Fortune s Fool

by Mercedes Lackey

  Then the Wolf said, genially, “Well, Prince Fool, I don’t suppose you thought about how you’re going to spend the night on the mountain, did you?”

  “Uh,” Sasha admitted, sheepishly. “No—”

  Maybe the bottle isn’t actually in the Castle at all. That had been Katya’s first thought on waking, and she had hurried into her clothing, made an excuse of breaking her fast on a bit of bread that she took with her, and headed for the Castle outbuildings. It had been like a revelation in the night, that thought. It would have been infernally clever, to put the bottle where the Jinn never went. It could be hidden among all the broken and useless objects in one of the sheds, of course. Or wedged in among the wood in the woodshed—as hot as it was, the only fires were being laid to cook things. Or even in the stable—the place was full of horses, donkeys, and mules, all brought by the troops that the Jinn had hired, but no one ever rode anywhere except to exercise a favorite mount.

  Katya decided to start with the stalls first. It would be just like that wretched Jinn to wedge the bottle in under a manger or a watering trough.

  The stables were a substantial stone building with exposed wooden beams and a huge hayloft overhead. She supposed that in the normal climate here the stone was a necessity to keep the horses warm in the winter; now it served to keep them from baking in the heat. When she entered the double doors and paused in the doorway she was met by a breath of cool air redolent with the scent of clean straw, the dryer scent of hay, and just a faint whiff of horse droppings. She was also met by at least two dozen sets of eyes as every beast in the stable turned to look at her.

  She had not been around horses much, but the legacy of the Sea King’s children and the dragon’s blood she had swallowed so long ago meant she could talk to and soothe most animals. The horses eyed her with suspicion, but a few words into the darkness convinced them that she was not an enemy.

  This was just as well, considering that these were war-horses. She went slowly from stall to stall, stopping to speak, and to listen, quieting fears, dispelling suspicion, and convincing them before she ever entered a stall that she was a herd member. These were not Wise animals, merely animals, but they did listen to reason when it was given to them in their own tongue. Even the worst tempered eventually allowed her into their stalls.

  She had finished with the last of the horses and had started on the few mules, when she heard it. She was hunting at the back of a mule’s stall, just under the manger, feeling through the straw when the voice whispered to her.

  “Psst. Sea princess—”

  Startled, her head came up suddenly, and she banged it into the bottom of the manger. Red and black flashes passed in front of her eyes, she saw stars, and sat down abruptly in the straw, her head alive with pain.

  “Ow!” was the first thing out of her mouth, followed by a stream of articulate and literate curses that were neither blasphemous nor prurient.

  She’d had years to develop a vocabulary of invective that wouldn’t offend anyone. It was the sort of thing a princess had to do if she was going to be able to adequately release her feelings.

  She put up her hand and felt the brand new lump on the back of her head, wincing as her fingers probed it. “Ow.”

  “Good saints, princess, I am impressed!” said the voice. “I do not believe I have ever heard anyone call me a noodle-spined bar sinister son of a blind camel and a cactus before.”

  “I’m not,” she replied crossly, slowly getting to her feet and peering over the top of the stall. “I’m not impressed, that is. I can do without being introduced quite so intimately to the underside of a manger, thank you. Who are you?”

  She wasn’t sure quite what to expect, but the ugly little creature, like a tiny horse with the long ears of a donkey and two humps on its back, was not it. “And while I am at it, what are you?”

  “Sergei. Son of the Mare of the North Wind. Called ‘the Humpback Horse’ by some.” The beast looked around furtively. “I don’t think there is anyone here to overhear us, is there? I don’t sense anything. Sasha sent me. We all think it’s not safe to send back the bird.”

  She blinked, felt the lump on her head again, and stared at him. How—where had this all come from? Had she hit her head too hard? Was she seeing things, hearing things? How could this little fellow have come from Sasha?

  Then it occurred to her: Fortunate Fool. Help from unexpected places. This was Sasha’s Luck at work, the first she had ever seen of it really.

