Fortune's Blight

by Evie Manieri

  “Somebody cut that damned thing loose,” said Eofar, still looking sick.

  said Nisha, switching easily from Nomas to Norlander. She spoke it as well or better than most Nomas, but her feelings wove and darted like a school of quick little fish: the moment Rho tried to grab hold of one, it was gone.

  said Rho. The ship pitched, and his stomach rolled anew.

  Grentha made no reply, but she regarded him with the frank skepticism in which she held all land-dwellers, most men, and Rho in particular. She bore a striking resemblance to the Argent’s carved figurehead, right down to the cracked skin and leaden eyes, and had slightly less charisma.

  Nisha asked.

  said Rho.

  said Grentha.

  He had been hearing the sailors whispering about the Barrels for some time—he had seen it on the map, nothing more than a few swirling lines far out away from any land, but no Nomas ship had ever crossed it voluntarily. Those who had been forced in by storms or bad navigation had returned with tall tales of stars that moved in circles, winds that blew from four directions at once, waves as high as mountains, swirling whirlpools with snapping jaws at the bottom and calms that never lifted.

  said Nisha, as the second mate, a willowy woman named Sabina, came over to join them.

  Rho suddenly became aware of an unfamiliar sound mingling with the wind in the sails and the hum of the ropes: a rattling sound. Nothing on Nisha’s immaculate ship had ever had the temerity to rattle like that before.

  Eofar rocked to his feet and twisted around to look behind him, reminding Rho of a dog chasing his tail; he found it amusing until he realized the cause. He jumped up on the locker behind Eofar and grabbed the hilt of Strife’s Bane. The sword was shaking so hard he could barely hold on to it.

  asked Eofar.

  “Where’s Dramash?” Rho shouted to the sailors. “He’s doing this: it’s the ore in the blade, he’s controlling it. Somebody find him!”

  “Why would he do that?” asked Nisha.

  “He must have seen the dead triffon.” Rho was hanging on to the black-bladed sword as Eofar tried to unbuckle the belt and free himself from it. “He loves them. That’s how Frea lured him away from his mother in the first place.”

  Nisha’s eyebrows shot up. “Oh, I see.”

  “He’s over there,” said Sabina, pointing, just as a knot of girls backed away from each other. The boy was sitting hunched over below the rail, with his head buried in his arms.

  Sabina, Nisha and half a dozen sailors all made some version of the same soft, pitying noise and started toward him.

  “No, don’t,” Rho warned them. “He doesn’t like people looking at him like that—”

  His warning came too late: Dramash looked up to see the women coming for him and power exploded out of his small body. Eofar got the buckle of his swordbelt loose at the worst possible moment and the sword and sheath flew sideways out of Rho’s hands, knocking him over. Eofar leaped for them, missed, and fell headlong into a coil of rope. Sailors scattered out of the way as the sword shot past them and crashed into the side of the landing boat, punching a hole straight through the wood.

  Rho heard the sound of Dramash’s bare feet slapping against the boards and got to his feet in time to see him disappear into their cabin and slam the door behind him. From inside the room came a sound like a volley of arrows loosed at a wooden target.

  “Rho,” said Nisha significantly. The curve of her mouth had straightened to an emphatic line. “We can’t have this.”

  “I know—I’m sorry. I’ll calm him down. It will be all right,” Rho told her and the dismayed crew as he climbed down from the locker and headed for the cabin. He paused with his hand on the latch, feeling the deck swinging beneath him and obeying an instinct to give Dramash another moment to calm himself.

  By the time he opened the door, everything inside was quiet. Rho pulled the door shut behind him, blocking out both the light and the activity on deck. Dramash sat curled up in a little nook behind his hammock with his arms around his knees. Pieces of Rho’s model, the wine jug and the cups littered the floor. The bags of sand lay strewn all around the room, no longer dusty.

  “I have to go,” said the boy, crawling out from under the hammock without looking at Rho. “Yara’s waiting for me.” He started wading through the junk like there was nothing unusual about it being there.

  “Wait, Dramash. You can’t go now. You need to practice,” Rho told him.

  “I have to go. She’s going to teach me a new game.”

  “Dramash,” Rho said, kicking one of the sandbags away, “you have to practice. You can’t keep putting it off. Do you know you just wrecked one of the boats?”

  “I’ll do it later.”

  “Later?” Rho swept his arm at the mess all around them, feeling a tickling of panic in the palms of his hands. “How much later? After someone’s been really hurt? Or later, when this ship is at the bottom of the sea?”

  Dramash glowered down at the cabin floor. “I don’t want to practice.”

