Fortune's Fool (Eterean Empire Book 1)

by Angela Boord

  “Does it matter?”

  “Of course it matters. If Jon was as loyal to you as you are to him, it would matter to him, too. You’re sitting here in the mews, not doing a damn thing to escape, not even looking around, and so I know you must either be planning something or you’ve just given up. Which is it, Arsenault?”

  “I thought you wanted to be taken to Cassis.”

  “I’m not talking about me.”

  “Geoffre’s moving troops. He’s got a detachment of gavaros on their way here—and if he let that slip, it means more than one. Probably with cannon.”

  I stop for a moment to absorb that information. “So, he does want me to kill Cassis. And then Geoffre will destroy his troops.”

  “It’s the way I’d do it.”

  “But why did he try to poison us in the bathhouse?”

  “He didn’t send the poison in the bathhouse. Devid did. I found that out from Madame Triente before I left to track you.”

  I ignore the flare of jealousy Madame Triente’s name provokes. “So, Devid is on Cassis’s side?”

  “I wouldn’t say that.”

  “What, then? Jon’s not working with Devid, is he? Devid captained the fleet that sailed to Dakkar. He’s the one—”

  Arsenault shakes his head. “No. That was a ruse. Geoffre didn’t trust Devid to captain the fleet on that kind of voyage, but he didn’t want the other Houses to capitalize on his absence. So, he worked an illusion, left Devid at home, and led the fleet to Dakkar himself. He’s the one who killed the B’ara.”

  “Geoffre...worked an illusion?”

  “It’s why I could never get close to him. I didn’t know what was happening then. They kept the house locked up. Sent Devid in his disguise out only under heavy guard.”

  “But surely, the gavaros knew?”

  “They weren’t exactly gavaros. They were the men Geoffre had been collecting.”

  “Like Lobardin?”

  “Lobardin would probably have been one of them, yes.”

  “But you said...then...you said that Geoffre would have had you. That he had a way of using people. As if you’d Seen him.”

  “It got more dangerous when Geoffre came back.”

  “But couldn’t you have Seen through the illusion when it was just Devid?”

  “I could have, if I had gotten close enough. But I wanted to stay out from under the eye of those gavaros. And there were enough times that one of them would show up around the docks, trying to sniff me out.”

  “Why didn’t you try to infiltrate their ranks?”

  “Because the illusion was Erelf’s. And if I had come that close...”

  “Can you really hide from him?”

  “I can stay...quiet. The way deer hide in the open, in the grass. I’m forbidden from using my magic except for small things, like the writing, and in self-defense, so as long as I keep that under wraps…” He shrugs. “Kacin helps veil my actions, but it’s not foolproof.”

  “So, Devid has even more cause to hate his father. Is that why he wanted to stop us? To give Cassis a chance to attack Geoffre?”

  “Maybe. He and Jon had been talking alliance.”

  I try to dig the heel of my palm into my forehead. “Jon again,” I mutter.

  “Jon didn’t put him up to using poison, Kyrra. Even Jon can’t control everything.”

  “Damn near, though.” I flick some straw off my metal arm. “I could take them both down.”

  “Both Geoffre and Cassis? How would you get to Geoffre?”

  Kill Cassis, then sneak out dressed as a man. Find Mikelo and let him go. Blend in as a gavaro in Geoffre’s army and get close to him that way. I could do it.

  “I’d find a way,” I say.

  “No,” Arsenault says, shaking his head definitively. “Geoffre wants you. He falls into black moods and upbraids Cassis for losing you and the child. He thought you were dead for years, so he didn’t look for you, but now that he knows you’re alive... Don’t try to finish your commission. Cassis will trade you to his father in a heartbeat for his own freedom if he catches you, and if you kill him, you’re just doing what Geoffre wants.”

  “Do you know why Geoffre wants me, Arsenault? As far as I know, the conjure magic is still working within me; I wouldn’t bear them any heirs.”

  Arsenault runs his thumb down his trousers like he’s smudging out a stain and keeps his eyes carefully on the line it leaves.

