The Jack of Souls

by Merlino, Stephen

  True to his word, Brolli remained fastened to the saddle on his pony. He grinned with relief and admiration. “Well done, old man!”

  “Ride!” Willard gasped.

  The ambassador’s face fell, gold eyes searching for answers in the anguish of Willard’s face.

  “Ride, I say! To Gallows Ferry. And get under that blanket, or we’ll be stoned by the first mob that sees you.”

  Red for the Peasant with dirt in his nails,

  Red for the Freeman at work in the vales,

  The blood of the Yeoman is red as his flock’s,

  And red is the Merchant’s, a-counting his stocks.

  Orange is for Gentlemen new to their farms,

  Yellow their betters, in glittering arms,

  Green for the highest a Gentle can wend,

  Blues for the Nobles whose cattle we tend,

  Purple the stain of the God in our Kings,

  Cut deep in the veins where the Phyros blood sings.

  —Didactic rhyme of the Arkendian “blood ranks,” social castes based in the ancient Blood Religion, translated into Iberg by Sandro Botini.

  3

  Curse & Counterspell

  Harric staggered back from Caris until he collided with the wall beside his desk. Morning light flooded the room. Wind banged the shutters, as if to frighten the fog it drove before it. A rush of relief escaped his lungs.

  Caris reeled and stared, face pale with panic. “Your mother…” she murmured. Now that the crisis was past, shock seemed to squeeze in on her. The hands she’d balled for a fight now flew to her ears as if to shut out echoes of what she’d witnessed.

  “Hey, it’s all right, Caris,” he said, her distress summoning a strength he didn’t otherwise feel. He took her wrists and coaxed her hands from her ears. “She’s gone. You saved me, Caris. She had me bewitched, and I was thinking I should just jump and end it when you woke me—or broke the spell, I guess.”

  Saying it aloud made it real for him as well, dispelling the last shreds of nightmare from his head, but Caris pulled away. Her hands snapped to her ears and she squeezed her eyes shut as if the horrors still swirled around her. “The fog—there were voices!” She crouched like she would curl up in one of her fits, but as Harric reached to put a hand on her shoulder, she sprang up and punched a hole through the plaster. With a strangled growl, she wrenched the door open and thundered down the treads, taking them three or four at a time until the sounds of her passage faded in the lower flights.

  To the stables, Harric guessed, and the solace she found among horses.

  He exhaled in relief. It was difficult to help her once she collapsed, and half the time when she did, his efforts at soothing were rewarded with kicks in the shins. Nevertheless, he debated whether to follow. Alone, the room seemed hollow and exposed.

  His guts chilled. He imagined his mother’s ghost in the shadow beside the window.

  Shake it off. It’s just your nerves.

  A stealthy rustle drifted behind him, and he spun about, heart in his throat.

  *

  Flat against the wall beside the door stood a girl, one hand clapped to her mouth as if holding in a scream. She might have been thirteen, all willow wands and ribs in a chambermaid’s dress and apron. He didn’t recognize her, however, which was odd because he knew all the maids by name.

  “Gods leave me,” she said, in a tiny, breathless voice. “That was the curse everyone’s talking about!” She sidled toward the open door, eyes wide and white.

  “Don’t worry. It isn’t contagious.”

  “Almost killed that Caris lady—stay away!” she cried, as he started toward her.

  He stopped.

  She fixed him with eyes determined but full of fear. After several heartbeats, she said, “You don’t recognize me.”

  He looked closer. Nothing about her mousy hair or somber mouth triggered his memory, though there was something familiar about her.

  “Lyla,” she said.

  He exhaled slowly, his eyes searching hers.

  “You won me from my master in the card game today. You freed me.”

  “Of course! Your face was all covered in slave paint! I see Mother Ganner took you in and got you some new clothes.”

  Her eyes dipped to his nakedness and bobbed back up. “You want I should fetch you some, too? The cold don’t do you no favors.”

  Harric let out a laugh of surprise. He was bare as an egg to his toes. “I’m—ah—it’s been quite a night.” He grabbed his trousers from the floor and threw them on.

