The Intrigues Of Arcadia Read online

  Zofia turned back to watch as a young woman, no taller than Nym, ambled out onto the arena floor amidst a chorus of cheers and jeers. Arcadia was not friendly to its outsiders or countryside dag’ears, and Michal was not sure if the gossip and intrigue that would surely follow this woman would be worth the trouble. Still, Zofia had survived long in the cutthroat world of the High Nobility; he had to believe she knew what she was doing.

  Michal eyed Tallis, unable to still his fidgeting fingers as his pulse raced. His uncertainty increasing as she tightened the maroon and gold plaid belt signifying his household colors. She had a build similar to Nym's, and did not look over-imposing. While it was not unheard of for women warriors to enter the Mettling on behalf of their households, they rarely won. Tallis appeared too small, too delicate, and plainly insubstantial to last long against the likes of Nym.

  The young woman glanced at Nym for a moment whilst twirling a pair of trident-shaped daggers in her hands so fast they blurred into a whirlwind. Nym caught Tallis’s eyes for a moment and took a step back, glancing at the others of his household as if suddenly leery of the waif-like woman. Tallis smirked at Nym before bowing low to the royal box and then turning to bow towards Zofia and Michal.

  Tallis stepped towards the center of the arena, still twirling her daggers and declining to play to the crowd the way Nym had. If Michal did not know any better, he would say she did not wish to be there but rather, like himself, found she needed to be to suit her own needs. Or, more likely, Zofia’s needs.

  “How many Warriors does this Hanner Pobl group bring with them?” Michal asked as the two combatants waited for the signal to begin.

  “It’s just Tallis,” Zofia said, twisting one of the several rings on her fingers.

  Michal nearly choked at her words. He brushed the few drops of wine off his maroon and gold velvet doublet, regaining his composure before he spoke again. “Surely you jest, Zofia. Warriors are never solitary; they have several members in their household or they’re worth nothing at all. Why would one girl attempt to stand for an entire Warrior Household?”

  “She is not alone; she’s simply the leader of this Hanner Pobl group of theirs,” Zofia replied waving a servant over to refill Michal’s goblet. “She is the only skilled Warrior, true, but all of her companions can fight if need be, my dear. However, her associates’ skills are better employed elsewhere, another reason I want Tallis and not a traditional Warrior House such as Nym’s. There is a charming rogue and diplomatic scholar in Hanner Pobl. This rogue was so bold as to steal from one of Theda’s notorious pirates, the scholar so brilliant that the masters of the Ordine della Macchina will be praising his genius for generations to come. They are not Warriors, but they have skills lacking in our traditional castes. And, for what I have planned, I’ll have need of all three of them.”

  “Three? Zofia, surely there must be more than that! It is…it is such a paltry-sized house! I’ll end up being the laughingstock of the Mettling; this can only bring you and your household shame! Surely you would not wish such a thing if I am to wed your Kaja?”

  Zofia sneered in response, her gaze cold. “Stop your sniveling at once. It doesn’t become you and I will not tolerate such behavior from Nobles under my household. I know what I want and know what I need to get it, which is all you need know. Now, shut your mouth and wave to the Artisan or you can disregard that betrothal. Understood?”

  Abashed, Michal swallowed in a futile attempt to steady his voice. “Y-yes, Lady Zofia. My humblest apologies. I bow to your wisdom in this and all things.”

  “That’s a dear,” Zofia said stiffly, sipping her wine and gesturing for Michal to wave at the artisan again.

  Once Michal had given his blessing, the combatants waited for the horn to blow from the Royal Household box, signifying the start of the fight. A hush fell over the hundreds who had traveled to the city for the Mettling. The blare of the horn broke the stillness, signaling the start of the match.

  “Shall we place a wager, darling? As you seem to doubt my chosen, I’ll wager a year’s supply of your honey harvest. If Tallis loses, I shall pay you double for it. If she wins, I get this year’s harvest for free. What say you?”

