Fortune's Fool (Eterean Empire Book 1)

by Angela Boord

  Thanks to my arm and my boot, I can’t tell if he has a cut on his cheek left by my dagger last night or not.

  By the time we arrive at the Prinze compound, on the high ground of the city, the cold spring morning has grown lighter and brighter, but it hasn’t gotten much warmer. The guards marched me the whole way with their dikkarros out—easily aimed at that distance—and Arsenault never let go of my arm once.

  It’s not like I really wanted to escape. But of course, only Jon would know that. The guards expected him to leave but he hasn’t, and from the look on his face, he’s still trying to think of a way to save whatever godsdamned scheme made him think hiding Arsenault from me was a good idea.

  The sight of the ancestral home of the Prinze hulking above us gives me pause, though. Rooted in the bluff that sets it above the lower city, surrounded by a jagged wall lined with pikes, its weathered sandstone walls glow peach and apricot, deceptively innocent. A row of cannons peeks out between the crenellations, ready to unleash all their firepower on anyone stupid enough to threaten the Prinze, and archers pace the catwalk, to finish off anyone the cannons leave alive. The blue-and-silver Prinze trident flag whips in the wind.

  The holding cells crouch in the shadow of the house. The big oak doors are barred with iron and studded with nails whose heads are as big as my fist.

  The gate guards peer at us. “What’ve you got there?” one of them asks.

  “Smuggler,” says Fish-lips, and spits in the dirt. “To be held for questioning.”

  “I hear the Mestere’s coming down later.”

  “And you’ll just keep your mouth shut, won’t you? We’ll have this smuggler put away well before then, and everything will be nice and tight as a drum for our lord Prinze. Now open the gates, man, before we all take our deaths out here in the cold.”

  The guard winches the gates open with a high-pitched creak, and I’m shoved through the dusty courtyard of the prison and into the guardroom.

  We enter in a great clatter of swords and guns. The guards took the daggers from both my boots, as well as my sword and big knife, but nobody has had the courage to search the sleeve that hides my arm. I learned long ago to always keep a small knife strapped to the place where my flesh meets the metal. It’s a small comfort, but it’s gotten me out of some tight places.

  The young guard sitting at the desk looks up, startled, lifting his quill. It drips a big pool of blue-black ink onto the parchment before him. I can see Cassis in his features—the mobile mouth and large eyes, the well-defined cheekbones—but his eyes are a sea-green blue and his hair is almost blond.

  Fish-lips leans on the desk. Arsenault tightens his hand on my arm.

  “Have we got room for another smuggler?” the old man says.

  The young guard’s eyes widen at the glint of light that flashes off my arm. “His arm,” he says.

  Fish-lips sighs. “Yes, I know, his arm. Probably lost it in the wars. They cut off enough limbs for gunshot, didn’t they?”

  I glare at him, thinking of Razi.

  The young guard swallows. “What did he do?”

  “Tried to buy a gun. Jon led us to him. He’s the one Mestere di Prinze said look out for. Do we have room or not? I don’t want to have to sit on him all night.”

  The young guard stares at my arm for a moment, then accidentally looks straight at me. I hold his gaze until he blushes and directs his attention down to his parchment.

  “I— Yes, I think so. Wait.” He brings his head back up. “Is that the one we’ve been looking for?”

  Fish-lips looks annoyed. “I said so, didn’t I? It’s your problem what you do with him. I just need somewhere to drop him.”

  The young guard nods. “Bring me his weapons.”

  A guard comes up from behind with my weapons and drops them on the desk with a clang. The young guard pulls my sword to look at it and his eyes widen.

  The dim light of the room bounces off the blade and shines in the runes. The old man picks it up and breaks into a cold grin. “Don’t suppose you’ll be needing this anymore, will you?”

  I shrug, though the thought of losing that sword twists my gut. I glance at Arsenault to see how he’s reacting, but he isn’t. His jaw is set in a hard line.

  “Huh.” Fish-lips’ eyes narrow and he lays the blade flat on the desk again. Then he picks up my bag and rummages through it.