  “And I don’t want you to kill anybody,” said Rho, and then instantly regretted it.

  “You can’t make me do it.” He looked up at Rho, his dark eyes as fixed and cold as a raptor’s. The Shadari gods may have given Dramash the power to cause destruction and death, but that look … Rho’s knife had called that into being, the moment he had pulled it across the throat of the boy’s helpless mother.

  Rho reached behind him for the stool and sat down. For a long moment, he watched the shadows rock back and forth with the swing of the lantern. “What game?” he asked finally.

  The disturbing look on Dramash’s face slackened away, but his chest still rose and fell like he’d been running.

  “What game is Yara going to teach you?” Rho asked again.

  Dramash picked up an old biscuit box at his feet. “I don’t know what it’s called.”

  “Oh.”

  The boy turned the box over in his hand. “Yara says everything in Norland is made of glass.”

  “Green-glass,” said Rho. “It’s ice with minerals in it, so it doesn’t melt like regular ice. It’s mostly for decoration. The buildings are made of stone, just like other places.”

  “And there are big cracks in the ground,” Dramash went on, “and if you fall into one, you have to serve an evil god and be in his army.”

  Rho’s already miserable stomach knotted up even further and he cleared his throat against the burn of the acid. “That’s just a story,” he said.

  Do not go down into the deep places. For there Valrig will curse you, and into his service forever will you be bound.

  Dramash opened the door and was just about to step over the raised threshold when he came back and dropped the biscuit box into Rho’s hand. “I won’t fall in. I’ll be careful.”

  “That’s fine,” said Rho, closing his hand around the box. “Careful is just fine.”

  Dramash was out the door and gone before the ship pitched down again into the waves. Rho covered his eyes against the light sliding back and forth across the cabin wall. He was beginning to feel like he’d never be on solid ground again.

  Chapter 4

  Kira Arregador made one final assessment of her reflection i
n the mirror. It was real mirrored glass, not just a polished silver plate, but a fault in the casting made the image wavy and distorted. Still, it confirmed what she already knew: the necklace did not become her. The orange stones clashed with her blue-and-white complexion, and the chain still reminded her of a noose about to be pulled tight no matter how she adjusted the heavy gold links over her collarbone.

  she asked Aline.

  Her hand-servant paused in the act of coiling and pinning up her braids in the arrangement that best framed Kira’s silver-gray eyes and chose a small jar from among the scents, creams and powders crowded onto the dressing table.

  She took the jar and leaned in for a closer look in the mirror. Veins webbed the whites of her eyes, and the delicate skin underneath had begun to sag. A few nights of real sleep would set it all right again.

  <“Pleasant sleep is the reward of a pure heart,”> she quoted, dabbing a tiny amount of the pearly cream under each eye.

 

  Kira replaced the lid on the jar and straightened the collar of her shirt.

  replied Aline.

 

 

 

  asked Aline.

  she said as she buckled on Virtue’s Grace over her spotless mourning whites. She admired the sheen Aline had buffed into its hilt; it certainly had not been sullied by use for quite some time. Someday she would likely regret not keeping up even her meager skills.

  said Aline.

  asked Kira. She waited while Aline slid the sleeveless fur robe over her arms and settled it on her shoulders. The silver ursa pelts weighed practically nothing at all, but they were warm enough to make her uncomfortable in the heated room.

  said Aline, preening a little at the compliment, but not feeling the real regret hiding behind Kira’s teasing.

 

 

  Kira thought longingly of taking off her coat and sitting back down in front of the fire, listening to the wood pop and snap as the heat lapped around her.

  said Aline, casting a proprietary eye around the one-room palace Kira had moved into following her husband’s death. The chamber, though large, was tucked in an out-of-the-way corner of the Arregador clan’s magnificent house in Ravindal. Tapestries were piled in heaps on the floor, waiting for Kira to make up her mind where to hang them. Her bed had so many cushions that she couldn’t even see the furs underneath. Crates leaking sawdust and pine needles held ornaments she’d yet to unpack, and bolts of fabric stood propped up in the corners while the tailors awaited her instructions.

 

  They left through the tiny entrance hall and passed through several corridors, then out into the gallery overlooking the great hall. The slanted green-glass panels of Arregador House’s elegant atrium gleamed overhead, but the people who usually congregated beneath it had already left for the feast in Eotan Castle. Cold air slashed its way inside the moment the door-warden opened up for them, and Kira pulled her coat closer to her body before striding out into the evening.

  she told Aline as a pair of guards at the end of an afternoon patrol flew by on their triffons, making their way back to the stables.