  Of course she knew of the Mare of the North Wind and her sons. The Humpback Horse was the most famous of them, and also the cleverest. How Sasha had managed to get the Horse’s help would probably be a story in itself.

  It was, after all, the way that the Tradition of the Fortunate Fool worked. He went about doing good deeds without thinking about it, just doing them. And The Tradition saw that he got paid back for them.

  But he was probably right about not sending the bird back. “I’ll need to send him information. You got in here, can you get in and out more than once?” she whispered back.

  The Horse smirked. “Easily. Most of what I do depends on looking worthless. If I slip out of the Castle and go wandering off into the desert, who’s going to go out there to retrieve something that looks like me? And even if they tie me up, there has never been rope or halter that could hold me if it wasn’t magical.” He stared for a moment at the lead rope fastening him to the manger. His eyes crossed, and the rope unknotted itself and fell to the ground, followed shortly by the halter that had come unbuckled.

  “In fact,” he continued, “even if a bond is magical, most of the time I can get out of it.”

  Alarmed, she hissed, “The Jinn! He senses spells!”

  “Ah, but it’s not a spell,” the Horse corrected. “It’s just me. Now where was I? Ah, yes. Sasha sent me. There is an ally that is carving a tunnel towards the Castle, evidently as easily as a mouse eats its way through a loaf of bread. Are there any tunnels leading out of the Castle? Escape tunnels, perhaps?”

  “One,” she whispered back, fascinated. “How did you guess?”

  “I could sound all superior, and point out that it was the Castle of a creature who was suspicious of everything and everyone, but the truth is, our ally thought of it first,” the Horse replied. He cocked an eye up at her. “Well, I presume they have some means of sensing these things, and I was told that if such a thing exists, they are going to drive for that tunnel, which should make things easier. Sasha wants you to have the girls ready to get down there at all times. Since at that point it won’t matter, he can send back the bird as the signal that our ally is going to break down the last bit between the two tunnels. Then you and they and anyone else you feel moved to rescue can run far away as fast as you can.”

  “We need to get our hands on the Jinn’s bottle first!” she whispered urgently.

  “Well, yes, obviously.” The Horse sounded impatient. “I might be able to help with that. I knew the Katschei and I knew all the hiding places he had for his heart. Well, it wasn’t really a heart per se, it was—never mind, I’m rambling. There are some hiding places. It’s possible your Jinn used one.”

  She nodded. “But what about places like—well, the stables? Unlikely places? Places where people wouldn’t think to look because no one would ever put anything valuable there?”

  Sergei considered that for a moment. “Would you say that the Jinn is subtle?” he asked, with one ear raised.

  “Not—really.” She thought about the little she had actually seen of the Jinn. He had come in with a whirlwind to abduct her; presumably he had done the same with the rest of the girls. That was hardly subtle. He seldom appeared except to briefly watch them—or perhaps it might best be said, to glower at them. That wasn’t even remotely subtle. When he felt a magic spell, he rushed in from wherever he had been, and immediately threatened whoever he thought had cast the spell, without waiting to see what had actually happened. Definitely lacking in finesse. He had said that he
considered them all animals….

  “Not subtle at all,” she said.

  The Horse nodded. “Fire spirits seldom are. Firebirds being the exception, but then, they are female, and gender might have something to do with that.” She got the impression of a smirk, the sort that invited you to join in the joke. “That being so, I think we can eliminate subtlety in the choice of a hiding place. I think we can eliminate creativity as well.” He laid his ears folded over the top of his head. It looked very peculiar, as if he was trying to hold his head down with his ears. “Now, when the Katschei died, I suspect his minions proceeded to flee rather than looting the place. I would in their shoes. He wasn’t called ‘the Deathless’ for nothing, and you never know when a creature like that is going to bounce back from apparent death. So the good saints only know what got left behind. I suppose you’ve found that out to an extent, but I am talking about dangerous things. You might find other items in these hiding places besides the bottle. If I were you, I wouldn’t touch them, no matter how attractive or harmless they appear.”