  Michal watched Tallis alternate in twirling her daggers as she circled Nym. Nym held his two-headed flail by the chain, waiting for Tallis to get within striking distance before letting the crude weapon fly. Michal pretended to be engrossed in the match as he debated how to answer Zofia. If he declined the wager, he may appear too soft, incapable of standing up for himself—something Zofia detested in her Nobles. There was no solution he could see that would win him any further accolades from Zofia, so he stuck with honesty.

  Michal straightened his expensive doublet, watching only the fighters as he said, “My apiaries are the most profitable export I have, Zofia. If I were to wager them, we would both lose as we’d get no additional funds from my Merchants selling them throughout Arcadia. A different wager, perhaps?”

  Zofia tittered at him as Nym became impatient waiting for Tallis to strike. “Well said, my dear. No, I don’t believe another wager is necessary.”

  A loud roar erupted from the crowd as Nym and Tallis sprang for one another. For all Nym’s speed, he could not out-pace Tallis. Whenever he swung his flail at her head or a vulnerable leg or arm, Tallis was already ducking or spinning out of the flail’s reach. The small woman avoided Nym’s hummingbird-fast attacks with ease, which only frustrated the seasoned dag’ear fighter.

  Nym gave a guttural cry as he launched himself into the air, swinging down at Tallis as she rolled underneath him. Crisscrossing her daggers across her chest, she sliced Nym’s calves as he landed on the spot Tallis had just vacated.

  A hush fell on the crowd as blood dripped from Nym’s legs, mingling with the sand and rushes of the arena floor. No other combatant in the Mettling had been able to touch Nym, but now an untested girl had just given him two long gashes within moments of the fight starting.

  Zofia chuckled softly at Michal’s side. “A woman who can face a dag’ear and draw first blood? She’s worth more than ten warriors put together, wouldn’t you agree, darling?”

  Michal did not respond as Nym lashed out at Tallis once again, his flail arching through the air in a dizzying display as its twin heads darted out towards Tallis. She spun away again, lowering herself in a bow to allow the spiked weapon to pass harmlessly over her. The heads did not even scratch her black leather jerkin as they passed.

  Without straightening, Tallis tucked herself into a ball and rolled towards Nym, coming up inside of the reach of his flail. Before he could jerk the weapon back, Tallis slashed his cheek with her dagger and then flipped herself over his head, landing behind the elf.

  The crowd was just as silent as Michal when they realized that not only was Tallis the more skilled fighter, but she was toying with Nym. Instead of ending the fight as quickly as possible the way Nym had done to his previous opponent, she was playing with him. Eventually he would be too tired to lift his heavy weapon.

  Nym took a few steps back, twirling his flail, as if that would help keep Tallis at bay. The match had only been going for a few moments and already Tallis had cut Nym three times and had the elf panting. Tallis, on the other hand, had barely broken a sweat.

  “Finish it!” someone cried from the pavilion below.

  “How rude,” Zofia mumbled. “The Merchant caste has no appreciation for the fine art of combat, I swear.”

  Again, Michal did not answer as Tallis darted in once more, answering the cry of the disgruntled crowd. Nym had gotten his weapon up in time, one of the flail’s long chains wrapping around one of Tallis’s daggers, allowing Nym to tug the blade free of her grasp. Nym sprinted at Tallis, but she rolled underneath, tossing him into the air with the force of an upward kick.

  By the time Nym’s body crashed back down to the arena floor, Tallis had retrieved her other dagger and was diving at Nym. He was only just able to deflect her blow as she added yet another deep ribbon cut along his forearms.

  Nym staggered to his feet and Tallis dove at him once again, but the elf had been feigning exhaustion. He flicked his flail at her. She jumped over the blow, twisting around midair so that she faced Nym. In a move almost too fast for Michal to see, she purposely tangled the chains of the flail heads around the prongs of one of her daggers and tossed both weapons away.

  Darting behind the stunned Nym, Tallis kicked him behind the knees, forcing the elf to the ground, and, plunging her remaining dagger through his foot, pinned him to the arena floor. The crowd went wild as Nym screamed in pain and Michal tried not to lose his lunch at the sight of so much blood.

  Casually, Tallis retrieved her dagger, along with Nym’s flail. She hefted the flail over her shoulder and slowly made her way back to Nym as he scrambled to free his foot. Tallis kicked him back to the floor before yanking her dagger out; a spray of blood erupted into the air.

