All That Glitters (8 page)

The game of
couronne
he had just described to Artus had begun. The pieces were on the board, and his opponent had just made her first move. In a way, it clarified things for him. He was thankful for it. He was going to Saldor and he was going to beat her at her own bloody game. He was going to teach her to never meddle in his affairs again.

And this time his mother was going to listen to him.

 

T
he journey south through Eretheria was a pleasant one, especially now that the gnolls could be taken with them anywhere they pleased and Tyvian didn't have to worry about the constabulary being called out and Hool eating anyone. They traveled in the daylight, stopping at roadside inns when they wished, and were able to pass for country gentry without anybody raising any eyebrows. The money from Tyvian's wagering got the best food most places could offer, and the best rooms, too. There were a few featherbeds along the way and it didn't even rain very much. If he believed in such things, Tyvian would have thought that Hann was smiling on him for once.

Hool, unfortunately, was not as well pleased. She despised wearing her shroud, and every compliment paid or hat tipped by a passing traveler made her angrier. “It's just because they want to mate with me,” she grumbled, her rich baritone thundering up from her elegant human neck.

Tyvian frowned. “Now Hool, give these gentlemen some credit. They're simply being polite to a lady, not trying to seduce you.”

Hool snorted. “Then why aren't they as polite to the ugly ladies?”

Tyvian considered this. “You may have a point there, I suppose. Of course, all that is different if you have money; money trumps looks every time.”

“That just makes humans stupider.” Hool wiggled her head a bit, which Tyvian inferred might have been her shaking her mane were she a gnoll. In her shroud, it simply looked like she was having a seizure.

“Remember your poise, Hool,” Tyvian said, yanking on his horse's reins to keep his mount on the trail. Even with the shrouds in place, the horses still didn't like Hool much. There was something about a human being that could run as fast as them that they found disconcerting.

Hool grumbled something unintelligible but held her head high instead of low and thrust forward, as was her typical gnollish preference.

While Hool grumbled over her human appearance, Brana found the entire affair to be hilarious. He spent a lot of time mimicking men he saw on the road and listened in on human conversations intently. His Trade improved a good deal, though he was still prone to peppering his speech with a variety of barks, growls, and yips. He squatted on chairs rather than sat in them, and his table manners remained atrocious. It wouldn't have been so bad if Brana didn't bother using utensils—­half the Eretherian peasantry ate with their hands anyway. The problem was, he didn't even eat with his hands—­he simply pressed his face to the plates, wolfing the food down in alarming gulps. Once, at an inn near the border of the Viscounty of Courmalain, onlookers had watched in horror as Brana cleaned a turkey leg to the bone in a matter of three bites. After that, Tyvian took to telling ­people Brana was an escaped circus performer. Disgusted by the whole affair, Hool was constantly scolding Brana and did her best to keep the pup away from ­people. Brana, of course, took his mother's disapproval with an obedient whine, but then would sneak off to do somersaults for ­people at the next possible opportunity.

They traveled south along the Laiderre Road, which led from Derby across the gap to Courmalain and through the Whispwood before it turned east into Lake Country. If northern Eretheria had been scenic and pastoral, Lake Country was like something out of a fairy tale. Here, the lush vineyards and orchards of some of Eretheria's richest fiefdoms clustered around pristine, royal-­blue lakes and glittering castles of alabaster and gold. Knights in armor so heavy with magecraft they
glowed
more than shined could be seen riding along the roads on a regular basis, embarked upon this or that quest or fulfilling all manner of oaths to their liege.

They frequently stopped to pay homage to Hool, as etiquette dictated. Tyvian found this richly amusing and wondered how many overglamoured Eretherian peers would press their lips to Hool's graceful hands before she took it upon herself to rip one of their arms off. Hool, to her credit, never said anything and never attacked anyone, but she also never smiled or gave the least indication she was pleased at being fawned over—­a fact that perplexed more than one handsome young knight. Each evening, she would insist on ditching her shroud to go hunting for mice in the woods. Tyvian guessed it helped her feel normal again.

