Fortune's Fool (12 page)

Well I am,
he thought, as he lay in his bed in the inn and stared up at the ceiling in the dark.
But my intentions are honorable!

He would not think of what his brothers might say. He would not think of what his Father would do. All of them should know better anyway. The Fortunate Fool always went away from home and returned with an exotic bride, more often than not, it was a magical one to boot! They should all be expecting it by now.

Could he win her?

He certainly hoped so, because he could not imagine feeling this way about any other young lady, ever again. It was not just that she was beautiful, kind, clever, and intoxicating. It was not that he was madly in love. If anything, he was sanely in love. If ever two creatures were suited for each other—

They were out riding at the moment that he came to this conclusion; she was up behind him on a pillion. Now, his regular saddle didn’t have a pillion pad, but true to the nature of his luck, there had been one left behind at the inn so long ago that no one quite recalled who had left it or why. Not that it mattered. It was his luck. So he was able to suggest to her that they go riding inland, and she readily agreed.

This was not a part of Led Belarus where they were likely to run into either trouble or people. It was, in fact, hunting lands belonging to one of the boyars, a man who hated to hunt. The people of the fishing village poached it with impunity. There might be a gamekeeper somewhere about, but if there was, Sasha had never seen him.

Sasha really wasn’t at all sure who or what lived in this forest, besides the possible gamekeeper. He only had one hope—that the unicorns weren’t around.

He felt his heart sink when he caught a flash of white through the trees.

“What’s that?” Katya asked, crushing his hope that she hadn’t seen it.

“I don’t know,” he temporized, because he actually didn’t
know,
he only guessed it was a unicorn.

“There it is again!” she exclaimed, as the path curved, and there was the briefest possible glimpse of a white flank.

Oh, this was bad. This was very bad. How was he to explain the unicorns to her? Oh he could probably sing them away but—

They rounded another turn in the path, and ahead, the path led straight into a beautiful glade. Sun poured down into the pocket meadow, golden and sweet as honey. The sound of gurgling water was just audible, along with the song of a lark. Lush, deep green grass carpeted the ground, and in the middle of this tiny paradise, haloed by the sun, stood—

A white doe.

Relief made him flush.
Thank heavens.

“Oh!” Katya said, as the deer turned her mild eyes on them and nodded. “Oh! She’s lovely!”

She was more than lovely. Sasha quickly ran through all the lore in his head. A white
stag
could sometimes be a guide, but a white doe—

He dismounted, and slowly walked toward the beautiful creature. She let him approach. He got within a few feet of her, then stopped. “Are you under a curse or a spell?” he asked.

Slowly, the doe nodded.

“Can it be broken?” Sasha asked, as he heard Katya behind him respond to that answer with a swift intake of breath. Again, the doe nodded.

“Does it have to be a Prince of the Royal House?” he asked, hoping that the answer would be
no
. Because all of the White Doe stories had a period of sorrow and trial to them, and he was hoping his brothers would be spared that. And oh no—he had chosen his bride, if it could be done, if Katya would have him, and in no way was he going to be this girl’s rescuer. To his intense relief, the doe shook her head. “Any boyar will do, then?” he asked, and was rewarded with a nod.

Thanks be to the blessed saints.
He thought about the man whose hunting lands these were. What he knew of Boyar Arkadij was all good. He was a kind man, good to his peasants—as witness the fact that poachers here went unpunished—faithful in his loyalty to the King, solitary by nature. Perhaps that was why the doe appeared here.

“I will send a message to the boyar whose forest this is,” he told the doe. “I think you will like him. I suggest you start showing yourself near the hunting lodge in this forest as soon as possible.”

The doe bowed her head and delicately pawed the ground. Sasha smiled as the doe reared a little, then whirled on her hind feet and vaulted off into the shadows under the trees so lightly he did not even hear a rustle of branches.

“Well,” he said, looking around at the perfect little glade. “This looks like as good a place as any for our lunch, no?”

Katya had known from the moment her father had asked her if she fancied Sasha that she was falling in love with him. Since he’d begun making moves she could only interpret as courtship almost immediately, she could see no reason why she
shouldn’t
. Traditionally, they were a very good match. The Fortunate Fool never, in any of the tales that she had ever heard, was paired up with an ordinary girl, not even a Princess unless she had some sort of magic about her or was the captive of a magical villain. He
always
found a wife who was a swan maiden, or a captive of some evil creature, or enchanted into the form of a bird, or a deer or—

That was why she realized, after Sasha himself had clearly figured it out, that the pure white doe must be exactly the latter. And her heart sank as she came to that conclusion.

But then Sasha had questioned it, and when he’d asked about how the curse could be lifted, then promised to tell the boyar who owned these lands about the poor thing, her heart had risen again.

She helped him to unpack the pannier they had brought with them, and set out a meal. There was far more food in there than two people could ever eat in a day, but Sasha explained to her that he
always
tried to pack a great deal of food, in case he should meet a little old lady begging, because such little old ladies popping up in the path of princes were almost always witches. That was even more the case when the Prince was a Fortunate Fool. Mostly they just gave him their blessing and let him ride on if he fed them, but once he had been sent to a treasure, and once he had been sent to the aid of an old hermit.

“That was a very kind thing you did just now, Sasha,” she said, going to the stream and returning with both their cups filled with water. She could hardly get enough of pure water when she was on Drylands. It was almost intoxicating in its sweetness, after the heavy salt of sea water. Sasha found that very amusing, she imagined, though he never said anything.

