Fortune and Fools, Chapter Two (FFXII AU, Balthier, Zecht)
Aaand here's chapter two, finally. ehe. You know, considering how long it took me to write the first chapter, the turnover time between chapters one and two is actually short! In all seriousness, though, I think chapter three's coming along next week.
Here's Chapter One, if you missed it. A brief recap: After running away, Balthier decides to become an actor instead of a sky pirate, and thinks himself quite clever after penning a few plays and escaping Archadia's notice. He discovers he's wrong about the latter point when Judge Magister Zecht asks him to make a choice -- either he gets a court-martial for desertion, or he puts his talents to use as a spy for Archades...
Fortune and Fools, Chapter Two. FFXII AU; Balthier, Zecht, and a whole slew of others. 4340 words. This chapter is worksafe, others may not be.
Ffamran Bunansa ran away to become the leading man, but the role of Balthier carries its perils.
Chapter Two: In which Balthier makes a choice and adopts a new profession.
Balthier blinks. “I hadn’t,” he says, though he believes there’s some historical precedent for it. The woman in the old leather-bound histories lining his father’s shelves-Charlotte Hardin? Yes, and House Solidor, as its iron fingers tightened around Archadia, elevated her family to the nobility as a reward for her service-she was an actress, or posed as one for a time. He hasn’t read Phyllo’s Histories in years, but he remembers the sketch of her: in profile, her chin sharp and tilted up, her dark hair coiled at the nape of her neck, her eyes focused not ahead but to the side, as though she stared at the artist tasked with rendering her on paper as he did his work.
He rests his knuckles on his forehead. Archadia musters her forces in his mind, prepares to rush over him in a wave of things best left forgotten. “I haven’t paid any mind to Archadian politics in a long time,” he says, which is true enough. He lets Meric fret about House Solidor’s latest triumphs or atrocities and keeps his mind on his craft. No point in spending your life looking over your shoulder. You’ll miss what’s in front of your nose if you keep that up. He wrote that in The Tale of Orras the Mariner.
“You’re skilled dissemblers,” Zecht says, jerking Balthier’s thoughts away from that topic. “You rub elbows with thieves and nobles alike.”
“There’s little enough difference between the two,” Balthier mutters.
Zecht snorts. “I’ll concede that,” he says. “You travel the breadth of Ivalice, and nobody questions your purpose in doing so. You costume yourselves for all occasions, you change your names and manners as easily as an ardent might change his hat, you-most of you-keep your counsels well. And a surprising number of you show skill as picklocks, forgers, smugglers. Doubtless you learn these crafts to better your art,” he adds.
“Oh, you’d be surprised,” Balthier says, though he learned to pick locks far before he learned how to act. It’s a useful skill for Judges, too-or at least for Judges-in-Training with a yen for the information trade.
“Little surprises me, Ffamran Bunansa.”
He folds his arms across his chest, looks up at the ceiling. Cobwebs stretch between the exposed support beams, and rot runs along the edges of the wood. Well, one doesn’t visit the Sea Pearl for the décor. “If you’ve seen so much, what do you need me for?” he asks. “Surely you can get a new beard, remove that earring, and call yourself by another name. What does a chameleon such as you need with spies?”
“A man can only play so many parts.” Zecht strokes his beard; Balthier sees a faint gummy residue circling its edges, beads of dried adhesive tangled in its hairs. So it is a false one. “I am the merchant Tariq in Rozarria, the scholar Haldare on pilgrimages to Kerwon, the botanist Westver in Dalmasca. And with my duties as Zecht demanding so much of my time, I haven’t the energy to increase my repertoire. I can’t be everywhere at once, after all.”
“Really? Judging by your reputation, you’re nigh-omnipresent.” Balthier examines the grime under his fingernails. Nothing is beneath the Ninth’s notice, or so the rumors in the Akademies go. The Ninth keeps track of how many times a day you use the privy, the Judges-in-training used to whisper when they thought themselves out of the instructors’ hearing.
