“Oh . . . crap.” I fidgeted with my doublet sleeves. Spinner had hemmed the cuffs in a double row of chain stitch, complaining all the while that I would never appreciate the effort he was putting in. I’d already stained one cuff with mushroom sauce. He was going to pound me. “Konrad, don’t get me wrong, that’s nice to hear, but you don’t know the full story. I’ve done some good, I hope, but I didn’t do any of it alone.”
He brushed that away. “Leaders never work alone. They ignite. They inspire. What matters is that you made it happen. You haven’t just given hope to the common people, you’ve reminded them of what their rulers can and should be.”
The dancing girls began a series of flying leaps, bare skin taking up the torchlight, so they almost looked like they were on fire themselves. I shifted my stare to the table. I’d seen enough people burning.
I wondered what Lynn was doing right then. Scrubbing out the galley, maybe—she had been talking about giving it a real down-to-the-wood cleaning. A clean galley meant food that wouldn’t make sailors puke, and sailors who weren’t puking were less likely to mutiny, or die on an enemy cutlass, or lose control of the ship in a storm. So her evening’s work was more likely to benefit the war effort than mine.
One of the dancing girls jiggled up to the table and gave me a coy smile. I smiled back, weakly, before returning my attention to Konrad. “None of that explains why I should swear myself to your service.”
“Because someone has to rule, and it can’t be you. You can’t govern from the deck of a pirate ship. And anyway, would you want to? You work very well as a folk hero, my sister, but as High Lady? I can’t picture you putting down rebels or sentencing thieves.”
“Why not? Because I’m such a delicate shrinking flower? Hell, Konrad, what do you think pirates do? I don’t spend my time knitting lace doilies, you know.”
He switched tactics. “All right, perhaps. But even if you could live with that part of the job, could you marry? Bear children? Could you be faithful to a husband—at least in public?” He glanced down the table at his wife, who was slumped in her chair snoring, and grimaced. “Of course, every lord in Kila has his concubines, but those relationships can never see daylight. I think you would find it difficult to keep a woman who always had to remember her place, who could never come out of the shadows.”
The image that came to mind was of Lynn huddled in that closet in Melitta’s room, Lynn too wrecked to even lift her head. That was a woman who knew her place, and that was something I never intended to see again.
“You’re right,” I said. “I’d be a disaster as High Lady and I don’t want it anyway. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to put you on the throne. I’ve got another candidate.”
“Another candidate? Who would you . . . ah, I see.” No flies on Konrad; he didn’t need me to spell it out. “Ariadne of Bain?”
“She’s got the pedigree, she’s got the talent, she’s got a universe of brains, and I don’t like her enough to feel bad about giving her the worst job in the world.”
Konrad frowned and rubbed his chin. “I see some advantages,” he said after a few seconds’ thought. “But the Lady Ariadne is practically an exile herself, now that her father’s cousin rules the House of Bain. She has no lands of her own, no war chest, no council. Do you plan to change that? Will you take back the Bain stronghold on Bero for her?”
“Um. No. No, I will not. I plan to stay alive, you see, and attacking Bero isn’t really in line with that goal. I’ll set her up somewhere else. And don’t ask where; I don’t know yet. When the opportunity comes up, I’ll take it.”
“Very well. Here’s the opportunity. Take it.” He took a breath. “I’ll marry her.”
I stared at him, and my ulcer began to throb. I swear, I heard it talking to me in a snivelling kind of whine. “You’ll do what now?”
“I’ll marry her. Say the word, and I’ll do it. I’ll take her without a dowry and deed her half of all my holdings, and you can swear fealty to us both. I know it sounds like an uneven bargain, but Darren, think. With your fleet and your legend protecting the seas around the Isle, Torasan won’t look like prey. We’ll be the city on the hill. Once that happens, we can start to come to terms with the smaller houses. Some will want alliances. Some will agree to become vassal states in return for protection. We’d ask them to pay a tithe in men and ships, and your fleet would grow and grow. Don’t you see? It’s a beginning. You—”
“Just stop, Konrad. Stop!” My head, taking inspiration from my ulcer, throbbed as well. “I’m not going to chart out the conquest of Kila while we’re having dessert. You’re using lots of big words—and I’m drunk—and Ariadne’s maybe in love with someone and maybe trying to seduce someone else—and hell and damnation, you’re already married.”
This time, he didn’t even glance at the pale woman snoring in her chair. “Do you think that matters to either of us? Lassaline and I will both be happier if I set her free and send her back to her father. As for Ariadne’s lovers—they’re women, I take it? Well, let her bring them along. As long as she’s discrete and doesn’t give people any reason to talk, she can keep a harem and I won’t give a damn. Hell, I’ll turn down the bed for them. I told you I’m a man of the world.”
I wondered whether Konrad would feel the same way if he knew that one of the potential members of Ariadne’s harem was hung like a horse and had stubble on his chin.