  As he cinched up the bastard belt, she edged the rest of the way to the door, stopping only when she stood with a foot on the top step, ready to bolt. But she did not leave. She swallowed hard, as if steeling herself to speak. “I ain’t here to thank you. I’m here to pay my debt.”

  “You don’t owe me anything.”

  “My freedom ain’t worth nothing?”

  “That’s not what I mean. I gave that to you freely. My payment was watching the expression on the face of that West Isle slaver while you burned the deed to your bondage. Anyway, I’m a dead man, and death cancels all debts.”

  “You don’t have to die today. I can tell you how to beat that curse. That’s how I aim to pay my debt.” She took a step forward, determination giving her courage.

  Harric suppressed a roll of his eyes. “Another surefire cure for curses? Look, I’ve seen her victims try a few dozen of those, and they don’t even delay their deaths. So, thank you, but if you don’t mind…” He gestured to the door to usher her out, but she stamped her foot, making a surprisingly loud bang. Her eyes blazed, wilting any remaining fear in them.

  “Look, Lyla—”

  “You better listen or you’re gonna be dead by sunset. You survived that fog, didn’t you? Her doom didn’t claim you. Why do you think that is?”

  “The doom has till sunset.”

  She put her hands on her hips as if addressing a dense or stubborn child. “And this crawly talky fog was just normal weather around came here? That doom came for you this morning, but you survived, and I know why.”

  Harric blinked. “So do I: because Caris intervened.”

  “Hah! You Northies wouldn’t know magic if it fell from the sky and hit you. Answer me this: all them other cursed boys had friends to help them. Mother Ganner told me all about it. But did any of them survive the fog?”

  Harric frowned. She had a point. The fog had come for Davos on the foretold day that spring, and Davos had a hired company of bodyguards to protect him; the fog slipped right past and did its work all the same. Gravin’s day came shortly after, and he encircled his cabin with a posse of witch hunters, who by morning lay strangled or decapitated with Gravin. Why had Harric alone survived?

  Lyla stepped toward him, eyes bright and earnest. “It was the power of your nineteenth Naming Day, Master Harric. That’s what I’m here to show you. You know about the Naming Day? You know about the Proof?”

  Harric grimaced. “The apprentice proof? Some kind of West Isle superstition?”

  She glared. “That superstition just saved your life, and it’ll keep you alive past sunset if you make your Proof today.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I’m here to explain it, ain’t I? The nineteenth Naming Day is called the Day of Proof because it’s the day a prentice proves he’s a master by doing something only a master can do. Once he proves that, he’s free, and his master has no power over him. See?”

  “Yes, it works that way here, too. But how does that apply to me? I’m not an apprentice anymore. I quit two years before my training was complete, when Mother’s madness got so—” His voice hitched. He swallowed and shrugged. “She chose this day for my doom because it’s the day I would have completed her training. Her way of saying I brought it on myself.”

  “You can’t quit what you already learned. You still know what she taught you, so you can still Prove it.” She studied Harric from the corners of her eyes. “I asked Mothe
r Ganner if your mama prenticed you as a witch, but she said your mama was never a witch. Said she was a lady of the court who went mad from visions of the future, but that your mama taught you how to be a courtier. Did I learn that right?”

  Harric smiled. “As far as it goes.”

  She nodded. “All right then, for your Proof you have to pick a courtly art of hers—something only a master could do—and show you can perform it like a master. When you do that, you break her power over you. See?”

  “And this ‘Proof,’ if I perform it, will somehow break my mother’s curse, too?”

  “Stop smiling at me like I’m some tickle-brained peasant. The curse is part of her power, ain’t it? So, promise.”

  An ember of hope sparked in Harric. Break her curse and live? Live to see the sunrise again? Embrace Caris? Dream—

  No. He snuffed it savagely. Her dooms always come true. Hope would only make him pathetic, scrambling after every witch charm and counter potion.

