Crown of Earth

by Hilari Bell

  The fact that he’d done a few good deeds hadn’t stopped him from killing anyone who stood in his way, including the king. Edoran thought the Falcon was just as ruthless, but he knew better than to say that to her daughter—who, judging by the way she was protesting, seemed to know it anyway in her heart.

  “We’d better do something about shelter,” he said instead. “It’s going to start raining in… a bit less than an hour, now.”

  Arisa shook her head. “It’s just weird how you do that. I don’t have a tent.”

  But she’d seen him predict the weather correctly before, so she gathered up her gear without further comment. She also took the time to thoroughly douse the fire, though Edoran, waiting impatiently, didn’t see why that was so important.

  “Where are we going?” he demanded, when they finally set off. “Is there a farmhouse nearby?”

  Arisa snorted. “If there was, would I have been camping out?”

  “How should I know?” Edoran asked. “You might have been trying to hide the sword and shield or something.”

  “I could hide them in the woods before approaching the house,” said Arisa. “And then go back for them. That’s what I did when I went into town to buy a meal and some camp food.”

  Edoran frowned. “If you set off a full night ahead of me, how come you’re no farther along?”

  “Because I had to sleep sometime,” Arisa told him. “And because I had to leave the road to check one of our message drops.”

  “Message drops?” Edoran asked. They were emerging from the trees onto the road. The moonlight coated everything with silver; if he hadn’t been so tired and sore, he would have thought the night was beautiful. The storm would come soon. The sky above them was still clear, but clouds obscured the stars in the south. And why hadn’t Arisa answered him?

  “If we had to move camp, or lost contact with one of our men for any reason, there were a number of places we’d leave messages for them,” Arisa told him finally. “I’m pretty sure that’s how my mother intended to contact me, when Holis was ready to negotiate.”

  “Oh.” That had been when the Falcon thought she’d have the prince in her hands, instead of Justice Holis’ lowborn clerk, though she’d still want to contact her daughter.

  Edoran had considered his own childhood a strange one, but Arisa’s, growing up in a series of rebel camps, had been even more peculiar. On the other hand, she’d had at least one parent who’d loved and trusted her, and Edoran hadn’t.

  “So where are we going to find shelter?” he asked. Edoran thought they were now walking west, back toward the city.

  “In that shed you told me about,” said Arisa. “Where else?”

  Edoran stopped walking. It took her a moment to notice and return to him.

  “What?” she asked. “You’re not afraid of the shed, are you?” You big baby, her tone added, but for once Edoran didn’t care.

  “Suppose they come back?”

  “Why should they? They’ve already taken everything you had. If they wanted to kill you, they’d have done it before they left.”

  “But there’s no hay there or anything. There’s nothing there.”

  “There are four walls and a roof,” Arisa pointed out. “According to what you say, we’re going to need that, so come on.”

  She walked off, and Edoran had to jog to catch up with her.

  The shed, when they reached it, wasn’t quite as frightening as he remembered, but the wood floor was just as uncomfortable, even with Arisa’s blankets beneath them.

  “Stop turning over,” Arisa told him. “You’re not going to find a softer spot.”

  “You were the one who insisted we share the bed,” Edoran reminded her.

  “There weren’t enough blankets for two beds. We’d both have frozen. Just relax. You’ve got to be tired. If you’d stop fussing, you’d probably be asleep in minutes.”

  Edoran sighed. “If you think I can sleep under these conditions, you’re out of—”

  Thunder interrupted him, and the flare of lightning through the cracks in the walls illuminated the shed’s drab interior. It was rough and dirty, and the remains of his possessions were strewn over the floor… but there were no lurking bandits. No danger. Rain drummed on the roof.

  “It probably leaks,” Edoran said. He inched over till his back lay against hers. It wasn’t comfortable, but it was warmer. The fury of the storm was impersonal, and somehow soothing.

  “We’ll know soon,” Arisa told him sleepily.