Tyvian was easily able to pass himself off as a provincial noble's second son, which meant he could glean a fair amount of gossip from each of the knights who happened by. On some occasions he was even invited to dine with the knight in his pavilion. They all had pavilions, since no self-­respecting Eretherian knight was likely to sleep in an inn, and not every self-­respecting knight was so well-­respected by
other
knights to secure himself a bed in the local castle. These pavilions were elaborate affairs, Astrally expanded and with a whole array of expensive magecraft allowing them to transport rather exorbitant amounts of food, drink, and furniture in containers that easily fit on the back of their squire's horse.

One such evening they were just outside of the Viscounty of Alouna and dining with a Sir Jenwal Esthir, a vassal of the Count of Hadda. He was a young man—­probably only older than Artus by a half-­dozen years—­well-­spoken, educated, and clearly wealthy. His taste in wine, for a rarity, was actually good, and he was sharing with Tyvian and Hool (whom Sir Jenwal had insisted dine with them) a bottle of Otove '24—­a good year, and it had enough time to mature the flavor into something more complex, with overtones of caramel. Tyvian noted, with some distress, that Hool wasn't even touching hers. She sat very still in the brightly lit tent, arms folded across her chest, and glared at Sir Jenwal. To her, Tyvian imagined this entire meal was a dominance game, and she was playing to win. Blissfully unaware, Sir Jenwal ignored her and focused his attention on Tyvian, as a gentleman who didn't want to get into a duel should. Tyvian knew, though, that any second the idiot would find an opening and, in a flash, he'd be on one knee yowling poetry to Hool as earnestly as any tomcat on an alley fence.

Tyvian decided to take his wine and get the hell out of there. Before he went, though, he gave Jenwal a wink and a significant look. “Careful, sir—­she bites.”

He found Artus and Brana sitting around the campfire outside the pavilion—­Jenwal's squire had been sent on some kind of errand, or perhaps was answering nature's call. Tyvian sat himself on a log and sipped his wine.

Artus, who had been sullen pretty consistently since Derby, roused himself from his adolescent doldrums to ask a civil question. He was sipping something out of a cup made of silver and inlaid with rubies. “Where do they get it all?”

“Get what?”

Artus motioned to the elaborate camp setup and the pavilion. “We've passed, what, fifteen guys like this since we been on this road? I've seen more fancy castles than I can count, too. And these weren't defensive keeps neither, or watchtowers—­these were castles of rich knights in rich clothes.” Artus shook his head. “Where do they get all the money, is all I wanna know. I mean, these are fertile lands, sure, but all
this
?”

Tyvian grimaced, but in truth welcomed the return of an Artus who didn't actively despise him. “Loans. Investments. It's all very complicated, Artus, but basically it's like this: Eretheria has been fertile farmland for thousands of years. There hasn't been a drought of any significance for almost a century. Now, what does that mean?”

Artus frowned. “Lots of crops, I guess.”

“Correct—­lots of crops. Lots of crops means guaranteed income. Guaranteed income means the capability to take out loans against your future prosperity.”

Artus nodded. “Yeah, I heard about that—­but then you gotta pay it back, right? You've gotta pay back more than you borrowed in the first place. Why would you do that, when you could just wait a bit longer?”

Tyvian shrugged. “You're not thinking like an ambitious Eretherian peer, Artus. Why wait when you can borrow money to invest in your land to make it worth
even more
money? Then, you can refinance your loan for even
more
money, which you can then reinvest.”

Artus laughed. “You're kidding me, right? That's crazy—­you can't do that forever.”

“Of course not.” Tyvian grinned. “When things get tight, though, you can just invade your neighbor's land and seize a particular part of it—­say a well, for instance—­and then you can pay off the loans with the new income that land generates.”

Artus shook his head, considering the implications. “That still sounds crazy to me.”

Tyvian nodded. “It is, in fact, crazy. I assure you of that. Such Eretherian financial gymnastics also happen to be the basis of the entire economy of the West. That, Artus, is where they get all the money.” Tyvian motioned to the smoke climbing into the night sky. “From everywhere and nowhere in particular.”

Hool stalked into the firelight and threw Jenwal's squire onto the ground and sat on him. He was unconscious. She said nothing, but took to examining her human nails with some curiosity. Her illusory hair was mussed, and not in a wind-­blown kind of way. Tyvian sighed. “Hool, what did you do?”

