by Stephen Case
Eris’s fingers went limp and Fawkes yanked the implement away. “To retake the kingdom,” she said in disbelief. “To slay the Illusionist.”
Fawkes dropped down onto the cushion across from her, provoking a small puff of dust. “Who sent you here? Besides the Illusionist, I mean.”
“The Coalition of Loyalists to the Stolen Crown,” Eris recited. “Crownies.”
“And you didn’t like ‘Otto’,” Fawkes said under his breath.
“I was the one who planted the idea,” Eris said. “Because your name day was coming. I spread a rumor with a few of the other girls that someone would be picked to go spend a night with the king. Then it grew, so it was someone to live with the king as his mistress. Once everyone believes something’s to happen, it usually does. The Illusionist got wind of it from one of his chancellors, and that chancellor suggested me, because I’d asked him to, and next thing I was telling the Coalition I’d been chosen to go to the Desert Lord. To the Crowned Exile. To you.”
A moment passed in silence. Fawkes stared down at his dirty nails.
“How disappointing I must seem,” he said at last. “I didn’t know I’d become a folk figure. I would have grown a great beard.”
“Don’t you dare make another jest.” Eris had gotten to her feet. “Don’t you dare. We risked our lives setting this up. To free you.” She balled her fists at her sides. “It’s this heat. The heat’s gone to your head.”
“Why would I want to leave?” Fawkes asked. “I have my games, I have my books, and now I have a nubile young mistress eager to satisfy my every twisted desire.”
“He was your brother!” Eris shouted, and Fawkes flinched backward. “Doesn’t every, every drop of blood in you cry vengeance?”
Fawkes wiped a fleck of spit from his cheek, wincing. “Half-brother.”
“Doesn’t half your heart die to think of him stabbed in the back by the man he trusted?” Eris demanded, but Fawkes could hear a quaver in her voice. He fixed his gaze on the skin between her eyes.
“He never had much use for me, nor I him. Listen. A ruler is a ruler. Do you really think things were perfect under my brother? Always at war or at hunt while the nobles stuffed their pockets, with impunity? While the capital crumbled under his feet from corruption? The Illusionist is not a good man, but he brought stability to the kingdom in a way my brother never could.”
“That’s a filthy lie,” Eris snapped. “He—
“Let me finish.” Fawkes’s bloodline must have still carried some authority to her, because she fell silent. “Your parents were loyal to the king, and no doubt wealthy, guessing from your speech and your physiognomy, probably the middling merchant class. They lost everything when the Illusionist seized power. Perhaps they were relegated to the poorhouses. Perhaps your father was imprisoned.”
Eris opened her mouth, but he plowed on.
“So your mother, dreaming of her filched finery, filled your head with fantastical nonsense about a golden age lost and the evil tyrant who ushered it out. Of course, it didn’t stop her from selling you to the brothels he now owned.” He kept his face cold even as Eris’s flush sent a guilty dart through his stomach. “Along the way you fell in with a motley group of radicals, and their tall tales triggered some deeply instilled delusion within you, and you began dreaming their dream of revolution, which it now seems is centered around one great myth. Which would be me. The rightful heir, here in exile, planning a glorious uprising from leagues and leagues away.”
Fawkes affected a performer’s bow. No applause came.
“You’re not much of a guesser,” Eris said, voice shaking and hands clenched, too. “My family has always been dirt poor. We’re loyalists because the king put a dagger through a Northerner’s shoulder the instant before the bastard would have slit my father’s throat. Dragged him all the way back behind lines, too. Because he was a good man, a brave man. A real man.” The disdain on her face was so vivid it ached. “Nothing like you turned out to be.” She spun, stalked toward the stairs.
“You have no idea how little that stings when heard for the ten-thousandth time!” Fawkes shouted after her.
The girl turned. “You’re the jest,” she said. “Not me. I’m going back to the Crownies, and I’m going to tell them you’re dead.”
She put her back to him and marched up the steps, shift swirling around her pale ankles.
Fawkes searched for a stinging retort and found his quiver empty. He’d spent too long with someone who couldn’t fire back.
