Player's Ruse

by Hilari Bell

  Player’s Ruse

  A Knight AND Rogue NOVEL

  HILARI BELL

  To the Denver Science Fiction Writers’ Guild—

  We had a great run, guys, and I miss you.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Chapter 1 – Fisk

  Chapter 2 – Michael

  Chapter 3 – Fisk

  Chapter 4 – Michael

  Chapter 5 – Fisk

  Chapter 6 – Michael

  Chapter 7 – Fisk

  Chapter 8 – Michael

  Chapter 9 – Fisk

  Chapter 10 – Michael

  Chapter 11 – Fisk

  Chapter 12 – Michael

  About the Author

  Also By Hilari Bell

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter 1

  Fisk

  Have you ever noticed that your friends get you into more trouble than your enemies ever could? But this time it wasn’t Michael’s fault. He was as surprised as I when we approached our lodging on that lazy summer evening and found trouble waiting, right on the doorstep.

  We’d spent the day fishing. Michael had insisted that any man approaching his twentieth birthday, city born or not, should know how to fish. When that didn’t motivate me, he added that if he caught them all, I would have to clean them. I wasn’t as good a fisherman—or as lucky—as he was, but we’d caught three goodish river cod between us, and Michael carried them, dangling from a string.

  The town of Litton was too small for cobbled streets, and our footsteps were raising dust on the rutted track when the familiar stink of the leather-works reached my nose. Our lodging, in one of the narrow wooden houses that lined the narrow street, was too close to the tannery for either of our taste—or anyone else’s—which was why it was so cheap. But it was only a few streets from the rough tavern where Michael worked—as a bouncer, of all things. It was also near enough to the edge of town that Michael could ride past the fields to the woodlands to exercise Chant and Tipple and do a bit of hunting to supplement our meager income, since I made even less for fine sewing, copying, and letter writing than he did as a bouncer. But Litton was the first town we’d entered in over a year that hadn’t thrown Michael out as soon as the sheriff found out about the tattoos on his wrists, so we’d lingered here all spring and into early Berryon, the first month of summer.

  Looking at the crowd surrounding our angry landlady, I had a feeling our welcome wasn’t going to last much longer.

  Then Mrs. Inger, who was standing on the stoop before her door, caught sight of us and shifted her massive form to one side. The glare she shot at us from under the ruffle of her cap could have felled an ox, but I barely noticed it, for her movement had revealed the girl who sat behind her.

  A cloud of rose-gold hair had come loose from the knot that slipped down her neck, framing a face of heartbreaking beauty, smudged and weary as it was. I’d probably have stopped dead in my tracks, as Michael had, except that I’d seen her before. At Michael’s home, when his father began the long, tangled idiocy that led to his being unredeemed today.

  Michael’s jaw dropped. He looked remarkably like one of our unfortunate fish, but he did have some excuse. He was in love with the girl.

  Rosamund followed Mrs. Inger’s gaze and saw us too. “Brother!” She sprang up from the battered trunk she’d been seated on and darted down the steps and through the crowd. The fine silk of her full skirts was grubbier than her face, and the lace on her wide white collar was torn. “Oh, Brother dear, I’m so glad you’ve come.”

  Neither Michael nor I was her brother.

  And Michael, almost as poor an actor as this lovely nitwit, was already shaking his head in denial.

  “Rosa!” I took two long strides and intercepted her embrace, gripping her shoulders and giving her a small warning shake. It was a good thing the crowd couldn’t see her face just then. “What under two moons are you doing here? Where’s your escort?”

  “Ah,” said Rosamund. “I . . . um . . .”

  My own sisters were lost to me, but you never lose the knack. I scowled and went on in my best brotherly tones. “Does Father know where you are? You ninny! They’ll be frantic.”

  “But I had to.” Even wailing, her voice was sweet. “He has half a dozen suitors lined up for me, and I want to marry . . .”

  She suddenly realized that the crowd around the doorstep had fallen silent, and a wild-rose flush bloomed in her cheeks.

  I controlled my appreciative expression before it went too far for brotherhood, but it was a near thing.

