Chapter Ten
W ant some?” Alphonse asked, pushing a small brown paper spill at me sometime later.
I looked up from examining my tarot deck, which I’d been carrying as a good luck charm but which looked like it could use some luck itself right now. And peered inside the spill. I made a face.
“You think you’re funny,” I told him. “But you’re not.”
“No, seriously. You didn’t have dinner, and you gotta eat. You’re puny as it is.”
I looked at the contents of the spill again, which was stuffed with small, charred, suckered legs, and felt my stomach churn. “You couldn’t have gotten something else?”
“I got all kinds of stuff.” He pulled open his coat to display more little spills, shoved haphazardly into pockets.
Most of the time, said pockets held guns, knives, brass knuckles, and assorted mayhem equipment, as Alphonse liked to be prepared. But right now, they were full of food—wonderful-smelling food. I heard my stomach grumble.
“Where did you get this?” I asked because if it was the ballroom, hungry or not, I was taking a pass.
“Relax,” he told me. “They got a market down at Fountain Court—the main one with the big ass waterfall?” I looked at him blankly. Like I’d had time to sightsee. “Anyway, I stopped by before coming here as it’s got all these vendors. You can even eat the container; it’s made out of pressed algae.” He crunched off a bit to demonstrate, then made a face. “ Can eat. Not should.”
He handed me a different spill of what appeared to be fried fish nuggets, and I tentatively took a bite. They were good and even a little warm still. Before I knew it, I’d finished the whole thing.
I moved on to wonderfully flavorful mussels cooked with herbs and citrus, some bland-tasting fish cakes, a ceviche of mostly lobster, and a half-dozen grilled scallops. But my stomach only grumbled ungratefully, as if the food had just woken it up, and demanded more. I pawed through Alphonse’s coat to see what else he had.
Meanwhile, Pritkin yelled next door.
We weren’t back in our room, and I wasn’t sure when we would be. Feltin, Nimue’s old flame and the resident power broker around here, at least until the end of the Challenge, had had his guards scoop us up following the fight and usher Pritkin and me here. Alphonse had come sauntering in a little later after a stop for takeout, as even the fey didn’t mess with a hungry master vamp.
Now, Pritkin was in what I guessed was Feltin’s office, along with the other heirs. I could hear them dimly through the door but couldn’t make out what they were saying, as my translator spell got confused when so many people were shouting at once. It had started giving me random words and sentences in a confused gobble-gobble that reminded me of a bunch of turkeys.
Luckily, Alphone’s ears were better, and since translator spells relied on them, his was better, too. He’d kept me up on things, not that I’d enjoyed it. The other heirs seemed to want Pritkin disqualified over what had happened to Aeslinn’s son, and Feltin seemed to be seriously considering it.
Not that it had had anything to do with us; one of the creature’s arms had refused to let the prince go when it escaped. It was something Feltin knew perfectly well, as he’d been there the whole time directing some of the guards. Or so he claimed.
But he was worried about possible Svarestri retaliation if the prince died under suspicious circumstances while at his court. And yeah, trying to explain to a murderous bastard that a giant octopus ate his son might be a hard talk. But I didn’t think that Feltin had anything to worry about.
Aeslinn had enough on his plate right now, and anyway, his son appeared to agree with his mother that dear old dad had really ruled long enough and needed to step aside for the next generation.
Or, you know, die.
I thought death was something they’d happily take instead.
In fact, from what I’d heard in council sessions, Efridis, Aeslinn’s queen, had tried to murder the old man, having had enough of his abuse over the years. And when that failed, she’d fled the court and attacked Nimue to open up another throne for her baby to take. I assumed that was why ?subrand, her silver-haired son, was here.
Or had been here, I thought slightly guiltily.
“Don’t start that,” Alphonse said, handing me another spill, this one full of little squid rings.
“Start what?”
“The agonizing. The guilt. The goddamned angst. ‘Cause, seriously, I can’t do that with you right now. I really can’t.”
“How did you know what I was thinking?” I demanded. “And is there any sauce?”
“What kind of sauce?”
“Marinara. Or ranch. Or anything that goes with calamari.”
“You eat calamari with ranch ?”
He looked genuinely appalled.
“I eat everything with ranch. And don’t get all Italian on me,” I said because he was going to. I’d had this lecture before.
He stopped, but it was clearly a struggle. “I don’t think the fey know about marinara,” he said as I searched the half-acre of coat.
“Well, that’s it then. That’s how we win. Let the others battle it out; we’ll bring the marinara and get crowned.”
“It’s a concept.” He eyed me. “So, I come up with a sauce, and we drop the angsting?”
I thought about it. I was tired tonight anyway. “What sort of sauce?”
“Well, you got your choice,” he said, going to the other side of the coat and pulling out some even smaller spills, these with their tops cleverly made to fit together to seal them up.