“It’s an illusion we labor to maintain,” Zecht says.
“You’re being quite frank.”
“I speak to you as I would speak to any Judge in my employ,” he says. “I like to credit my subordinates with some measure of intelligence.”
“I’m not a Judge,” Balthier sighs. His temples throb; he refrains from massaging them.
“But you’re in my employ.”
They also said that the Ninth housed the most arrogant bastards you’d ever cross paths with, Balthier thinks. “We still haven’t discussed the terms of my employment.” The carousing from the tavern filters up through the gaps in the floorboards. A woman’s voice, light and clear, sings the first few lines of an old Archadian love song. He wonders if Meric and Kait are still down there, glancing up at the steps through the haze of smoke undoubtedly filling the air by now or knocking back pints with the best of the scoundrels sitting at the bar proper.
Zecht glances at the door, crosses to it, jiggles the bar sealing the door shut and wrenches it even more tightly closed. “It concerns your patron.”
“My-” He starts to say he doesn’t have one, but the Linberry Players do, of course, though the flow of gil from his coffers has stemmed to little more than a trickle these days. Something about taxes House Solidor levied or his sister’s extravagant dowry. Meric explained it, but Balthier only half-listens to anything the man says. “Garrick Beoulve?”
“Lord Beoulve.” Zecht nods. “We believe he’s in collusion with Rozarria.”
“Indeed,” Balthier says. “And why is that?”
“We’ve kept an eye on his finances over the past year or so.” Zecht takes his chair again. “He reports a monthly income hundreds of thousands of gil lower than it ought to be. We’ve found no trace of the missing gil in his estates, in his transactions, in his donations…”
“And you conclude he’s invested the money elsewhere? Somewhere he’d rather not have Archadia look?”
Zecht nods. “Lord Beoulve’s master of chocobos is a Rozarrian man. Yunus, of House Dani.” He looks at Balthier, his brow arched.
House Dani should mean something to him, Balthier knows, but his lessons in Rozarrian history took place during another lifetime. He grasps at a thread, a faint memory of a stifling afternoon spent with his nose buried in a book as the breeze stubbornly refused to circulate by him. “They’re related to House Margrace, aren’t they?” he asks. “On the distaff side. Serving as master of chocobos to an Archadian lord hardly seems an occupation befitting one of their sons, unless House Dani’s fallen on dire times.”
“They suffered losses when they mounted an expedition to reclaim the Yensan Sandseas, but nothing so dire as what you suggest,” Zecht says. “House Margrace helped to bolster their finances after that ill-fated maneuver, after all.”
Balthier whistles. “And this son-Yunus-he goes about proclaiming his heritage for all Archadia to know?”
“He conceals it.” Zecht’s teeth flash white, sharp. “Not well enough. Yunus entered Lord Beoulve’s service a year ago, and a month later the first financial discrepancies started to surface.”
“Perhaps Yunus helped himself to Lord Beoulve’s gil without my lord’s consent,” Balthier says. “Found his way into the ledgers and skimmed the estate’s profits. Lord Beoulve either doesn’t know or doesn’t wish to report the loss.” Some Houses value pride over sense; he doesn’t know if House Beoulve falls into that category, but he remembers the House’s reputation for chivalry and honor, which suggests some manner of mulishness on their part over matters concerning reputation.
“We thought so at first,” Zecht says. His fingers sketch a downward arcing path across the table, from a point Balthier assumes is Archadia to another point, south and to the west of the first. “But then our agents found a member of his personal guard in Rozarria’s capital. Visiting his sick mother, he claimed.”
“I presume said sick mother doesn’t exist.”
“We’ve found no trace of her.” Again the flash of teeth. “It is safe to assume she does not. Our agents also intercepted a letter to House Margrace from parties unknown. The senders discussed an Archadian benefactor, someone working with the Margraces and the military to solve a problem concerning chocobos.”