  “Pouch of willowbark,” he says, placing it carefully on the table. “Bandages. Comb.” The comb Arsenault gave me. It goes on the table, too. “Needle, thread.” The contents of my bag are the contents of every gavaro’s bag, except for one thing. The guard pulls it out now, holds it up and squints at it.

  “That’s a pretty piece of work,” he says. “I think we’ll have this, too.”

  Arsenault’s wolf.

  Arsenault sniffs and stares at the wall. I want to kick him just to get a reaction.

  “I’ll wager you’re dead by moonrise anyway,” Fish-lips says. The wolf goes into his pockets.

  “That should be turned over to the treasury,” Arsenault says.

  “Shut up,” Fish-lips tells him without turning around. “The treasury’ll get the arm; what does a trinket matter?” He grins at me. “How’s your arm come off, eh?”

  I grit my teeth and clench both my hands into fists.

  Fish-lips pushes my right sleeve up over my forearm, and I yank away from him. A crowd of guards comes with me.

  “Here, now; none of that.”

  “We’ll have to take the manacles off,” one of the guards says.

  “Or cut off the arm,” another jokes.

  Wait. Maybe he’s serious.

  “He’s to remain for questioning,” the guard behind the desk interjects. “We have to send a message to Mestere di Prinze. Leave him whole till then.”

  Fish-lips looks disappointed, but I start to grin. It’s a bad habit of mine, grinning under pressure.

  But they don’t expect it. Nobody ever does.

  “Here.” Fish-lips grabs my manacled hands. He extracts a key from inside his cloak and sticks it in the lock. The manacles snap free of my wrists, and I flex my fingers. He grabs my arm with one hand and pushes the sleeve up with the other.

  “Tekus on high!”

  I tug free of the startled guards, grab the blade from my bicep with my left hand, and lunge across the desk for the young guard, the nearest Prinze. I want Arsenault, but he’s a gavaro and won’t do as a hostage and, in any case, would probably knock me on my backside. A householder—that’s another matter.

  We go over backward in his chair before anyone reacts. Half the men in the room are still staring at my arm as I drag him up with my right arm around his throat, the blade in my left hand pressed against his side. The guard gasps and struggles, but I press the blade into his ribs just enough to pierce the skin, and he stops.

  The guards all have their weapons out now but it’s too late.

  Arsenault stares at me as if I were as addled as the beggar in the alley.

  “You,” I say to Arsenault. “Push my sword over here. Hilt-first.”

  He meets my gaze. We stare at each other for a long moment, but his eyes might as well be stone. Then he flushes an angry red and shoves the sword toward me.

  I push my hostage forward, keeping the point of my blade in his side as I reach out slowly with my right arm to grab the sword. I sheathe it as quick as I can, then move my right arm back into a headlock around the young Prinze’s neck.

  “I’m taking him outside,” I tell the guards, who watch me like I’m a demon. “I need an escort. Him,” I say, nodding at Arsenault, “and Jon Barra. I think those two will do to get me out the gates. You’ll throw my wolf outside, too, old man, if you know what’s good for you. Otherwise, I don’t mind killing him, and what will Geoffre think?”

  “You’d kill me for a trinket?” my prisoner gasps.

  “I’m partial to the wolf,” I tell him. “Not to you.”

  Fish-lips glares. Then he takes the wo
lf from out of his pocket and hurls it into the dust outside.

  “Go with ye, then, you prickless bastard. They’ll hunt you down again before nightfall.”

  “Not if they want to see your Prinze alive, they won’t.”

  I drag the young guard out the door, followed by Arsenault and Jon. “Pick up the statue,” I tell Arsenault, and when he hesitates, I yell at him, “Now!”

  Arsenault does as I tell him, then holds the wolf out to me in his open palm.

  “Keep it for now.”

  He pockets it without a word, looking frustrated. Humiliated.

  Who is this brown-haired man? Why did I think he was Arsenault?

  “What in the name of all the gods do you think you’re doing?”

  Jon whirls on me as soon as we’re out of the gates, his cloak snapping out behind him. The guards watch us from the arrow slits and towers—waiting for me to let go of the young guard, to back away just for a moment. They’d shoot through Jon and Arsenault, but I stay close to the boy, my knife still pressed to his throat.

