Fortune's Fool (Eterean Empire Book 1)

by Angela Boord

  “He was trying to escape, you know,” Lobardin tells me, putting his elbows on his knees. “He had Mikelo and was just going to abandon you.”

  “I told him to protect Mikelo. I can handle myself.”

  Lobardin’s eyes grow hooded. “Obviously. That arm is most ingenious.” His gaze slides over to Arsenault. “He gave it to you, didn’t he.”

  No use keeping it secret now. “Yes.”

  He leans back again and crosses his arms over his chest. “One of your last great feats as a magician, was it, Arsenault? Keeping that information from Geoffre?”

  A muscle in Arsenault’s face tics. I can see that in the moonlight, but I can’t read the emotion in his eyes or tell if this is one of the memories he’s kept. He doesn’t say anything for such a long time that I wonder if he’s hurt more than I thought. Finally, he says, “Don’t bait me, Lobardin.”

  Lobardin goes still. Then he puts his hand on his sword.

  Except it isn’t his sword. It’s Arsenault’s sword. The sword Arsenault passed on to me.

  “That’s an interesting threat, from a dead man.”

  Arsenault doesn’t move. He stays where he is, his head against the side of the coach, his legs bent in front of him. But there is a tenseness that hangs in the air like a line of ominous clouds.

  Lobardin shoves the door open and backs out. After he closes it, there’s a screech and the door shudders. He pushed something through the latch to keep it from opening. His boots crunch in the stones as he walks away.

  “Hie on, boys,” he says. “The horses have had their rest. Time to press on.”

  In a moment, the coach lurches to a start.

  “What did he mean about Geoffre?” I ask Arsenault.

  He doesn’t answer. His body sways with the motion of the coach, as if he’s finally succumbed to exhaustion.

  The air of threat remains long after, until finally I sink into my own sleep.

  Our journey lasts four days because of the mud. The coach gets stuck more than once, and Lobardin presses Mikelo into helping shove it out of its ruts, but he never unties Arsenault or me. The ropes cut a deep, bloody groove into my left wrist. Both my arms feel like dead weights, except for when my left awakens in a stinging mass of needle-like pain.

  After a while, I piece together what I think Mikelo wanted to tell me—that Silva got away. But I don’t put much faith in a rescue attempt undertaken by a courtesan shepherd-boy, not against a company of well-armed gavaros and Lobardin.

  I know Arsenault and I could fight our way out. I don’t know what other magic Mikelo is capable of, or how he fights with a sword, but I think the three of us could make it.

  Except that this coach is taking me exactly where I want to go.

  On the fourth day, the road grows steeper. Lobardin and Mikelo ride inside with Arsenault and me now. The coach groans as the horses pull it uphill, their hooves clopping on the remains of old Eterean bricks. Out the window, deciduous trees return to skeletons. Firs and pines become the only green. The air inside the coach grows colder. Lobardin lets us have our cloaks, in a gracious gesture.

  When the road changes, I lean forward to mark our progress out the window. I haven’t seen this road in five years, but I remember the markers well—the gray stone pillars covered in winter-dead vines, the shattered statuary that forms gray lumps in the brown detritus of the forest floor.

  Every path to the hunting lodge is burned upon my heart. I know the way Arsenault and I came, together, and I know the way he left and I left, opposite each other.

  The coach creaks to a stop. Patches of steaming, melting snow scar the ground, and the forest is awash with fog. Lobardin grins and rises from the bench before the coach stops moving. “Finally,” he says, and pushes the ropes down the handle so he can open the door. When he does, Arsenault and I are both jerked forward, but then Lobardin shuts the door and Arsenault, Mikelo, and I are left alone inside.

  I flex my fingers, as much as I can. My metal hand obeys, but not as easily as I would wish. I’ve been unable to examine it since we’ve been in the coach, and then my head seemed the more important part of my anatomy.

  Arsenault looks out the slit the draperies leave of the window. Four days in the coach have done him some good.

  “We have a welcoming party,” he says.

  I clench my right hand into a fist. Then the door jerks open and Lobardin grins at me. “Time to go,” he says, and pulls me out of the coach by my arm.

