both grinning, in the manner of men who had just cheated death. Saes and Verrin stepped away and Arsenault collapsed into a chair.

  “Are you going to tell the story or not, Lobardin,” he said, closing his eyes.

  There was something different about his voice. Lobardin glanced at him, amused, then sketched a bow that would have made any householder proud and climbed the bench to the table like he was climbing stairs.

  “We went in disguise,” he said, standing on the table like a player in a play. “As a merchant train. Our Captain Arsenault played the role of foreign merchant, and I rode ahead like an idiot householder, my saddlebags full of treasure. We had donkeys and silk and an ancient, creaky wagon stocked with wine barrels. And bolts of silk—oh, the best indigo silk—such a shimmering midnight color as you’ve never laid eyes on.”

  I had laid eyes on it. A bolt was worth six months’ pay for all those gavaros combined.

  “We were irresistible! And just as we made it to Lovers’ Pass, they attacked. They came down at us from off the rocks. If we’d been a regular merchant train, we wouldn’t have had a chance. The leader was Garonze, with military training, and knew what he was doing. They boxed us into the pass so it was almost impossible to fight our way out.”

  A true bandit prince, then. The Garonze had long been our rivals in the silk trade, in the same manner that jackals tried to steal wolf kills.

  “And then to make matters worse, those treacherous Aliente gavaros deserted us, can you imagine? But can you imagine that the banditti didn’t give chase?”

  “Why would they, when they had your barrels of wine and two rich hostages?” one of the gavaros sitting next to him said.

  “Well, we’d already sent Verrin ahead to pay them off to make sure,” Saes added in the midst of lifting a glass of wine. “He’d been scouting in the past month and the bandits knew him. It was almost like the captain had planned it all from the beginning.”

  Verrin scrubbed a hand through his unruly curls and smiled in an embarrassed way when a number of gavaros beat him on the back in congratulations.

  “But the captain told me only to pay them to let us gavaros go,” Verrin said. “Not those idiot aristocrats. We threw them to the wolves.”

  “You rotten cowardly bastards,” Lobardin agreed offhandedly, glancing over at Arsenault. He took a big bite of bread and gulped down about half of the wine that had been pressed into his hand.

  He closed his eyes briefly, as in ecstasy. “Oh, that’s better,” he said. “Maybe we really did make it.”

  The other gavaros in the party made wordless sounds of assent, involved as they were in their own version of Lobardin’s public play. Arsenault had taken off his hat and put his leg up on a chair, and was taking a huge bite of a sandwich he’d made. Pickled peppers hung out the side. Margarithe stood beside him, leaning against the table and fiddling with loose strands of hair at the bottom of his braid, but he still looked tense, his gaze roving the crowd as he ate.

  I’d been so wrapped up in Lobardin’s story, I hadn’t noticed her go. The hall was fuller now too. Everyone on the estate must have seen them come in. I spotted Ilena making her way over to Arsenault. I wanted to greet him too. But if I was merely a commission, then perhaps I would only be a reminder of more work he had to do. I sat back down on my barrel and lifted my feet up onto the top, trying to curl up so small, no one would notice me.

  “So, our worthless gavaros ran off and left us to that ruthless Garonze bastard.”

  “Is that what happened to the captain’s leg?” someone asked.

  “Hurt it in the first fighting,” Arsenault said. “Damn Garonze cut me when I was still horseback. Backed me into a cleft in the rock where I couldn’t maneuver.”

  “Then we had to convince him not to kill us,” Lobardin said, growing more serious.

  “Fed him a load of your horseshit, did you, Lobardin?” someone said.

  Lobardin flashed him a grin, but it lacked the brightness of his previous smile, and he ran a hand through his hair. “Something like that.”

  “It worked,” Arsenault interjected. “The Garonze bound us and put us in his cave.”

  Lobardin shuddered. It seemed like a real gesture, and one that he stopped as soon as he caught it. “But they weren’t expecting our gavaros to come back and attack them,” he said with forced brightness.

  “Did you get all of them?” another gavaro asked.

  “All of them except one. The Garonze captain is down in the holding cells.”

  A cheer went up. Lobardin took a big, graceful bow, then jumped down from the table. The gavaros who had remained and the kitchen girls and the other serfs were smiling and laughing, pounding the heroes on the back, drinking to their health.

  But the heroes’ smiles seemed strained as they raised their glasses.

  There followed a feast the likes of which I had never attended, made all the more amazing because none of it was planned. Gavaros lived hard and might die at any time, so if they saw an excuse for celebration, they took it. The night turned into a bright frenzy around me. The gavaros pushed the tables, benches, and chairs against the walls for dancing, and the ones who could play went back to their bunks for their guitars and fiddles. The
room became a swirl of skirts and laughter and stomping boots. The cooks tapped an extra barrel of wine, and all the bottles of foreign liquors that the gavaros were hoarding made an appearance. I remained in my corner, watching in amazement, but somehow, I always had something to eat and my glass was always full.

  Arsenault sat in his chair with his head tilted against the back and drank out of a brown bottle—not wine. Margarithe sat next to him all night, and I couldn’t bring myself to walk over. As I watched the gavaros dance with all the girls, I remembered the last time I had danced, that night with Cassis. The memory came back so sweet and painful, it was like the first bite of a candied fruit—a burst of sugar so sweet, it made your mouth water in pain.

  I was nearing the bottom of my third glass of wine when a man’s knee jostled my barrel. I flailed out to keep my balance, and the rest of my wine sloshed over the rim of the glass onto the dirt floor. I stared down at it stupidly, and then a hand grabbed my arm.

  It was Lobardin, looking flushed. “Come on, Kyrra,” he said. “You can’t hide in your corner all night.”

  “I wasn’t hiding—” I began, but Lobardin was already pulling me out into the dancers and didn’t grace my words with a reply. Instead, he whirled me around, away from him, then back up close, his hand on my waist.

  “I can’t do these dances!” I shouted at him. “I’ve only one arm!”

  “Oh, excuses, Kyrra!” he shouted back, and spun me again. “Have a little fun!”

  “Are you drunk?”

  “Yes, thank all the gods! Are you?”

  “P-perhaps…”

  He laughed. “Wonderful! Why haven’t you been over there, hanging around Arsenault?”

  “Because—”

  “You can’t be jealous of Margarithe, now, can you? Or that girl Ilena?”

  “Why can’t I?”

  “I suppose you can be anything you like. Are you?”

  “No! Why should I have a reason to be jealous? Especially of Ilena?”