My brother was still talking. “And then, my children with Ariadne would have a claim to the House of Bain. By the time they come of age, our forces might be strong enough to—”
“Konrad, that can’t happen! She’s barren.”
I regretted the words as soon as I saw him recoil. Down at the far end of the table, Ariadne giggled. Konrad’s eyes jerked to her—I think he was astonished that she could still laugh when she was so seriously broken.
Eventually, he mastered himself. “Well. Well, that’s certainly . . .”
His voice trailed off. He blew out a breath, shook his head, and started again. “Well, that . . . complicates things. But . . . do you know? It might actually be all right. I have four sons already; my legacy is secure. Perhaps there would even be some advantages. Less domestic drama. Yes. I’ll do it. I’ll take her.”
Ariadne was not my favourite person, but this was too much. “Oh, don’t strain yourself. If you want to marry her, then ask her, say her hair looks nice, maybe there could be some flowers involved—but don’t expect me to talk her into it. Not if you’re going to treat her like damaged goods.”
He looked at me in wonderment. “But she is damaged goods.”
“Oh, go away and put your head in a fish. She bloody isn’t.”
“Darren, have you thought this through? You plan to make this woman the High Lady of Kila, yes? Well, if she’s barren”—he almost choked on the word—“then there’s only one way that can possibly happen. She’ll need to have a very understanding husband at her side, one who already has heirs of his own. You know that. You have to know that.”
People assume all the time that I know things just because those things are blatantly obvious. All too often, they’re wrong.
I scowled, as though he’d offended me terribly by second-guessing my judgment. “Of course I know that, but it’s still her choice. I’m not going to put her in a sack and drag her to the altar for you.”
“All right. We can talk about that later. But you have your own choice to make.” He set his hand over mine. “Sister, please. Take back your title and your name. Come home.”
Home. I couldn’t hold back a laugh—mind you, I didn’t try all that hard. “Maybe I’m not a very big person, but I’m still not quite over that whole part where you banished me.”
Konrad pounded the table, and it was my turn to jump. “Father banished you! Why should I pay the price for our father’s stupidity? Why should Torasan pay?”
He breathed hard, his cheeks a furious red. “It’s no good, Darren—you can’t spend your whole life hidi
ng from what you are. A phoenix can live among the sparrows, but it can’t purge the fire from its veins. Stop denying that you are what you were born to be. Rise up, and take your place at the table.”
The dancers had finished their act. Some of the audience clapped, the ones who were still sober enough to understand concepts like “dancers” and “finished.” As the dancers headed for the door, my brother Talon leaned over to run his hand up a bare thigh. The girl shivered, but kept a fixed, frozen smile on her face, and walked a little faster.
“At least say you’ll think about it,” Konrad probed, his wine-flushed face far too close to mine. “Promise me.”
“Sure,” I said, shoving my chair back, away from the table where there was no place laid for Lynn and never would be. “I’ll think about it a whole, whole lot.”
AN EMPTY SEAT had opened up next to Ariadne. I collapsed into it and prodded her in the side. “How’s it going here?”
“Quiet. I’m winning.”
With a flourish, she rattled a dice-cup. Jada sat opposite her, looking sour and defensive and a little desperate, like all the other poor sods I’d seen trying to match Ariadne at koro.
Ariadne flicked her wrist. Two ivory dice bounced from the cup and clattered across the tabletop, coming to rest beside three others. Ariadne wasn’t faking the silvery laugh any longer—she full-out cackled when she saw the result.
“House of the crescent moon!” she announced triumphantly. “And you didn’t bother to hedge, so I get the full two hundred points and you can choke on it, worm. Choke on it, I say. Roll over and expose your belly in total submission.”
“Bloody hell,” I muttered. “How drunk are you?”
“How drunk?” She hummed to herself, thinking. “On a scale of one to ten, I am, approximately, monkey.”
“How much did you drink?”
“That, I do not know. I cannot say. It is a mystery to all of us. But I can say this. There is a very big, very empty bottle of cherry wine over there, and it was full when I got started. All right, Jada darling, your turn.”
She slid the dice-cup across the table. Jada contemplated it with a look of loathing, and shoved it back. “Whatever. You win. I give up.”
Ariadne swept a small pile of silver coins into her palm while the onlookers groaned in disappointment.
“Do you always forfeit when you’re losing?” Ariadne asked, as she arranged her winnings in neat stacks of five coins each. “No wonder you’re pathetic at this. How far am I ahead—six hundred points? Even Darren usually does better against me, and her brain is made of marshmallow.”
Jada shrugged. She was trying too hard to look like she didn’t care, and she wasn’t fooling me, so she sure as hell couldn’t have been fooling anyone else. “It’s just a stupid game.”
“Sore loser, are we, buttercup?” Ariadne asked. Her cheeks were pink, pink, pink; her eyes bright with wine and wickedness. “You should work on that.”
“Look, you had stupid good luck. Two sunbursts in a row, and crescent moon? Fluke.”
