Beggar's Flip

by Benny Lawrence

  “This isn’t necessary,” Ariadne said tightly. Cracked voice, through cracked lips. Her eyes never left the floor. “I’m going to do what you say.”

  Jada considered her, letting the cane slide between her fingers, then lashed out. One vicious slice. Ariadne convulsed, and a new whip-weal bloomed on her cheek, the same shade of red as watered wine. Jada grabbed her by the neck and yanked her upwards, and only then did Ariadne try to stand upright. Her bare feet scrabbled on the stone.

  Jada pulled her in close, mouth next to Ariadne’s ear, as though she was going to whisper a secret, but the words were loud enough for the whole room to hear. “Oh, I know you are.”

  With a quick shove, she sent the princess staggering; one kick, two kicks, and Ariadne fell back to her knees. There was a belch of laughter from the crowd, though I saw one woman in the audience close her eyes tight. Ariadne crouched low, and her head shook slowly to and fro; I can’t do it, I can’t I can’t I can’t.

  Lynn didn’t look at her sister, though they were only inches apart. When Jada tossed the cane at her, she caught it deftly.

  “I don’t need to spell things out for you, do I?” Jada asked. “Take the skin off her back. Do it like you mean it. Do it well enough and I won’t make you do it over again—or send her back to the whipping post to have the job done right. Do it or she’ll spend the next week screaming curses at you for not doing it. Is there any confusion at all about what you’re about to do?”

  Lynn said nothing, and now even the watching crowd was quiet, waiting.

  The waiting was too much for Ariadne, who choked out, “For the love of all the gods, Gwyneth, just do it!”

  She’d mistaken Lynn’s stillness for hesitation. I knew better, and Ariadne should have, too. Lynn had already decided on her course of action, and was taking a second to work out all the angles before she followed through.

  Lynn breathed in, held it, and raised the cane. Jada grinned savagely, and Lynn returned the smile. She was still smiling when she opened her mouth and, with neither hurry nor hesitation, thrust the tip of the cane down her own throat.

  I have never had to dodge a spray of vomit myself—a record which, gods willing, I hope to keep intact—but I don’t think Jada handled it very well. She did manage to turn her face, but the reeking spray still caught her head on, splattering her from cheeks to knees. Before she had time to do more than gasp, Lynn pounced. Still retching, Lynn thrust her hands into the mess on Jada’s shirt, smearing it over Jada’s face, into her mouth and eyes. Jada lost all sense of control, shrieking and spitting. Lynn made full use of the opening, hooking an ankle around Jada’s leg and taking her down hard onto the bare flagstones.

  Lynn squatted down beside her, raked a vomit-smeared hand through Jada’s hair, and forced her chin up. “You see that?”

  “That” was Milo, who was bent over as if racked with terrible cramps. But he wasn’t in pain—he was laughing, his whole body shaking with laughter, gripping the arms of his chair in a useless attempt to keep quiet.

  “He doesn’t love you,” Lynn said. “You knew that, of course. But he doesn’t respect you either. Is that part a surprise?”

  Jada came out of her paralysis, flailing, kicking, punching. I’m sure she was doing her best to make Lynn dead, but it was hard to take her seriously, that moment. With her face screwed up in a wet purple scrunch, she looked like a toddler mid-tantrum.

  Which was appropriate, since that was pretty much how she was acting. A stern sisterly talking-to was in order.

  I banged my manacles on the bars. “Lynn, shove her over here!”

  Lynn glanced at me, nodded, and aimed a kick at Jada’s head that made her scrabble backwards across the floor. Milo wasn’t laughing anymore, but he seemed almost gleeful, a hard glitter in his eyes. When one of the Freemen started forward, Milo waved him back.

  Jada managed to wrench herself to her feet, but in the process, she took her eyes off of Lynn—always a mistake. Lynn lashed out with the cane, swinging it up and down rather than left and right. We used to call that “the bacon-slicer” when our tutors did it to us, and it hurts like a particularly unpleasant hell. Jada clutched at her ear, blood oozing between her fingers, and flinched back when Lynn raised the cane again. I’d been waiting, measuring the distance between us. One careless step brought Jada in range.

  An open message to the peoples of the world: If you want to get bonked on the head real hard, then get yourself a prisoner, put some wrist shackles on her, and stumble into her reach. I don’t know offhand why you would want to get bonked on the head real hard, but I am not one to judge people’s hobbies.

  I balled my fists together and swung. The metal cuffs smashed against Jada’s temple, and when she staggered, I threw an arm around her neck and dragged her back against the bars.

  An experienced brawler would have grabbed my fingers and bent them backwards until either they broke or I had to let go. Jada just shrieked and kicked. I put a stop to that by squeezing her throat, increasing the pressure until the shrieking turned into gurgling. Then I gave a little extra squeeze, just to be sure I had her attention.