Balthier can think of several problems with chocobos-noisy ill-tempered strutting preening overgrown birds long overdue to be roasted on a spit; give him an airship any day, thank you-but for once he exercises restraint. He’s capable of doing it when it suits him, though it doesn’t suit him very often. “What problem might that be?”
“Would that we knew, but we remembered Lord Beoulve and Yunus when we learned of the letter’s contents.”
He admits he doesn’t know. Interesting. Atypical, but Judge Magister Zecht had something of a reputation for unorthodoxy, as he recalled. Many of the Judge Magisters did. The rank clearly encouraged eccentricity among those who’d achieved it, his yearmates at the Akademy concluded.
“And there appears to be an-attachment between the two of them,” Zecht continues, “far more than what their short period of acquaintance would suggest.”
Balthier props his boots up on the rickety table. It creaks, protesting the weight. He pays the noise no mind. “Perhaps they’re lovers?” he suggests. “And the lordling masquerades as a stableboy to hide from those who would never condone their star-crossed ardor.” It would make a decent enough play, some suitable amusement for an evening. Plenty of places for the ladies to clutch their handkerchiefs and sigh.
Zecht braces the heels of his palm on the edge of the table and pushes himself upright, walks around its perimeter and grabs Balthier’s collar and jerks him forward by it. “If you play the fool, I will be forced to treat you as one.” His voice is clear, measured, even: he states rather than shouts, lets the threat of his words bleed through in the force of his fist at Balthier’s throat, in the sharpness of his teeth. “Do we have an understanding?”
“We do,” Balthier says, and Zecht releases him; his chair settles against the ground again, and the din from the tavern below once more echoes in the back of his mind, an ambient noise to accompany the proceedings. He keeps his hands in his lap, drums his fingers on his knee. “So you wish me to spy on my lord? Learn more about his friendship with his charming chocobo-wrangler?”
“Yes,” Zecht says. “Talk to whomever you need to. See if Lord Beoulve’s ties to Rozarria are documented. Find out where his gil is going and to what ends it’s being used. Look for any Archadian allies he has in this business. We must not, cannot move against him until we know how far this web of treachery spans.”
“And if I do this, my obligation to Solidor and country is discharged?”
“Partially.”
“Of course.” He rubs the back of his neck. He has to tug his rings free of his hair; it’s gotten obscenely long in the back. He ought to cut it again. “And if I decide to thumb my nose at the lot of you and take off for Rozarria and beyond?”
Zecht smiles again, that sinuous curl of his lips. “Then Master Ralenson, Mistress Tyral, and all the others in your troupe will be penalized for harboring a fugitive and deserter. And I will not leave the matter at a mere fine.”
Perhaps he should have become a sky pirate. Alone in the clouds without a soul to bind him to the earth again, without another’s cares to shoulder or another’s troubles to consider.
It would be a lonely sort of life.
“I suppose we have an agreement, then.” He has little enough choice in the matter, and it chafes, chafes like an iron collar clamped around his neck and cinched tight. “How shall I report to you? Need I fill out form after form after form?”
“You needn’t,” Zecht says. “You’ll report either to me or to one of my subordinates. They’ll know to look for you. They’ll display the insignia of the Ninth-discreetly, I should hope. I trust you still remember what the emblem looks like.”
“All too well.”
“Think of it as an opportunity for adventure, Master Balthier.”
“My adventures tend to go better when they’re scripted,” he replies.
“Here’s your chance to improvise,” Zecht says.
“Within a framework.”
“Of course.” Zecht gets up from his chair and pauses, his hand over the bar. “The Ninth will contact you in a fortnight’s time. Be ready.”
“What should I do if I’m discovered?” he asks. “You found me out easily enough, it seems. What if others do the same?”
“Lie. You’ve practice at doing that, I know. I leave the nature of such lies to your imagination.”
