The Jack of Souls (30 page)

“Yes,
yes.
You heard it, girl. All the world has heard it. And she nearly lost her crown in the outrage that followed. I guess you didn’t hear
that,
did you? Our queen moves too fast, and she has enemies, blast them all. And blast these bugs too, while you’re at it.” He swatted his neck and sucked fiercely on the ragleaf, which was so small he had to pinch it between thick fingers.

“I have training,” Caris repeated quietly. “I’ve got the family and blood as well. Cobalt,” she said, though the knight seemed deaf to it.

“Training?” Willard drew the greatsword from its sheath with a musical chime.
Belle.
The fabled weapon of Willard’s days as Champion. “What’s this?” he asked, holding the weapon before him at an odd angle.

“Widow’s ward,” said Caris softly.

“Bah.” He snapped the blade to another position above his head.

“The Plowman.”

He grunted again and held it behind his head, the tip angling back and into the earth.

Caris smiled. “Queen’s Ward, or Sir Gregan’s Lie. Often followed by a Reaper.”

The knight stared in consternation. “
Gregan’s
Lie?” He let forth a furious cloud of ragleaf. “
I
invented that one. Gregan only popularized it.” He snapped the greatsword into its sheath, and dug another rag-roll from his saddle.

“It might bring favor with the Queen,” Harric suggested.

Willard squinted at Harric as he lit the ragleaf by puffing it against the end of the tiny fragment between his lips. A corner of his mustachio burned, shriveling whiskers like retreating antennae on a snail.

“Who said I need favor?”

“Well, your armor—”

“Enough quibbling.” The knight fixed his gaze on Harric, as if seeing him, too, for the very first time. “I promised. It’s done.” He spat a bit of ragleaf. “For good or ill, it’s done.”

Caris fell to her knees and kissed the old man’s armored gauntlet, which he retracted as if from a snake.

“You can keep the theatrics, girl.”

“You won’t regret it,” she whispered. “You’ll never regret it.”

“I already regret it. But no matter. You won’t last a week.”

Caris blinked as if slapped. She dropped her gaze and clenched her jaw. “You’ll see I can take it as well as Harric can. Maybe better.”

“You’ll have to do better than that, girl. You’ll have to be better than
everyone
. And not just a little better, either—ten times better! Twenty!—because they’ll all be after you and itching to prove you the weak, foolish thing they know you are. You’ll fail, girl. Fancy blue armor doesn’t make a knight. You’ll quit of your own right.”

Tears of anger filled her eyes, but she would not blink and send them down her cheeks. “I’ll be the best student you ever had,” she said fiercely. “I’m better than all of them.”

Willard returned her glare, but something in her words or her face seemed to reach behind his bluster, and his eyes softened. He sighed. “It isn’t you, girl. It’s your sex. Look at that arm.” He tugged her elbow from her side and held it out to expose the profile. “You’re strong—horse-touched strong—I’ll give you that. But the best knight’s arm is bigger, and burly like a root. The kind of strength you’ll never have.”

“I don’t fight with strength.”

“Is that so?” Willard’s eyes sparkled over his smoking moustache. “So tell me what you’ll do when a knight with shoulders like a bull is raining blows that could fell an oak?”

“Like Sir Yolan?”

“You won’t always have him by the cloak.”

“Then I’ll use his strength against him. Like you do.”

“You’re flattering me, girl.”

“I don’t flatter. I saw you fight.”

A complicated expression flickered briefly in the old man’s face, impossible to read. Curiosity? Scorn? He studied her face intently for a moment, as if he might read her fate in her eyes. Then the mask of bemusement returned, and he sighed gruffly. “Did you see that, Brolli? A woman prentice. What would Gregan say?”

“What do the balladeers say?” said Brolli.

“Cork it, Ambassador.”

Brolli laughed. “But what you say is true. There is no respect for women among your people, so your women wish to be men.”

Caris’s jaw clenched briefly. “I don’t want to be a man. I want to be a knight.”

“But as Sir Willard says, the warrior’s way is a mystery of manhood; you can understand some, but you cannot know all, just as he cannot know mystery of birth.”

“
Queen’s
Knight,” Willard muttered. “I give her a week, at most.”

“We shall wager on that?” the Kwendi asked.

“Of course. What stake?”

“A favor to be asked at a later time.”

“Done.” Willard turned from Brolli to Harric, and nodded with an air of instruction. “First lesson as my valet, boy: ambassadors’ favors are valuable things. Remember that. And if you ever snare me again with a boon like that one I’ll denounce you as a jack and trickster and leave you hanging at the nearest gallows.”

Humor sparked in the old man’s eyes, but his words had an edge to them. Caris’s dark eyes searched Harric’s face, strong emotions moving behind her gaze.

“I’ll remember that, Sir Willard,” Harric said. “But with regard to trickery, I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean.”

—From
The Tutelage Manual
of Bright Mother neocolytes

Whispers & Wounds

T
hey stopped several
hours before dawn to bed down in a shepherd’s camp beneath a wide-spreading weeping willow overhanging the stream. Sheep pies and insects abounded, but the encircling curtain of branches hung thick enough to screen a camp of twenty from errant eyes in the valley. The Mad Moon, now setting in the western sky, scattered shards of orange light on the stream. Stripes of red light slashed across the campsite, through the branches.

To Harric’s relief, the campsite was wide enough that when Caris picketed Rag at one end, he was able to bed down at the other, while she would have to stay near Rag. He was in no condition for wrangling about any aspect of their new condition together. He quickly chose a reasonably soft spot along the opposite perimeter of branches, and laid his bedding out before she laid hers, so it wouldn’t be so obvious he avoided her.