  The step makes me stumble, and I hastily right myself. Mikelo is next and then Arsenault, and finally we’re all standing in a huddled group, staring up at my father’s hunting lodge.

  Calling it a lodge is misleading. It was our country estate, but it isn’t like the unwalled, unfenced country estates of the lowlands, mere pleasure holdings for rich city householders. My father’s lodge is Eterean-built, as all our important holdings were. It sprawls across the lip of a granite bluff, gray stone and brown cedar timbers, with towers on either end from which blue-and-silver Prinze flags fly. Its huge pine doors are barred with black iron and studded with nails, and a short wall flanks it on all sides.

  The whole fort is carved of granite block. The valley it defended has long since given up its population, but the lodge remains—defensible, impregnable.

  Except with guns and gunpowder. What I heard is that my father sent all the Aliente women and children, including the serfs, up to this lodge while most of the men remained below to defend the mulberries and the worms. But Geoffre sent a detachment to attack the lodge with cannon. Cannonballs obliterated sections of the wall, and men with guns picked off the gavaros manning the towers. Archers took down some of Geoffre’s gavaros, but mainly, it wasn’t even a contest. The Prinze overran the lodge, took the women, and that was that.

  I don’t know if my mother was here or not, because I haven’t heard what happened to her. And I only pray that Verrin got Etti and his children out.

  Now it’s just Cassis waiting inside with Driese di Caprine, and Jon waiting for us out here in the courtyard.

  He stands half a head taller than any of the other men, so he’s easy to pick out. He gives a short nod to the men to whom he’s been speaking and walks toward us. Cold-brittle leaves crunch beneath his boots. He keeps the hood of his cloak up against the chill, and his hands are encased in matching brown leather gloves. Arsenault’s cloak rustles as he moves behind me.

  Jon seems to ignore him, but I’m not that stupid. “I think you might tell Cassis you’ve arrived,” he tells Lobardin. “And get a wash.”

  “And leave you out here alone with them? I know you’d have no problem leaving Kyrra to us, but Cassis wants Arsenault and Mikelo, too.”

  I must have made a noise. Jon looks at me from under the fringe of his hood.

  “He speaks truth, doesn’t he,” I say.

  There is sadness in Jon’s eyes. “You stand in my way, Kyrra. I try to tell you to get out of it, but you stubbornly insist on blocking my path.”

  Arsenault shifts closer to me at his words, which is some comfort.

  “Go tell the Mestere we’ve arrived,” Lobardin tells one of the men offhandedly, still focused on Jon. To Jon, he says, “The Mestere wants her alive, and alive he’ll get her. You’re at cross purposes with the other two, and don’t think I won’t point that out.”

  Jon watches him for a moment, then smiles. It’s something I’ve seen before, that wide, laughing grin. He claps Lobardin on the back. “Do that and see how far you get.”

  Lobardin tightens his grip on the hilt of Arsenault’s sword. I flex my fingers again, back and forth, gritting my teeth against the pain in my left hand.

  In that moment, the big doors to the inner court begin to open, winch cables shrieking in the cold. When they finally part, my heart skitters.

  Cassis stands between them, his breath clouding the air.

  Just as carelessly beautiful as he always was.

  He wears a fine coffee-colored cloak over sienna silks, a
nd his brown hair blows free in the wind. The jeweled hilts of his swords jut past the edges of his cloak, but they’re dull in the gray light of the afternoon.

  He lifts his right hand and bends his fingers in a summoning gesture.

  “He acts as if he’s a king,” I say through my teeth.

  “He acts that way,” Jon agrees, and walks ahead of us, his cloak snapping behind him.

  Lobardin gives me a gentle shove to get me going.

  Cassis looks us over briefly when we reach the doorway, but he doesn’t look in my face. “Put them in the old mews. Strike their bonds. I’ll hear them later.”

  “But, Mestere,” Lobardin says.

  Cassis’s gaze flickers over to me, then he says, “No, do it. Strike their bonds and give them food and water. Bring Mikelo to me first.”

  He turns his back and walks down the stone hallway before we can say anything, the sound of his boots muffled by the tapestries on the walls—tapestries I recognize.