  “For your magic, Kyrra. He’s always wanted you for your magic.”

  Something is amiss. What could I be but a magical curiosity to Geoffre? Better as an assassin to take care of his son without it being traceable to him, but he wouldn’t want me then; instead, he’d have me killed as soon as I’d committed the crime.

  “You’re not going to convince me to run away again,” I say. “I won’t let Geoffre have you, either.”

  Arsenault’s gaze roves over my face. “If I hadn’t seen you fight, I might take that less seriously.”

  “But this is what you did to me. It’s my arm.”

  He didn’t know. He had Seen the battle magic that pulled at me, but he didn’t know how his arm took the magic and honed it like a blade.

  “Is that really my fault?”

  The words sting. “It’s not a fault, Arsenault.”

  For a moment, he’s silent. Then he rubs the place where his scar should be with two long fingers that aren’t as nicked-up as they used to be. “No,” he says. “You’re right. I’m sorry.”

  “Sometimes, I wonder if it’s you in there. If you haven’t become someone new.”

  “Kyrra. I died at Kafrin Gorge.”

  The words take all the air out of me. I thought I understood before, but maybe…it’s just beyond my ability to understand.

  “It was your father,” he goes on, without my asking for once, as he rubs his blood-crusted wrists. “I’ve been putting things together. I remember I got there late. Geoffre left me alone in the tent with a silver spoon in his tea service. It was careless, unless he did it on purpose. I Shaped the spoon and cut my ropes. He’d told me he was moving his troops up the other side of the gorge and going to parley with the Aliente troops, but by the time I got out of the tent, the Prinze were already setting it on fire. It wasn’t as Silva imagined. I remember walking down into the mouth of the gorge. The flames were hot on my skin. I tried to Fix them, to push them away from me, but my talent weakens when it comes down to something like fire, and Geoffre had kept me…” He swallows, then smiles bleakly. “Well, let’s just say to cut the ropes, I needed something metal. I could work with my talent, but anything else required too much magic. I wasn’t in any condition to direct it, and when I tried to work the flames, the magic overran me completely without doing a damn bit of good.”

  I put my hand on his leg. “Arsenault—”

  But he goes on. “Your father was ahead of the flames. It took a while for me to reach him. He held a white truce flag in his hand.”

  When I look up, Arsenault is studying me, trying to gauge my reaction. I can’t help but hold his gaze, though I don’t want to. Because what I see in Arsenault’s eyes is a complicated mix of concern for me, bitterness, sadness, anger...and resignation. Perhaps it was inevitable that my father’s devotion to the law would in the end become the sword he fell on. But that he dragged so many down with him...

  “A truce flag,” I say wearily. It makes so much sense now. “Because he expected Geoffre to abide by the same rules he did.”

  I’ve mourned my parents for a long time now. But talking about it brings the pain up fresh. I rub the join between my arm and the flesh of my shoulder.

  Arsenault takes a heavy breath and turns away. “Regaining my memories is like fighting a battle. Trying to outsmart the enemy. Erelf takes as much as he can, leaving me only what he thinks will torture me most.”

  Finally, I understand. “Your book,” I say.

  He nods. “It’s an idea I keep having, I guess. But the book has to survive. And someone
has to keep it for me.”

  “You should have given me one of your books.”

  “I’d planned on it. But there was no time for plans at the end. When I came back, I told everyone you were dead. It was easy enough for them to believe, although Geoffre took some convincing. But when I woke after Kafrin, nothing stopped me believing it, too. I still had a memory of you but separate from your name. As much as I tried, I couldn’t remember your face. The god twisted everything so it was just a giant muddle. Mikelo’s actions filled in the gaps.”

  “With what?”

  A trace of warmth lights Arsenault’s eyes. “I suspect it was some kind of memory.”

  And then he is looking at me, and I know. The scar on his chest is me. That’s why he’s recovered some memories now but not others. It’s a trick of Fixing, making memory real.

  “I’m not the way you left me,” I say. “I’m not the way you remember me.”

  “I’m not the way you remember me either.”

