Fortune's Fool (Eterean Empire Book 1)

by Angela Boord

  I brace the tray against the wall and shove open the sash with my right hand, then slide the tray out into the air. It sails downward and hits the cobbles with a great metal clangor. Sweet buns and coffee explode into the air in all directions. People walking below cover their heads, shout, and look up.

  “Why did you do that?” Mikelo’s voice shakes.

  Arsenault comes to join me at the window. A flock of pigeons wings over from the fountain across the street and settles upon the buns, pecking and cooing.

  One by one, the birds begin to careen around as if they’re drunk. One by one, they shriek and collapse and die, shuddering, on the stones.

  “Oh,” Mikelo says. “Oh.”

  “It wasn’t for you,” Arsenault tells him. “Just for us.”

  “But what if I wanted to share?”

  “I guess that’s a risk Geoffre was willing to take,” I say.

  Mikelo backs away from us toward the bed with his hand over his mouth. He’s so pale, his cheeks have a greenish cast to them.

  I don’t have time to deal with him right now. “The girls will be here soon. That poison would have worked fast.”

  Arsenault nods. “Let me deal with them.”

  “No.”

  “They know me.”

  “They don’t know you well enough to refuse to kill you.”

  “They work for Geoffre.”

  “This bathhouse is supposed to be neutral. We’re on Caprine ground,” I say.

  “Don’t you think the bathhouses in Prinze territory have their share of Caprine spies?” he asks.

  Mikelo still looks pale. “Will they take me back to my uncle?”

  “Get your shirt straight,” I tell him. “We don’t have time to make you pretty. We’ll throw the guarnello over your shirt and trousers. Get that blond wig.”

  “What? I thought I was to go down to the baths!”

  “What are you planning?” Arsenault says.

  “Just do it.”

  Arsenault growls. “What are you planning?”

  Instead of answering him, I draw my sword and stand in front of the door, settling my heels into the carpet—my feet clad only in my stockings—in the guard stance he taught me.

  A key snicks in the lock.

  “Dammit, think!” Arsenault hisses, grabbing my left shoulder.

  The door pushes open and my arms move of their own accord, sweeping the sword out in an arc that takes both women standing in the doorway straight across their stomachs.

  Blood spills onto the carpet like it was poured out of a bucket. The women make a high, wheezy pain sound as they fall. I step forward before even Arsenault can react and draw my sword backward across their throats to silence them.

  But, oh gods, there’s so much blood. Blood everywhere, like I’ve just sacrificed a couple of sheep.

  I swipe my blade clean on my trousers and shove it back in its scabbard. The room smells like blood and shit now, mingled with the odor of almonds and Mikelo’s vomit. He’s throwing up again, all over the carpet. Arsenault is cursing me. I drag the first girl into the room by the shoulders and her head lolls, the wound in her neck gaping open like a second mouth. He grabs the second girl and pulls her in, then shoves the door closed with his shoulder.

  “Who taught you?” he says, furious.

  “You did,” I say.

  For half an instant, he looks taken aback. Gray. His hand comes up to the temple that used to be scarred and he shoves his hand through his hair. Then the grayness floods with color and his eyes snap. “That could have been Clara standing there,” he says.

  “You knew it wouldn’t be. She was only a delivery girl. It was Geoffre’s spies who needed to confirm their kill. You knew it and I knew it.”

  “The blood. You should have let me handle it!”

  “And give them another chance to knife us in the back? Mikelo, get your clothes on. Come on, Arsenault, if you’re coming; we’re leaving now.”

  I undo the laces on my trousers right there in front of him and Mikelo. The chemise falls down past my knees when I yank my trousers down. I unbuckle my sword belt and tear my tunic off over my head, then put my swordbelt on again over the chemise.

  “Move!” I yell at Mikelo, and he jumps, looking frightened and miserable. Shaking, he grabs the guarnello I altered for him and struggles it on over his shirt and trousers. Arsenault curses loudly as he wraps his urqa with practiced, vicious movements.

  I tie on my skirts the same. Feet in my boots, and I’m looking over at Mikelo, who is still fumbling with the laces on the guarnello. His hands shake too badly to tie them properly. “Wait,” I say.