  “You’d better listen to me, Jada—are you listening? You really should be listening because you’ll be dead in less than a month if you don’t get smart.”

  “You piece of shit,” she gasped, almost sobbing with fury. “Filthy pig. Coward. Liar—”

  “Sure. Plus, I’m reliably informed that I’m a pervert, and also I snore. Forget about my personal failings. Start thinking survival. Don’t you get that you’re walking on fire? If Milo didn’t need a Torasan wife to have a claim on the throne, he’d have killed you already—”

  She thrashed against my grip. “Stop lying. Stop lying, you’re lying, stop it!”

  “You know this already. You’re just too chickenshit to look truth in the face. You’re his useful idiot, not his girlfriend, and your usefulness is going to run out.” Milo had finally signalled his Freemen, and they were almost on us. I yanked Jada’s head back until my mouth brushed her ear. “Think, Jada. For once, think. I’m more valuable to Milo than you are, and he doesn’t need us both.”

  I let her go before the Freemen reached us and backed away, hands upraised. Jada reeled, swaying, purple-red blotches covering her face.

  “Get them out of here,” she choked out. I figured that her throat was a bit sore, and grieved not. “Get them out of my sight, take them all away!”

  Someone took Ariadne by the shoulders and bundled her through the nearest doorway. Lynn was in a less docile mood. The first man to grab her got a gouging thumb in his eye, and limped off howling. The other rebels didn’t make the mistake of attacking one by one. They all piled on at once, and Lynn vanished underneath the heap.

  To hell with self-preservation, to hell with keeping my head down. I took three quick breaths and threw myself against the bars of the pen. Once. Twice. My ribs screamed, but the fence cracked, and one wall toppled. I scuttled towards Lynn, dragging the chains behind me, dragging a length of fence along with the chains.

  By now, they had her upright, holding on to her by the arms and the hair and the neck and I couldn’t make them take their stinking hands off of her, so I put my hands on her too.

  I touched her shoulders and I touched her face and framed her cheeks with my hands and leaned into her and against her. In the middle of that screaming crowd, in a room still charred black with my family’s ashes, I kissed her with a fierceness that would have been pathetic if she hadn’t been kissing back the same way. I pressed close, covering as much of her as I could, and grinned into the kiss when I felt her right hand moving. Clever girl. Clever, clever girl.

  They yanked her away from me, before the kiss had gone on nearly long enough, and more hands clamped onto me when I tried to follow.

  She twisted in their grip, trying to look back. “Darren, I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t you dare,” I told her, and kept telling her, getting louder and louder as they pulled her away. “Do
n’t you dare be sorry. Give the bastards hell!”

  But I don’t know how much she heard before they dragged her out of sight.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Lynn

  THEY THREW ARIADNE in the cell first, then me. The door slammed shut, cutting out the light, as I scrambled back onto my feet.

  “What are you doing?” Ariadne whispered.

  “Just getting my bearings.” The room was clean-swept and empty. I found the door and wrenched at the handle—yes, locked. Not that I’d expected otherwise, but it’s best to try the simplest solution before getting fancy.

  “Lynn, stop that and sit down!”

  “Why?” I stooped and squinted through the dimness at the door fastener, trying to figure out whether it was a warded lock or just a latch.

  “They’ll hear us, they’ll come in here, you’ll only make it worse—”

  “Well, I hate to break it to you, but I’ve already made it worse. Jada won’t forgive me for throwing up on her if I sit quietly in a corner for a while.” I shook the door hard, and the hinges rattled.

  “Stop it!” The words tore out of her, hoarse and desperate. “They’ll beat us! They’ll beat us!”

  “They sure will, if you keep making noises.”

  Her mouth snapped shut so fast that her teeth grated together. She was learning.

  I left it at that. No point in trying to comfort her. All the platitudes in the world don’t mean much when you’re locked in a bare cell, waiting for a woman with a whip to decide exactly how much she wants you to hurt.

  Leaning back against the door—I couldn’t stop anyone from coming in, but I could make sure of a few seconds’ warning—I ran my fingers along the hem of my shirt. Milo’s men had searched me when they first brought me into the Keep, but they hadn’t stripped me, the damn amateurs.

  When I found the stiff spot in the fabric, I bit away the hemming thread, poked two fingers into the hole, and drew out my garrotte. I wound it around my right wrist, where it belonged, and felt a bit better.

  “Come over here,” I said.

  “I don’t want a hug.”

  “Good, because I’m fresh out of those. Get over here. Please.”

  She would have argued if she’d had more energy. As it was, she shuffled towards me. Once she sounded close enough to touch, I patted around until I found her arm, passed her the knife, and wrapped her fingers around the hilt.

  She almost dropped it. “What’s this?”

  “I hope that’s not a serious question, because I know for a fact that you’ve seen a knife before.”

  “Where the hell did you get a knife?”