* * *
Fawkes made a half-hearted attempt at a philosopher’s treatise before he packed the book away and emerged from the cellar to watch Eris fill skins from the well.
“Let her at it,” he said to Otto. “She’s incredibly tetchy.”
The automaton looked over at him, head cocked at a slightly skeptical angle.
“I may have been a tad insensitive,” Fawkes admitted. “I forget, sometimes, that not everyone is made of iron.”
Otto nodded impassively, and they agreed on a new game of tarots as Eris tied off the skins and moved on to ransacking the larder. Around icy silences and angry glares, Fawkes managed to extract her travel plans. She intended to leave in the night, when it was coolest, with all the water and food she could carry.
“Ridiculous.” Fawkes directed it toward Otto as he flipped his cards. “Without a lodestone, she’ll be lost before dawn.”
Otto nodded, then tip-toed his fingers jerkily across the board, pantomiming walking in pain.
“And those feet,” Fawkes agreed. “Not a single callus. She’ll burn them to stumps.”
Otto turned his head, to watch Eris now bundling her supplies into a less-than-sturdy sling. Fawkes refused to do the same.
“Not to mention the brigands,” he said, still to Otto. “The marauders. The sandeaters. They’ll eviscerate her forthrightly and leave her bones to the buzzards.”
“I can hear you,” Eris snapped.
“Let her go, then. See if I care.” Fawkes shook his head. “Deluded little girl.”
Eris ignored him; Otto flipped his cards.
“It’s my name day, apparently,” Fawkes remarked. “What do you make of that?”
He lost the game a few moments later and hopped his way back down to the cellar in a sulk while Otto went to tally his win.
* * *
Fawkes didn’t hear the shriek of the desert wind anymore, no more than he heard his heartbeat or his lungs, so the scratching of feet up above the cellar was enough to rouse him from an admittedly tenuous sleep. He stared into the thicket of shadows above his head, charting her progress to the cathedral doors, imagining her slipping through the arched entrance, trudging over the crest of the nearest dune, out of sight and out of mind.
He might be able to forget she’d ever existed—-Otto certainly wouldn’t bring her up in conversation. It wasn’t as if Fawkes remembered the name of that barber, either.
But the barber hadn’t wandered off into the desert to die.
“Damn it all,” Fawkes ordered the ceiling, wrapping woven blankets around himself like a cloak as he staggered to his feet and up the stairs. The air had turned bitingly cold, and starlight spotted the sandy floor of the cathedral, leaking from its various cracks and holes. Fawkes scarved his face against the blowing grit as he hurried toward the doors. Otto looked up at his passing but made no remark.
By the time Fawkes was outside, Eris was wading her way up the first dune, hunched against the wind. “Hey!” he bellowed. “Hey! Hey!” The call was stripped away the instant it left his lips. He hesitated one moment longer, then dashed after her. Starlight also seeped into the pale sand, making it gleam like teeth, and it stuck to his skin when sweat began to bead. He hadn’t run in years.
He caught her on the crest, lungs ragged and aching. She spun away at his touch, producing a knife Fawkes thought he’d hidden better, then stopped when she recognized the red hair and hooded eyes.
“What?” she demanded.
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“Wait,” Fawkes moaned, doubling over. “Just wait...” He took a deep breath that was half sand, choked, and spat mucus. “Until morning,” he finished. “Wait until morning. I have an idea. Maybe Otto could go with you.”
“Why would I want that big hunk of metal following me?” Eris asked, but she’d tucked the knife back into her makeshift sash.
“He knows the way,” Fawkes said. “He knows the way, he knows the desert, and nobody will give you trouble if you have an automaton at your back.”
Eris snorted. “You really do trust him.”
“He always keeps his word. And makes me keep mine. So, yes. I do.”
Eris looked out across the swooping dunes, and Fawkes could see the distance shrinking her. The desert was vast, an ocean of bone; the sky was vaster, an inky cavern pierced only by foreign constellations. He could tell she felt infinitesimally small, as he often did.
“The stars are different here,” she said. “Didn’t realize it before.”
“Everything is different here.”
“Why would he give his word?” Eris asked.
Fawkes straightened up, still breathing hard. “He has a gambling problem. I’ll explain. Inside.”