Willard grimaced in pain as he dismounted, though he’d smoked enough ragleaf to numb a lance wound. Brolli insisted he remove his armor to examine his wounds, but Willard refused.

“I’ve had wounds before, Ambassador.”

“You are immortal then.”

“These wounds are nothing.”

“Is that why you leak blood like the rain pipes?”

Willard followed Brolli’s gaze to the knight’s right hip, where the strain of his dismount had conjured bright new red stripes on the black iron skirt.

“We must stop that. I must clean or it grows foul.”

“And if I’m ambushed in my bedclothes this whole ballad turns foul.”

The two argued so long Harric did not wait for an outcome.

He rubbed down Brolli’s pony—Idgit was his name—fed him a ration of grain, and cleaned his shoes as best he could in the low light. When he tried to do the same for the gangly “unridable” filly in the faded caparison, Willard shooed him away.

“Holly’s mine, boy. You can leave her to me.”

Harric nodded. “Holly. Like Molly. Cute.”

By then, Willard had reached a compromise with Brolli to clean and wrap the worst of his injuries at the joint between breastplate and hip. With Brolli watching, Caris helped Harric unbuckle the breastplate and lift some of the quilting. He expected Caris to ignore him in her semi-horse-tied state, but she continually glanced at him across that emotional gulf. Her expression, if distant, seemed open, but clouded with doubt or worry. Such a babe she was in the ways of courtship, Harric realized. Her horse-touched nature left her without even the most basic of skills to mask her feelings, nor perhaps any inkling of why she should.

Strangely, he found that appealed to him deeply. There would be no games with Caris. No hidden agendas. No tests. With her there would never be guessing. No bluffing, no calculating, no manipulating. His mother would despise her. He laughed inwardly. By that measure alone, she was the best girl in Arkendia. If only she’d accept him as he was, what more could he ask? And if only she wasn’t magically forced to love him, he might hearken more to the stirring he felt every time she was near.

Too many “if onlies.
”

When the armor had been removed, Brolli moved in, waving Harric aside. “Go rest now. I do the bandage.”

Harric happily bowed out, leaving the others to tend the dressing. As he limped to the edge of camp, seeking a private place to relieve his bladder, Spook trotted up to him, meowing.

“Hey, catty,” he said. He was too stiff to bend and pick him up, so he let the moon cat follow, and pushed his way through the drape of willow branches on the uphill side. Following a well-trodden path—and the smell—he found the shepherds’ latrine a little way beyond a ferny hummock. As he laced up his pants after relieving himself, Spook hissed at something behind Harric, back arched and bristling, then whirled and bolted into the ferns.

Harric spun to find his mother in the path before him, white makeup flashing in the moonlight like a ghoulish mummer’s mask. She held herself like an empress in her threadbare gown, and regarded him from heavy-lidded eyes.

“Oh, this is precious,” she drawled. “Ring-bound to the horse girl, and valet to the Queen’s fool, Willard. How mighty you are grown without me.”

“Get out of here, Mother,” Harric hissed, trying to keep his voice down so the others wouldn’t hear. “Go back to your pet Bannus.”

“I’ve been watching the horse girl over there,” she said, as if she hadn’t heard him. “She’s off in horse-land now, rocking back and forth like a bear in a pen.” She snorted her distaste. “Kill her, Harric. She endangers the Queen.”

“What?” Rage choked his words.

“I see it in the Web,” she said ominously. “This girl endangers the Queen. If you will learn of me, kill her, Harric, and save your queen much trouble.”

He stumbled backward and turned to stalk back to the camp before she started shouting.

“Stay, Harric, and hear! You endanger more than the Queen’s safety—indeed, you endanger your very soul—with that vile stone in your pocket.”

Harric halted. He turned and glared. His heart was sinking, his hand reaching unconsciously for the stone beneath his shirt. It hadn’t kept her away.

“Of course I know of that cursed stone,” she snapped. “I came here tonight to warn you: if you have not cast that wretched stone away before Bannus sends you to the spirit world, even I will be unable to help you. Kill the foul cat that follows it, then cast the stone away. Even now the spirit of the stone inhabits the cat—”

“Kill my friend? Kill my cat?” Harric barely kept his voice in check. “You’re mad! You’re still mad!”

“I speak of your soul, Harric. Please…” She fell on her knees, her hands clasped in the air between them, beseeching. “This life is temporary—it matters not—but the soul is eternal! Cast it away, before it is too late! Do you understand? Answer me!”

He stepped back from her. He felt his heart leap with hope. He removed the stone from his shirt, and she recoiled as if he’d produced a rotting head. He smiled. “I think I finally do understand.”

“Keep that thing away from me!” Clambering to her feet, she backed away from the stone.

Harric walked toward her, stone extended before him, and she retreated. “You don’t like Caris because she’s different. And you don’t like this stone because…why? It must be because it threatens you somehow, just as my Proof threatened you.”

She began a sneering reply, but he advanced, thrusting the stone in her face, and she cried out, falling over herself in retreat.

“Idiot boy! Sir Bannus comes! Do not think I value your soul above the Queen’s survival! I will kill you to save her! You have been warned.”

“Leave!” he said, pursuing. “Leave me and
never come again!
” He ran at her with the stone, but before he reached her she vanished, leaving him panting among the ferns.

Below him on the hillside, the willow branches jerked. Harric could see the old knight struggling to part the curtain of branches. “Boy! What in the Black Moon are you playing at?”

“Sorry,” Harric whispered. “I just… Sorry. I’m okay. Just talking to the cat.” He tucked the witch-stone back in his shirt, and made a show of limping back toward the willow camp, hoping the old knight would be satisfied to leave him alone.

Willard’s scowling head emerged from the willow curtain. He studied Harric briefly, muttered something under his breath, and withdrew to the other side.