  The next time Edoran opened his eyes, it was morning.

  The roof had leaked, he noticed. Or perhaps that puddle had come through the cracks in the wall, which now admitted the light of the rising sun. At least it hadn’t leaked on him. The blankets wrapped around him still held her body’s warmth, but the girl had managed to leave both bed and shed without waking him.

  Birds twittered in the fields outside, and Edoran felt a sudden burst of optimism. He’d survived the night—and there’d been times when that hadn’t seemed likely! His good spirits lasted right up to the moment he tried to move.

  “Ow!” Edoran exclaimed, for perhaps the twentieth time.

  “Stop whining,” Arisa told him. “Walking will make you feel better, once your muscles warm up.”

  Edoran pulled the blanket he was using as a shawl a bit tighter, but drafts still leaked up from the bottom. He was beginning to feel better, but he thought he had a right to whine a little bit. If he was back at the palace, he’d have ordered a hot bath, perhaps followed by a massage. Even the meanest peasant would have put some arnica salve on bruises like Edoran’s—which in the light of day were quite spectacular. On the other hand, Arisa had replaced the inner soles in his boots, and also rigged him a rough belt from some twine she’d found in the shed, so he probably shouldn’t complain for too much longer.

  “What are we going to do now?” he asked. “Keep following the troop and see if they lead us to your mother? Or check another of those message drops of yours?”

  “Those troops couldn’t find my mother for over a decade when they worked for Pettibone,” Arisa said. “What makes you think they can find her now? Besides, I think the men she sent out of the city were just a diversion. I think she escaped by sea and probably took Weasel with her. But I know all her old hideouts, and she’ll be trying to contact me. I can find her. You’re going back to the palace. I’ll leave you with the guard in the first town we come to, and they’ll see you back. You’ll be warm and comfortable in just a few hours, Your Highness. So stop moaning.”

  “Wait!” Edoran stopped walking. This time she didn’t even pause, and he had to scramble to catch up. “I want to go with you! No more whining. I promise.”

  He’d have sworn the corners of her mouth twitched up, but she suppressed her smile swiftly.

  “It’s not that,” she told him. “I’m accustomed to hearing you whine. There are several reasons I can’t take you. Real ones.”

  “Like what?” Edoran demanded.

  “Well, I’ll leave aside the fact that Holis must be out of his mind with worry by now. And that if you get killed, there could be a civil war over who gets to be king instead. Because frankly, I don’t care about either of those things. You can’t come with me because first, all the guardsmen in Deorthas are about to start looking for you. They’d never be able to find my mother, but with you… Even if they don’t get lucky, they’d get in my way. Second, as soon as it becomes known that you’re missing—and don’t think that news won’t get around—all the villains in Deorthas will start looking for you too. And they’re a lot smarter than the guards. I don’t want to be rescuing you all the time.”

  “I can rescue myself,” Edoran protested.

  “Third,” she continued, “you’d slow me down.”

  Edoran winced. She probably would travel faster without him.

  “And fourth,” she finished, “if my mother gets hold of you, along with the shield and sword, I’m not sure I could talk her out
of trying to seize the throne after all. Because with you in her hands, she’d win!”

  That silenced Edoran. She was right. But he wasn’t as convinced as she was that her mother could elude the guard. And while the Falcon might listen to Arisa, and would pay no attention to anything Edoran said, if the Falcon ever got herself trapped, the guards and shareholders who were dealing with her would simply ignore Arisa… and they might be forced to listen to their prince. It was going to take both of them, but Edoran had heard her use that decided tone before—she wasn’t interested in any arguments he might make.

  Did she want to be the one to rescue Weasel herself? She’d been jealous of Weasel’s friendship with the prince. To be honest, he’d been jealous of Weasel’s friendship with her. So did he want to be the one to save Weasel? He did, but if it came down to it, he’d put Weasel’s safety first.

  Was she right? Would it be better for Weasel if he went back?