  But the ember wouldn’t snuff. It grew. He couldn’t help it. He couldn’t ignore the fact that for the first time one of his mother’s dooms had stumbled, which meant there was hope. He couldn’t deny it, and the hope seemed to know it, expanding from an ember to an unquenchable conflagration that reduced all his defensive walls to ashes.

  “All right,” he said, through grinding teeth. “You’d better be right about this.”

  She studied him, then nodded, evidently satisfied this qualified as acceptance, if not gratitude. “I am right.” She took a tentative step forward, a flash of mischief in her eye. “So, what art will you perform your Proof in, Master Courtier: fencing, feasting, or foining?”

  “You forgot feigning.” Harric gave a barren smile. “Yes, I learned those things. But my real training was for more…secret…skills to serve our queen.”

  “It can’t be a secret if it’s your Proof, so you have to tell me.”

  He took a deep breath, trying in vain to calm the turmoil in his chest. Could he truly defeat his doom? What if he failed?

  She arched an eyebrow. “Well?”

  “I’ll make my Proof in the art of the con. That’s my strongest suit.”

  “I knew it! She trained you as a trickster. That’s how you beat my master in poker. It’s probably how she kept her magic secret all those years.”

  He gave a non-committal shrug. “Sadly, all of Gallows Ferry saw me trick your master. The whole outpost will be alert to anything I try now. If I want to con anyone today, I’ll have to focus on new emigrants passing through the market.”

  “How many cons could your mother do in a day?”

  “Nineteen.”

  “Then for your Proof you’ll need twenty.”

  He felt the bottom drop out of his stomach. Nineteen had been a lucky day for his mother. Her best before that had been twelve.

  “You can do it, Master Harric. You can. I saw you beat my master.”

  Harric nodded. He’d done well against her master, but he’d also been reckless because he didn’t think he’d be alive the next day and therefore hadn’t cared if he made enemies. Now, if they learned he lived, they’d try to kill him themselves if they got a chance.

  “So promise you’ll make your Proof.”

  He nodded. “All right. But if this goes wrong you should probably know I’m going to haunt you from the grave.”

  “I’ll bury you on an island so your ghost can’t cross the water.”

  He laughed and reached out to take her hand, but she jumped back as if he’d held out a rat, and her initial fear returned in a blink. Whirling, she flew down the stairs, but stopped at the landing and looked back. “You can do it, Master Harric. Don’t forget you promised.”

  “I won’t,” he said, more to himself than her, for she had turned and continued her flight down the stairs.

  He closed the door and laid his forehead against its painted wood.

  His heart, which had calmed after the nightmare in the fog, had begun to flutter again like a frightened bird in his ribcage. Twenty cons in an outpost full of enemies and people who knew to watch him. He chuckled grimly. “I’m dead already.”

  “Doomed,” said his mother, behind him. “There’s a difference.”

  He whirled, anticipating murder, only to find her across the room, regarding him with cool amusement.

  “Miss me so?” she said. She looked precisely as she did the day she died, a vision of insanity from his childhood. She wore the same threadbare ball gown she’d fled court in twenty years before, and which she’d worn almost exclusively the last ten years of her life. Scarcely more than a colorless bag now, it hung limp and stinking from bony shoulders. She smiled, cracking her mask of thick white makeup, in fans around her eyes and mouth. Blue lipstick hanging crooked on her lips. Once a subtle and delicate style of makeup in court, years of madness had made it lumpen and clownish.

  He backed against the door with a thump, heart racing. Hurt and anger battled in his chest, paralyzing his tongue.

  She followed his gaze to the gown, and frowned. “This is how you remember me, therefore this is how I appear to you.” She swirled the skirts about her ankles, wafting the stink of urine. Her nose wrinkled. “Pah! This was but a shell I cast off at the grave. The Sight, which made me mad in life, now gives me power in the afterworld. If only you could see me as I am now. Try! Look past this memory of madness and see. Do I rave, as I once did? Do I foam at the mouth? I do not. Indeed, I come to offer you life, my son. You needn’t die tonight, if only you will follow me. In the afterworld I am clear-eyed and strong. I can train you as you were meant to be trained. Follow me, and I will steer you from your doom.”

