The Jack of Souls (16 page)

Harric kept his eyes on the floor, and studiously away from the corner of his mattress, in which his saddle knife hid, and away from the wainscot behind which the secret closet lay. His mind raced for a way to get them to leave him in there, alone, but his head throbbed, and his ribs ached with every breath.

Tartar knocked Harric on his back and wrestled the riding boots from his feet. He flashed Harric his orange grin. “I don’t see why the hangman should get this fine pair of striders.”

The third groom stepped away from the door to rifle Harric’s desk, which the others had somehow ignored. He threw Harric’s drawings on the floor. When he found Harric’s quill knife, he glanced at the others to be sure no one noticed, and quickly pocketed it. He picked up the bottle of harts-horn spirits, and lifted the stopper to give it a greedy sniff. The ammoniac stench rebuffed him like a kick in the face.

He staggered back. “Moons!” Spontaneous tears blinded him, so he nearly toppled the bottle when he stoppered it and returned it to the desk.

Harts-horn. That’s it,
Harric thought. He’d find a way to spill it, and the reek of it would drive them from the room. Getting them to lock him in with the tortuous fumes would be comparatively easy.

Harric took a furtive step toward the unguarded door. As he expected, the third groom’s head snapped toward him. Third’s eyes narrowed as if contemplating a sadistic kick to Harric’s crotch. Harric jerked away from the anticipated blow, making sure to stumble toward the desk.

Third resumed his post at the door, while Leader and Tartar dumped their loot on Harric’s bed.

“Fair shares,” Third said to his mates, who sat on the bed, sorting loot.

Leader nodded. “Only I get first pick, since this was my idea.”

“It was
my
idea!” said Tartar. He knuckle-punched Leader in the thigh as if to better remind him. Leader flushed and delivered a counterstroke to Tartar’s shoulder of such disproportionate force that Tartar toppled from the bed and cut his hand on a broken dish. “Moons take you!” Tartar shouted. “It was my idea!”

“My idea,” said Leader. “You get second choice.”

Tartar glared, rubbing his shoulder with his uninjured hand. Apparently he thought better of escalating the battle. He shifted his glare instead to Harric, who was careful not to meet his gaze or indicate he’d even noticed their transaction. Tartar nevertheless rose and knuckled Harric’s shoulder so hard Harric bumped his head against the wall beside the desk.

The other grooms laughed, and their tension evaporated.

“Second choice, then,” Tartar conceded. “But I keep the boots on top of it all.”

“Wouldn’t fit us anyhow,” said Leader.

They took great joy then in holding up Harric’s possessions one at a time, as if at an auction. A new shirt. A pair of ivory dice he’d won from a hunter that summer. Tartar flipped through the set of painted playing cards he’d willed to Wallop. “What you suppose these are worth?” he asked Harric. “Fifty queens? They’re beauties!”

Much less, fool. The Jack of Souls is gone. The best of all. The wild card in the deck.

Harric could still picture the dashing figure on the missing card: a half spirit, half carnal rogue, dressed for courtly revels, his masquer’s visage lowered enough to reveal the look of wit and mischief in his eye. Harric had pinned the card to the wall when he was young. He fancied the Jack a sort of hero for his trade. Mysterious, wonderful, wild. But his mother had visions about it, and threw the card away. “You are a courtiste, not a ballad knight,” she’d hissed.

Leave it to you, Mother, to take the romance from a thing.

“I’ll bet it’s worth fifty if it’s worth two,” Tartar said. “I’m glad we made your acquaintance, Master Bastard.”

Trumpets sounded and rebounded off the cliffs outside. It sounded like a royal heralding, so Harric doubted he’d heard it correctly. Perhaps another nobleman?

“Prince Jamus,” said Third, a hint of fear in his voice.

Leader looked up. He crossed to the east window with Tartar, where they poked their heads out and peered up the road. “Prince Jamus!” Leader hissed. The trumpets sounded again, louder. From the sound of it, Harric gauged they were yet a half-mile up the Hanging Road. Surprised voices echoed between cliff and lodge from the porch below. Someone shouted for the stable master and the hostess.

Third fidgeted. “Think it’s wrong we took the bastard’s truck for ourselves?”

A shadow of guilt or fear darkened Leader’s face as he hurried back to the bed. “Get over here,” he snapped at Tartar. “We have to divide it up before they get here. Choose it or lose it.”

They set to sharing with quiet efficiency then, each of them hiding their loot in boots or in shirtsleeves.

Harric backed to the desk while they were distracted. His hands were bound at the wrists, but he easily found and unstoppered the bottle of harts-horn and laid it on its side to drain. By the time the stench of it hit the grooms, Harric had sidled away. He waited for the first twitch of nostrils among the grooms, then shouted,
“Stupid cobs! You spilled the harts-horn!
”

The face-collapsing stench hit him then, and he choked in earnest. He staggered to the door, eyes watering, gasping for fresh air. “Get me out of here!” he demanded. “Open the door!”

Third slugged him in the stomach. “Shut up.” Then Third’s hand went to his nose, and he recoiled, momentarily unable to inhale. “Moons!” he gasped. “Let’s get out of here.”

“Let me out, you idiots!” Harric said. “Don’t leave me here!”

Leader opened the windows, gulping fresh air and peering out at the steep roof on each side, and the yard four stories below. “A right tower prison, this is.” He closed the windows with a laugh, picked up his loot from the bed, and ran for the door. “You’re staying here, Bastard.”

“No—wait—” Harric choked.

Third and Tartar piled out the door, followed closely by Leader. “We’ll be on guard at the bottom of the stair,” said Leader, in mock servility. “Do ring if you should need us.” He slammed the door and tromped down the stairs, laughing, as Harric coughed and cursed. On the landing below he heard them arguing quietly about how best to conceal their theft, and whether squire Keeter should know, and if so, if he would demand a share.