He started describing the contents, none of which sounded very appetizing, with frequent uses of the words fermented and krill. I took the opportunity to examine my cards and decided that I should have left them at home. They’d gotten wet before and come through mostly okay, but this time. . .
They weren’t even yelling at me, which was a bad sign. They’d been spelled to describe the meaning of each tarot card, often at length, and while it was an old enchantment, it had never failed me before. But I didn’t get so much as some confused muttering this time, not even when I shook them, and one looked to be—
“Oh, no,” I said, peeling off the two halves of the World card from the end of the pack, where it was clinging to the next card in line after having been torn in two.
I didn’t understand that, as the deck had been inside my armor in one of the pockets that moved around as it morphed. This one had ended up on my belt and must have gotten the brunt of some blow or other, probably when that damned tentacle was trying to squeeze me to death. And now—
“What’s wrong?” Alphonse said, seeing my face.
“Eugenie’s cards,” I told him, feeling teary-eyed. Which was stupid, but the deck was the only thing I had from my old governess. She’d had them enchanted for me when I was a kid, and I’d kept them ever since.
Now, they were ruined.
“Hey,” Alphonse said because he’d known her, too. “Don’t do that.”
“What?” I said, not looking at him because big, bad Pythias didn’t cry. Especially not over a ratty old pack of tarot cards!
“Cards can be fixed. See, there’s your problem,” he said, pointing at the ruined World card. “It’s messing up the enchantment. It got torn somehow.”
“I know that!”
“So you also know that, if you mend it, the enchantment will work again.”
I looked up at him. “Really?”
He nodded. “Not all of us have a ton of decent mages around. That Pritkin guy, he don’t have to fix anything. He just casts a new spell. But when you’re one of us untalented slobs and shell out for a thing, well, you gotta have that thing. So, you get it fixed, right?”
“I guess.” I didn’t know if something as delicate as a ruined card could be fixed.
But Alphonse seemed to feel differently. “Yeah, this won’t be too hard. Your Dad repaired something similar for me once.”
“My Dad did?” I blinked. I hadn’t known that he and Alphonse had interacted much, mainly because Tony hadn’t allowed anybody to talk to me about my parents. But nobody cared what Tony thought now.
“Yeah.” Alphonse looked uncomfortable suddenly, as if he was sorry he’d brought it up. “It was nothing.”
“What kind of nothing?”
He scowled. “The poem kind, okay?”
I blinked some more, absorbing this new information. “You write poetry ?”
“Hey, I got an artistic side.”
Yeah, but I didn’t think that photographing corpses counted. “What kind of poem was it?”
“Like I said, nothing. I just took a pic of Sal one day when we were running some errands for Tony. It was when the casino was being built, and he was going back and forth between Philly and Vegas to keep an eye on the place. He’d have preferred to put it in Atlantic City, but Mircea was insistent on Vegas, so. . .
“Anyway, some of the contractors screwed up, and he fired ‘em, but they’d just taken a draw and didn’t seem interested in doing a refund. Sal and I were sent to expedite the process. And it was pretty easy.
“They folded like a house of cards when she brought out the nutcrackers.”
“I bet.”
“So we figured, why not take the rest of the day off and go to the lake? She looked real pretty, hanging over the pier to throw popcorn to the ducks. Or she was trying to. They had birds that hung around that pier to get tourists to feed them popcorn from this stand, you know?”
“Ducks eat popcorn?”
“Ducks eat everything, but there’s not much to eat there. You seen Lake Meade, there’s not a lot of vegetation going on, so I don’t know what they usually snack on. But they like popcorn.
“Only so do the fish, these big goldfish types. Somebody must have released ‘em into the water, and they got busy. Now there’s a ton of ‘em, and they’re like a foot long or bigger, and they and the ducks were going at it.
“The ducks would peck at the fish whenever they went for some popcorn, and the fish would whack ‘em with their tails in response, like really smack ‘em around. It was all-out war, with quacking and splashing and whack whack whack , better than some fights I seen in Vegas. Sal fed ‘em like ten containers of popcorn she was laughing so hard. The stand made out good that day. . .”
He trailed off, staring into the distance as if he could see it all again.
“I’m sorry,” I told him after a minute. “About Sal, I mean. It wasn’t fair what happened to her.”
“No, it wasn’t,” Alphonse said, his face expressionless. “And somebody’s got to answer for that.” After a minute, he glanced at me, and life flooded back into those features. Taking his face from serial killer to slightly more animated serial killer. “Anyway, I took a picture of her, laughing her ass off, and later, after I saw how well it came out, I had one of the mages Tony kept around enchant it for me, so it moved.
“It was nice. You could hear her laugh and almost smell the popcorn. Then I wrote her a poem on the back.”
“What did it say?”
“You know, I don’t remember?” Since he was blushing slightly, I doubted that but didn’t press it. “I was gonna give it to her for our anniversary, but that dumbass Hanson spilled coffee all over it, and then tried to fix it and ended up tearing the thing! I took it back to the mage, but he said he couldn’t do anything, something about rupturing the structural integrity of the piece.