  I walk over to the bed and pull a pillow out of a pillowcase. Then I stuff the pillowcase down the chest of the guarnello and I jerk his laces as tight as I can, levering my foot against the side of the bed.

  “Kyrra!” he gasps. “I can’t breathe!”

  I pull them as tight as they’ll go, and I tie them off quick. He’s still trying to gulp air but his chest looks better. I grab a neckcloth and make it into a sash for him instead, trying to give his waist better definition. Then I settle the blond wig on his head and attach it quickly with hairpins.

  In spite of the Prinze mouth and cheekbones, his face framed in all those golden curls looks oddly as if I am looking into the other side of a mirror. He makes an awkward girl possessed of a kind of boyish beauty, as long as you don’t look too close. Or maybe the vulnerability I see on his face comes only because he’s shivering.

  Arsenault looms in over my shoulder. He’s wrapped head to foot in shimmering gray silk, the kind of gavaro a rich man would keep beside him as a guard.

  Everyone is going to notice him.

  “Done?” he says.

  I’m starting to shake in reaction too, but my reactions tend to run toward violence and paranoia. I start to worry that Arsenault was in league with the girls, that he’ll turn on me once we get downstairs. If he keeps that urqa on, he might as well be dressed in a surrender flag.

  How am I ever to know if I can trust him or not? He wears the urqa and allaq so casually and well that I know it’s not the first time he’s put one on.

  He doesn’t remember me.

  He’ll try to stop me.

  It doesn’t matter that I saw the first glimmers of memory in his eyes right before the girl came in with the poisoned pastries.

  “Kyrra?”

  I’m staring at him, at his eyes, the same color as the fabric of his veil and just as complex as the silk.

  “Done,” I say. I pull the gun with my right hand and throw the cloak over my forearm to hide it. “Come on, Mikelo, move. And swish your hips a little, unless you want people to recognize you dressed as a woman.”

  Arsenault takes the back stairs at a pace that makes me fear Mikelo will slip off a riser and break his neck. He shoves the door to the baths open and we follow him inside, white steam curling around us like smoke, surrounding us with the smell of sulfur as if we’ve just stepped into the underworld.

  He falls back finally and bends to murmur in my ear. “Do you remember the map I drew you?”

  “The door to the women’s side is past the bathing pools and the steam room,” I answer.

  “I can’t follow you. I’ll meet you outside the door to the kitchens.”

  I catch his arm before he can move off. “Arsenault…I just want to know, before we try this ruse, do you still not remember me? At all?”

  His eyes and his brows are the only parts of him visible in his robes. His brows pull down over the bridge of his nose and his gaze roves over me, troubled. At least he’s lost some of his anger.

  “I… This isn’t the time to speak of this.”

  I nod. His not-an-answer is as good an answer as I can have right now. I had forgotten about deciphering him, but it comes back to me now.

  “You’re right. We’ll meet you. Outside.”

  I move Mikelo away from him, and he turns aside to go his own way.

  Bathhouses are
the only place in all Liera where House allegiances aren’t immediately visible. There are no colors in the baths. Everyone here is naked.

  I can’t tell at a glance who is allied to whom.

  I haven’t been in a bathhouse since I had two human arms. When I dressed as a man, I avoided public baths the way I avoided being taken by the enemy. The only other situation as fraught with danger for me was pissing in the woods. None of my fellow gavaros ever understood why I was so private about my habits of bathing and elimination. But if any of them had ever caught me washing or urinating or changing my cloths when I bled, that would have been the end of my disguise. The Kavol would not have dealt well with me, the Rojornicki better only because Markus Seroditch, the boyar who hired me when I came down out of the high peaks, was an honorable man. A man like Arsenault.

  I poke Mikelo in the side to remind him to move his hips and keep his legs closer together, and he closes his eyes briefly and takes a deep breath. Then he does move, subtly, but enough. Men in the bathing pools watch us walk by.

  One of them down at the end watches us a little more intently than the rest. In the steam, it’s hard to make him out, but I hear a splash and catch a glimpse of a tall man levering himself out of the water, a flash of the white robe he ties on as he walks toward us.