  Their boot-nails crunched through the ice as they walked through the alleys and yards between the Arregador and Vartan houses. Snow clung to the sloping roofs of the outbuildings and pushed up against the walls in sweeping drifts, and icicled thaw-vine branches bobbed and snatched at their clothes as they brushed by. Clusters of tiny purple berries were just beginning to appear: she remembered eating the warm fruit by the handful as a child, trying to keep from breaking the branches so the hot sap wouldn’t ruin her clothes.

  Work had ceased early for Eowara’s Day and a thin layer of ice covered the firepits and cold furnaces. The alleys were deserted except for vermin forging tunnels from the kitchens to the slop-yards. They passed through Saddler’s-yard and out into Smith’s-yard, where the tang of charcoal and the taste of hot metal sharpened the rest of Kira’s senses to a needle-fineness. At the end of the alley, they climbed up the green-glass slope of Knife Bridge, named for the shape of the ravine it spanned in the black rock.

  Kira ran her hand along the etched railing and looked down into the depths of the crevasse as they passed. Luminous mist from the hot springs deep in the rock puddled in some spots and twined out in ribbons in others. She still remembered her sister telling her that the mist concealed Lord Valrig’s twisted minions, who came up from the Under-realm to snatch away naughty high-clan children and boil them up for soup.

  Once across the bridge, they passed into wider streets sheltered from the snow by green-glass canopies and protected against the wind by frequent turnings. They crossed yet another bridge and hurried on, passing no one but street-sweepers clearing away the snow and scattering fresh pine needles. Finally they came out into the Front—the open space in front of the gates of Eotan Castle—where the headland, cracked in too many places to build upon, sloped up gradually to the sharp rise under which lay the sealed tombs of Norland’s most ancient monarchs, including the first and mightiest of them all, great Eowara herself. Kira was not fond of the Front. She preferred the narrow streets and little courts; here, she felt like she was being watched from every angle: from the towers and apparently empty slit-windows of Eotan Castle; from the huge green-glass terrace on the western side, supported by two twenty-feet-tall statues of wolf-headed Eotan the Progenitor; from the worn faces on the carvings of the ancient monarchs lining the rise; from the top of the hewn steps between them to the headland’s highest point where the beacon burned day and night to guide ships into the harbor; and where the skull of Gargrothal, last of the great sea monsters, gaped down at them.

  The gates of the Eotan clan’s castle stood open and a wholly unnecessary contingent of extra palace guards with Eotan tabards stood at attention in front of them.

  Aline said, slowing.

 

  Vrinna Eotan, scion of a particularly stiff branch of Norland’s highest clan, stood in the center of her command in her bronze helmet, no doubt kept warm by her zealous devotion to the emperor who had ordered her to stand out in the cold while he feasted. Vrinna watched them approach for a while before coming down the steps and circling around them like a crag-cat climbing down for a closer look at her prey. Kira felt Vrinna in her mind for a moment like a hand darting out for a slap, but then retreating so swiftly one couldn’t be sure it had happened at all.

  said Vrinna.

  asked Kira, looking around the empty Front with dismay as if she was only
just noticing she was alone.

  said Aline, playing along with just the right amount of sullen apology.

  said Vrinna.

  Kira let the clumsy innuendo swing right over her head and replied, She felt Aline’s trepidation: they had of course planned on entering discreetly from behind the high table; now she faced a long walk down the entire length of the hall, but she would not give Vrinna the satisfaction of seeing her bothered. Summoning up her most aggrieved inflection, she said,

  Vrinna moved back just far enough to let her pass. Aline went up the stairs ahead of her, dragging her feet through the slush left by the passage of the six hundred or so high clansmen and their attendants already inside. Kira followed until her coat caught on something and yanked her shoulders backward. She flailed her arms, trying to regain her balance, but could not compensate for the weight of the sword across her back and crashed down, hitting her shin and elbow particularly hard before she stopped herself from sliding any further.

  Aline cried, rushing over to help her up. Kira breathed through her anger, deflating it until it was small enough to fit back in the little box where she kept it. As Aline tried to brush the dirty slush from her beautiful coat, Kira noted the boot-print on the fur just at the spot where Vrinna had been standing beside her.

  Virtue’s Grace thrummed against Kira’s back, coming alive with her loathing. She had never won a tournament or even seen a battlefield. She knew it would be suicide—and a very quick one at that—to draw on the captain, but Vrinna knew it, too, and her smug certainty galled Kira far more than her graceless tumble. Vrinna was the woman who had brought “battlefield justice” to her new position; apparently the captain saw no point in arresting someone and holding a trial when she could just slice off a few of their fingers and set them out to die.