He chews on the inside of his lower lip. There’s a difference between fabrication and falsehood, he knows that, he relies on the distinction, his work functions because of that distinction. But he sees little point in elucidating the difference now, and Zecht would humor him but not believe him, not truly listen, because he knows what Balthier’s answer will be, must be, and damn him for cutting through the wordplay to get at the truth. Really, what sort of Archadian is he? “One more question, if you don’t mind.” Balthier steeples his fingers together in front of his mouth, his rings clicking.
Zecht shakes his head. “Were you this inquisitive at the Akademy?”
“Quite so,” he retorts. “Considering the manner in which I’ve been recruited to your service, I have little incentive to report the truth about Lord Beoulve to you. How do you know you can trust me?” Perhaps Zecht’s logic will finally show a hole, a weakness he can exploit, a gap he can slide through.
“You will have your little show of defiance, I suppose,” Zecht says. “You’re not the only agent we’ve assigned to watch Lord Beoulve. If we find discrepancies between their reports and yours, we’ll take them into account.”
Thorough sort of bastard, isn’t he? “If you’ve got other men and women doing my job, I don’t see why my role is so vital.”
“Multiple perspectives,” Zecht says. “You’ll see elements of this affair that our other agents may miss, and they’ll take note of details that might elude you.”
“And we’ll all be wiser in the end,” Balthier mutters.
“I hope so.” Zecht presses a few hairs in his false beard back into place. “Time to play the pirate king once more.” At last, he pulls the door open.
Balthier rubs his thumb against the patch of skin between his eyebrows. He suspects the headache building there now will be followed by many, many others.
***
“And what did the lord Reddas want with you?” Meric asks him next evening, ten minutes before the start of The Lady’s Last Resort. The backstage area is, as usual, thrown into an ordered sort of confusion; actors dab powder puffs on their faces to set their makeup and do their best not to spill any powder on their costumes, the young apprentices run every which way fetching props and tying laces and fastening buttons for the overburdened senior players, and a constant stream of whispers fills the air and serves as a background noise to Meric’s strained commands.
Balthier fumbles with the clasps on his vest; the copper fastenings have tarnished over time, leaving them a dull and sickly green. “He advised me to pick my fights more carefully in the future.”
“That can’t have been all-Gwynne, will you help me lace up this damned dress? Thank you-” Kait grimaces as young Gwynne tugs the laces tight, strapping Kait into a wine-colored velvet monstrosity of a dress, complete with heavy folds and billowing sleeves and frayed silver trim. “You were upstairs with him for quite some time.”
He sighs. “Lord Reddas grew enamored of me and tried to lure me to his bed, and I, foolish man, resisted him, pleading my virtue.”
Kait snorts.
“Niniver! Keep your hands away from Kait’s wardrobe and get back to repairing Balthier’s doublet!” Meric strikes his temple with the heel of his palm. “These apprentices-”
“-will be the death of you, I’m sure,” Kait says. “Gwynne, mind that you don’t catch my hair in the stays. Really, Meric, is there anything that won’t be the death of you? It’s a miracle you’re still alive."
" Five minutes!” Meric calls to the actors, all of whom acknowledge him with a whispered “thank you” and then go back to their previous bits of business: adjusting wigs, walking through dances and duels with their partners in those scenes, mending stockings, trading stories. "And I know it is.” Meric tugs his cuffs down. “I’d best go and beg the audience’s forgiveness for what we’re about to do.”
“The Lady’s Last Resort ought to do well,” Kait says, “though we might have done better had we put Balthier in the dress.”
“There are some sacrifices I will not make for my art.” Balthier resumes buckling his boots. The curled toes pinch his feet, but he knows better than to complain. “Who’s in attendance?”
“We have a respectably sized audience tonight,” Meric says, “or so Rollys reports. Three-quarters full for once, and three of Lord Beoulve’s men are here: a messenger and two guards.”
“Oh?” Kait asks. “And what’s the message?”