Eris took one more look across the desert, then nodded her dark head. They made their way back down the slope of the dune, wind bowling at their backs, and Fawkes saw Otto framed in the entry of the cathedral, tall and skeletal and very still. For a moment he looked more threatening than concerned, but it was always hard to tell with Otto. Jealous, perhaps.
“I’m back,” Fawkes said, once in earshot. “Don’t be such a clucking hen.”
The automaton turned and walked away as soon as they entered. Fawkes knew reproach when he saw it. He led Eris back down into the cellar and set about adding more fuel to the brazier. Her hands were tinged blue, so he let her sit closest.
“You can still tell them I’m dead,” he informed her, stoking the flames.
“I was still planning to,” Eris said flatly, pulling her feet under herself. Fawkes saw the flash of purple ink again and remembered.
“I didn’t recognize that tattoo on your ankle at first,” he said. “The eyeball. From the alchemical cultists. ‘The Hanged God watches every step.’ I didn’t take you for a devotee.”
Eris frowned.
“Having blue blood, even half, is the same way,” Fawkes said. “Always watched. Always judged. Every little thing magnified. Always compared to your betters.” He looked across the brazier at Eris. “There are no eyeballs out here.”
“You’re hiding.” Eris’s nostrils flared. “You’d be here even if the Illusionist hadn’t sent you.”
“My brother’s supporters didn’t want me then, and they don’t need me now. I’d be useless in any sort of rebellion. A figurehead at best.” Fawkes found he was using his wheedling voice. “Don’t you understand why I won’t go back to that?”
“Symbols have power,” Eris argued. “Not just the magical kind.”
Fawkes ran a hand through his hair. “I’m no king, Eris. I’m just a silly man playing silly games and waiting for sundown.”
There was a long silence, in which Eris tucked her hands under her armpits and rocked backward. Forward. She stared at the brazier, and then, finally: “Didn’t you love your brother at all, then?”
“Half-brother,” Fawkes corrected by rote. “And I did. Or I thought I did.” He paused. “He took me to a brothel once, on my name day. Brought a dozen different whores in. I wanted to please him, so I picked one.” Fawkes swallowed. “Couldn’t do it.” He rubbed at his face, staring at nothing for a moment before he spoke again. “He made me try another, and another, and in the end he brought a boy in and sat there watching while I fucked him. Laughing. Like it was a jest.” Fawkes managed half a laugh himself. “That’s the man who was king. And the man you think should be king, there with him. Do you really think either of them any better than the Illusionist?”
Eris shook her head. “You don’t know what he’s done. Maybe the king was no saint, but kings aren’t meant to be. The Illusionist is a fiend from hell.” She exposed the purple eye tattooed against her anklebone. “I didn’t choose this. It’s the alchemists’ guild mark. They own the brothels now. They own half the capital, now. The Illusionist gives them leave to dig up graveyards. Take children off the streets. You remember the cultists, don’t you?”
“Exaggerations,” Fawkes said. “Scapegoating. And even if it were true, there’s nothing I could do. You simply refuse to realize that.”
“But you’re a royal,” Eris protested. “That counts for something. You’re educated.” She scrambled upright, running her hand along the spines of his library. “Look at all these damned books... strategy... tactics of war-at-sea... infiltration...” She paused. “Gods’ blood. You have been thinking about it, haven’t you?”
“Of course not,” Fawkes protested. “It’s only for the games. That’s all.”
Eris looked at him for a long moment, eyes burning. “Fine,” she said at last. “Only for the games. Is that how you plan to get Otto’s word, then?”
“More or less,” Fawkes said, breathing easier once more. “If I win, he’ll escort you back to the capital. If I lose, he gets something he wants very much.”
“Which is?”
“Go to sleep,” Fawkes said. “So I can get ready.”
* * *
Dawn arrived far too quickly, finding Fawkes weary-eyed and buried in books. He’d slept intermittently, and would’ve gladly taken another few hours, but he felt that now, with all manner of obscure rules and maneuvers thrumming fresh through his head, was the time. He roused Eris with a shake of her shoulder.