  She shivered, thinking of all of the deadly potions, possessed daggers, gems and pieces of jewelry that had either curses or inimical spirits attached to them that she had encountered just in her travels. “No worries there,” she assured him. “I’d rather not spend my life as a toad.”

  “Or worse, find yourself dead and your body hosting the Katschei’s spirit. Or anyone else’s spirit for that matter,” the Horse said darkly. “There are more nasty things in pretty packages in the world than most people would believe. All right. The first hiding place was the most elaborate. There was a fountain in the garden. Is there still a goose in it?”

  “No, not when I got here,” she said.

  He heaved a sigh of relief. “Good. That one was a nightmare. You’d have to be an expert archer to deal with it. Have you looked for a secret compartment under the throne?”

  “Not yet. We were leaving the throne room until last. The Jinn is sometimes in it, and it’s generally guarded.” She couldn’t imagine why the Jinn would be in the throne room, but she had caught a glimpse of him there once or twice.

  “There’s a second hiding place in the throne room. If you sit on the throne and stare directly at the wall opposite, you’ll see the reflection of light from the facets of a jewel no larger than a grain of sand. Press that jewel and the hiding place will be revealed. Another hiding place is in the well in the root cellar under the kitchen. Lower someone down on the rope. Halfway down is a niche.” The Horse sighed. “The Katschei used all of those before he hit on what he thought was the perfect solution, and that was an elaborate version of the goose. There was an oak tree in the forecourt—it’s gone now. There was a dragon curled around the foot of the tree. In the tree was a chest. In the chest was a fox, in the fox was a rabbit, in the rabbit was another duck, in the duck was an egg and in the egg was his heart. You had to get past the dragon, climb the tree, open the chest, kill the fox before it got away, then kill the rabbit, then kill the duck and break the egg.”

  Katya’s brows rose. “Good heavens. That just shrieks ‘I am an important hiding place, look into me!’ Why didn’t he just put a big sign on the tree that said My Heart Is Up Here?”

  “He should have.” The Horse sounded amused. “Thank the saints that The Tradition favors villains making mistakes. But we can’t count on that this time. The Jinn isn’t in our Tradition. Any mistakes he makes will be due only to himself, not to The Tradition. We will have to be careful as well as clever. I think that bottle is our only hope of really ending this.”

  “Once I find the bottle, Sergei, I still have to read what is on it,” she reminded him. “That brings me to another question, when I find the bottle. Should I move it, or leave it where it is?”

  His eyes widened. “You are careful as well as clever! Leave it, by all means, if you can manage to read it without touching it. We won’t actually need the bottle until the time comes to confront him.”

  She smiled. “Thank you for the flattery.” Now the question she really and truly wanted answered. “Sergei—how is Sasha?”

  “Worried sick about you. Missing you. Blushing when he thinks about you. Blushing and other things that is, making me wonder how blood can rush to two places at once.” She blushed, but laughed. “And great friends with your father, despite the fact that your father sent a storm to fetch him.” The Horse sounded amused again. “Did your father intuit his existence, scry on you, or did you tell him?”

  “I told him. I’m his agent, it’s my duty to keep him informed.” She sniffed. “Father could use some lessons in subtlety himself. All right. I will try those hiding places right now—if the bottle isn’t there, we’re no worse off than we were before. I will be back before nightfall and let you know of my progress.”

  Or lack of it, she thought, as she left the stable. And she felt her head again. This task was turning out to bid fair to break her skull. Ow.

  The view from the minstrel’s gallery above the throne room was superb. You could see everything with nothing in the way. There was only one guard on the throne room. The three captives eyed him dubiously. He was one they all recognized and he was a good enough fellow, but they probably could not get away with strolling into the throne room and rummaging around in secret hiding places.

