Fortune's Fool Read online

  But of course, it wasn’t all that intelligent, and couldn’t know that it was actually telling him the way. When it yielded, Sasha knew he was going in the wrong direction.

  When it blocked him, he knew he was on the right path.

  The more it tried to prevent his passage, the closer he knew he was.

  There was no doubt that this was his goal. The pond and its surroundings were a curious mixture of ethereal beauty and shadowy menace. The pond itself was bathed in moonlight. Or at least, what appeared to be moonlight.

  The only trouble with that was that the moon wasn’t up.

  The water was crystalline clear, so clear that it was easy Fortune’s Fool

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  to see the gracefully waving streamers of water plants and the tiny silver fish that darted among them. Of course, the moment anyone entered the water, those harmless-looking plants would wrap themselves around the victim and pull him under, and the little silver fish would strip him down to the bone.

  Everything here told him that she was here, and thought she was here to stay.

  Now what Sasha did to her was going to depend entirely on what she was. If she was a ghost, and there was any vestige of humanity left in her, he would try and touch it, to awaken her conscience and maybe, just maybe, persuade her to leave on her own.

  If, however, she was nothing but hate…

  Well, in a lot of ways, that would be easier. Harder, in terms of a fight, but easier in terms of reducing the problem to a situation of pure black and white. She would be evil, he would be good, and he would have no com-punction about singing her into oblivion if he had to.

  “Who are you, who lingers at the water’s edge?” came a voice from behind him. It was a sweet voice, yet cold, as if the sweetness was a mask over something much darker.

  There was an echoing quality to it, and the sense that the speaker was somehow not altogether in this world.

  He turned.

  Like the pond, the young woman before him was a mixture of ethereal beauty and menace, although he doubted that most men would notice the “menacing”

  aspect. She was dressed in a simple gown of white with 108

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  silver and pale blue embroidery at the throat, the wrists, and the hem. Her long, silvery-blond hair flowed down her back like a waterfall. She was slender, delicate, and very pale. There was a transparency about her that told him that this was, indeed, a ghost. He wondered how she had died. How it had happened would have a lot of bearing on what was going on in her mind.

  And her eyes were utterly empty. Though he doubted most men would recognize that either.

  But her expression changed the moment she got a good look at him, from sweetly cold to shocked.

  He had anticipated any number of reactions on her part, but shock wasn’t one of them.

  “You!” she exclaimed.

  He lifted his eyebrows. “I don’t believe we’ve met?” he replied, carefully. “I certainly do not recall ever seeing you before this moment, and believe me, I have a very good memory for names and faces.”

  But she was already backing away from him, drifting just an inch above the grass, her hands upraised. “If I had known that this was your Kingdom… Do not touch that instrument! I have no wish to be sung into oblivion!”

  Her expression turned angry and sour. “Just let me withdraw in peace. I will find somewhere else. You have won, I have lost and—”

  He felt suddenly guilty, even though he had not done anything, and went on the defensive. “Of course I won’t let you settle in to my Kingdom! You Rusalkas lure men to their deaths! Any young man, any man at all that Fortune’s Fool

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  crosses your path! You don’t even trouble to discover if they deserve any punishment, much less that!” He glared at her. “Of course I sing Rusalkas into oblivion, or at least, out of my kingdom! What do you expect?”

  She bristled; her shoulders squared, and her eyes flashed. “I haven’t lured any young men to their—”

  And then she stopped, and a faint flush came over her cheeks. She looked first embarrassed, then mortified.

  He blinked. “You haven’t? But I thought—that’s what all Rusalkas did.”

  “Well of course we want you to think that’s what we all do!” she exclaimed, now bright red. “This is what a Rusalka is! Only…it…isn’t. Not always. Not…even…

  mostly.”

  “Since the only other Rusalkas I have encountered were certainly luring men, young and old, to drown, you can scarcely blame me for assuming that common knowledge was accurate,” he pointed out dryly. He wondered if he could believe her. He wanted to believe her. Then he looked about, spotted a rock, and sat down on it. “All right, then, tell me—”

  He was interrupted at that moment by a whinnying scream and the flash of three glowing white bodies charging out of the forest, heading straight for the Rusalka. With a scream of her own, the Rusalka dove into the water, and the unicorns skidded to a halt at the edge, snorting and dancing with fury.

  “We have come to save you, Prince!” one of them shouted, shaking her horn menacingly at the Rusalka, 110

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  who had poked her head cautiously above the water. It was a sign of her otherworldly nature that her hair wasn’t the least wet, though it floated around her on the surface of the water.

  “We will not let this creature of evil harm you!” said another, her hooves thudding on the ground as she reared and curveted.

  Safe in the water, since the unicorns were hardly going to go in after her, the Rusalka looked from Sasha to the unicorns and back again, with puzzlement at first, and then the dawning recognition of why they were there. She put her hand up to her mouth, and burst out laughing.

  Sasha gritted his teeth. “Don’t say what you are thinking,” he warned. “My patience is not endless.”

  “I would not venture a word,” the Rusalka said, then laughed again.