  He’s probably too old to be called a boy, but he looks like one to me.

  “I could ask you the same thing,” I say, dragging the guard backward, away from the prison. As long as the archers can see that I’ll kill their Prinze, they won’t loose their arrows, but once we’re out of sight, the patrols will burst from the gates like packs of dogs. “You, working for the Prinze? And Arsenault—” He walks grim-faced, to my right. “Do you remember me or not?”

  The guard rolls his eyes to look at me. “You all know each other?” he rasps.

  “We’ve been acquainted,” I say carefully. “In another life.”

  “You’ll all hang when my uncle gets hold of you.”

  “Your uncle?”

  He shuts his mouth. Arsenault watches me, undistracted by Jon and the guard, or the fact that we’re walking. He’s got his hand on his sword; I never thought to tell him to throw it down. But now, the look in his eyes and his silence…

  “Kyris—” Jon says.

  “Drop your sword, Arsenault.”

  He cocks his head and makes no move to do so.

  “Drop your sword!”

  Instead, he draws it.

  I jerk my arm tight against the guard’s throat in reflex, choking him, and Jon says in an urgent whisper, rushing forward to grab my arm, “Kyris! Geoffre’s his uncle!” as Arsenault shifts the sword so that the hilt is swinging toward my head—gods damn everything, my head.

  I tear away from Jon, ducking, forcing the guard I hold to duck too. But the edge of the pommel clips his skull with a low, sick thud. He cries out and falls forward, and I move my knife in a hurry, before he can cut himself on the blade. I pull him upright and step backwards into the side of a building, holding him in front of me like a shield. I can hear the shouts of the guards already.

  “If either of you would care to make the betrayal complete,” I say, breathing hard, “I’d be happy to drive this knife into his ribs just a little deeper.”

  The guard’s eyes are round as a child’s but glazed with pain.

  “They’ll be hunting the whole city,” Jon says. “You won’t be able to hide here. You’ve outlawed yourself.”

  “And who do I have to thank for that?”

  “Thank yourself for it! You didn’t have to take that job. You didn’t have to buy a gun for it. Why did you need the gun, anyway?”

  “You know why I needed the gun. You must have heard the story.”

  In my ears, my words lack the impact and anger I want to give them, because my chest tightens like a fist. I feel like I can barely breathe.

  Arsenault shakes his head in disgust. “You’re going to topple this peace for a petty attempt at revenge. Didn’t enough people die in those wars? Aren’t you satisfied with that?”

  “I didn’t cause the thrice-damned war. You told me it wasn’t my fault. Did you change your mind?”

  A thousand questions light in Arsenault’s eyes.

  “Kyris,” Jon says quickly. “There are many things you do not know.”

  “You knew, Jon,” I say through my gritted teeth. My hostage stirs and I pull him back against the wall with me. “You knew and you lied to me.”

  “Look at him, Kyris. Can you see the man he used to be? Can you see him at all?”

  “I—”

  How wild must I look? I curse myself for faltering.

  “The things best hidden are those which abide in plain sight.”

  Arsenault makes a noise in his throat. “Jon. I’m right here.”

  I pull the guard along the wall. “Throw down your sword,” I tell Arsenault. “Now.”

  That muscle in his jaw twitches again. But he obeys, to the letter, throwing the sword into a pile of broken terra-cotta with a crash.

  “Will you let him go then?” Arsenault asks.

  “Why would I let him go? Those patrols will be down on me any second, and I can’t trust either of you. He’s all that’s keeping me alive right now.”

  “He won’t keep you alive long,” Jon says. “You don’t know who you have in your hands.”

  Arsenault jerks. “Jon!”

  Jon ignores him. Instead he leans over to speak directly in my ear. The sounds of running Prinze guards pass by the opening to the alley, as if we have all somehow been obscured, until there is only Jon’s voice, the tickle of the guard’s hair against my cheek, and the way his back heaves with his terrified breathing, and standing in front of me—Arsenault, watching, horrified.