“Is that so?” Ariadne licked a garnet-red drop of wine from one fingertip. “So I suppose if we played a game without the element of luck, you’d crush me.”
“I’m just saying.”
“Oh, I heard what you said. Now prove it.”
Ariadne collected three cups and arranged them in a row, flipping every other one to make a pattern: upside down, right side up, upside down.
“Now this is very simple,” she said. “You make three moves, you flip two cups every time, and when you’re done all of the cups should be right side up. Like that.”
She made three passes, each time turning over two cups. It took barely an instant, and when she was done, all the cups had their brims turned upwards. With one more quick motion, she flipped the middle cup, resetting the game.
“Your turn,” she said. “How closely did you watch? Everybody keep an eye on her—make sure she doesn’t cheat.”
By now, we had quite an audience, with people all down the table craning their necks to see the game. I had vivid flash of memory—an archery competition when I was twelve, which most of the court came to watch, for lack of anything better to do on a rainy day. I lost spectacularly, and during the banquet that followed, the main topic of conversation was how badly I was going to disgrace Torasan when I was old enough to captain a ship. The general consensus was that the day after leaving the harbour, I’d trip over my feet, fall overboard, and get eaten by a manatee.
I hadn’t done the protective-older-sister thing in a long time, but the instinct was still there.
“Listen, to hell with her,” I told Jada. “Don’t let her bully you. You don’t have to play.”
For a whole three seconds, I thought she was going to let me rescue her. There was something in her eyes that could easily have flickered into agreement, gratitude, relief. But she looked at the audience, and her face sealed over again.
“I am not an infant in need of your protection, pirate queen,” Jada said. She dragged her chair up to the table. “Let’s just get this stupid thing over with.”
The next few minutes were painful for everyone. Jada flipped cups, paused, stared, started over, stared again, grimaced. I narrowed my eyes at the cups, trying to figure out where she’d gone wrong. Ariadne had started by flipping the middle cup and the one on the right, then the cups on either end . . . hadn’t she? But Jada had done exactly the same thing . . . hadn’t she? My vision was dissolving in a haze of strong liquor, the scene soft and smeared around the edges.
Jada tried again. She used exactly the same moves Ariadne had shown her, I knew it, I knew it, but when she was done, the three cups faced down, not up.
Ariadne shook her head sadly as she reached out with one hand to reset the game. “You do know the difference between up and down, don’t you, sweetheart? I didn’t think I had to spell that part out for you.”
Jada stared at the cups. “It’s not possible. It’s a trick.”
“Of course it’s a trick. It’s the Beggar’s Flip, the oldest trick in the book.” Once again, Ariadne’s hands moved deftly, flipping cups. “It’s transparent. It’s infantile. It’s the kind of thing I did to pass the time when I was in my cradle. You really haven’t figured it out?” She finished the sequence, and once again, the three cups stood with brims upwards.
“Just ignore her, Jada,” I said. “She’s a bitch and there’s no cure known to science. You don’t have anything to prove.”
Ariadne let out a stinging peal of laughter. “Oh, like hell she doesn’t have anything to prove. Jada—darling—this is why your family won’t trust you with a ship anymore, isn’t it? Because you lack the reasoning skills that the gods bestowed upon the common crumpet? You must have been a disaster as a merchant captain. I bet the other traders slavered when they saw you coming. Brought out all their rotten apples and their moth-eaten wool, and sold you magic beans and hen’s teeth.”
Jada stared at her empty trencher, teeth clenched.
A few seats away, Gunnar guffawed. “You’re not wrong!”
“All right, princess,” I said, my last few shreds of patience blowing away with the passing breeze. “Put down the cup. You’ve had more than enough.”
“No. My cup. You can’t have it. Stop pawing at me, Darren. Go away. Ye gods, why are you such a wet blanket? Do you hate joy? Is there anything that makes you happy, other than boinking my sister?”
“Oh . . . sod it, Ariadne.” She’d said it in her brightest, loudest, most penetrating tone, and faces all down the table turned in our direction.
“Because she is, you know,” Ariadne went on blithely, to everyone in earshot. “Boinking my sister, I mean. Vigorously. Frequently. I’m a bit surprised that their cabin floor hasn’t caved in yet.”
Mustering my courage, I managed to look up and scan the room for some helpful person. A captain of the guard stood at attention by the door. He seemed sober enough, and I snapped my fingers to summon him over.
&nbs
p; “I know, I know, it’s confusing,” Ariadne said to Jada, although no one, least of all Jada, had asked. “Everyone thinks I’m an only child. That’s because Gwyneth is a bastard half-blood, so, legally speaking, she doesn’t exist. She existed enough for my mother to beat the living crap out of her whenever she felt like it, though.”
“Can I be of service, my lady?” the guard captain said, leaning down beside me.
“Oh. Uh. Yes. Please see if you can find my man Regon. He’s about half a head shorter than me. Scar on his lip, no beard. Ask him to meet me at the main stair?”
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