  Michael’s jaw had closed. The glare he sent me as I threw a fraternal arm around the girl’s shoulders almost matched Mrs. Inger’s.

  “Well, for mercy’s sake don’t tell the whole street.” I hauled her back to the house and maneuvered her up the front steps.

  “You asked,” she protested, sounding so miffed, it came out quite sisterly.

  “Fine, tell me later. Mrs. Inger, I thank you for welcoming my sister, but could she go upstairs now? She’s had a long journey.”

  A stocky, middle-aged fellow I hadn’t noticed before snorted. “Is that so, Master Fisk? If she’s your sister, how come she has a noble’s accent and you don’t?”

  This drew a murmur from our audience, who hadn’t noticed that small detail, curse the fellow. It wasn’t as big a crowd as I’d first thought, just a dozen lads from the leather shop and a few farm girls with baskets on their arms. After four months in Litton, Michael and I knew most of them, but Michael’s become wary of mobs. He lingered at the fringes of the crowd, managing, for once, to be inconspicuous. Not too hard, with Rosamund around.

  “You don’t look much like her, Squire,” Mrs. Inger said suspiciously. “That’s a fact.”

  Curse the cranky old besom, too. Rosamund and Michael were some sort of third or fourth cousins, but neither my curly, medium brown hair and stocky, medium tall body, nor Michael’s taller, leaner form and straight, light brown hair bore the least resemblance to Rosamund’s dainty fairness. In fact, no one . . . “No one looks like her.” I shrugged, with just the right degree of rueful pride. I’ve had a lot of practice lying my way out of difficult situations.

  “She’s really my stepsister. Her mother was of a Gifted line, but she and Rosa weren’t. When her father died, their noble kin . . .” I shook my head sadly, evoking a murmur of outraged sympathy at the thought of a noble family so ruthless and dastardly that they’d cast off this lovely girl, just because she hadn’t been born with the Gift for sensing magic.

  In fact, nobles are usually no more or less ruthless and dastardly than most folk. But no one in this rough, working-class crowd had my experience with gulling the wealthy, and they were firmly on my side when I turned to the stocky man.

  “And what business is it of yours, anyway, Master . . .”

  “He’s been following me,” Rosamund put in angrily. “The horrid man. I had to—”

  “Quidge,” the man interrupted. He had thinning sandy hair, and his manner was unobtrusive, but he neither yielded nor stiffened to defy the antagonism of the rabble. “Oliver Quidge. I’m a warrant officer, hired by this girl’s uncle—”

  “Her uncle?” I decided to interrupt, before he told too much of the truth. “Why would he send a bounty hunter for Rosa, after all these years? Or let me guess—he learned she grew up pretty.”

  Even Mrs. Inger looked angry at that, and Quidge’s gaze slid to the growling crowd before he went on. “I was hired by her uncle, who’s cared for her since her parents died—as you well know. It’s Master Sevenson here is her cousin, and you, Master Fisk, are no kin at all.”

  “You wretched creature,” said Rosamund, putting her arm around my
waist. “Fisk and I grew up together just as he says, and no one here is going to believe your nasty lies for one minute. Will you?”

  She looked at the crowd and widened her clear, aquamarine eyes. Her lashes were just dark enough to set them off properly, and they subverted every man under ninety. There was a time when they’d have had the same effect on me, but a con man, which had been my profession before I joined up with Michael, learns to see people as they are.

  Quidge had the sense to know when he was beaten, though his eyes narrowed in annoyance. “Very well, Mistress, you win this round. I’ll just take your uncle’s letter to Lord Roger. I doubt he’ll be as gullible as this lot, who don’t even realize that you’re calling your ‘brother’ by his last name.”

  “If your name was Nonopherian, you’d go by your last name too,” I said, before the dismay on Rosamund’s ingenuous face could give us away. I was usually called Squire here in Litton, thanks to Michael’s ridiculous persistence in introducing us as knight errant and squire to everyone we met. Several tanners snickered, and Quidge shrugged in grudging defeat. He took himself down the steps without another word, paying no heed to the hostile stares.