  The unicorns stopped dancing angrily, and looked from Sasha to the Rusalka and back again. And back to Sasha. And back to the Rusalka.

  “Um,” said one, hesitantly. “A problem…”

  “No problem,” said the first immediately, tossing her head. “This is a creature of darkness!”

  “But…” the hesitant one said, as she dropped her head to sniff at the water. “A virgin creature of darkness…”

  It was the Rusalka’s turn to flush as bright a red as a ghost could manage.

  “No problem,” insisted the first, who was evidently the leader of this group. “That is a female. So are we, and we do not protect females. And she is a creature of Fortune’s Fool

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  darkness. We destroy creatures of darkness. Virginity doesn’t enter into it.”

  “But…”

  “I’m sure there are virgin creatures of darkness all the time,” the leader retorted, stamping her forehoof. “The fact that they are virgins does not make them good or worthy of protection. I would guess that most creatures of darkness are virgins, unless part of their darkness is that they seduce men. After all, who would want to take one to bed if he were not being deceived in the first place?”

  The Rusalka flung her head up, angrily, and glared at the unicorns with a dangerous expression. “Now look—” she began hotly.

  The leader of the unicorns continued on, ignoring the Rusalka altogether. “It is a creature of darkness. It is a female. We are female, and we do not protect females.

  It is menacing our Prince—”

  “I wasn’t menacing anyone!” the Rusalka said indig-nantly.

  “—therefore, no prob—”

  An equine scream rang through the forest again, interrupting the unicorn. A fourth gloriously white body slammed through the underbrush and skidded to a halt beside the pond. The very male unicorn reared, pawing the air with his silver hooves and brandishing his pearlescent horn. “Begone, wretched, bestial man!” he shouted. “Unhand that virgin! Maiden, I have co—
”

  “Ilya!” snapped the leader of the female unicorns,

  “You idiot! Shut up!”

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  Ilya dropped to the ground, abruptly, sapphire eyes going wide, suddenly deflated. “Um…Zhenya? Nelli?

  Galya? What are you doing here?”

  “Protecting our Prince from that creature of darkness!” retorted Zhenya, the leader, with an emphatic stamp of one hoof.

  “But that—” Ilya fumbled “—and she—and—”

  His head whipped back and forth as he stared at Sasha and the Rusalka in turn. His nostrils flared as he sampled the air. “—and he—he’s a virgin!” the unicorn all but shouted. Sasha groaned.

  “Tell the rest of the kingdom, why don’t you?” he muttered crossly. “I’m sure there are a few people at the border who didn’t hear you.”

  But the unicorns were ignoring him as they looked from one to another of their number. Finally Ilya spoke.

  “Um,” he said hesitantly, “problem.”

  The other three just sighed. “There is now,” said the leader, with resignation.

  The full round of the Kingdom of Led Belarus took several days. Summer was a good time for that, though Sasha had no set times or seasons when he made his rounds. For one thing, although he might be the Fool to the ordinary folk of the Kingdom, the magical folk knew very well who he was and what he did, as evidenced by the fact that the Rusalka had recognized him. That meant magical folk both kindly and unkindly. If word spread that, say, on the day after Midsummer’s Eve, the Fortu-

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  nate Fool made his rounds, the unkindly could go into hiding until he returned to the Palace.

  Or something much more powerful than anything he’d ever had to face could ambush him and do away with his possible interference.

  There were some very nasty pieces of work out there, Traditionally speaking. He just considered them all fortunate that they seemed to concentrate on larger Kingdoms than Led Belarus. Perhaps it was the name, which meant “Lovely Land of Ice,” although the winters were no worse here than in other Northern Kingdoms.

  The Kingdom of the Sammi was far, far colder. But the name might well be one of the reasons why they were left alone. Who wanted to rule over a kingdom of ice?

  Perhaps it was that it was so small, small enough to ride around in a fortnight. Perhaps it was that, although it was a happy and prosperous place to live, Sasha took care that it was not too prosperous. He made sure never to sing of gem mines, for instance, nor silver, nor, heaven forefend, gold. In fact, he didn’t think there was more than a bucket-load of gold in the entire Kingdom, and that was just fine with the entire Royal family.

  The most complicated problem that Sasha had ever been forced to deal with was that of the Rusalka, and that was mostly because the unicorns had come charging into the middle of it.

  He felt himself blushing, and was glad that there was no one on this coast road to see him.

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  to keep her word and not go egregiously about drowning people, he’d negotiated with her for her right to remain.

  She would be permitted that patch of forest and he would leave her alone. In return, she had to pledge never to harm anyone—

  But she did have the right to frighten them, because that was not entirely a bad thing. Sasha had always made it a policy not to chase every dark thing out of the Kingdom, so long as they kept themselves and their powers under control. A story that was all sunshine and roses quickly became boring; a Kingdom without some frightening places grew people that were complacent about the darkness. And when people grew complacent, and were sure that terrible things could never come to their homeland, they became easy targets for those terrible things.

  This was the sort of opening that The Tradition would seize on and exploit to dreadful results.