Meric shakes his head. “He won’t give it to us until after the evening’s performance.”
“Interesting,” Balthier says. “Might the news affect our performances for the worse?”
“Or perhaps this messenger places pleasure before business,” Kait says. She tosses her curls back from her brow and fixes her diadem in place, a gaudy gift from-she won’t say where, but Balthier assumes it’s a present from a past admirer, and a cheap one, too; the jewels are glass replicas. “Well, we’ll have time to contemplate the message’s contents later.”
“Right, yes.” Meric shifts his weight from foot to foot. “The prologue. Of course. Balthier, mind you don’t clock Rollys’s jaw when you draw your sword tonight.”
“Really,” Balthier mutters, “he should have gotten out of the way faster.”
Meric darts out the door and onto the stage, shaking his head until he vanishes from sight. The crowd greets him with a swell of noise, applauses and whistles mixed with cat-calls and several, ah, creative phrases. A hush of sorts falls over the backstage area, and several actors cross to corners of the room, delivering their speeches at half-volume to the weathered wooden walls. Kait and Balthier walk to the props table: Kait to make sure her fan’s in place, and Balthier to make sure none of the other players mistakenly picked up the letter he’s supposed to carry into his first scene, when Lord Horner receives the lover's confession meant for Sharpmore the merchant.
“I doubt he slept enough last night,” Kait says quietly. She paces; her skirts are voluminous, cumbersome, and she can’t sit in them, not properly. She hovers over chairs and rustles the fabric around, but she never manages to lower herself enough.
“Is he fretting about the company’s fortunes again?”
She nods, her lips pale beneath the rouge. “He’s worried that Lord Beoulve’s men are here to announce the dissolution of the Linberry Players.”
“They can’t.” Balthier pauses, tapping his chin. “Could they?”
“They can’t prevent us from operating a theatre company, but if Lord Beoulve withdraws his patronage, we can’t call ourselves the Linberry Players any longer.” A roar of laughter from the audience, the echoes loud enough to set the floor beneath them reverberating. “Meric must be making a good impression.”
“I suppose he’s rewritten the old prologue.” Balthier remembers it: he found it simpering, a plea for the audience’s tolerance.
“Yes, I suppose he has.” She presses her palm to the rough wood of the stage door, her eyes half-closed. “If Lord Beoulve-if he withdrew his support. I wouldn’t be surprised, I don’t think. He’s been stingy enough with his patronage lately.” Her smile flashes across her face, transient as-transient as a wisp of a cloud over the face of the moon, to borrow a metaphor from The Alchemist’s Gambit. He always was fond of that one.
“Stingy?” Balthier asks, but Kait continues on, delivering her speech to an audience he can’t see.
“You remember Lord Beoulve, don’t you?” she asks. “Fair-haired, clean-shaven, the saddest blue eyes I’ve ever seen.” For a moment, she stands on the precipice of-something, some revelation powerful enough to leave an audience breathless. “I would, however,” she says, rubbing the bridge of her nose, “understand if you did not recall him. He hasn’t attended one of our performances in, oh, a year.”
“He never asked after me,” Balthier says. A year? Interesting timing, that. If Rozarria hadn’t claimed it first, would some of Lord Beoulve’s errant gil have found its way to the Linberry Players’ coffers? He wonders. Oh, he wonders. “Did we anger him a year ago?”
“I don’t see how we could have given offense,” she says. “We performed The Sorrows of Alyse that evening. His favorite. And he sent me a dozen Galbana lilies afterwards.” She twitches her head to the side, enough to clear it but not enough to dislodge her diadem, and resumes her pacing. “Perhaps he’s found a more diverting pastime than the theatre.”
“Perhaps.” I suppose Rozarrian plots are more exciting than the ones we stage, at any rate. “But what spectacle could prove more entertaining than our fair selves?”
Kait snorts. “He’s made new friends, I think. I suppose his new friends have other concerns than the theatre. I would expect as much, given the company he now keeps.”