  He touches my right hand and I flinch. But instead of drawing back, he tightens his fingers on mine and pulls me closer to him, lifting my metal hand to his lips. For some reason, when his lips brush my knuckles, it doesn’t feel like dull metal anymore.

  “Erelf is playing a long game, Kyrra, much longer than any of you can see. Geoffre’s ambition is such that he makes a perfect tool for the god. I can’t let him have Mikelo, and I won’t let him have you.”

  Looking up at him, seeing the fierce earnestness in his eyes, I wonder if he knows about Erelf’s offer to take me instead of him.

  But then he pulls me toward him. I slide into his arms and tip my face up to his. For a moment, he remains still, and the look in his eyes changes. He leans closer to me by a fraction, and then a fraction more when I don’t move away, and finally he brings his lips down warm and soft to touch mine, making a sound like something long tied has been loosed within him. His other hand rounds my hip, pressing me against him, his fingers solid and real against my body, and five years are erased.

  And then the door rattles.

  Both of us scramble to our feet in an instant. My hand goes to my side in a futile quest for my sword. I speak quickly. “I meant what I said about Geoffre. If you and Jon have other ideas, I’m going to stand in the way.”

  “Kyrra—” he says, but then the door creaks open and Lobardin stands there, his hand on the sword that should be at my side. Or Arsenault’s.

  Whose sword is it now?

  “Well, Kyrra,” Lobardin says. “You’ve an audience with the prince. Cassis requests that both you and your paramour be made ready to meet him, so I suppose that involves a bath.”

  “A bath?”

  He looks me up and down. “I was as surprised as you are. But you certainly look like you need one.”

  Chapter 30

  For the first time in eight years, I am bathed and dressed by a small group of women—chambermaids for Driese, I’d assume, though she’s nowhere in sight. The dress Cassis provides fits well enough, and as far as I can tell, it isn’t one of my mother’s that was left hanging in the closets by mistake. The watered blue silk hugs me just a bit too tight, and the square, lace-scalloped neck dips down uncomfortably low. I guess this is the fashion now. Ungloved, my right hand gleams in the candlelight as Lobardin locks the manacles on my wrists. A small group of guards flanks him, their hands on their weapons.

  “Where’s Arsenault?” I ask as Lobardin pulls me up and sets me walking.

  Lobardin doesn’t look at me. “He’ll join us.”

  “Mikelo?”

  “Let me worry about the details, won’t you?”

  I study my own details, remembering the way the halls link together, refreshing my memories of iron sconces and peeling frescoes lining the walls—images of Ransi and Adalus, Tekus, Ires, and Erelf, the Doomed God, the god of Sight.

  In the Eterean pantheon, Erelf is nameless because he traded the life of his brother Adalus for the ability to See. The Etereans hid his name and regarded his magic warily, like a double-edged blade. They knew that like water, magic seeks the easiest courses instead of the best. It becomes a handle for the gods to grab in the games they play and the wars they wage against each other.

  Erelf’s face haunts me all the way to Cassis’s chambers—my parents’ bedchamber. The artist captured a good likeness; I wonder if he was a Seer too.

  Then Lobardin opens the door to the bedchamber and Cassis sits there, waiting for me.

  My eyes have been opened too well to think the setting isn’t well planned. The dress he gave me is the same color as the dress I wore the day we met. He sits on a gold brocade chair that used to grace the drawing room, and the huge oak bed upon which my parents slept looms behind him, draped in a canopy of rose-colored silk.

  I have to remind myself that he doesn’t know about the chair. How could he? He rises from it and stares at my right hand with the shock of a man who didn’t know what to expect and only half-believed the stories, and I find myself beginning to grin, because at least this is something he didn’t plan, something none of his family ever could have foreseen.

  “It’s true,” he says. “What Jon said.”

  Jon again. I let my gaze rove over the room before I answer him, taking in the positions of all the candelabras, the furniture, his weapons.

  There’s a sword on the wall, in a rack. I turn my gaze back to him. “Where’s Arsenault?”

