Fortune's Fool (Eterean Empire Book 1)

by Angela Boord

  “That wasn’t my question. My question was, do you feel remorse?”

  I shoved myself off the bench. “I’m not a demon, Father! How do you think I feel?”

  The muscles of his face sagged. He looked, for a moment, like he wanted to touch me. But he didn’t. His fingers twitched against his side, but his hand remained where it was. “I hardly know anymore, Kyrra,” he said.

  I dug my nails into my palm. The stump of my right arm throbbed in time to the beat of my heart, and the missing half of it ached. “What do you want from me, Father?” I asked, in a voice so cold, it surprised even me.

  He flinched. It didn’t give me any satisfaction. There was an empty place inside me, a place that had always been there but had at one time been no bigger than an egg—a small, hollow eggshell where there should have been something fertile, something that should have grown warm and large. But instead, it was the emptiness that grew, and now it was so big that it threatened to consume me. Until all I became was emptiness.

  I tried to beat it back. Tears pricked my eyes and I beat them back, too.

  My father straightened up, his face suddenly flat and expressionless. “You disobeyed my rule that serfs are not to carry edged weapons. You killed a girl in cold blood, without real evidence.”

  “But, Father—”

  “Hush!” He put up his hand to stop me and closed his eyes, turned his head so he wouldn’t be looking at me when he opened them. “You did it, Kyrra, and you know you did.”

  “I haven’t been arguing about that, Father.”

  “I could let you go,” he said, as if I hadn’t spoken at all. “I could let Arsenault take you out of here right now. But—may the gods forgive me, Kyrra—I need you.”

  I blinked. “For what?”

  “Verrin told you that you were to perform for Geoffre di Prinze, didn’t he?”

  I bit my lip. “Yes,” I lied. Arsenault had told me, but I didn’t want my father’s trust in Arsenault to slip any further.

  “I’ve opened negotiations with the Prinze on the price of our silk thread, and also about selling off a small parcel of our lands. He’s more concerned with the Caprine than us—”

  “Father!”

  He was attempting to pace, turning in brief circles to touch the walls, to look at the ceiling. He stopped and looked at me instead. “This wedding,” he said in a level voice, “will bankrupt us otherwise.”

  Now it was my turn to flinch. I looked down at the floor, at the head of the bone that jutted out from the wall. Then he surprised me by going down on one knee before me.

  I looked down at him, startled and horrified. “Kyrra,” he said, “as your father, I have no right to ask this, and no desire to, either. As your father, this will—” He swallowed and glanced away from me, then he reached out and took my hand.

  I stared at his hand on mine. Hadn’t his hand seemed larger once? Stronger? Now it was thin, and his fingers tightened hesitantly on mine. I looked up, into his eyes.

  “Kyrra, as your father, I will rot in the deepest pit of the underworld for what I am about to ask you to do, but as the Head of your House, I must ask you—I must, do you understand?”

  “What is it?” I could hardly bear to speak. I knew what he wanted. I could see it in his eyes.

  “We can’t give Geoffre any more ammunition than he already has. He can’t be allowed to have any legal footing to attack us. And he can’t be allowed to take you, either.”

  His hand tightened on mine.

  “Kyrra. Will you give your life for your House?”

  The nothingness that had only moments before threatened to overwhelm me broke like waters behind a dam. It swept me up and swirled me away.

  “Yes,” I whispered.

  My father hugged me. He put his arms around me so tightly, I could hardly breathe. I had felt like crying moments before, but now all I could do was shake.

  My father was shaking too.

  He stayed for a while longer. It was as if we could finally talk—could share a brief, bittersweet laugh over the fopperies of tailors and lutists—now that the pretenses between us had been chipped down. My father didn’t look at me when he talked, but I felt half-hidden in dream anyway. It barely occurred to me what I had agreed to.

  Then my father left and took the light with him. I remained sitting on the cold stone bench, alone with fragments of old paintings I couldn’t see in the dark and a handful of rat bones in the corner. It was only then that the weight of my decision pressed down on me, like a rock too heavy to lift.