  “That’s Mikelo di Prinze,” Jon says. “Geoffre’s grooming him for the heirship.”

  Jon says he knows a bathhouse, and now that he’s given me this information about Mikelo di Prinze, I trust him to take us there, but not enough to let Mikelo walk without my knife in his side. I’m sure we’re being followed by a detachment of Prinze, but bathhouses are neutral territory and I feel safe enough on the Caprine side of town.

  Jasmine Pleasures is a two-story building made of quarried white marble built into the cliffs surrounding the low, swampy lagoon that forms Liera proper. In the afternoon sun, the inlaid carnelian flowers and vines around the doorway spark blood-red, tinting the marble a sickly pink. Bathhouses in Liera are all constructed on a similar plan. The baths, separated by sex, are located underground where the hot springs bubble up in rock pools. The men’s areas for eating and business are upstairs, where courtesans are also provided. Wives and daughters do not enter here.

  Jon walks in the back door with the easy familiarity of a man who’s been here before, then disappears down the hallway. Arsenault, Mikelo, and I stand in the entry, where we’re examined by a golden-skinned girl in a dress of jade green silk.

  “Andris,” the girl says, smiling as she leans on a polished wood stand where a book lies open. “I wondered when you were coming back. Are these your friends?”

  She looks us over with mild interest.

  Arsenault forces a smile. “Yes. Just bringing them in for the night.”

  “If you have any ideas about who they might want, let me know. I’d be willing to take the shorter one. He’s a little scruffy, but he’s cute.” She shoots me a smile designed to look innocent.

  I turn to Arsenault. “They know you here, do they?”

  “They’ve seen me here before,” he answers.

  I can’t think of anything to say to that. I pull Mikelo closer to me so they can’t see the knife I have pressed into his ribs. Mikelo stiffens. “Bend,” I whisper to him, and try to smile back at the girl.

  Jon returns with a girl on each arm. “They have a place for us,” he says. “I’ve told Madame Triente what we need.”

  Next to Jon, the girls look like tiny porcelain dolls dressed up in crimson silk and diamonds. They’re probably kinless or they wouldn’t be working in a bathhouse, but they’re not kinless like me, because most householder men like girls with arms, and the diamonds mean their company doesn’t come cheap.

  The whores give me a once-over, the sam
e as they give Mikelo and Arsenault, just a quick sweep of their dark eyes, sizing us up. You can tell they like the look of Arsenault more than Mikelo or me, but they like Jon best.

  “They’re not coming, are they?” I say.

  “Only as far as the door.”

  They shoot him a glance that says they’re disappointed, probably because they know they won’t be making any money tonight.

  Mikelo stares until I give him a push.

  The whole house smells slightly of sulfur from the hot springs, and my big cloak is making me sweat. Our boots sink silent into deep velvet rugs.

  More courtesans stand inside the hallway, both women and men, and they watch us walk in, flashing smiles like vendors in the market. Arsenault and Jon both keep their eyes forward, but Mikelo has obviously never been in a bathhouse for anything other than a bath. It would be funny if I wasn’t strung so tight.

  The girls lead us up the stairs to a room with a nameplate that says Lora. Which one, I wonder, is Lora? Jon gives them some coins and they drift off down the stairs in a rustle of silk. The work of so many worms, their dresses, their slippers, these rugs. I wonder if any of it is Aliente.

  As soon as I shut the door, Mikelo tries to yank himself away from me. I jam the knife in his side and his eyes grow bigger and wilder.

  “What are you going to do to me now? Have I come here to die?”

  Arsenault’s gaze flicks over to me. “If you behave, you’ll probably be ransomed.”

  “I have money,” I say, throwing the bolts on the door with my right hand, keeping the knife out in my left. “What I want is safe passage out of the city and an explanation.”

  “So, you are going to kill him.” Jon sits heavily on a couch too low for him. His knees stick out ridiculously. He bends to unlace his boots, and I become aware that my feet ache. Fiercely.

  “Mikelo?” I shrug. “Perhaps.” I pull my knife away from him. “That depends on whether he wants to test me.”