Hool glared at him, and in her copper eyes Tyvian could see every inch of the man-­eating beast she was. “That man touched my breasts.”

Tyvian swallowed hard. “Did you . . .”

“I didn't kill him. I just hurt him,” Hool said simply. “We should leave now.”

Tyvian looked down at the velvet-­wrapped object in Hool's hands. “Fine,” he said. “But we don't steal anything.”

Hool shrugged. “Who would want all this stupid stuff anyway?”

Tyvian ducked back into the pavilion to check on Sir Jenwal's injuries, but the knight was nowhere to be found. He looked everywhere in the Astrally modified tent—­under the table, under the cot, behind the weapon stand—­until, finally, there was only one place left to look: the chest.

Tyvian took a deep breath and opened the lid. There, folded up like a pocket handkerchief and stuffed inside, was the bruised and barely conscious body of the young Sir Jenwal. Tyvian sighed and shook his head. “Perhaps I should have been more specific, sir. Of all the things the Lady Hool does to overeager suitors, biting is only the most common.”

He reached into the chest and removed Sir Jenwal's signet ring; the knight only moaned in protest. The ring was much less understanding—­it seemed to hiss on his hand, but Tyvian ignored it. Just to spite it, Tyvian decided to nick the wine, too. Life was too short to pass up good wine, ring be damned.

T
hree days later the four of them were crowded inside a private compartment aboard the Eretheria-­Saldor express. They had been riding for almost twelve hours, the spirit engine screaming past the green pastures and azure ocean vistas of southern Eretheria at top speed. The sun had set while they wound their way into the Tarralle Mountains, and now, as they picked up speed heading down the other side, the Sovereign Domain of Saldor and its titular capital city was no more than an hour or so in their future.

Tyvian felt a certain dryness at the back of his throat that he had come to associate with unease. The Quiet Man back in Derby still unsettled him—­it was only raw luck that he had survived, honestly. Indeed, this entire enterprise—­his decision to return to Saldor, his plan for crossing the border, everything—­was almost entirely based upon luck. Tyvian felt as though he was going mad, somehow. He wondered—­not for the first time during their trip—­if Artus wasn't right about him. Maybe his judgment was off. Maybe the damned ring had finally robbed him of his edge.

“The border between the counties of Eretheria and the southern end of the Saldorian domain is the Vedo River, which we are crossing right about now.” Tyvian pointed to a map he had laid out across the table in their cabin, indicating a major branch of the Trell River that split off from just north of Bridgeburg and ran all the way south to the Sea of Syrin.

Only Artus was looking at him. Brana had stuck his head out the window and was letting his tongue loll, inhaling the seaside air in great gulps. Hool was growling at him, just an edge of fear in her voice. “Get back inside! You will fall out and die! Brana! BRANA!”

Artus looked worried, “Won't they catch us once we get there? I mean, we aren't stowaways, but we
are
smugglers, sort of, and . . . well . . .” Artus looked at the gnolls haplessly; Hool was dragging her pup inside by his belt while Brana howled.

Tyvian sighed. “Hool and Brana definitely count as contraband, yes. The shrouds they're wearing aren't technically illegal, but they're definitely frowned upon and will attract attention if detected. Saldor is a place that takes security very seriously, as you will soon see. What's more, the Defenders will be using auguries to scry the future to a limited extent, so they will know within a reasonable degree of accuracy what is going to happen and who they are going to find when they search the train, before they actually search.”

Artus looked like he had just been stabbed. “Wh-­What? Seriously? They can see the bloody
future?
”

Tyvian shrugged. “To a certain extent. Scrying has its limits.”

“I am waiting for your stupid plan to start making sense,” Hool said. She picked up the teapot from the end of the table and drank from the spout. “I am tired of having to act like a human. It hurts my back.”

“Unfortunately for you, Hool, acting like a human is an integral part of the plan. I've gone to some lengths to make this work, now, so don't let your negative attitude get in the way.”

Artus shook his head. “How can we avoid them if they already see the future? I don't get it—­how will Hool acting like a human fool anybody? Won't they be using magic—­won't she be detected?”