Masks

  Chapter Twelve

  Mark woke on a hard bed to pain and the musky scent of an unfamiliar man faintly tinged by fish. A filmy shirt covered him to his knees and he was draped in a light blanket. He sat up. A flash of sharp pain in his head, arm and leg reminded him of the fight.

  Grant.

  Shit, the book and the ring! He groped for his waistcoat. Gone.

  His bag sat by the bed. He grabbed it up into his lap, ignoring the hot stab in his bandaged arm, and opened the top flap, panicking—

  The ring sat on top of his personal effects with the book tucked in on one side.

  Had Grant looked at it? Did it matter?

  At least he had them. Tension rushed out of him in several panting breaths, leaving him dizzy and confused. Even if someone had taken his money, it didn’t matter. He’d be on Dainty as soon as he got rid of the damned things.

  Someone shifted on the floor at the foot of the bed and sighed.

  Mark’s heart fluttered up into his throat. “Who’s there?”

  “Just me.” Grant sat up. Mark’s breath caught.

  Golden hair, a tidy beard and eyes the color of tropical green water graced his benefactor’s strong face. A scar across Grant’s nose didn’t detract from a gentle gaze and the sublime harmony that only the most handsome men owned. If he didn’t know better Mark would have sworn he’d met an allolai. His heart hammered hard and heat blushed in his belly.

  “Something wrong?” Grant’s green eyes narrowed.

  “No.” Mark bowed his head and focused on the bed. His head throbbed worse and he tried tipping it back instead. Still hurt. He settled for keeping his head bowed. “I—thought I recognized you. Never mind.”

  “Maybe you’ve met one of my cousins. I’ve got dozens.”

  “That’s probably it.” Mark forced a smile.

  “Hey, dozens and cousins rhymes.” Grant chuckled, but then his ears and cheeks blushed deep pink. “Never mind.”

  “It was cute.” Mark smiled. Obvious, but cute.

  Grant stood up and stretched. He had a body like artwork, a few picturesque scars like rivers on a muscular landscape. Warmth and tension spread between Mark’s legs despite his aching head and sliced skin. The last thing he wanted was to be aroused. He wasn’t hard for the man, but it wouldn’t take much encouragement to get that way.

  Grant stretched again. “Hungry?”

  Hollow belly, weakness, a little nausea, and he did find hunger in there as well. “Yes.” Mark gingerly set his feet on the ground. When he moved the pain had jagged edges that made him grind his teeth. Someone had wrapped his leg and arm wounds. It held his wounds tightly closed, but he didn’t feel sure enough to stand yet.

  “I got bread, butter, cheese, and wine.”

  “It all sounds good. Thank you.” Mark’s rapier, pistol and dagger were on an armor stand. They looked like they’d been cleaned. They rested among well-maintained martial equipment that he was pretty sure hadn’t been there when he first came in.

  Grant owned a heavy canvas and hardened leather jacket that could serve as armor, as well as a sword and a pistol fitted with a crude wooden handle. All of the equipment had seen action. The short sword was little more than a sharpened bar with a wooden hilt wrapped in rawhide. His boots didn’t fit the armor. Black, knee-high, oiled and with sharkskin soles—a naval sailor’s boots.

  Grant unwrapped food from oily paper and began to pare thin slices from a small wheel of hard, dry cheese.

  Mark had no idea what to say to Grant. “I want to thank you. For helping me.” The words sounded so trite.

  “You did a good service.” Reluctance in Grant’s words suggested that he wanted to say no more. “So what brings you to the islands?”

  Grant was an honest man. He’d want honesty back, but Mark couldn’t give it to him, except in the form of a lie with all the right words put in to reassure him. “I couldn’t find honest work on the mainland. I have hopes that things are better here. If not, I’ve already had an offer to crew on a ship.”

  Grant shrugged. “Sailing’s mostly honest work most of the time.”

  Mark had to reward him somehow. “What do I owe you?”

  Grant sliced up some bread. “For?”

  “Taking me in and finding a doctor in time to save my life.” Not stealing my extremely valuable things, slitting my throat and dumping my body in the ocean.

  Grant poured a couple of mugs of wine, then braced on the counter. “Don’t worry about that.”

  “I’ll have to insist when I know you better.”

  That won a smile that made Mark warm.

  He couldn’t let himself get distracted. “I need to find a man named Rohn Evan. Do you know of him?”

  “Colonel Evan? Everyone knows him. Why?” Grant still had that casual sway that sweetened his words with poetic music, but Mark heard a warning tone behind the question.

  “I have a message for him.”