  Rage welled in Harric. He clamped his jaws against screaming fury and turned from her, forcing himself to breathe evenly. She isn’t real, he told himself. Just a vision. Part of the madness in the family blood. I mustn’t engage, lest it worsen and Mother Ganner find me alone and shouting in my room again.

  Stalking past her to the wall beside his bed, he did his best to ignore her. He ran his fingers along the wainscot, searching for the latch points of the hidden closet where he kept the “bag of tricks” he’d need for his Proof.

  His mother let out a careworn sigh.

  “Spare me the theatrics,” he growled. “I won’t live as your pawn anymore.”

  “Then you know I must kill you. I do not wish to, but I must.”

  “So you say.”

  “I speak truth, Harric! Without my guidance, you will destroy Queen Chasia and all she has brought to our land! It is woven in the sky! You are fated to destroy the queen you love. I see it! And I cannot let it happen. That is why I cursed you. Either you must follow me that I may guide your path from harming the Queen, or to preserve her I must kill you. Oh, Harric, you break your mother’s heart!”

  She gazed at him, eyes soft and pleading. Tears streaked her makeup, making her even more clownish, and suddenly the whole thing seemed ridiculous, including the longing she stirred in his heart. He laughed. “You love playing the martyr, don’t you, Mother? But I know it’s all the same lie, your mad attempt to keep me as your puppet. And you’re still jerking at my strings.”

  “If only that were so!”

  His hands found the hidden latch points of the closet. He depressed the points, and the locks clicked. The door swiveled out on hidden hinges, revealing shelves and hangers arrayed with all the tools of a courtesan spy (or for training one). He knew the books on the shelf by heart: manuals of courtly etiquette, treatises on poison, lock crafting, subterfuge, deception. As bookend to them all stood the coded journal of his mother’s secret service to the Queen.

  She looked past him into the closet. A bitter scowl cracked more plaster from her nose. “Behold the glories of my arts. How can you bear to look at them, Harric? Every kit, every lock-hook, every tincture in that holy sanctum abides as a burning symbol of the greatness you rejected when you rejected your apprenticeship before it was complete. If you had finished your training, your fate
would be different. Of that I am certain.”

  Harric clenched his jaw. He hated himself for listening, hated himself for feeling pain at her words. Why was it that nothing he said affected her as she affected him? And nothing he could do would make her leave.

  He picked up his own journal of apprentice “missions” around Gallows Ferry. As he flipped through the pages, a wave of nausea rolled up his stomach. Cons, seductions, betrayals—all designed to harden his heart and wear away sentiment and petty loyalties. Each entry burned in his memory, an icon of sacrificed childhood.

  He slammed the book back on its shelf and turned on her. “My only regret, Mother, is that I did not abandon you sooner.”

  She retreated in alarm as he advanced with steady steps. He felt the corners of his mouth draw back in a lipless smile. “I beat your doom today, Mother. You failed. I won. Why is that, do you suppose? If all the others died in your precious fog, why did I survive?”

  “If I’d wanted you dead, you’d be dead,” she snapped. “This morning was a warning, that I might offer you one last chance before sunset.”

  He laughed. He’d glimpsed something in her face. It took him a moment to recognize it behind the cracking mask of makeup, but when he realized it was fear, an ember of hope leapt to life inside him.

  “Do you know why I opened the secret closet?” he said, gesturing to the open door. “So I could grab my bag of tricks and perform my Proof in the market. Do you know what that means?”

  Her jaw dropped. “You fool, Harric! Queen Chasia forbids magic! In your desperation would you sneer at her? Would you disgrace and dishonor the land and your queen above all?”

  “Don’t try to shame me, Mother. I dedicate my life to the Queen; it’s you I sneer at. And you question me about magic! That was your fog this morning, wasn’t it? The one full of clawed hands and twining snakes?”

  “In the afterworld my visions are power. I see into the Web of Fate and know its patterns—even weave them! Spirits obey me. That is not moon magic; it is power as natural there as the air is in this world. That little slut’s ‘Proof’ is nothing but West Isle sorcery!”