  “Should we distract him with our feminine wiles?” asked Yulya in a whisper. She didn’t look happy about the prospect, but in the past few days she had gone from timid and incapable to determined and capable of accomplishing quite a bit. That Rusalka would not have gotten the better of her a second time. She still wasn’t the equal of, say, Klava, but her attitude toward everything had improved enormously.

  “I don’t think so,” Katya whispered back. “Not that you don’t have plenty of feminine wiles, Yulya, but it’s one thing to chat up one of the guards when they aren’t on duty. It’s quite another to come marching up to him when he’s on an important post and start batting your eyelashes at him.”

  “You think he’d suspect something?” Yulya sounded more relieved than disappointed.

  “I would, if I were him. These fellows aren’t stupid, more’s the pity.” Katya surveyed the room, looking for any more guards. Their hiding place in the minstrel’s gallery gave them a good vantage point for any purpose; the carved screen across the whole of it allowed them to see without being seen. Evidently the Katschei or his predecessor believed that minstrels should be heard and not seen. “Remember what Sergei told me. Since The Tradition doesn’t hold the Jinn here, we can’t count on him making Traditional Path mistakes, like hiring stupid guards. And he hasn’t.”

  “It’s true that they do seem very smart,” Yulya said thoughtfully. “Smarter than I would have expected.”

  “All right. He can’t see the throne from where he’s standing,” Katya observed. “Guiliette, it looks as if the first hiding place is yours to look into. Literally.”

  The Wili nodded, and slipped into her semitransparent state. If she was moving, you would certainly see her, but if she was still, she could be mistaken for a trick of shadows. “I’ll come through the corridor wall and then freeze in place.”

  The problem was this throne room was built in a kind of extension to the Castle itself, so that there were three outside walls. It had probably been planned in order to have as many windows as possible, taking advantage of natural light. However, that made getting into it a challenge. The four of them were in the minstrel’s gallery on the one inside wall, facing the rear of the room and the throne, and directly above the corridor that gave access to the room.

  The throne was not only on a dais, it was inside a kind of enclosure that was twice the height of the throne itself, gilded on the inside. The effect would be to make both the throne and its occupant seem larger and more important. Katya wondered what the Katschei had looked like. Had this been his idea? Had he been a wizened little thing, or the opposite? She had the feeling he had been small and wizened, and very self-important.

/>   There were two niches for guards behind the throne, in the two rear corners of the room. Because of the enclosure, the one guard on duty could not actually see the throne itself. But Guiliette would have to be very careful when crossing the floor between the wall and the throne. There was no real way to approach it without being in the guard’s line of sight at some point.

  Alas, that the Wili could not fly! It would have been so much easier if she had been able to drift in the rafters among the battle banners, and float down into the enclosure. There would have been a point where she was exposed, but not nearly for as long.

  She slipped out of the minstrel’s gallery and down the stairs to get to the corridor, for although she could pass through the floor, to do so would mean she would fall from the ceiling. It wouldn’t hurt her, but it might make a noise. The guard would be watching the door, of course, but he might not be watching the wall, so that was why she was going to pass through the stones.

  Guiliette had already checked the niche in the wall; that was easy for her, and accomplished just in the same way that she found the secret passageways and three other hiding places. It had, alas, been empty, but at least they hadn’t had to go through all the rigmarole of sitting on the throne and finding and pressing nearly invisible jewels in order to check it.

  So once Guiliette was out of the minstrel gallery, they waited. And waited. There was no sign of the Wili. Katya began to get impatient, then alarmed. What could be going on?

  Then Lyuba chuckled throatily. Katya glanced at her sharply.

  “Look at the floor,” the Wolf maiden whispered. “Halfway between the wall and the throne.”

  It took Katya a moment to see it, because the stone of the floor was full of irregularities, and because she wasn’t sure what she should be looking for. But then, finally, she made out something, as transparent as a jellyfish, moving along the stone. It was the Wili, who had plastered herself flat to the floor and was crawling toward the throne, taking advantage of the stone to hide her, and the fact that the guard was keeping watch for someone standing or walking, not crawling. This would be why she was taking so long, of course.