  “He don’t like jesters.”

  Grant had seen the masks. Protesting his innocence probably wouldn’t work, especially since Grant probably thought Mark had already lied to him about the sailing business. “I’m not in service to anyone.”

  “He’s not lookin’ for a jester, neither.”

  “I’m not looking for a master. I don’t want to work as a jester, here or anywhere. I just want to deliver this message and go.”

  “Well, I’d take you but I got business with the Church.”

  He couldn’t mean as a witness to the fight, could he? Mark tried to gauge his expression, but he found nothing helpful there. Grant’s face carried such a pervasive look of kindness, it was hard to tell what the man thought of him. “You didn’t do anything,” Mark told him. “And I ....” If he posed as a jester, the Church would have no reason to interfere unless a lord or another jester came forward and accused Mark of a crime. The temptation to lay claim to Lark rose up inside him.

  No.

  “It was self-defense,” Mark reminded him. “And you didn’t attack anyone.”

  Grant pared some mold off a wedge of cheese. “I know. I got a duty, as a witness.”

  Everyone did, but Mark had never known a commoner to willingly admit it, never mind do his duty. “Then I suppose I’ll have to go too.” He might have to pose as a jester after all.

  What would the captain think if that got back to him?

  “Not very jesterly of you.” Grant peeled uneven pieces of cheese onto an old wooden platter.

  “Look, if I explain everything to the constabulary priests, then you don’t have to get tangled up in it.”

  “I gotta go to trial either way.”

  “Trial? There’s no reason for a trial.”

  “Men are dead.”

  Mark tried to make some sense of it, but he couldn’t. “But they’re commoners, right?”

  “This isn’t the mainl’nd. Things are better here. Here, all crimes get trials whether a noble brings complaint or not, and all good men are held to have worthy souls. I figure you don’t believe but that don’t matter. It’s my duty and I’ll do it.”

  As bizarre as it sounded, Mark couldn’t dismiss it. Aside from Gutter, he’d never seen anything special in a noble that suggested that they had worthy souls while commoners were merely fodder for morbai in the afterlife. The idea that the church here somehow decided that on its own and wrote it into law shook him on a deeper level. The word heresy wasn’t a term he dared apply lightly, even in the privacy of his own mind, but what else could he call it?

  Grant brought the wine and cheese over to his table, along with a loaf of bread with the end already torn off. He tore fresh pieces off the bread and started eating, washing it down with wine. “Want me to bring you some?”

  “I’ll come over in a moment.” Mark wasn’t sure what question he wanted to ask first, so he started in the middle of his thoughts. “Can they counter-accuse?”

  “Sure.”

  Such a simple declaration with huge consequences. “So
if I don’t support your testimony, you could end up in jail.”

  “That’s about the measure of it.” He didn’t sound angry, or resigned. The beautiful man with the gentle power of a huge beast ate his breakfast as if nothing special would happen that day.

  “I can’t let you take that risk alone.” And he couldn’t let those bastards who tried to kill him win. He’d have to make a statement as a jester and have the case dismissed. He couldn’t chance Grant’s word as a commoner would measure well against known murderers who’d apparently evaded the law so far.

  Grant glanced at him, and Mark thought he saw cautious approval in the green eyes. “You’d really do that?”

  Mark had a feeling he was about to step on a hornet’s nest. He didn’t know enough about the laws here to do this, but he couldn’t let Grant face the court alone. Reading about loyalties forged by a saved life failed to convey the strength of powerful gratitude he felt. They also didn’t mention how fragile and more precious life seemed after a hard fight. Every breath felt like a gift, all because of Grant. Aptly named Grant, he thought with a pleasant sense of the art in life that poets tried to convey. No, he couldn’t let Grant go to court alone any more than Mark could have left his mother to die alone. “What do you know about the Morbai’s Kiss?”

  Grant shrugged. “They, um, fought on our side, the island side, during the war.” He gave Mark a heavy look. “Their reasons for trying to kill you are none of my affair. The war’s over. I’ll turn myself in and we’ll see what’s what.”

  “Do they bother commoners too?” Mark asked.

  “Yeah.” Grant looked at him askance. “Does that matter to you?”

  “If they thought I was a spy I can understand why they’d attack me on sight. Not that I’m going to forgive someone for trying to kill me, but considering I killed two of their friends, it’s not like they flew off like birds. But if they’re hurting people who have no argument,” like his mother, “and they get away with it ...?”

  “They do,” Grant said softly. “The war, it messed them up.”

  “Then they need to be stopped. What can I do to help?”

  “It works like military law,” Grant told him, and suddenly everything became clearer.