  No. He was oddly sure of that. Arisa saw her mother through eyes blinded by pride and love. But he’d never be able to persuade her of that, either.

  So how to convince her to take him along? He couldn’t run off and find the Falcon himself. Even if she hadn’t escaped by sea, Edoran was clearly hopeless on his own. But the only thing he’d ever seen this stubborn girl pay attention to, besides her mother, was…

  The familiar sinking in his stomach chilled him. But it was something she might heed. And seeing his future laid out wouldn’t kill him. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t seen it a dozen times before.

  “Do you have your arcanara deck in that pack?” Edoran asked.

  “Sure,” Arisa told him. “I figured I’d need all the guidance I could get. Why?”

  “Seek guidance now,” said Edoran. “Ask the cards if you should take me with you.”

  “I already know the answer to that. I don’t bother the cards about something I already know.”

  “I’ll bet you don’t know,” Edoran told her. “In fact, I’ll make you a wager. You let me shuffle that deck. If the tower turns up as the threat, you’ll take me with you.”

  Arisa laughed. “If sending you back made the tower come up as the threat, I’d take you with me, bet or no bet. The tower’s the worst card in the deck. It’s not just death, it’s the destruction of all you hold dear. The tower signifies the destruction of your whole world.”

  Her voice was even, but the freckles stood out on her pale cheeks. Edoran wondered if she’d cast the cards on the night she’d learned of her mother’s plot. Her own world had certainly shattered.

  “So take the wager,” he said. “If the tower does turn up, you won’t have to do anything you wouldn’t do anyway. And if it doesn’t, I’ll go to the town guard without arguing about it.”

  He never said he’d stay with them, but he doubted it would come to that. He’d seen the arcanara cards at work too often.

  Arisa eyed him oddly. “You hate the cards. You don’t believe in them.”

  “But you do,” said Edoran. “Try.”

  Arisa had finally stopped walking. “If the tower doesn’t come up as the threat, you’ll go to the guard without any argument?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Then that’s got to be worth it. But I warn you, the odds are fifty-three to one in my favor.”

  Edoran only smiled.

  It took some time to find a rock flat enough to hold the layout, but the morning sun had already dried it. Edoran folded his blanket to sit on while Arisa pulled the deck from the depths of her pack and shuffled it once. Then she passed it to Edoran. “Your turn.”

  He shuffled three times, though that was probably unnecessary. He only had to touch the cards, sometimes just be in the same room, to affect them.

  So it didn’t worry him when she took the deck and shuffled once more herself. In fact, he almost laughed. Did she really think he was such a skilled cardsharp that he could stack the deck as he shuffled it?

  “My question is: Should I send this worthless prince back to his palace?” Arisa intoned.

  Edoran grimaced, but it wouldn’t matter how she phrased it, or even what she asked.

  “This is my significator,” she went on. “The card that represents me.”

  She set the first card in the center of the rock, and stared at the fool’s bright motley in astonishment. “But my card is the storm!”

  Edoran’s breath trickled out in a sigh, and she frowned at him.

  “This supports me,” she said. “This I can rely on.”

  “Chaos.” Edoran spoke before she even lifted the card from the deck, long before she turned it over. Her eyes widened with astonishment.

  “How did you do that?”

  He shrugged. “I won’t do it again.”

  In truth, he couldn’t, for the other cards changed. All except chaos and the tower. Because the fool wasn’t her card. It was his.

  “This inspires me,” said Arisa slowly. She laid down a picture of an old man and a babe, spinning the world between them. “Time. The past creating the present. If you’ve got nothing to rely on except chaos, time probably would inspire you. But that’s not me!” She stared at the fool once more.

  “Get to it,” Edoran told her. “You’re about to lose.”

  Arisa scowled. “This threatens me.” She turned the next card.

  Edoran looked at the gray stone tower, collapsing into rubble as flames shot from its roof, and tried not to smirk.

  “How are you doing this?” Arisa demanded.