Bless Kait. She’s going to make this task of his a sight easier.
Rollys and Gwynne rush past the two of them with breathless apologies; Balthier imagines them pink-cheeked and panting on the stage, launching into the introductory song without enough breath to support their voices. The first few phrases falter, but then he hears their high piping voices, Rollys’s sweet tenor and Gwynne’s soft alto, and the crowd seems to approve.
“Do tell,” Balthier murmurs to Kait.
“Teysa tells me he’s been seen about Archades with Lady Kaesa, of House Rinhardt.” She twirls one of her curls around her finger, thinking. “Though I confess I’m surprised he has time for her, as he seems quite attached to a young man in his employ. Quite attached, Teysa says." Kait's tone is droll. "She heard it from Lord Beoulve’s cook, who heard it from gods know where.”
And thank the gods for gossiping servants, Balthier silently adds. Of course, with streetears offering a pretty sum for tidbits about their masters, it’s hard to keep them silent. It was an old lament of his father’s, about how his most secret projects were never as secret as he would have liked them to be. His thrice-damned father. He doesn’t need to be thinking of such things now.
“Though why all of this should be of any concern to you, I don’t know,” Kait says, fixing him with her best stare (and she has a number of very good ones).
“Oh, I’m a hopeless gossip.” Balthier laces his finger behind his head. “You know that, Kait.”
“Indeed. Oh hell, that’s my cue.” And with that, she gathers up her skirts and half-runs, half-waddles to the stage door, the tips of her slippers peeking out from the swathes of velvet.
He lingers by the stage door. The guards and that messenger, why are they here? What do they know? And that’s always the question, isn’t it, whether you’re in Archades or Balfonheim or Nabradia or Rozarria or in the midst of the vast uncharted wastes of the Cerobi Steppe: what do you know?
What does he know about House Rinhardt? His sister Viruna married a Richese, and House Richese is-a branch of House Rinhardt? Related to them through years of intermarriage? Something along those lines. Genealogy was, likely still is, Viruna’s specialty and not his; he read books on engineering underneath his desk when his tutor tried to lecture him on the great Houses of Archadia. House Richese has a seat in the Senate, he does remember that, but it’s a minor one, he thinks House Beoulve is in considerably higher standing, or it was the last time he bothered to check. He doesn’t imagine the jostling for position among the Houses has changed their actual status much. Solidor governs the empire, the Senate bickers, the spires of Archades stretch closer and closer to the sky, and the city stagnates, drained of its vitality, its pulse, its blood.
The Rinhardts. Of course. He rubs his forehead and curses Zecht’s ancestors, whoever they may be. Their ancestral lands are somewhere in the Tchita Uplands, yes? Close to the Nabradian border-
“-than die a fool in Fortune’s bosom,” Kait says, and the audience laughs. They always laugh when she wants them to; she commands their attention, directs it, controls it. And that’s his cue.
He strides onstage, his chest thrown out, walking with a bowlegged sort of gait. “And I would die in your bosom, Lady, for I’d be a fool indeed to spurn what it offers.” The audience howls, either at his lines or at the feathers stitched to the back of his vest that make it look as though he’s growing a tail from the base of his spine. “I have sampled Fortune’s milk; it is too bitter for my tastes, but I wager yours is sweeter.”
“Why, Lord Horner,” Kait says, snapping her fan out and holding it steady in front of her face, “Fortune’s fruits are far more ample, and I wonder if you have sampled them fully if you glorify my little treasures so.”
Balthier bends at the waist, leaning in and jutting his neck forward, his eyes wide and his upstage hand held at his ear. “Madam, you do yourself an injustice, for indeed your treasures overflow all restraints.”
The audience signifies their approval of the repartee, Balthier allows himself a small bow, and beneath the crystals’ steady glow overhead, slathered in makeup and draped in heavy old clothes; here, with his voice pitched higher and his stance broadened, it is easy to forget about Zecht and Lord Beoulve and Rozarria and clashes among the great states. There is only the stage, which now resembles a drawing room, only the stage and the audience, and in this realm, he leads the action.