  All the tapestries from my father’s villa line this hallway. They billow with the wind swirling in the open door, their edges flicking out toward Cassis’s legs as he walks away and keeps walking, down the hall his family plundered from mine.

  I could trace my finger over every pattern and I would know it, the way I know the twists and turns of every hallway Lobardin makes me walk, and the old scent of birds that still hangs from the rafters when we reach the mews and Lobardin opens the door and has his men push us inside.

  But there are no birds here now, no straw, no falconers. There are only the memories of fall hunts and summer retreats, and the misplaced hope of a girl.

  Lobardin slices the ropes away from our wrists with his knife. I think about charging him, but what good would that do? I have no blades, no gun anymore, and I can barely lift my metal arm. Lobardin still gives me a wary look as he moves away, grabbing Mikelo.

  “Someone will bring you food,” he says.

  Arsenault rubs his wrists. “What a good servant you’ve become, Lobardin.”

  “Did it do me any better to honor my contracts to the Aliente?”

  My arm creaks as I lift it, and my knuckles shine dimly in the thin light. “Don’t tempt me.”

  He backs away. Jon takes Mikelo’s other arm, and they walk Mikelo out the door. Mikelo glances back at us, looking young and scared.

  The door thuds shut. Then the iron sound of a bolt slamming home echoes through the room.

  Arsenault stretches. “Fifty thousand astra, eh?” he says.

  His wrists are as bloody as mine.

  I’ve never been good at waiting. I prowl the mews like a cat, letting my metal hand trail past the empty wooden cages, thumping the bars. My right shoulder and upper arm awaken painfully.

  “If I can find a way, I’ll kill him tonight,” I say. “Then we can all ride to Rojornick. The new Seroditch heir might welcome me back.”

  “You’re not thinking, Kyrra,” Arsenault says. “You’re only angry.”

  “I have every right to be angry!” I say, stopping to face him. “He plundered my father’s house and uses our lands as a stronghold against his father—”

  “Against his father.”

  Arsenault rubs his arms as he watches the door. “That’s the key. The Prinze are divided. If you really want to topple them, you’ll let them tear each other down.”

  Chapter 29

  Arsenault’s words finally make some inroads into my anger. “That’s what Jon’s trying to do, isn’t it? Why you were trying to kill me, to get me out of the way?”

  “Let the Prinze tear each other apart, Kyrra.”

  “It’s too risky. Besides, what’s going to become of you and Mikelo? Is Jon just going to throw you into the pit? Cassis wants to kill you, and I bet he’ll toss Mikelo in on the bargain, if he knows half the things about Mikelo you do. Would you lay your life down for Jon? Does he mean so much to you?”

  Arsenault looks troubled.

  “Do you even remember who he is?” I say.

  He shifts and looks around. Kicks at something under the straw, like a dog trying to find a place to lie down. “We rode the caravans together. Fought some battles… I remember his boys, the ones who died. I remember when the slavers dragged me off that ship. Jon was young then.”

  I stop. “I always thought you and Jon were the same age.”

  Arsenault laughs. It’s a painful sound, especially as it echoes in the dim, empty mews. “I perpetually never live to grow old. When I die, I just go back to where it all began. Over and over again.”

  “And that’s why you seem younger now?”

  “Did I seem old to you then?”

  “At first…not old. But not young, either. I was young. But you look closer in age to me now than when I met you. How old are you, really?”

  “I don’t know. Some memories are lost forever, I guess. Sometimes I live long enough to get some gray in my beard, but mostly I always seem to be the same age I always am.”

  “But if Jon was young then and you weren’t, does that mean Jon knows about you?”

  “He knows. Otherwise, I’d still be drunk in an alley.”

  “Then why didn’t you tell me?”

  The words come out through my teeth and expose a lot more pain than I meant to, the way an unlaced shirt accidentally exposes flesh.

  Arsenault sits down in the old, moldy straw and leans back against the frame of a falcon cage, draping his arms over his knees. “I didn’t tell Jon. I’m forbidden from telling anyone. Jon knew because he saw it happen. As you did. Except there was no Mikelo.” He gives me that sideways look again. “Did you really believe I was dead?”