  “So nobles and jesters are like officers, and commoners are like soldiers.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So they can counter-accuse you, and only a noble’s or a jester’s word will hold stronger weight than number of witnesses.” Grant was a brave man to go forward alone. Unless another witness came forward on his side, it would be two on one, and military law was required to give all common soldiers equal word. “Unless someone of more importance than I comes forward to defend them, I can make a statement, you’ll walk out of there and we’ll be done.”

  Grant hesitated. “Not exactly. There still has to be a trial.”

  The court would be busy all day every day if every matter like this came to trial. “You must mean an accounting.”

  “No, it’ll be a trial. I know I said it was like military, but there has to be a trial for everything because just having enough people or some noble type on your side doesn’t make you right. A judge has to listen and weigh the facts, and there has to be evidence and stuff.”

  Though Mark knew intellectually he’d killed in self-defense, the mewling cries of the dying swordsman came back to him. That had been a human being, a mother’s son, perhaps a husband and father. “Can they judge me?” He could, maybe even should, be judged but he didn’t want to be.

  “The priests can’t judge nobles or jesters. That hasn’t changed yet, if it ever will.” Grant delivered breakfast to the table. “The barons come together to hear those things.”

  “Barons.” He was missing something. “A baron is a minor sort of lord, Grant, at least where I come from.”

  “The only folk who call themselves lords around here are mainlanders come visiting and continental sympathetics. Every islander who owns a house, land and armaments is a baron.”

  “Everyone? So what do the nobles call themselves?”

  “Barons too. For a while no one had any sort of title that wasn’t earned in the war, but it didn’t work so well to call everyone mister who wasn’t an officer so they came up with barons.”

  It was one thing to wonder what made Lord Argenwain special, and to wonder if allolai would save his lord’s soul just because he was born noble in the privacy of his own mind. But a cult that tried to remove all sense of rank from the nobility and even removed the separation between a nobleman and an independent commoner—it didn’t seem practical or even functionally possible. “Really?”

  Grant shrugged. “Freedom, noble-ness and afterliving for all good men or none, I say, and the priests say all. They ought to know. They’re the ones who see.”

  “See what?”

  “The visions.”

  If he hadn’t been weak already he’d certainly be weak in the knees now. This islander knew more about the Church than he did after a lifetime of studying history, art, philosophy—everything had been open to him but the Church. “Have you read the sacred poetry, then?”

  Grant grinned at that. “I can’t read!” He laughed.

  Mark shook his head. “It’s madness.”

  Grant straightened up and Mark’s belly tensed. He’d forgotten for a moment that he was in a stranger’s home, and at his mercy. “I figure you don’t understand, so I’m not going to make anything of this, m’lo, that is, m’jeste, but maybe you should remember you’re not on the mainland.”

  Having Grant name him a jester made him even more uneasy than Grant’s height and offended glower. “It’s just strange to me. I meant no offense.” Ancients had visions, not everyday people, or so he’d thought. All this traveled so far outside Mark’s experience he couldn’t make himself take it seriously anymore. “Have you had a vision?”

  “It’s not for me. Barons and their jesters, they get them, and priests sometimes too. That’s all I know.”

  “All barons? Even ones that aren’t noble—that is, from a sacred lineage?”

  “I don’t know nothing about that.”

  “Do you know what’s in the visions?” No doubt fancy rooms with leaky roofs and fire and children crying. Everyone had nightmares. Maybe that’s what they had begun to call visions now, as if stripping the idea of proper titles had carried over and gave all dreams the same importance as visions.

  “I said all I know is that they have ‘em.” Grant sounded irritated. Mark lowered his gaze. Lust licked down his spine and into his groin, but the potent things Grant had told him quickly smothered it.

  A long-forgotten eagerness to see sacred poetry seized him, burning hotter now that he might be given access and learn something that might, what? Give him hope that he might survive in the afterlife? Make sense of these wonderful but frightening and outrageous things Grant talked about as if they were clouds in the sky and dew on the leaves?

  Maybe even tell him if the voices he heard might be real rather than madness ....

  If what Grant was telling him was true, jesters wouldn’t need lords to save them, not if they were good men in their own right. Commoners wouldn’t need patrons. Everyone could survive or perish on their own merit.

  Gutter had said if all were right with the world, jesters wouldn’t need lords and commoners wouldn’t need patrons. Had he referenced the Church here in Meridua in that statement?

  Mark would have done it anyway to help Grant, but now the idea of doing the right thing held such rich meaning that testifying felt almost ...

  Sacred.