  Outside I heard Arsenault talking to my father. The door and the stone muffled many of his words, but it seemed I could hear them clearly anyway. Only Arsenault’s words, and none of my father’s replies.

  You’re keeping her in there, Mestere? Why?

  She told you why she killed Ilena. It’s what I would have done in her place; would you lock me up, too, for doing your work?

  He was angry. So was my father. I couldn’t make out my father’s words, but I knew his tone of voice.

  The conversation grew more distant until it was as faint as the sound of water far back in the caves, and I got a twisty ache in my chest.

  Surely, I could speak to Arsenault one last time. Surely, I might touch his hand or his face before I died. Otherwise, my last memory of him would be his back retreating into the trees and the sight of the sword I’d hurled after him.

  “Arsenault!” I shouted.

  Running footsteps echoed off the stone walls.

  “Open the door,” Arsenault said.

  “The Mestere said—”

  “Open the door.”

  Suddenly alarmed, I got up off the bench and stood on my tiptoes to look out the window, pressing my hand against the clammy wood. But all I could make out were shadows.

  I pressed myself harder against the door. “Verrin! Let me talk to him!”

  Verrin’s silhouette didn’t move. Nor did Arsenault’s. “The Mestere says you’re to have no visitors. No one, even Arsenault.”

  Not even Arsenault?

  “But just to talk to her, Verrin...”

  “Arsenault, don’t make this into a struggle. He’ll probably let her go in a couple days. She’ll be safe here, and—”

  Arsenault yanked his sword free of its scabbard. The runes on its blade sparked so bright, I flinched away from the window, and Verrin flung an arm up to protect his eyes, his own sword hanging useless at his side. The white light lit up Arsenault’s face. His eyes gleamed as silver as his blade. He pointed the sword at Verrin, and Verrin stepped back, letting his arm drop to his side.

  “I know you’re following orders,” Arsenault told him. “I wish you no trouble. But if any harm comes to her and you’re a party to it, this sword will be the least of your worries.”

  Verrin blanched. “I—” he began.

  I clenched my hand and let my forehead rest against the wood, slimy with mold as it was.

  I couldn’t let this happen. What had I been thinking, calling out to him? Of course my father would have left orders to keep him away.

  “Verrin!” I called out, without looking up. “If Arsenault is still here, tell him I’ve changed my mind. I’ve no wish to talk to him anymore. Tell him to go away!”

  The light that poured in through the window faltered. “Kyrra?” Verrin said.

  “You heard me! Tell him!”

  The light winked out. Arsenault cursed, loudly, but he didn’t leave. Instead, there was a scuff against the floor, followed by the sound of a body hitting the wall.

  “Arsenault—” Verrin gasped.

  The door rattled against me as Arsenault tried the lock. The wood grew suddenly warm as if he might be using his magic on the iron bar, and I jerked backward in surprise.

  “Arsenault!” I cried out in alarm. “Leave Verrin alone! Think about his children!”

  “Kyrra, what game are you playing in there? What did your father say to you?”

  “You know you won’t be able to mak
e it out of here with me. And then everything I’ve done will be useless. They’ll all know, Arsenault, and my father will be forced to throw you in the caves—or put you to the sword. Dammit, Arsenault, stop!”

  Smoke curled into my small space from the hot door. I raised my arm to my mouth and began to cough.

  There was silence for a moment. Then Arsenault uttered a deep, strangled cry, and a slamming, clanging blow rang against the iron, echoing off the rock and making the door shudder as if an earthquake was going to pull down the walls.

  I threw my arm over my head and cowered in the corner.

  “I know he said something to you,” Arsenault said through the bars at the window. “And I’ll find out what it was.”

  The tattoo of his boots on the stone let me know how angrily he walked away. Then I heard Verrin say, “Dammit, Kyrra.”

  I slid down to the ground with my back against the door. The ache in my chest held me tight in its fist—worse than I expected. I rested my head on my knees.

  The sound of my tears was only another drip-drip-drip in the dark.