“We were all set to go out. Sal was finishing her makeup, and I was panicking. Until your Dad happened by and fixed it.”
I tried to imagine Alphonse panicking and failed utterly. “I thought you said it couldn’t be fixed,” I said.
“No, that’s what that punk-ass mage claimed. Your Dad wasn’t a punk ass. He did a spell to knit it back together and clean it up. He said he did things like that all the time when he was a garbage man—”
“He disenchanted unstable magical objects,” I corrected. “He wasn’t a garbage man.”
“Okay,” Alphonse said. “But the point was, he would sometimes find usable stuff when pawing through the trash—excuse me, the unstable magical objects—and some could be repaired and resold. It was a nice little sideline, even while he was with Tony. I don’t know why I didn’t go to him first.
“Anyway, he was going to reapply the spell, but he didn’t have to. Once it was whole again, the original enchantment worked just fine. So, all you probably need is a hairdryer and some tape.”
“Neither of which I have,” I said, but I cheered up slightly. Maybe I could save them after all once I got back home.
If I got back.
“I’m surprised it tore,” he added. “Being in a deck and all. Are the rest okay?”
I checked them out. They were currently welded into a block, like paper mache. But they didn’t look damaged and the plastic coating should help me pry them apart once they dried.
“I think this is the only one.”
“Maybe it’s a sign,” Alphonse said, sitting back and raising a black brow. “Isn’t that what those cards do? Predict the future?”
“Kind of. The witch who enchanted them for Eugeniue said that they could predict the overall climate of a situation, but yeah.”
“So, is it a good card?”
“It can be. Tarot cards aren’t exactly good or bad. It depends on where they fall in a reading.”
“Then what does it mean on its own?”
I knew Alphonse was only keeping me talking to cheer me up, but I answered him anyway. I could almost hear the card’s usual happy burble informing me of the various possibilities. I’d listened to them so often growing up that I could recite them from memory.
“The World shows a woman dressed in purple cloth stepping through a large laurel wreath,” I said. “Her head is turned behind her, toward the past, while her body moves forward into the future. She holds two wands in her hands, like the one seen on the Magician card, symbolizing that what began with the Magician has now come to fruition in the World—”
“What began with the magician?”
I shrugged. “Again, it can be a lot of things. Unlimited potential is the usual meaning, but it depends. Or, in this case, potential realized.”
“Okay.”
“Likewise, the wreath is circular, like a portal to another world. It also recalls the Wheel of Fortune, symbolizing life’s cyclical nature, where one cycle closes to allow another to begin. The four figures at the card’s corners are a lion, a bull, a cherub, and an eagle. They represent the four elements, the four fixed signs of the zodiac, the four compass points, and the four suits of the tarot. They are here to act as guides in the new cycle, bringing aid on the journey.
“One World is ending and telling you it’s time to move on to the next. Is this always positive? No. But is it necessary? Yes. It’s a sign of a significant and inevitable change, one of tectonic magnitude. It’s also a warning not to let your fears hold you back and instead embrace the knowledge that your journey has brought you, using it as a catalyst for growth.
“Reversed it means refusing to let go of the past to experience the fresh start you’re longing for. You can become your own worst enemy if you don’t listen to the advice of the World.”
“Impressive,” Alphonse said. “How many times have you heard that?”
“A couple thousand,” I admitted. “Maybe more.”
“So, upright, new phase, embrace it. Reversed, new phase, embrace it or else.”
“Kinda.”
“And what does it mean if it’s torn in two?”
But for that, I didn’t have an answer.
And we didn’t have time anyway, as the outer door to the little antechamber we had parked our dripping butts in suddenly slammed open. And there he stood, in all his mangled glory: ?subrand, heir to the Svarestri throne, dragging a familiar purple tentacle and breathing like an ox on steroids. Until he saw me, that was, and the pewter-colored eyes narrowed to slits.
Well, crap, I thought and dropped my calamari. And managed to catch him with the Pythian power halfway through a lunge so fast that I hadn’t even seen it, I’d just known that it was coming. Which was why, when the shit show next door suddenly came running, the Svarestri hope was suspended off of the floor, cussing up a storm and with his hands grasping for my neck.
It got messy after that, with lots of shouting and people, because the prince’s entourage had muscled in, too, and they didn’t like me any more than their master did. And lots of jostling for room, which didn’t make Alphonse happy, who started snapping and snarling at anybody who got too close because he knew how quickly a shiv could go into vulnerable flesh. He’d done it often enough himself.
Pritkin finally fought his way over and grabbed me. “Can you?” he asked grimly.
I assumed he meant drop ?subrand on his face, so I did, but that caused another stir, so I decided to assume that he also meant “get us out of here.” So, I did that, too, while the juice was still flowing, and I could. Leaving the whole squirming, furious mess behind.