  Nym lay on the arena floor, staring up into the cloudy sky as the crowd chanted: “Finish him!” over and over.

  Tallis regarded the crowd for a moment, glancing across the throngs of the blood-thirsty lower caste members before looking up at Zofia’s private box. Michal was not sure if Tallis saw the slight nod Zofia gave her—or what the signal meant—but she exited the arena, keeping Nym’s flail.

  “Is she…is she allowed to do that? I thought that the loser was to be executed by the winning Warrior?” Michal said, openly staring at Tallis.

  “Whether or not they wish to dispose of their opponent is at the Warrior’s discretion. Over the years, it has become rather expected, so generally yes, the victor slays the defeated Warrior. Something you would know, my dear, if you attended more mettlings. Tallis will not adhere to the crowd’s bloodlust, which is something very new for the Ludwik Mettling. I believe, even though Nym lives and may yet join Kacper’s Household, Tallis has just won over the hearts of the rabble.” Zofia vaguely gestured to the crowd as their cheering faltered before cascading into a thunderous roar of approval.

  “Now all we need is for Tallis to survive against Bogdan’s champion tomorrow; then the true games will begin.” Zofia concluded, clinking her wine glass against Michal’s.

  Michal swallowed the bile in his throat. “Uh, yes, Lady Zofia. Wodan willing.”

  Chapter 2

  Tallis kicked open the estate door, sending it careening into the wall, rattling the old, bronzed clocks and platters on the walls. Rosslyn peeked over the railing upstairs at the noise, shaking her head and rolling her honey brown eyes once she saw it was her best friend and not some casteless come to rob them.

  Tallis went up the winding, narrow staircase to where Rosslyn waited, the house creaking and groaning with each step. The three-story estate sounded like an old man struggling to rise from a tub as its occupants went from room to room.

  Tallis did not particularly like the manor, but when Rosslyn had shown it to Colben, the troubled elandili child had fallen in love with its faded murals of flowers painted above each doorway and its antiquated furniture. She still felt a thickness in her throat and a churning in her stomach over not having saved him before he was tortured by Paolo and Carlo, therefore she found it impossible to deny him anything, even if it was an old, wooden estate that had stood empty for over a year and smelled vaguely of mold.

  Rosslyn was waiting alone for Tallis on the second-story landing, her hand outstretched expectantly. Tallis grinned and dropped the flail’s handle into it.

  “I still don’t understand why you insist on keeping these things, Roz. I’ve no need for them,” Tallis said, tossing herself down onto the faded green daybed opposite the window.

  Rosslyn gingerly touched the prize’s spiky heads before looking at Tallis. “It’s how we’re building for you that mighty reputation we need to get home. We turn you into the fearsome warrior these dodgy nobs want, get their support, then they agree to send us home with enough swords and people who know how to use them to keep those ungrateful louts back in Selkirk from executing us as soon as we leave the ship.”

  “Aye, I know that part, but I don’t see how keeping the weapons of the people I defeat accomplishes that.” Tallis waved to the far wall. It was cluttered with a random assortment of weapons and broken shields she had taken and were then painted gold by Rosslyn.

  Rosslyn gave an exaggerated sigh. “It makes you look bigger than life—a force to be reckoned with by all those people who want to hire us. You may not win this mettling business tomorrow, and if that’s the case, we’re still going to need to look mighty and impressive to anyone who has the coin and desire to hire Hanner Pobl.”

  “I still don’t like the name.”

  “Oi! I don’t care,” Rosslyn answered as she got out the gold paint. “The name’s clever and it’s not as if anyone here would know any Sipsi words or phrases. They didn’t even know about us lot from Selkirk until the tremps stopped being feral.”

  “The Half People, though? Isabetta said she wasn’t going to tell the nobles here what…what Colben and I are and then you go right ahead and publicize it to all of Arcadia? You’re going to get us all into trouble.” It was an argument she had used before. She did not expect it to work on Rosslyn this time either, but decided it was worth another try.