  “A hard man.” Michael had quietly climbed the steps.

  “I’m afraid so. Come up to our rooms, Rosa, and tell me what this is about.”

  I whisked her past Mrs. Inger’s threat to raise the rent if she stayed, and hustled her up the stairs to the two dingy rooms that Michael and I shared. He picked up her trunk and followed.

  Rosamund settled herself on one of the unmatched straight chairs that served our all-purpose table, looking like a wildflower in a turnip bin. The lowering sun lit her hair with soft fire; we’d left the shutters open since these attic rooms collected heat and we had nothing worth stealing. She gave me a beaming smile. “Thank you, Master Fisk. That was very quick of you. I hadn’t intended to lie, you understand”—she cast a rueful glance at Michael—“but your landlady refused to let me in. She said no women were allowed except family, and I knew that wretched little man would be along in moments, so I—”

  “What are you doing here, Rosamund?” Michael’s voice was quiet, even firm, but the glow in his eyes as he looked at the girl made me flinch.

  I’d realized how Michael felt when I’d seen him with Rosamund before and written it off as calf-love. Painful while it lasted, but no real problem since the wench was safely stuck under the care of her guardian, Michael’s father, in the last place in the realm Michael was likely to go.

  “That’s what I started to tell you,” she went on now. “Michael, the most wonderful thing—I’m in love!”

  Now that same foolish glow lit her face, and Michael’s smile flattened. “Who are you in love with? Come on, Rosamund—Father isn’t greedy. If he’s at all suitable—”

  “Rudy is suitable.” Her eyes actually flashed. I thought that only happened in ballads. “He’s the handsomest, kindest, most honorable—”

  “Not suitable at all, I take it?” I put enough sarcasm into it to sting, and she frowned and lapsed into silence, one hand picking at the lace on her cuff.

  “Out with it, Rose.” Michael’s voice was very gentle—only someone who knew him well could have heard the pain beneath. “What does this Rudy do?”

  She sighed. “He’s a traveling player. In a perfectly respectable troupe with excellent references, and my money is mine anyway so I don’t see why it matters that he doesn’t have any, and my own grandmother was a miner’s daughter so I really don’t see why your father made that silly speech about vagabond rogues and fortune hunters, for he isn’t.”

  “I see why,” I said. And she was going to entangle us in this farce? Wait a minute . . . “Mistress Rosamund, how did you find us?”

  “That was easy,” she said smugly. “Kathy told me where you were. The hard part will be finding Rudy, for Uncle intercepted all his letters.”

  Michael’s eyes met mine, and a ghost of a smile touched his lips. “You see, Fisk? ’Tis what comes of breaking the rules.”

  When Michael was declared unredeemed and cast off by his family, his father had forbidden his brothers and his young sister to write to him. So Mistress Kathryn, with typical ingenuity, started writing to me.

  Michael, honorable fool that he is, refused to respond to the bedraggled, long-traveled letters that caught up with us periodically—less out of respect for his father’s wishes than for fear of getting Kathy into trouble. I had no such scruples, for fifteen—sixteen now—is old enough to make your own choices and take your lumps if they turn out badly. Besides, she was a lively correspondent. When we settled in Litton, it had seemed quite harmless to pass on our address.

  Michael turned back to his cousin. “Rosamund, you must see that Father has a point. Gifted, wealthy—you could wed as high as you choose—”

  Indeed, the Gift for sensing magic in the plants and animals that have it is so highly prized that it can raise a butcher’s granddaughter to baroness—if it breeds true. For the sensing Gift only passes through the female line.

  “I don’t choose high,” said Rosamund, her fine jaw firming in a way that looked downright mulish. “I choose Rudy. And you’re in no position to lecture anyone about unsuitable choices, Michael-the-knight-errant-Sevenson.”

  This stopped Michael in mid speech. Knights errant were more than half myth even when there were such things, and that was over two centuries ago. To choose it as a profession was an act of lunacy, though he’d done it, at least in part, to defy his father. To actually make it work, even in the haphazard fashion Michael had managed, was so insane that when I wasn’t cursing him for it, I had come to see a bizarre beauty in the thing. But mostly I cursed him.