Harric crossed to the bed, choking and blinded by tears. He fumbled the saddle knife from the mattress and, despite the awkwardness of manipulating it behind him, managed to slash his bonds without cutting himself. Staggering to his feet, he threw open the window and gasped in the fresh air. When he’d caught his breath, and the throb of his headache no longer threatened to knock him out cold, he tore the blankets from his bed and smothered the puddle of harts-horn on his desk. That made it much easier to breathe. With a chair from his desk he barred the door. It wouldn’t stop a determined foe for long, but it would grant him the warning he needed to flee out the window.

From the east window came the sounds of hubbub and trumpets as the prince’s retinue entered the market and stable yard, but Harric did not waste time looking. He went straight for the wainscot and opened the closet to claim his things so he could leave. Hope swelled his heart at the sight of his mother’s travel pack, in which he kept his wallet of savings.

He threw the saddle knife in his pack, along with his mother’s fur-lined travel cloak and a pair of breeches and shirt he found strewn in the chamber by the hasty grooms. As he stuffed them in the pack, an ornament on a pack string clapped loudly against the siding. Irritated, he grabbed it to pull it off and toss it on a shelf, but stopped as he remembered how it got there.

When he was ten he’d discovered the ornament in a box in the closet—a spindle of white alabaster about the size of his little finger. He fancied it, and attached it to the pack string, but his mother had snatched it away. “That is the most valuable item in the closet!” she cried. In her madness, however, she said that about everything. When she died, he’d reattached it to spite her, and kept it there even though he found it tacky.

As a token of his victory that day, he let it remain.

From the closet floor he picked up his best boots, a little too stiff and new, but better than nothing, and crammed them on his feet.

Tower prison, indeed,
he thought, looking out the window at the Bright Mother setting beyond the scablands. The groom who’d said it clearly hadn’t grown up climbing river cliffs or lodge gables. It seemed almost too lucky to be true: the road from Gallows Ferry glittered with possibilities.

Moving as quickly as he could, he removed from his sleeve the purse of coins he’d lifted from the squire, poured it onto the mattress, and stuffed the damning purse in a crack in the wall, where it dropped between the laths and was lost.

The mere sight of the coins made his stomach lurch. How could he have pulled the thing in daylight with a hundred eyes upon him? It broke every rule in his first years of training. The fact that he couldn’t even recall deciding to do it was what galled him the most. It was as if someone else had controlled him. He had to have been witched.

He divided the coins in three portions on the mattress, then knotted them in socks he found beneath his bed. The greatest portion would go to Lyla for her torn dress and humiliation; the rest he’d split with Caris.
Share spoils handsomely,
his mother had trained him.
Buy allegiance from strangers, and increase love in allies.
To her, everything was political. She’d have him share his take with Lyla to “increase love in an ally,” not because it was the decent thing to do. He hated it. In their last months together he’d argued this point on several occasions, and her lecture always ended the same:
never throw away gold upon sentiment.

It gave him some pleasure, therefore, to give Lyla the largest share of silver, for he’d probably never see her again. If he could manage it during his escape, he’d leave it with Mother Ganner in the kitchen.

As he slipped the socks into his shirt, he found the purse the Phyros-thief had tossed him, and emptied it in his palm: its only content was an odd nut, like an elongated walnut, only larger. He smiled wryly. Cheap old fart. But the nut held his attention, for he’d never seen its sort before. It was brown and wrinkly, vaguely phallic.

Taken by a sudden inspiration, he crept to his desk and found a near-empty inkwell the grooms had left as worthless. He wet a quill in it and scratched a message to Caris on the nut.

My
Y.

—
Harric

He blotted it dry, and slipped it into his sleeve with the rest. She always told him his heart was in his pants. With luck, she’d get the joke.

The sounds of a scuffle broke out among the grooms below. One shouted. A tremendous crash followed, suggesting Leader had laid one of his disproportionate wallops on Tartar. Silence followed. Then someone stumped heavily up the stairs. Tartar, Harric guessed: aching from his beating and coming to take out his frustrations on Harric again. His head and jaw throbbed anew with the memory.

“Not this time, thank you,” Harric muttered.

He crossed swiftly to the west window above the stable yard, and hoisted a leg over the sill, just as he had that morning to escape the fog. This time, he wouldn’t halt on the peak of the gable to await his doom; he would scramble across the spine of the main wing to Lyla’s room in the female servant dormers. From there it was but a short hop down the service stairs to the stable yard, and thence to freedom.

As he swung his legs over the sill and onto the lowest rung of the roof ladder, he heard a light rap and a whisper at his door.

“Harric? It’s Caris. If you want to live, get over here and let me in. And hurry. There’s no time.”

—From field notes recovered from the Iberg Bright Mother Library in Samis

Father Kogan’s Outdoor Stage Play

F
ather Kogan jogged
to the head of his caravan as it approached the first trestle on the road. The bridge was a colossal timber affair, spanning eighty or ninety paces over a deep-cleft gorge.

“That’s the one,” he said, calling the wagons to a halt. “Gather up and listen.”

The Widow Larkin pushed to the fore. “Tell me you didn’t bargain with that Phyros-rider, Kogan,” she said, as if speaking for them all. “Tell me you didn’t pledge us in some scheme.” His flock clung near, frightened eyes searching his face. Many frowned and avoided his gaze, as they always did when unhappy with his decisions.

“We isn’t pledged to mix with no Phyros-lord,” a drover ventured. “I won’t do it.”

“We ain’t obliged,” another agreed.

Nods and murmurs passed through the flock until the priest stumped the haft of his ax on the road.