  I rake my hair with my left hand as I prowl about the room, wishing I could comb the thoughts and emotions from my mind along with the tangles in my hair. But none of them want to budge.

  “If I did, I wouldn’t be here. An Aliente gavaro I didn’t know made it to Kavo and told me no one could find you. The first thing I did when I came back to Liera was find Jon and ask him if he knew anything about you. And he lied to me.”

  Arsenault rubs his jaw. He hasn’t shaved in nearly a fortnight, and one might almost call his stubble a beard now. It makes him and that gesture look much more familiar.

  “Trying to protect us both, I guess. Keeping you out of it and making sure the Prinze didn’t get wind of who I was, either. I don’t think that situation would have gone on forever.”

  “Really? And how was ordering you to kill me protecting me?”

  “I’m not Jon’s wind-up machine, Kyrra. Getting you out of the way was my idea, not Jon’s.”

  That hurts. More than I’m willing to admit, even though I know the reason behind it. I take a deep breath and try to focus again on the issue at hand.

  “But why would Jon do something so cruel? To let me keep believing that you’d died—and to let you keep believing that I was dead? Even if he didn’t tell you to kill me, he would have let the Prinze hang me before he told you who I was.”

  Arsenault falls silent for a moment, thinking. Then he says slowly, “Maybe he would have seen you killed if it came down to it, but he wouldn’t have wanted you to fall into the hands of the Prinze. If he really thought you were a threat, he would have shot you outside the prison, taken Mikelo back, and tried to convince me you were nobody.”

  “That would have been ironic. Since I’ve spent the past five years using Nothing as my family name.”

  Arsenault stretches out his legs. “By that time, I’d seen you with my sword, though. I knew you had some connection to me, but I didn’t know what it was.”

  “I suppose...” I say thoughtfully, “that when I took Mikelo, you might have threatened me with your blade. Not just your hilt.”

  His mouth hooks up in a sardonic smile. “Ah. A declaration of love the poets will write about.”

  I smile in spite of myself and throw myself down in the straw beside him. “I could beat the door down,” I say.

  He looks at me strangely. “With y
our arm? You use it as a hammer?”

  “I use it however I need to. They’ve got a bar on that door, but I might be able to beat through it.”

  “There are guards on the other side for sure.”

  “I said I use my arm however I need to. It’s also a weapon. You know how to fight with your hands, don’t you?”

  “And when we’re out?”

  “What do you think Cassis is going to do with Mikelo?”

  “Hard to say. First, I imagine he’ll test Mikelo to see if he really is Geoffre’s creature. When he finds out he isn’t, Cassis may try to recruit him to his cause.”

  “Which is?”

  Arsenault’s brows shadow his eyes, and he scratches his beard again. “It can’t just be Driese.”

  “I wouldn’t have pegged Cassis as the ambitious sort. Do you really think he has the courage to defy Geoffre?”

  “It may be less courage than firepower that makes the difference,” Arsenault says. “But Geoffre wasn’t treating him well.”

  The memory of Erelf’s voice slides through my head again. Ask Arsenault about those entertainments…

  I shiver involuntarily. “Did Jon know that Geoffre and Cassis knew who you were?”

  He looks at me, startled. “What?”

  “You didn’t tell him, did you?”

  “But how do you—”

  “Did you forget I See, too, Arsenault?”

  He lets his breath out. “I hoped you didn’t See that.”

  “Not all the details.” I could have told him I’d had it from Erelf, but I thought this was enough for now, as shaken as he looked. “Why didn’t you tell Jon? If the whole reason he had you with the Prinze was to hide you in plain sight?”

  “I don’t think Geoffre knows who I am. But…” He leans his head back against the wall and closes his eyes. “Kyrra, it’s been so hard to move. To get up again. Jon seemed hopeful, like he had a plan, and I didn’t want to ruin it by telling him the base was rotten. So, I just took it. Liquor and kacin…it wasn’t so hard.”

  Anger starts to grumble up in me again. “You’re lying,” I say. “You never thought it was easy.”