The Jack of Souls (2 page)

“Nothing I can’t handle,” she murmured.

“Good.”

Shrill voices rose in the bar, and her eyes jumped to the door behind him.

“This here’s private, folks,” said Mags, on the other side. “Harric’s done said his farewells.”

“Aw, we can’t leave him alone tonight,” said a voice Harric recognized as Ana. “You
know
he’s writing his will.”

“Yes, and you aim to kiss your way into it,” said Mags, “but I ain’t letting you. So get!”

“He ain’t slept alone all summer,” Ana said. “Who’s he got up there? Ain’t that simple Lady Horse-touched, is it?”

“I said get! I got drink to pour!”

Caris’s jaw clenched. She turned sideways and gestured for Harric to pass, pressing her back to the side of the passage. It made little space for him to slip by, and since she was almost two heads taller, her breasts stood level with his nose. She blushed, for though she tried to hide her feminine parts in loose-fitting men’s gear, there was no denying their presence.

His skin tingled at the thought of brushing front to front, and the notion summoned the void back to his chest and a sting to his eyes. He bit the inside of his lip and turned sideways to sidle past. Before he took a step, she grasped his arms below the shoulders and lifted until his feet left the ground and his head bumped the ceiling.

“Or you could just lift me,” he said.

Face dark with embarrassment, she rotated him past, set him at the foot of the stairs, and turned back to the door.

“Let me through, Magsy,” said a male voice beyond it. “I’ll be sure you get a share.”

“
Magsy
?” The brewer snorted. “I said get!”

Caris glanced over her shoulder and frowned when she saw Harric still standing at the bottom of the stairs. “If they get by Mags, they won’t get by me. You can thank me in the morning.”

“You’re the only one I haven’t bid farewell.”

“I won’t let you. I’ll see you in the morning.”

Harric gave a weak smile. “You still think I’m crazy. You think all this fuss about my curse is for nothing?”

“I never said crazy. Just mistaken. We make our own fate.”

“Ah. And all the people I grew up with here—all the people who knew my mother and her curses—they’re mistaken too?”

She shrugged. “I’ve only been here two months. I can’t say I know you or your mother like they do. But maybe that makes me see more clearly.”

Harric rubbed his eyes. He knew he should go. He’d kept the boil of grief and rage well bottled all night, and he mustn’t let them leak now. Of all people, Caris would know least how to receive a torrent of emotion. But she surprised him, turning toward him and lifting her gaze from the floor to meet his, a task surely harder for her horse-touched sensibilities than lifting a donkey.

“No mother would kill her child,” she said, voice low, eyes bright with tears. “Not even my mother, the mother of a—” Her gaze faltered, then rose, defiant. “I’m proof. No mother could hate her child like that.”

Harric smiled. “In the two months I’ve known you, I’ve only heard you mention your cob-head father, never your mother.”

“Don’t change the subject. Your mother didn’t hate you.”

Harric sighed. “Who said anything about hate?”

“You’re saying she loved you?”

The ache in his chest deepened. Memories of his earliest years with his mother returned unbidden. Golden scenes of her lucid days, sitting in the sunny window above the river as she read to him, or sang. He swallowed the tightness in his throat. “She’s mad. Her visions showed her that the Queen will fall because of something I do, and only my death can prevent it.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

He nodded. “But her curses are real. I have less than a day.”

The bar door flew open and banged against the wall. With a triumphant squeal, a wave of petitioners swept in, and Caris whirled to face it. Harric retreated up the lowest steps and watched as she grabbed the leader by the arms—it was Gina, the eldest barmaid—and spun her about to face the flood that followed. Pinioning Gina’s arms, Caris used her as a breakwater against the rush.

Second in line was Donnal Bigs, who caught Harric’s eye and waved a debt slip from the card tables. “There you are, Harric! Since you got no use for your coin anymore, be a good lad and float me—”

Donal’s eagerness turned to confusion as Caris put her shoulder to Gina’s back and drove her forward, mashing her into his chest as Ana collided behind. “Hey!” he cried.

“Horse-brained bitch!” Gina spat. “Brute!”

Deaf to their outrage—or perhaps fueled by it—Caris propelled them backwards, picking up speed until she ejected them into the bar, where they fell in a welter of boots and petticoats.

Their expressions as she slammed the door made Harric laugh.

Caris set her back to the door as curses rained against it. She glanced Harric’s direction to be sure he’d seen the action. A rare smile parted her lips, making her quite pretty in spite of her size.

Another throb of loss in his gut. He hadn’t had enough time with her. “Thanks, Caris. You’ve been a good friend—”

“See you in the morning.” She slid down the door till she sat, knees to chest. Refusing to meet his gaze, she clapped her hands to her ears.

“Gods leave me, you can be stubborn,” he said. She gave no sign of hearing, and he wondered for the hundredth time how she came to be horse-touched. Whether a careless maid had used mare’s milk for her mother’s tea, whether she’d been conceived in a saddle, or a dozen other explanations he’d heard, of which none might be right. The only thing anyone knew for certain about it was what could be seen: the massive body, the uncanny sympathy with horses, and the crippling incomprehension of people.

“Farewell, Caris.”

No acknowledgement.

He turned up the stairs before his grief boiled over.

*

In the silence
of his chambers, four floors above the bar, Harric inked a quill and laid it to paper.