  Especially when Rosamund went on, “Michael, Kathy says you help people. Well, I need your help. Master Makejoye—he runs the troupe Rudy works with—he took them south, into other fiefdoms, out of Uncle Roland’s reach. I thought I could find them on my own, but then Uncle sent that man after me, and now . . . Will you help me?”

  Those aquamarine eyes would have melted a stronger man than Michael, even if he wasn’t in love with her. In fact, Michael being Michael, he’d probably have said yes even if she was a total stranger and plain as a boot. The only thing that surprised me was that he hesitated nearly two seconds before saying firmly, “Yes. We’ll find this Makejoye’s troupe and help you get there. My word on it.”

  “Ah, Michael, may I talk to you for a moment?”

  “Certainly, Fisk.” He was gazing at the delighted gratitude on Rosamund’s face, his smile so fondly doltish as to make anyone want to whack him.

  “In private, Noble Sir.”

  That roused him, for these days I only call him Noble Sir when he’s being particularly idiotic.

  He told Rosamund to make herself comfortable, dropped the string of fish he still carried into the water bucket, and followed me into our small bedroom. I closed the door firmly behind us.

  “Michael, setting aside the fact that Quidge is even now hunting up Lord Roger to talk him into ordering his deputies to pick the girl up, and aside from the fact that, as an unredeemed man, you’re in no position to offer anyone protection, and even aside from the fact that those players could be anywhere in the realm by now, are you sure this is the right thing to do—for her?”

  “Yes, I am.” The assurance in his voice caught me by surprise, and he held up a hand to silence my protest. “Oh, not that she should actually wed this handsome player—that’s naught but the foolishness of first love.”

  He should recognize it. I managed not to say it aloud.

  “But Father’s going about this all wrong, Fisk. He should have let her go with that troupe, along with a suitable chaperone, and spend six months living in a camp and trudging down dusty roads, having to perform day in, day out when you’re tired, or have a headache, or just don’t want to. In a few weeks—two months at the most—she’ll have fallen out of love with this Rudy and be longing to go home.”

  This
made so much sense that it silenced me for several seconds. “But what if she doesn’t change her mind?”

  “If the hardships of a vagabond life don’t deter her, then she truly loves the fellow, and to compel her to wed another would be deeply wrong. But a player’s life isn’t so different from our own, and Rosamund is . . . ah . . .”

  “Spoiled?”

  “Gently reared. Eighteen is old enough to make her own choices. If she can cope with such a life, then mayhap . . . ’Twould mean she feels deeply.”

  And it might mean that she wasn’t so hopelessly beyond the reach of an unredeemed fourth son after all. He intended to court her himself. I tried not to wince visibly, for like Quidge, I know when I’m beaten.

  Michael was opening the door when I made my final point. “All right, but I don’t know what we’re going to do for money. We’ll have to—”

  “Oh, money won’t be a problem,” said Rosamund helpfully. She’d taken advantage of our absence to wash her face and pin up her hair, but she still looked tired, and I felt an unwilling sympathy. It took courage for a sheltered rich girl to set off on her own, though in these peaceful times there wasn’t much danger. As long as she kept away from the worse parts of the towns she passed through. And didn’t flash a lot of money. Or come across someone who thought to try her uncle the baron for ransom.

  She opened her trunk and dug into a tangle of lacy white linen. “I knew I’d need money to travel, so I brought my jewelry.” A smaller chest emerged from her undergarments, locked with one of those dainty, flimsy padlocks that women think are cute, not realizing they can be broken with a twist of the fingers. She no doubt kept the key . . . yes, she was pulling the chain out of her bodice now, which even I found distracting. Michael swallowed audibly.

  Then she opened the box, revealing a tangle of gold and silver, with gems flashing amidst them, and I swallowed. Though I hope it wasn’t audible. “Mistress Rosamund, you haven’t shown that to anyone, have you?”