  Mikelo’s breath catches.

  “Keep walking,” I whisper to Mikelo. I try to keep myself calm. Maybe the man isn’t coming for us.

  But my prayers aren’t answered. He puts himself in front of us and forces us to stop.

  “Hello, girls,” he says. “You’re from the kitchens?”

  I look up at him. And then my breath catches too.

  It’s Vanni di Forza.

  I knew this would happen some time. I was so careful when I was dressed as Kyris, and I could control where I went and where I didn’t. My paths lay low anyway, down the streets and alleyways householders don’t frequent.

  But now I’m dressed as a woman and looking straight into the face of Vanni di Forza, and I can tell from his eyes that he knows who I am.

  Vanni himself looks different but not. He’s bigger, of course—a man now, not a boy, with a stubbled face and broader shoulders. But his hair is the same lank brown, his dark eyes still the sort that might have made him handsome had they not also been cruel…and his smirk is made meaner by the scar he’s picked up at the corner.

  “Well,” he says, sweeping his gaze up and down me and then up and down Mikelo. “I was going to ask you for figs and apricots, but perhaps I should ask you for water instead?”

  Useless to pretend I’m not who he thinks I am. “Of course, if you’d like water, I’ll retrieve it for you, mestere.” I try not to talk through my teeth.

  “And who’s this with you? Another new girl?”

  He reaches up to finger the curls of Mikelo’s wig. Mikelo’s eyes go wide.

  “We’ve both been hired in the kitchens,” I say. “We’ll get you some figs and apricots, Vanni, if you let us go.”

  Mikelo glances at me in alarm, finally realizing I’ve been recognized.

  “No.” Vanni rubs his thumb along Mikelo’s chin. “I don’t think I want figs and apricots now.”

  Mikelo looks like a bird caught in a net. He doesn’t know what to do. Should he pull away and possibly give himself up? Who is Vanni and who does he work for? Would a woman submit or not? You can see the thoughts on his face.

  “Leave her alone, Vanni,” I say. “She’s new and just a kitchen girl. She’s not a courtesan.”

  “What’s your name?” he asks Mikelo.

  I want to curse. I want to use all my curses, right now.

  Mikelo makes a noise to hide the fact he’s clearing his throat. When he speaks, it’s a decent attempt to make his voice into a husky female voice like mine. “Kela,” he says.

  “Kela,” Vanni repeats. Then he swings around to look at me. “Kela and Kyrra. Hmmm. What are you doing down here, Kyrra? Our best intelligence had it you must have died.”

  “I was the subject of intelligence?”

  “Given the circumstances of the last time you were seen…it was hard to give much credence to the stories. People said you must have died.”

  I shrug. “I don’t know what the stories said, but”—I gesture with my left hand—“here I am.”

  “Here you are. Not on your father’s estate.”

  “No. But my father’s estate is no longer my father’s, is it?”

  “No. It’s my father’s. The Aliente serfs—the ones who still lived—were all transferred to my father. That means you should have been transferred too, Kyrra, according to your sentence.”

  “You don’t think the war disrupted that? How many other serfs ran off?”

  “I don’t know. Some of them stayed.”

  I don’t want to ask. I don’t have time to ask. But the word comes out of me anyway. “Who?”

  “I don’t have any dealings with serfs; how should I know? I’m living in Liera now, and I have a higher station. Let my father keep the lands. My older brother will inherit. But I’m working with Geoffre di Prinze.”

  “Working with him or for him?” I say. “He’ll grind you under his heel, Vanni, if you get in his way.”

  “I’m not getting in his way. He told me I could take you back to the villa, as long as I gave him back his nephew.”

  Shit.

  Mikelo groans. “You knew?” he says. “You knew all along?”

  Vanni lets his gaze rove over Mikelo. “You make a pretty girl. But seeing you with Kyrra…I knew who you must be.” He takes Mikelo’s chin in his hand before Mikelo can move away.

  Mikelo jerks backward. Vanni chuckles and drops his hand slowly, turning back to me. “Do you know how embarrassing it was when I was sent back home before my fosterage was over?”