“Kind? I suppose so.” He helped himself to a boiled egg and began to peel it. “I was just hoping she hadn’t come for me, or for one of my brothers. She won’t have an easy time of it. The boyar will break the curse, I am sure, but whatever cursed her will know that the curse has been broken and come here to plague her. Something bad will happen to her, and she and her boyar will have to work through it before they can be happy.” He shook his head. “Usually the firstborn child is stolen, and the witch makes it look as if the mother has murdered it. Often the girl is actually at the stake to be burned before the truth is discovered. There is a lot of grief, pain, and fear before the proper people are found and punished. I don’t want that kind of trouble in my family.”

She nodded soberly. He sighed. “That’s the thing, you see. There is a lot I can do…but there is a lot more that I can’t. I’m not powerful enough to make it so that poor girl won’t have to endure that suffering. I can make a choice of paths for The Tradition, but I can’t send it out of its chosen path once it’s in. There are too many things I can’t do. I can sing a ghost into the afterlife, or a demon to sleep, but I can’t cure someone’s illness, nor do anything at all about boyars that are mean-spirited and cruel to their peasants. It’s—” he looked down at the half-peeled egg in his hands, as if surprised to see it there “—it’s frustrating.”

She felt a surge of pity for him, as well as a burst of affection. How could you
not
love a man like this one? His heart was so big….

And with all that he did for people, he himself was treated as the fool, the nuisance, the fellow best gotten out of the way when something important was going on.
Even though his family knew what he was
. They still discounted him,

“Why do you keep doing these things?” she asked finally. “You get scant thanks from it, even from your own people, who know what you are. You get kicked around by everyone else. And there is probably at least one of your brothers who thinks you are a fool anyway for making yourself miserable with trying to help everyone else and not going off and finding treasures and coming home a rich man.”

He pondered that a moment. “I do this because…I have to, Katya. I have to, or I won’t be true to myself. I’m not a legend or a hero, I don’t slay dragons, I don’t do any of the things that a real hero can. But I can make things better, one day at a time, for most of the Kingdom. We’re given a choice in our lives, to make things better, or worse, or merely endure like sheep. I choose to make things better, as much as I can.”

She nodded. “I’m lucky,” she said ruefully. “Even if only a handful of people know what I do, at least I’m not abused the way you are.”

But he laughed at that. “Oh, my family makes sure that I never have to worry about truly being abused. And it’s not so bad, really. I get to pull some pretty outrageous pranks and I get away with it, too. So there’re some advantages to it.”

As they ate, he told her about some of his funnier stunts. How he’d left a sheep in the bed of a visiting boyar who seemed to think that his rank gave him the right to use whatever servant girl he wanted. How he’d arranged for another who was drunk nearly all the time to get only water while he stayed. How he’d blundered into a group of mutually antagonistic boyars and tangled them all up together in their own cloaks so that they
had
to talk to one another.

She had to smile at the image that called up in her mind.

By that time, they were both full, she had packed what they hadn’t eaten back into the hamper, and the sun was making them both drowsy. Finally he stretched and yawned. “Would it be terribly ungallant of me to take a nap?” he asked. “I didn’t sleep much last night.”

“No, not at all,” she hastily said. “Bad dreams?”

“No, the opposite.” For some reason, he was blushing.

She smiled. “You go right ahead. I’ll keep watch.”

He stretched himself out on the blanket they had used for their picnic. “Thank you, Katya,” he murmured drowsily.

And then he was asleep.

She watched him for a while, as he slumbered so deeply that he scarcely seemed to breathe. She wondered what had happened to keep him awake. And then, the warm sun overhead felt so good…her eyelids started to droop. She woke with a start twice, but the third time she could not fight sleep off anymore.

She woke up curled against Sasha’s chest. She could tell he was asleep, or mostly asleep, but his hands were caressing her hair and shoulders, slowly.

Now what did she want to do about this?

The sensation of his hands on her body made her tingle, made her skin feel alive, made her feel entirely wanton. Which was perfectly fine for someone like her, all of her brothers and half of her sisters had taken lovers already and no one had second thoughts about it. Things only got complicated when the lover was someone who would then try to use the relationship to gain influence from the King. So far, that hadn’t worked, and the lesson had been learned by the sibling in question so it never happened again.

Magic creatures were like that. Humans thought they were fickle, when in fact, it was a matter of knowing that for a creature of magic, there were lovers and there was Love, and an emotion as powerful as Love tended to get all tangled up in the magic and make for complications.

But for ordinary folk, the humans of the Drylands, there were a hundred thousand social codes and religious considerations and things they thought of as “moral behavior,” never thinking or knowing that one group’s “moral behavior” meant nothing to a different group. The question was…where was Sasha in all of this? How would he look at her if she—

Then, mentally, she shook her head. She was what she was. He would love her as she was, or there was no point in continuing this. She moved a little and put her hands on either side of his face and kissed him.

“Hmm?” he murmured, his arms tightening around her. Then he opened his eyes and looked at her blankly. “Uh—”

“Good. You’re awake. Are you completely awake?” she asked, her mouth quirking in a little smile.

“Uh—” he flushed bright red, and she felt something hard and insistent stirring against her leg.

“Very good.” She kissed him again, this time letting her lips part, teasing his with the tip of her tongue. She could feel his indecision; whether to respond or not, and ended the kiss.

“Um…Katya…your father is going to kill me—” He was bright crimson. “I want—I mean—you’re wonderful and—but—”

She chuckled. “My father has never interfered in the lives of his children that way,” she said. “We’re not like you, we sea-people. My father concerns himself only where matters of the Kingdom are concerned. We don’t make alliance marriages. He would not care if I had a dozen lovers so long as I was discreet…and it did not interfere with my doing my duty.”