  The two days I spent in the cave I would have sworn were the longest in my life. But that was before I left Arsenault and knew what living is like after your heart dies. Waiting for death isn’t as hard as that.

  But there was nothing to do, and not even Verrin talked to me. I made a game of feeling the bone in the wall, trying to determine what sort of man it had come from. I knew something of anatomy from helping gut pigs and sheep, and I knew something of human bones from illicit forays into my tutor’s sketchbooks. I thought this bone had probably belonged in someone’s leg. But it was so big that at first, I thought it might be a bear’s bone. I spent a lot of time running my hands over its cool, smooth surface, my fingers finding every little scratch, every worn-down groove.

  It was a man’s bone, no doubt about it.

  I started wondering how he had died. Had he been condemned like me, his bones cast aside, not even buried in a pauper’s grave? Had he cornered a bear or a lion in this cave, this giant of a man, only to find that he had trapped himself?

  It disturbed me to think of the man as an animal’s kill. It seemed so random and unnecessary a death. If a man had to die, let there at least be a reason behind it.

  I let my fingers wander away from the bone and discovered old paintings on the wall, ones I couldn’t see but that I could track with my fingers. The artist had first carved lines into the stone, then brushed paint into the depressions. If I closed my eyes, I could imagine the paintings in my head: fanciful and grotesque combinations of human heads and legs and arms and animal bodies, teeth, tusks, antlers.

  Perhaps the man that belonged to the bone was the artist. Maybe the earth shifted, dropping the rock on top of him.

  Every little noise afterward seemed to me the trembling of the earth.

  On the night of the second day, I let my fingers linger on a painting of a deer with the head of a man. Perhaps it was a centa, those half-hind creatures that bounded through old Eterean tales, kidnapping travelers and goring them with their antlers, then roasting them over their cook-fires.

  I stayed awake as long as I could, fearing the quiet time before sleep. While I lay curled on the cold stone floor, all my fears ambushed me. But I couldn’t fend sleep off forever. Eventually, I succumbed to exhaustion and dreamed about the man-deer on the wall.

  His whuffling hot breath filled up the close space of the cell. When he moved, his antlers clicked against the ceiling and his hide scrubbed the walls.

  It didn’t seem possible that he could fit in the tiny cell. Enough light trickled in that I could make out the ruddy gold of his hide, the blunt shape of his head, and the luminous black ovals of his eyes—eyes that stared at me with far more intelligence than any deer’s. Like the elk on the seashore I’d dreamed so long ago, this stag watched me with the eyes of a man.

  “What do you want?” I asked. “Why are you here?”

  The deer didn’t answer. Instead, he bent his forelegs and lowered his head until his muzzle touched his chest. His antlers scraped against the wall as he brought them down toward me. I looked around wildly for an escape, but there was none. The tips of his antlers split my flesh like knives, sliding easily through skin and muscle, pinning me to the cold stone floor.

  I writhed and thrashed. But with my every movement, his antlers punctured me more thoroughly.

  Sacrifice, he whispered.

  The pain was hot and wet and filled me up. It transformed me into more of itself, an alchemical reaction that left me something less than human, a mass of blood and bone and skin and nothing else.

  “Please,” I gasped. “Please.”

  The deer jerked his antlers. I howled like a wounded wolf, and the pain bore me off, spiraling down into some black sea. I bobbed on its waves until I found myself standing high atop a cliff, surrounded by the tossing silver-green foam of grass.

  I couldn’t breathe. My chest felt as if it had closed. I patted my hands over it, feeling for wounds. But my flesh was as sealed and perfect as it had been—

  Before my arm was severed. I had two hands. I raised them both and stared at them, turning them over so I could examine the lines on their palms, the ridge of their knuckles. I flexed my right hand and it moved for me, as solid as it had been before my mother buried it beneath a cork tree.

  It was only then that I realized I was dreaming.