  “Darren. She lurched over to kiss me before the Freemen dragged me out of the hall—”

  “Oh gods, that idiot . . .”

  “No, this was a strictly practical kiss. She squashed herself against me so that nobody could see what I was doing with my hands. While everyone was watching us suck each other’s faces, I reached backwards to a guard’s belt and groped around until I found something hard. Which could have been very awkward, if the hard thing had been something other than a knife, but it was, in fact, a knife. Take it.”

  “What am I supposed to do with it?”

  “Keep it on you, just in case. Things are about to get hairy. Milo’s struggling to keep control, and if he slips, then the Freemen could do something stupid.”

  “You mean they might kill us.”

  Actually, I meant that they might kill her, but there was no need to go into that level of detail. “Yes. So hang onto the knife, and if worst comes to worst—”

  “If worst comes to worst . . . what? What do you expect me to do if some hulking thug tries to cut my throat? Challenge him to single combat? If they want me dead, I’m dead!”

  The shrillness in her voice could have been terror or fury, but either way, it was exhausting. For just a second, I let my head loll back against the door. This would be so much easier if Darren and I didn’t have any deadweight to carry.

  “That’s not true,” I said, with an effort. “As long as you’re alive, there are things you can do to try to stay that way. If someone attacks you, then pick a body part of theirs and do your best to rip it off.”

  “You really think—”

  “Shut up and listen. This is the important part. Once you start fighting, you can’t stop until everyone around you is friendly or dead. You can’t stab twice and then cringe away and hope for the best. In a fight, the first person to stop hitting loses, so keep hitting, no matter what. If they break your arm, use the other. If they break both of your arms, kick. But whatever you do—”

  Metal crashed against the wall in a shower of sparks. She’d thrown the knife.

  “No wonder he likes you,” she said, voice raspy and trembling. “You even sound like him.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  No answer to that, just heavy breathing, and the rustle of cloth as she let herself slide to the floor. Then she said, “You know, Gwyneth, when you were with my mother—”

  “When I was ‘with’ your mother?” The dam in my head broke and icy water rushed through. “I wasn’t dating her, you know. She was my jailer!”

  “When you were with my mother, no matter how bad it got, at least you were never disposable. You knew she couldn’t kill you.”

  “No. I really didn’t.”

  I listened to her shuddering breaths in the darkness. She was barely a foot away from me, but the space between us had substance and weight.

  “Do you actually want to play the who-had-it-worse game?” I said at last. “That won’t end well, but if you have to get it off your chest—”

  “I know who had it worse,” she said, biting the words off one by one. “I’ve never been confused about that.”

  Well, good. I ran my forefinger up and down the rough wood grain of the door.

  “But it doesn’t matter. Maybe what I’m going through is just a pale shadow of what you’ve lived—hell, maybe it looks like paradise to you. But I still can’t take it. You hear me? I can’t.”

  “You are taking it. This is what it means to take it. The pain happens, and you live through it because you don’t have any choice. I don’t have some magical way of coping. If I did, I’d let you know. But this is all there is.”

  More silence. When she did speak again, it was muffled, as if she was curled into a ball, with her head on her knees.

  “I’m sorry if I disappointed you,” she said.

  We didn’t speak for the next few hours.

  “AREN’T YOU GOING to ask me about Latoya?”

  It was well into the evening, judging from the chill in the air. The silence between Ariadne and me had gone from annoying to ridiculous. She still hadn’t lifted her head.

  “What’s to ask?” she said dully. “Latoya mutinied. Now we’re both here. End of short, stupid story.”

  “She mutinied because she wanted to save you.”

  “Yes, that detail did not escape me. Thanks for the reminder that I can’t even fall in love without screwing you over.”

  Well. That was new information.

  “So you do love her,” I said. “I’ve wondered.”

  She let out a dull little cough of a laugh. “Have you ever tried not loving Latoya? It is a frustrating enterprise. She’s steadfastness and kindness and strength and patience and . . . just everything good. Plus, have you seen her? Especially the legs. Gods on high, the legs.”

  “So why . . .”

  I let my voice trail off before I asked the obvious question—something along the lines of “Why, in the name of every last god, have you been shoving her away from you with a stick?” There wouldn’t be an answer that made a lick of sense. If there was one thing that Ariadne and Darren shared, it was a talent for making simple things complicated.

  Instead, I said, “If the three of us are ever in the same room again, I’m going to toss both of you in a large wooden crate, drill a few air holes, and nail down the lid. Once yo
u’ve sorted yourselves out, I’ll send Darren along with a pry bar.”

  I thought she was ignoring me until I saw her shoulders shaking, her hand pressed against her mouth. Didn’t she ever run out of tears?

  I tried again, just for something to do. “You know, I’m fairly sure that Latoya would break this island in half for you. I’m not saying that’s enough, or that it’s the only thing that matters. But it’s true.”

  She sniffed, wetly.