Here's Chapter One, if you missed it. A brief recap: After running away, Balthier decides to become an actor instead of a sky pirate, and thinks himself quite clever after penning a few plays and escaping Archadia's notice. He discovers he's wrong about the latter point when Judge Magister Zecht asks him to make a choice -- either he gets a court-martial for desertion, or he puts his talents to use as a spy for Archades...
Fortune and Fools, Chapter Two. FFXII AU; Balthier, Zecht, and a whole slew of others. 4340 words. This chapter is worksafe, others may not be.
Ffamran Bunansa ran away to become the leading man, but the role of Balthier carries its perils.
Chapter Two: In which Balthier makes a choice and adopts a new profession.
Balthier blinks. “I hadn’t,” he says, though he believes there’s some historical precedent for it. The woman in the old leather-bound histories lining his father’s shelves-Charlotte Hardin? Yes, and House Solidor, as its iron fingers tightened around Archadia, elevated her family to the nobility as a reward for her service-she was an actress, or posed as one for a time. He hasn’t read Phyllo’s Histories in years, but he remembers the sketch of her: in profile, her chin sharp and tilted up, her dark hair coiled at the nape of her neck, her eyes focused not ahead but to the side, as though she stared at the artist tasked with rendering her on paper as he did his work.
He rests his knuckles on his forehead. Archadia musters her forces in his mind, prepares to rush over him in a wave of things best left forgotten. “I haven’t paid any mind to Archadian politics in a long time,” he says, which is true enough. He lets Meric fret about House Solidor’s latest triumphs or atrocities and keeps his mind on his craft. No point in spending your life looking over your shoulder. You’ll miss what’s in front of your nose if you keep that up. He wrote that in The Tale of Orras the Mariner.
“You’re skilled dissemblers,” Zecht says, jerking Balthier’s thoughts away from that topic. “You rub elbows with thieves and nobles alike.”
“There’s little enough difference between the two,” Balthier mutters.
Zecht snorts. “I’ll concede that,” he says. “You travel the breadth of Ivalice, and nobody questions your purpose in doing so. You costume yourselves for all occasions, you change your names and manners as easily as an ardent might change his hat, you-most of you-keep your counsels well. And a surprising number of you show skill as picklocks, forgers, smugglers. Doubtless you learn these crafts to better your art,” he adds.
“Oh, you’d be surprised,” Balthier says, though he learned to pick locks far before he learned how to act. It’s a useful skill for Judges, too-or at least for Judges-in-Training with a yen for the information trade.
“Little surprises me, Ffamran Bunansa.”
He folds his arms across his chest, looks up at the ceiling. Cobwebs stretch between the exposed support beams, and rot runs along the edges of the wood. Well, one doesn’t visit the Sea Pearl for the décor. “If you’ve seen so much, what do you need me for?” he asks. “Surely you can get a new beard, remove that earring, and call yourself by another name. What does a chameleon such as you need with spies?”
“A man can only play so many parts.” Zecht strokes his beard; Balthier sees a faint gummy residue circling its edges, beads of dried adhesive tangled in its hairs. So it is a false one. “I am the merchant Tariq in Rozarria, the scholar Haldare on pilgrimages to Kerwon, the botanist Westver in Dalmasca. And with my duties as Zecht demanding so much of my time, I haven’t the energy to increase my repertoire. I can’t be everywhere at once, after all.”
“Really? Judging by your reputation, you’re nigh-omnipresent.” Balthier examines the grime under his fingernails. Nothing is beneath the Ninth’s notice, or so the rumors in the Akademies go. The Ninth keeps track of how many times a day you use the privy, the Judges-in-training used to whisper when they thought themselves out of the instructors’ hearing.