  So Led Belarus was never perfect, and the Rusalka fit very well into that scheme of things. “After all,” he’d told her, “which would you rather? Go about avenging your wrongs on fellows who have never even heard of you?

  Or prevent little boys from growing up into the kinds of lying blackguards who use and discard women without a second thought?”

  When that caught her interest—which it did immediately, her being a ghost and all—he had outlined his plan.

  It was simple, really. All she had to do was frighten the boys and girls who ventured into her part of the forest.

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  The boys, she would terrify, letting them think she was going to drown them for the wrongs she had suffered—and she would go into great detail. The girls, however, she would frighten in an entirely different fashion. She would take them to the rankest, swampiest part of her pond, let them think that this was her home, and then tell them her own story, with emphasis on how you could tell when a young man was the kind of blackguard who would use and discard women. She would make them see that there was nothing romantic about being bound to avenge herself over and over as a Rusalka. That probably wouldn’t completely stop the girls from doing foolish things—people who thought they were in love were not known for rational behavior—but at least it would prevent some tragedies.

  At least, that was what she promised. Whether she could be trusted to keep that promise, only time would tell.

  “Maybe I am a fool, a real one,” he said out loud. His horse cocked its ears back at him and snorted, then turned its head a little to look back over its shoulder at him. “What do you think?” he asked it.

  It shook its head, but there was not enough of North Wind blood in it to make it truly intelligent. Not that he particularly needed or wanted a smart-tongued horse in his life to make fun of him….

  Well, what was done was done. He made a note to ask Yasha to keep an especially close watch on that part of the Kingdom. If people started going missing…

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  to. It was even easier, since she was a spirit, than it would have been if she was something of flesh and bone.

  Or he could get a real magician to banish her….

  Oh, he was thinking too hard about this. And one more day and he would be back at the Palace.

  But first, he planned to spend a day or two here at the seashore. He almost never got the chance to come here, except when he was making his rounds. There was a nice little inn around the next turn of the road, where they knew him, but only as a traveler. He’d planned to be there by noon at the latest and it wasn’t even midmorning now.

  Yes. He would spend a day, perhaps two here. And then—

  He sighed.

  Then it would be back to the foolery. This had been a nice change, but alas, it was time to get back to work.

  He wondered though, as he rounded the curve in the road and saw the inn in the distance, if anyone ever realized just how much work it was….

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  The inn was full of people, the smells of good food, the murmur of talk. Sasha stared morosely into his mug of honey mead and toyed with the remains of his apple tart.

  This was not going as he had planned.

  It wasn’t because the inn wasn’t warm and welcoming, because it most certainly was. And it wasn’t because he wasn’t remembered as a good customer and treated as such. No…no it was none of that.

  It was that for some reason—maybe it was the season, maybe it was because the current crop of local youngsters was just old enough to begin thinking of love and lovers—the inn was full to the rafters with courting couples. What they were all doing here, he had no clue.

  It was the middle of the day, and surely they should all be out working. Fishing, cleaning, baking, mending nets 118

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  or boats—what have you. Yet here they were, mooning at each other over their midday meal.


  Maybe he had been a little too good when he’d sung all those songs at the wedding. Sometimes even he couldn’t tell what The Tradition was going to seize on and run away with.

  The barmaids each had their swains, who teased them as they worked, under the indulgent eye of the innkeeper’s wife. There were couples at every table, inside and out, in every possible stage of courtship. One very young pair, who from their costumes were a couple of apprentices to a potter, was at the shy, tongue-tied stage, hardly looking at each other, yet the tension between them was palpable. Another, who could hardly be separated, and he learned from overhearing bits of conversation, were newly married; he a fisherman, she a net-maker. Two couples were awkward for another reason; dressed in their finest, these were arranged engagements and the young men were awkwardly, and dutifully, trying to win over the young ladies while their matchmakers looked on. It didn’t look to Sasha as if they were getting bad bargains either; both girls were clean, nice to look at, and seemed to be amiable and cheerful, both young men looked as if they were hardworking and not unkind.

  As arranged marriages went, these were certainly not going to be the worst. And—well, it looked as if the girls were beginning to think well of the boys.

  That wasn’t a bad thing at all.

  There was an old couple near the fire, quietly sharing Fortune’s Fool

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  a meal, but with obvious affection between them; those two he could understand being here in the middle of the day. Though he wore the garb of a fisherman, it was clear that his fishing days were long past.

  And the innkeeper and his wife were clearly bound by both love and a strong partnership.

  It was all a lovely atmosphere of contentment, affection, cordiality.

  And the result of all of this was to make Sasha feel terribly lonely.

  It was one of those moments when he realized how very apart he was from the rest of his family. His very nature set him apart from them; he would always be one thing to them in private and something different in public. Out here he wasn’t the Fool; he was Sasha the Singer; a bit of a mystery, but he’d made this trip often enough that people took him at face value. When he got home, though, it would be back to being Sasha the Fool, and no one was really kind to Sasha the Fool except behind closed doors.