  Rosslyn snorted, not looking up as she began painting the flail. “I doubt it. No one really cares what we call ourselves as long as you remain the impressive fighter you are. Speaking of which, considering you’re sitting here without a single golden lock out of place, I take it you did well in your little skirmish today?”

  Tallis shifted on the couch; she disliked that she had to perform in the Mettling. Having the best warriors from across the land battling potentially to the death to impress the crowd was a pointless and barbarous endeavor. She had fought to survive, slaying people and elves alike over the course of the past year, but she killed out of necessity. She killed in self-defense or to protect others from suffering. There were occasions when a dark voice hissed though her mind, encouraging her to slay any who stood in her way. The voice was loudest in situations like the Mettling but, so far, Tallis had been able to ignore the voice, knowing it would be wrong to act on such impulses.

  It was why she so staunchly refused to kill anyone now just to entertain a mob.

  “Obviously I won, Rozy. If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have brought another trophy for you,” Tallis said stiffly.

  Rosslyn paused, looking up from her work to study Tallis. “If you hate the practices they have here so much, why not overthrow them? You did that in Theda when you saved Colben. After all that and then killing that demon tree thing in Selkirk, overthrowing a system like this should be easy.”

  Tallis sighed. “I don’t like the system they have, but that doesn’t mean the people here don’t like it. The Arcadians seem happy. No one is all that disgruntled by the Mettling or by their caste. They could leave and become casteless if they felt oppressed, which very few do. I may not agree with the structure, but they embrace it and it seems to work for them so I’ll just have to put up with it till we can go home.”

  Rosslyn narrowed her eyes at Tallis. “That’s an odd thing, coming from you. You sniff out injustice like some bloodhound and this caste system doesn’t raise your hackles? After you were almost sold on a Bride Block and after what happened to Colben, I thought the first thing you’d want to do when we got off that ship was turn Wodan’s Pits inside out to right this wrong.”

  Tallis considered Rosslyn’s words for a moment. It was true, in a way. She had known as soon as she stepped foot in Theda that something was wrong. She quite literally felt it in her bones. It had turned out that the electric tingling she felt was because the masters in their mechanic shops, the Ordine della Macchina, had been artificially creating half-elves and plugging them into the Tower to power their mechanical limbs. It still made Tallis shiver to think about.

  Colben was destined to have his life sucked out of him, suffering years of excruciating pain in order to power their machines, but Tallis had stopped it. She had forced that society to acknowledge their deep and unsettling secret and change the way they operated things. Tallis hoped that it would change Theda for the better, but she could not be sure as she had been forced to leave Theda in a similar fashion to leaving Selkirk.

  Her reputation from Selkirk made it impossible for her to stay in Theda once its Seneschal knew who and what she was. Isabetta’s advice had been good though; go to Arcadia and repair her reputation so that Isabetta could convince the Lord of Theda that she was not the monster of Selkirk.

  Tallis was not the one who incited the riot that caused the feral elves to rampage across her homeland. She was the one who freed the tremps of their madness, but no one, outside the elves, knew that. Now the monarchy, instead of focusing on the fact that the elves no longer wanted to eat them, hunted for Tallis, claiming to seek the perpetrator of the most recent travesties the elves had carried out. There were, however, some citizens who thought the monarchy’s claims that Tallis was to blame for all their misfortune was simply a distraction of sorts meant to keep them quiet. Those people now believed Tallis to be a savior of sorts and used her name as a rallying cry to overthrow the oppression they felt at the hands of the king and queen. That spurred King Ailbeart and Queen Morgana to want to apprehend Tallis all the more.

  Tallis wanted to go home. No, she needed to go home and fix the mess she’d left behind after freeing the elves from centuries of being possessed by the malevolent spirit that had created Tallis in order to conquer the world. But for Tallis to be able to do that, she needed allies, and powerful ones.

  It was that knowledge which led Tallis to agree with Rosslyn to spend an exorbitant amount of the jewelry she had pilfered from Rodrigo as payment for the house they now stayed in. They needed a place they could operate from while Tallis helped the nobles and merchants stop gangs of casteless from disrupting their practices. She had been in Arcadia less than a month before her actions caught the attention of Lady Zofia, who had asked her to participate in the upcoming Mettling.