  When I looked up, the man who had been the elk in my long-ago dream stood before me, his long gray hair braided down his back like a tail. This time, he wore a shirt and trousers of soft, tawny gold. A polished bone horn hung from his neck on a leather thong. He stroked it and cocked his head, studying me.

  “You toy with me,” I said, “making me think I have two arms.”

  “I toy with you?” He raised his eyebrows. “Your arm exists. Flesh is more malleable than you suppose.”

  I clenched my hands into fists and took a deep breath. “Who are you?”

  “That is a question not easily answered, I’m afraid.”

  “Try.”

  He gave me a look. “Let’s just say I patronize sacrifices. You seem lately determined to become one.”

  “How else can I serve my family?”

  “Another good question. How else can you serve your family?”

  “Surely, I am in the only position—”

  “Death is not the only route to sacrifice. Though perhaps,” he said, with the ghost of a smile, “sometimes it is the easiest.”

  The corners of my mouth tugged down tight. “You make light of it.”

  Abruptly, his smile disappeared. “No, I don’t make light of it. But if you continue to allow pieces of yourself to be carved off, you will cease to be the Hunter and become instead Prey.”

  The night pressed down around me, filled with the crashing of waves against the shore. Water eating away sand, whittling off pieces of the beach, devouring them in its belly. A gust of wind aroused the grass to a fury. It sounded like an angry crowd.

  “When have I not been prey?” I asked. “My whole life, I’ve been used, my only value in how I could best serve the interests of my House or someone else’s House. I failed in that purpose once. Now I only seek to make amends. I have to do this thing for my father because he asks it of me.”

  The man frowned. “Leaving yourself blind to the wider world. Walking through a forest like a human, blunt and big-footed, crashing and breaking twigs along the way, never realizing what’s under your feet.”

  “And what would that be? To what am I blind?” I said crossly. “Your riddles make my head hurt. Can’t you speak plainly?”

  “If I did, I fear you wouldn’t listen. There is more to the world than what you think you know. You have more use than as a corpse.”

  “Show me how to avoid it, then,” I pleaded. “Show me any tomorrow in which I don’t die, and Arsenault doesn’t die, and my father and my House live on.”

  The truth was, I didn’t want to die. But I
couldn’t see any other path that made me more than a coward. I was an armless serf girl convicted of murder, the unwed lover of a man who shaped the world with a magic I barely comprehended...but I would not be a coward. I owned nothing except my pride.

  When the man didn’t answer, the hope died within me, the pain of its passing more intense for its short bloom. I turned, unable to face him.

  But then he spoke, wearily. “Hunter,” he said. “And Sacrifice. In you, the two are combined. You choose which road you follow, with which vision you will see. Your heart will always be your own.”

  “No,” I said softly, shaking my head. “I’ve given that away.”

  The man went still, as if the prospect frightened him. Then he let out his breath. “A gift,” he said. “To bestow where you wish.”

  Not wherever I wish. My heart resided with Arsenault, and if Arsenault died, they would bury my heart with his body. I didn’t know how I would go on, heartless.

  “Come.” The man motioned to me. “Look.”

  I hesitated. He walked to the lip of the cliff and lay down prone, fingers curling around the crumbling edge. He looked down onto the beach below.

  I followed him in spite of myself. And saw Arsenault.

  It was like a continuation of that other dream, the one I’d had after I’d stolen Arsenault’s silver wolf. But this time, Arsenault knelt on the beach beside a man with an arrow protruding from his chest.

  I glanced at the deer-man, but he shook his head slightly without saying anything. Below us, Arsenault bent over the man on the sand, and the wind carried the sound of his weeping.

  “Who is that?” I whispered to the deer-man. “Did Arsenault kill him?”

  The man didn’t answer me. I clenched my fingers on the rock in frustration and looked at Arsenault again. From this height in the luminous semi-dark, I couldn’t make out the colors of the clothes he wore, but the cut of them was strange. His hair gleamed black as the sand on which he knelt—a trick of dreams, to see him so well, I thought—with no white to mar it. The dead man seemed to melt into the sand; his hair must have been black too.

  “Listen,” the deer-man whispered.