“Time for the game,” he said. “You can watch, if you’d like. Sort of boring to the uninitiated.”
“I’m going to watch.”
Fawkes climbed the cellar stairs, finding Otto sweeping the floors with his broom of bundled twigs. The automaton looked up at him, then behind him, to see Eris unknotting her dark mess of hair. He returned to his sweeping with a resigned air.
“Best of mornings to you, Otto. My creaky companion. My iron... intimate.”
Otto ignored him.
“I know we’d agreed to let the girl wander off and die in the desert, but what you witnessed last night was a crisis of conscience,” Fawkes said. “Fortunately, it also presented me with an idea.”
Otto didn’t deviate in the slightest from his rhythmic scrape of twigs on stone.
“For an outrageous wager.”
The automaton’s head swiveled.
“If I win, you escort Eris as quickly and safely to the capital as possible, then return here to resume your duties as gaoler,” Fawkes said. “If you win... the crown is yours.”
Otto stopped sweeping altogether, and Eris grabbed Fawkes’s elbow from behind, fingers pinching painfully tight.
“What do you mean?” she demanded. “What crown? What do you mean it’s his if he wins?”
“I mean exactly as I said.” Fawkes went to the back of the cathedral, where an old wooden box was waiting. He blew thick dust off the top and opened it. He ignored Eris’s incredulous look as he removed a wreath of lovingly twisted scrap metal and brought it to the altar. “The wearer of this crown is the Everlasting Master of Games and undisputed Eternal Ruler of the Cathedral,” he explained, setting it on the stone surface. “It goes to the first inhabitant of the cathedral to reach a thousand victories. Until now, that is.”
“Unbelievable,” Eris murmured.
“Respect the crown,” Fawkes snapped, and Otto nodded in solemn accordance. He turned to his gaoler. “Well, what do you say, Otto? We’ll be playing a war game.”
The automaton’s shoulders shook with what might have been silent mirth.
“He always wins these,” Fawkes explained in undertone.
Eris rolled her eyes. “Of course he does. He’s an automaton. Can’t you play him at dice or something?”
But Otto was already ext
ending his iron hand. Fawkes put his inside and they shook, cool metal against sweaty flesh. The automaton retrieved the game board, then deftly assembled it on their customary table. Both players sat down in silence.
Fawkes dispatched his first scout, and the game was on.
* * *
For the first hour, Eris was a sort of bird fluttering vaguely in the background, saying vaguely annoying things like automatons can’t make mistakes and look at your Eastern border, he’s slaying you. But after a while she fell silent and stopped moving, absorbed by the intricacies of the game, and Fawkes had to admit it did have a sort of hypnotic quality to it. He felt almost in a trance himself.
Raiding parties traded blows, emissaries were hanged, and he was playing fast and fluid as he never had before. Every minor decision felt like a key’s tumblers clicking into the grooves of a lock, and the hourglass at the center of the table seemed irrelevant, sometimes rushing downward in a deluge, other times crawling so slowly Fawkes could see each grain of sand tumble down into its fellows.
“Well-taken,” he murmured, as Otto brought his outpost down.
His opponent acknowledged the compliment with a slight inclination of the chin, glass eyeballs click-clacking in their sockets, still raking intently across the game board. Otto knew that things were dangerously close, closer than they had been for a long time. Fawkes felt it, too, like standing on the edge of a razor.
He sent a lance of cavalry along Otto’s border, a feint to draw attention from a slow-moving supply convoy. He blinked sweat out of his stinging eyes as Otto appeared to take the bait, moving to redirect his army, but then...
The automaton’s hand stopped. Hovered. Fawkes could have sworn his metal mouth had widened into a grin. Otto split off a token reinforcement for the border and angled the rest of his forces south, instead. The convoy marched right into them.
“God’s blood, why didn’t you bring a bigger escort?” Eris whispered.
Fawkes wiped the sweat from his forehead, picked at the salt crusting the corner of his lip. “Surplus of optimism, I suppose,” he said faintly. His stomach flip-flopped as Otto methodically stripped the convoy of its supplies. His fist clenched under the table. For a tense moment it looked as though the messenger might escape notice, but Otto ferreted him out from the last cart.