  I can see how this is setting up. I’m going to have to get rid of him, then run for it.

  “No,” I say.

  The gun will be too loud but would be the most effective. It would take too long to grab the knife from my stays. I could go for my sword…

  “It was your fault. And that gavaro’s. At first, my father wouldn’t even talk to me. But I got your gavaro back, didn’t I?”

  My gavaro.

  “He was only doing his duty, Vanni.”

  “He could have looked the other way.”

  “What did you do to him?”

  Vanni looks smug. “Oh, you’d like to know, wouldn’t you? I heard that maybe it was a bit more than his duty he was doing, wasn’t it?”

  I want to hit him, but then I’ll never get any more information out of him. I smile at him sweetly instead. “Perhaps he was just more of a man than you were.”

  The smirk turns into a scowl. He steps toward me. “Not at the end, he wasn’t. He broke just like anybody else.”

  His words make me go still inside. The raid Arsenault led against the Forza before Kafrin Gorge. Was Vanni there?

  “For you?” I say.

  “For me. For everybody.”

  “I don’t believe it. I don’t believe you were the one who broke him in the first place. You just swept in like the vulture you are and picked up the pieces.”

  “You think you’re invincible, just like he did, don’t you, Kyrra? That rules don’t apply to you. And then when you run into somebody who breaks the rules better than you do…”

  “You? You couldn’t even have me when I was a serf girl armed with a ladle.”

  He grabs me by my left arm. “There’s nobody to save you now, is there?”

  “Ah, Mestere Di Forza,” a timbrous female voice says behind me. “Have my kitchen girls displeased you?”

  I glance back, quick, over my shoulder.

  A middle-aged woman stands there, dressed in a spectacularly simple gown of indigo silk that shows off her still-handsome figure, her chestnut curls—threaded here and there with silver—piled on top of her head. Her arm is woven tight around Arsenault’s, holding him so close that their hips slide against
each other.

  He doesn’t have a relationship with the girls. It’s with Madame Triente, the proprietor of the bathhouse.

  Impressions swirl around me in the steam—the way the Madame’s fingers stroke his arm; his gaze, struggling with recognition of Vanni; the way his veil sucks into his mouth with a quick breath; Mikelo with that rabbit look again, wondering where he should bolt; and Vanni, gripping my arm harder, staring at Arsenault and then down at my right sleeve which should be empty and is instead supporting a cloak.

  “Kitchen girls?” Vanni says, beginning to frown at my arm. “They’re not kitchen girls. Didn’t Mestere di Prinze let you know?”

  He looks up at Arsenault. “You’re the one they call Andris, aren’t you? I think I’ve changed my mind.” He shoves me backward, toward Arsenault. “Andris, you can take care of her. The Mestere wants her alive but taken down a notch. Mikelo, the Mestere is waiting for you in the kitchens.”

  Arsenault catches me with his free hand, but he avoids my right arm, instead stopping me with a hand to my back. Steam curls up from the pool, blurring my vision.

  “Si, Mestere,” he says. “I’ll take her outside—”

  “No, here. Now. In front of me.”

  Arsenault still has his hand on my back. I feel the madam pull him the other way. “Not in my bathhouse,” she says. “Do you want to run all my customers off?”

  “The Mestere di Prinze wants it witnessed. Somebody’s got to make sure she’s incapacitated. Maybe a little more than incapacitated.”

  What I wouldn’t give to wipe that damn smirk off his face.

  “Then can’t you go outside?”

  “I’ll witness outside,” Mikelo says quickly. “I’ll tell my uncle.”

  Is he trying to save me or Arsenault?

  “No. Here. Now. Andris.”

  Arsenault’s fingers begin to tremble. Does he remember Vanni? Did he really break? Does Vanni know who he is? He begins to tug away from the madam on his other side.

  I thumb the dog back on my gun and pull the trigger.

  It fires with a loud crack and a cloud of smoke. The recoil kicks me back into Arsenault, who rips his arm away from Madame Triente and catches me with both hands. Vanni cries out and staggers in the opposite direction. He slips on the tiled lip of the pool and falls backward into the water.