Chapter 93: Fool’s License

The fifty were given the morning to rest, and none of them rested.

They were lodged in the barracks on the fifth terrace, a long stone building with a yard behind it, and by the second bell after dawn the yard was full. Candidates sparred and stretched, or stood in small hard groups by house, talking in low voices about the hall, and the cold, and the fragment, and the fool.

The fool was sitting on an upturned bucket in the corner of the yard, juggling three wooden balls and eating an apple at the same time.

He had decided it was the safest thing he could possibly do, because people who were laughing at you weren’t really thinking about you. He had already heard his new name three times before breakfast: the Stone’s Fool. Somebody had even drawn a little picture of him on the barracks wall in charcoal, with a stone floating over his head like a halo.

’Marvelous, I’m a saint now!’

He was on his fourth apple when the yard went quiet.

He knew who it was before he looked, because he knew the sound of those boots.

Kaela Voss walked through the gate in her black armor with two officers behind her. She ignored the candidates and the sparring rings and walked straight across the yard to the corner, stopped in front of the bucket, and looked down at the fool.

He looked up at her, took a leisurely bite of the apple, and kept juggling.

"Stand up."

He stood up obligingly. The three balls kept going round over his head, one, two, three.

"Put those down."

He put two of them down and kept the third going, tossing it lazily from hand to hand and gazing at her with the painted mouth that smiled and frowned at the same time.

Somebody in the yard laughed, then thought better of it.

Kaela’s jaw tightened. Without looking, she held out her hand to one of the officers, and he put a practice spear in it, ash wood blunted at the tip and wrapped in leather.

"Pick one up," she said, nodding at the rack of practice weapons by the wall. "Let’s see how lucky the Stone’s Fool really is."

The yard had gone completely silent, and all fifty candidates had stopped to watch. Aren saw Sigrid by the well with her arms folded, and Cassian Haskel sitting on a barrel with his boots up, grinning broadly in anticipation.

He thought about the carpet, and the wine glass, and the boots that had stopped in front of him.

’Careful now. She’s not testing your arms, she’s testing your feet.’

Then he walked to the rack, studied every sword and spear and staff on it very seriously, one after another, and picked up a wooden spoon from the bucket of porridge beside it.

He held it out in front of him like a duellist’s blade.

The yard exploded.

Kaela didn’t laugh; she simply came at him.

It wasn’t a real attack, and he knew perfectly well it was a test. The spear came in low and quick at his knees, the kind of strike that makes any trained fighter step back, and it would show her exactly how he stepped. So he didn’t step back at all. He jumped straight up, much too high and much too clumsily, legs flying out in two directions, and the spear went under him. He came down hard on his backside in the dirt and lost the spoon.

Everyone laughed loudly, and he found the spoon and got up.

She came again, faster, a thrust at the chest. He twisted sideways at the last moment, flapping his arms wildly, tripped over his own feet, rolled, and came up on the far side of her with the spoon still in his hand and porridge on his mask.

"You’ve got good reflexes, Captain," he piped in the fool’s high, silly voice. "For a woman your age."

The yard howled.

She was twenty, and everybody in the yard knew it. A muscle jumped in her cheek.

The next strike wasn’t a test. He saw it in her shoulders before it came: a sweep at the head, flat and hard, with real speed behind it, the speed of a Blooded lancer who no longer cared what the fool’s legs did. In the half-moment he had, he understood that this was the real test. If he moved properly now, she would see it. If he didn’t move at all, it was going to hurt.

’This is really going to hurt.’

He stayed exactly where he was.

The spear caught him across the side of the head, through the cap and through the mask, and he heard the wood crack. The world went white, his legs went out from under him, and he hit the dirt flat on his back and lay there.

The yard went quiet.

He let it stay quiet for three breaths, then four, long enough for somebody to say uncertainly, "Is he...?"

Then the fool raised one hand straight up into the air, very slowly, one finger pointing at the sky.

"Captain," he croaked faintly, "I think you’ve killed me."

He let the hand drop.

"Tell my grandmother," he added, with his eyes closed, "that she hits harder than you."

The yard broke apart. Even the two officers behind Kaela were laughing, and Haskel actually fell off his barrel.

Kaela Voss stood over him with the cracked practice spear in her hand and her face white with anger, and he could see exactly what she wanted to do. She wanted to put the spear through him for real, or rip the mask off and look underneath.

She could do neither.

"Fool’s license, Captain!" someone shouted from the back of the yard, a grinning Merrow boy, and others picked it up, laughing. "Fool’s license!"

Aren hadn’t known what it meant until the night before, when Mother Grell explained it over the cook fire with her pipe in her mouth. It was an old law, as old as the Throne. A fool could say anything to anyone, and nobody could strike him for it. The emperors had kept fools for three hundred years to tell them the truth when nobody else dared, and to hit a fool for a joke was the act of a coward.

To hit a fool for a joke in front of fifty candidates of the noble houses was the act of a coward who would be talked about at every dinner in Kharos for a month.

And Kaela had already hit him once.

She looked at him lying in the dirt. Then she bent down, so close that her shadow fell across his mask, and spoke very low.

"I’ll find out what you are."

He opened his eyes behind the mask. He answered neither in Ren’s voice nor in his own, but in the fool’s.

"What I am, Captain?" he whispered back. "I’m handsome, everybody says so! You’ll be terribly disappointed when you see."

She straightened up slowly, dropped the cracked spear in the dirt next to his head, and walked out of the yard without another word. Her two officers hurried after her, while fifty candidates of the Iron Empire watched her go and laughed.

[Kaela Voss. Hostility: 100%.][Hostility cannot increase further.]

’Cannot increase further? Is that a warning or a compliment?’

Then, lying there in the dirt, he laughed, really laughed, as he hadn’t laughed since Kharn, under the mask, with his head ringing and porridge in his hair.

Across the yard, Sigrid Varken was watching him with her arms folded, and she wasn’t laughing. She was looking at the side of his head, where the spear had hit, and where any normal fool would have been bleeding.

He wasn’t bleeding at all, and she had noticed.