To the lady Caris, I leave all the silver in my strongbox. May it help her find a knight brave enough to make her his squire.

To Mother Ganner, I leave my collection of painted playing cards, with all but the
Jack of Souls,
which I want buried with me, and the
Maid of Blades,
which I leave to Caris, for luck.

He leaned back in the chair to read what he’d written, and frowned. The style was too informal. He’d learned to forge wills as part of his mother’s teaching, and they had always been ceremonial in their language, but somehow he hadn’t thought his own will would need it, or that he’d ever value such ceremony. He set the sheet aside, bemused.

On his last sheet of paper he began anew.

I, Harric Dimoore, being of sound mind and body, do hereby bequeath unto the following people, the worldly possessions here named.

That was better. He formalized the rest. Then he added,
Item: One longsword, barely used, for Mother Ganner’s mantel,
and chewed the end of the quill while he studied the words. Should he add,
with my love,
or
for being my mother when my real one was mad
? Of course. He wrote it all and swallowed an unexpected knot in his throat.

“Damn you, Mags,” he hissed, rubbing a sting from his eyes. He’d already said his farewells and had his tears, and now writing the will dragged him through it again.

To Rudy, the stable master,
he wrote,
my chamber pot, with contents.

Harric chuckled, then wept.

And damn Mags for watering the wine. He’d drunk enough to lay him out, but it merely filled his bladder.

He hastily wrote off the rest, adding,
To Caris: My unrequited heart—if only it had longer to convince you to open yours.
That made him laugh again. A flirtation from beyond the grave. She’d find that perfectly in character.

Signing it for Mother Ganner as witness—as he signed for all her dealings—he set it aside.

As the sealing wax cooled on the will, he noticed the air had grown hot in his chambers. Outside, the usually ceaseless river winds had died. He tore off his shirt and dropped it to the floor, then crossed the room and threw open the wind shutters.

Silver moonlight of the Bright Mother bathed him, and he stood at the sill to let the summer air caress his skin. She watched him from across the scablands, her face full and serene as if all were well in the world. Below his window, the dark void of the river canyon sighed. He nudged a candle stub off the sill and watched it fall past five stories of inn and fifteen fathoms of cliff face toward the swirling waters. Since they’d built the inn upon the very edge of the cliff, and since the top floors jettied even farther over the river, the candle hit the surface well away from the foot of the cliff to vanish without a sound in the black waters.

The view of the broken hills across the river, which normally cheered him, only made him wistful. This was his last look. After tonight, would he ever know beauty again? Would he know anything? As the Bright Mother moon set into the scablands of the opposite shore, her low-angled light etched the rocks in stark relief, a jagged labyrinth of stone. He had always meant to explore those lands, but never had. In patches of darkness between its crags he spotted the campfires of emigrants bound for the Free Lands, another place he’d never see.

As the Bright Mother sank below the horizon, he imagined he felt her protective powers withdraw, even as the Mad Moon, which he knew rose somewhere in the east, marshaled threat and destruction.

He snorted. “Such symbolic timing, Mother.”

Laughter gusted from the windows of the bar far below. His guests were probably betting on the manner of his doom again. He’d started the wagers himself, to keep things light at supper. “Hanging” had been a popular one, along with “tooken by a god,” though his personal favorite was “loved to death by hoors.” They all knew it was a pointless pastime, since all victims of his mother’s curses died under cover of fog. The last two victims had been Harric’s friends, Chacks and Remo. The day before their appointed dooms, they’d fled for the Free Lands, and the fog overtook them. Emigrants had found their bodies on the north road, without a mark on them to show how they’d died.

Harric slammed the shutters on the view, biting back a string of curses against his mother.

The room spun. His head felt heavy. Maybe the apple wine was finally doing its work. He tore off the remainder of his clothes and flopped on his bed to lie sweating in the stagnant air. If sleep would come, he’d have it; no sense watching all night for his doom. Without sleep he’d be dull and vulnerable the rest of the day, unfit for resistance.

He pulled his sword from under his bed and lay with it clasped to his breast in its scabbard. Small help, perhaps, when fighting a mystery, but its weight and edge gave comfort.

He closed his eyes, resolved at least to rest, and fell into a wine-soaked sleep, his last in Gallows Ferry.

*

The fog rose
quickly around the cemetery island, drawing spirits from the grave cairns that crowded its stony shores. The strongest of the spirits drifted to the edge of the water. Like the rest, he was a transient citizen of the Unseen; once living, he was still bound to his bones so he might serve his kin until the next should die and take his place. Also like the rest, he hadn’t seen his kin for a single night since he died, for his people feared the attentions of the dead, and placed their graves on river islands where moving water confined them.

It is here
, he said of the fog.
As she promised. Soon we can cross.

The others stood well back and watched. They were fainter souls, weak but hungry.

They gazed in hope at the fog, which had already begun to calm the violent essence of the river as a blanket stills a fire. They gazed in fear at the sky, which, like the river, had been terribly transformed from the one they knew in life. In the world of the living, the Bright Mother and the Mad Moon had dominated the heavens, while the Unseen Moon—black as the space between stars—lurked in corners, unregarded. In the unseen world of spirits, this inverted. Here the black moon dominated the sky like the hole at the center of a whirlpool, and the sky itself—which in life displayed a mantle of stars—now bore the black moon’s web of souls.