  “So you’ll take me?”

  “I guess I have to.” Her gaze went to the tower, and her lips tightened. “It looks like I’d better. This will protect me.”

  She laid the wedding between the tower and the fool.

  “Alliances of all kinds.” She looked at Edoran over the cards, then shrugged. “This misleads me.” She placed the brimming cornucopia to the fool’s far right.

  Edoran didn’t comment on that. It had always been clear to him that returning to the comforts of the palace would be a mistake.

  “And this guides me true.” She set the farmer, tending his crop, between abundance and the fool. “It looks like one of us has some growing to do.” Her glance was very sharp.

  “We’ll probably have the chance for it,” Edoran agreed blandly. “Traveling together and all.”

  Arisa sighed. “You won. You don’t have to rub it in.”

  They’d walked for almost an hour, mostly in silence, before she asked him, “How did you know that the tower would turn up?”

  Edoran smiled grimly. “I don’t believe in the cards.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Justice: the balancing of the scales. May indicate either punishment or a voluntary act of contrition.

  They came to a town at midmorning, and Arisa assigned Edoran to carry the sword and shield along the paths and back roads around it and meet her on the other side.

  Edoran protested that every carter who’d passed them this morning had already seen them. Arisa replied that in just a few hours, days at most, those carters would be somewhere else, almost impossible for a troop of guardsmen to question, while the townsfolk would be right there—perfectly willing to tell the troop’s captain about the young girl who’d come through lugging an antique shield and sword… and the boy who’d traveled with her.

  Edoran then proposed that they wrap the sword and shield in blankets, or disguise them some other way. Arisa invited him to try, and spent the next ten minutes chuckling at his attempt to conceal two distinctively shaped objects, one almost four feet long and the other a bit longer.

  He managed to wrap the blankets around them, but the result was a bundle so awkward that it would attract as much attention as carrying the shield and sword openly.

  “Look at it this way,” Arisa told him, as he struggled to return the blankets to their neat roll. “If you weren’t here, I’d have to carry them around myself, then go back into town to find out about the troop, and then drag them out of hiding before I went on—so inste
ad of slowing us down, you’re saving me time.”

  It wasn’t much consolation to Edoran, as he carried them along the paths that ran between the fields. Arisa had rigged straps to hang both sword and shield over his shoulders, and the sword wasn’t too uncomfortable. But even with the blanket to cushion his back, the shield was hard-edged, heavy, and awkward. Edoran was sweating by the time he found the place she’d described, where a stone wall surrounded a small orchard.

  As he thankfully shed his burden and settled in to wait, it occurred to Edoran that she’d been carrying these things not only all morning, but all day yesterday as well. She really was an amazing girl.

  He began to think her somewhat less amazing as the minutes dragged past, but he forgave her when she turned up carrying not only a fresh loaf of bread, but a hot sausage whose scent filled the air before she even unwrapped it.

  “I bought you a coat as well.” She indicated a lump of rough brown wool and patches. More patches than wool, as far as Edoran could see.

  “That’s a coat?”

  “It’s warmer than what you’ve got now. And it was cheap,” Arisa told him. “I think it’s even clean. You can’t wander around wrapped in a blanket; people will notice. And that’s important,” she added. “Because they’re looking for you.”

  Edoran abandoned his half of the sausage, suddenly less hungry. “Already?”

  “The guards passed me as I was going into the town. Palace guards.” Arisa’s voice was properly grim, but her eyes were bright with the thrill of the hunt. “I’d pulled my hair back and tucked it into my collar, so there was almost no chance they’d recognize me.” She still wore her dark red hair that way, and unless they looked closely anyone would take her for a boy—particularly men who’d previously seen her wearing the gowns of a fine lady. “I managed to get close enough to overhear when they stopped in the main square to question people,” she went on. “It was you they were looking for. It’s a good thing you’re such an unremarkable little shrimp. Brown hair and brown eyes are no good at all as a description.”