  Potentially. Assuming he allowed himself to believe even a trace of what Grant talked about. Assuming, again, that Grant wasn’t confused, or making things up, or addled from a brain injury or twisted by strange forces in the midst of a battle against nobility.

  “When do we have to appear in court?” Mark asked.

  Grant blinked at him. “What?”

  “I already said I won’t let you go
there by yourself. If you’re going, so will I.”

  “You’re really going to court on my account?” Shock opened his eyes wide, giving him a sweet look. Mark’s heart skipped a few beats.

  Mark made himself look away. “Not just because you helped me. I’m tired of cruel men winning their way.” If they brought a jester or a lord, rather, baron, to their defense, it might get Mark into more trouble than he could handle. But then Grant would need him more than ever.

  What about Dainty? And Rohn Evan?

  A good and honest man’s freedom, maybe even his life was at risk.

  Grant stood and brought his heels together, a soldierly formality peeking through his gratitude. “I’m glad for your help, m’jeste.” He bowed.

  “You’re welcome. Now, if you would help me up I’ll test my feet.”

  Grant took the two steps required to cross the distance and Mark set his hand on Grant’s heavy forearm. The gesture felt uncomfortable, like he’d overstepped his bounds, but his hand tingled with the pleasure of human contact at the same time. As soon as he stood he drew his hand away. His balance felt fine, though the skin on his leg around the wound felt painfully stretched. “Thank you. That should do,” Mark told him. Grant took his seat again.

  “I suppose I’d better hurry about breakfast,” Mark said. “And I should dress.” Into what? His clothes, wherever they were, were ruined.

  “Fair enough. Can I fetch the rest of your effects?”

  “Evidence.” Mark bit his lip, on the edge of a thought. He limped over to join Grant at the table. It made him dizzy and he grabbed the chair to steady himself before sitting. “I hope my word will help.”

  “Of course it will. You’re touched by the divine.”

  “No, I’m really not.” Grant might believe, but Mark wasn’t ready to, and it felt especially wrong to claim it when he wasn’t sure what the letters meant or what Gutter had trained him for. “I’m not a bound jester. I don’t know if it’ll count for anything, or make things worse—I could always stay out of it if you think it’d be best, but I do want to help you.”

  Grant stared at him a moment, then looked down. “Things are different here.” He tucked his chin and gazed at Mark shyly. “You are a jester, aren’t you?”

  He couldn’t say no anymore. “I don’t want to be, but yes.”

  “Jesters aren’t all bad.”

  “I hope so.” Mark raised his mug of wine. “No greater honor to men than justice.”

  Grant raised his glass as well. “To justice.”

  Mark sipped and almost choked. He’d had bad wine, but nothing like this: thick and cloying and almost vinegar with oak that may have been used to house something like pickles before they used it to age the wine.

  Grant blushed. “Sorry, master jester. Since the war, we haven’t been able to get good wine, not without paying more than it’s worth. I have a little whiskey if you’d rather have that.”

  Mark shook his head. He’d heard of whiskey, usually in conjunction with men rotting in gutters. “Here’s to improved trade,” Mark said, offering another toast.

  “To good trade.” Grant smiled and took another swig. Mark’s second sip wasn’t as bad as the first. He killed the flavor with some of the rough rye bread and set to eating the rest of his breakfast. The cheese was past sharp but still edible. It was easily the worst breakfast he’d ever eaten, but he was so hungry he didn’t care.

  “How far is the court?” Mark asked between mouthfuls.

  “Center of town, about thirty blocks.”

  “I’ll need a coach.”

  “I told you yesterday, there aren’t any for hire on the island,” Grant said. “But I’ll try. Maybe the church will send one.”

  “Just as long as I don’t have to walk.” He’d have to get dressed soon. Should he wear his weapons—his heart skipped a beat with a sudden realization. “I forgot to clean my pistol.” After practice he’d always cleaned the pistols right away. Had he ruined Lake’s beautiful weapon?

  “I took care of it. Loaded the pistol after and sealed both your weapons against the salt, too, though the stuff I use probably isn’t as nice as what you can afford.”

  Mark settled. “Thank you very much.” He resisted the urge to inspect the pistol. It would be an insult to suggest by even the slightest gesture that Grant hadn’t done a good job.

  “You’re welcome.”

  A thought he’d had earlier finally completed itself. “Maybe I should wear the damaged clothes. What better way to display evidence than to match the blood to my wounds? Besides, the less time we give them to prepare, the better. Assuming they’re caught.”

  Grant’s expression drooped and he nodded. “I have a feeling this time they’ll turn themselves in.”