  He puts his hand on one arm of the chair and starts to sit back down. “That’s nothing you need to worry about.”

  “I should have known not to trust you. Where did you put him? Back in the mews? In his own little cell in the towers, perhaps?”

  Cassis leans back in the chair and lets his hands slide down the fabric of the arms. “We’ve renovated the old prison compound, actually. You didn’t know about that, did you? We had to excavate the foundation.” He props his head with a finger. “It was fairly clear what it had been used for.”

  I struggle to recall a prison compound…and then I remember the mound of earth and broken walls in the woods. When I was a child, I used to run away to climb through its rubble. I was always scolded severely, but I kept going back.

  “You rebuilt it?”

  Cassis smiles, and I can see the ghost of his father in its lines, but Mikelo, too. “Somewhat. A prison can’t be too comfortable, you know. But it wouldn’t do to have it look too much the part, either.”

  “Your father can’t know you’ve turned this place into your own private fortress.”

  “No.” He looks up, catches Lobardin’s eye. “You can leave us now,” he says.

  Lobardin straightens. “But, Mestere—to leave you alone…”

  “Her hands are locked, aren’t they?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Do you have the key?”

  Lobardin tightens his mouth and nods.

  “Then take it away. I can defend myself.”

  “I told you how she fought,” Lobardin tries, one last time. But Cassis frowns at him.

  “I said I can defend myself.”

  Against her, I read in his eyes. Are they really so arrogant, these Prinze? I hope so.

  Lobardin bows. “So be it, Mestere,” he says, and throws me a dark glance before he retreats out the door and closes it.

  Cassis looks up at me. “Why don’t you sit? I must apologize for what passes for dinner here. We have to be careful with our rations.”

  I sit. They manacled my hands in front, not back, so I clasp my fingers together, metal and flesh, and notice for the first time a stand and tray placed beside the brocade chair. Cassis is apologizing for a bottle of Imisi white with a vintage stamp and what smells like stewed rabbit in a bowl with bread. I would have killed for such a meal when I was campaigning.

  “Why do you want me here?” I say, before he can speak. “Jon told you about me. That’s the only way you could have known we might be in Karansis.”

  He smiles bleakly as he pours a glass of wine and hands
it to me. “So, you really were on your way to kill me.”

  I accept the wine but don’t drink it. “Did you expect otherwise?”

  “From you?” He ladles out two bowls of rabbit. “I suppose I shouldn’t have, though I was surprised to learn you were alive and in a position to be hired as an assassin. I don’t know what disturbs me more—that the Caprine hired you to kill me or that my father sent you here knowing that.” He pulls the stand in between us so we can both use it as a table.

  I put my wineglass down and wait for Cassis to take the first bite before fumbling my spoon with my manacled hands. It just smells like rabbit, though, and the last thing I ate was a road biscuit early this morning.

  “You’re building a fortress out here,” I say after I eat enough to stop the hunger pangs. “Is it any wonder your father wants you dead?”

  He pales slightly and stops with his spoon in midair, dripping broth back into his bowl. Then he takes the bite and swallows. “I thought I might have to torture that information out of you,” he says, wiping the corners of his mouth with a napkin.

  “It’s only a guess. Why would I hide it?”

  He leans back in his seat and folds the napkin onto his thigh again. “I don’t know, Kyrra. We’ve both been caught in the net our families wove.”

  I’m not sure I’ve heard him right. “Are you calling yourself a victim, Cassis?”

  His face twists with distaste, and he hides it with a drink of wine. He sets the glass down firmly before he speaks. “Did you think I wanted to do what I did? That I didn’t feel dirty every time I lay with you and knew what my father wanted? My father used me, too.”

  “I suppose it was too hard for you to tell your father you weren’t interested before we even got started?”

  “I can see you don’t know my father very well.”

  “I only wonder how you managed to carry on with something that disgusted you so.”

  “It was the purpose that disgusted me, Kyrra. Never you.”

  “How do you expect me to believe that?”

  “I suppose I don’t. I could tell you what really happened, and you wouldn’t believe that, either.”