“It’s an illusion we labor to maintain,” Zecht says.
“You’re being quite frank.”
“I speak to you as I would speak to any Judge in my employ,” he says. “I like to credit my subordinates with some measure of intelligence.”
“I’m not a Judge,” Balthier sighs. His temples throb; he refrains from massaging them.
“But you’re in my employ.”
They also said that the Ninth housed the most arrogant bastards you’d ever cross paths with, Balthier thinks. “We still haven’t discussed the terms of my employment.” The carousing from the tavern filters up through the gaps in the floorboards. A woman’s voice, light and clear, sings the first few lines of an old Archadian love song. He wonders if Meric and Kait are still down there, glancing up at the steps through the haze of smoke undoubtedly filling the air by now or knocking back pints with the best of the scoundrels sitting at the bar proper.
Zecht glances at the door, crosses to it, jiggles the bar sealing the door shut and wrenches it even more tightly closed. “It concerns your patron.”
“My-” He starts to say he doesn’t have one, but the Linberry Players do, of course, though the flow of gil from his coffers has stemmed to little more than a trickle these days. Something about taxes House Solidor levied or his sister’s extravagant dowry. Meric explained it, but Balthier only half-listens to anything the man says. “Garrick Beoulve?”
“Lord Beoulve.” Zecht nods. “We believe he’s in collusion with Rozarria.”
“Indeed,” Balthier says. “And why is that?”
“We’ve kept an eye on his finances over the past year or so.” Zecht takes his chair again. “He reports a monthly income hundreds of thousands of gil lower than it ought to be. We’ve found no trace of the missing gil in his estates, in his transactions, in his donations…”
“And you conclude he’s invested the money elsewhere? Somewhere he’d rather not have Archadia look?”
Zecht nods. “Lord Beoulve’s master of chocobos is a Rozarrian man. Yunus, of House Dani.” He looks at Balthier, his brow arched.
House Dani should mean something to him, Balthier knows, but his lessons in Rozarrian history took place during another lifetime. He grasps at a thread, a faint memory of a stifling afternoon spent with his nose buried in a book as the breeze stubbornly refused to circulate by him. “They’re related to House Margrace, aren’t they?” he asks. “On the distaff side. Serving as master of chocobos to an Archadian lord hardly seems an occupation befitting one of their sons, unless House Dani’s fallen on dire times.”
“They suffered losses when they mounted an expedition to reclaim the Yensan Sandseas, but nothing so dire as what you suggest,” Zecht says. “House Margrace helped to bolster their finances after that ill-fated maneuver, after all.”
Balthier whistles. “And this son-Yunus-he goes about proclaiming his heritage for all Archadia to know?”
“He conceals it.” Zecht’s teeth flash white, sharp. “Not well enough. Yunus entered Lord Beoulve’s service a year ago, and a month later the first financial discrepancies started to surface.”
“Perhaps Yunus helped himself to Lord Beoulve’s gil without my lord’s consent,” Balthier says. “Found his way into the ledgers and skimmed the estate’s profits. Lord Beoulve either doesn’t know or doesn’t wish to report the loss.” Some Houses value pride over sense; he doesn’t know if House Beoulve falls into that category, but he remembers the House’s reputation for chivalry and honor, which suggests some manner of mulishness on their part over matters concerning reputation.
“We thought so at first,” Zecht says. His fingers sketch a downward arcing path across the table, from a point Balthier assumes is Archadia to another point, south and to the west of the first. “But then our agents found a member of his personal guard in Rozarria’s capital. Visiting his sick mother, he claimed.”
“I presume said sick mother doesn’t exist.”
“We’ve found no trace of her.” Again the flash of teeth. “It is safe to assume she does not. Our agents also intercepted a letter to House Margrace from parties unknown. The senders discussed an Archadian benefactor, someone working with the Margraces and the military to solve a problem concerning chocobos.”
Balthier can think of several problems with chocobos-noisy ill-tempered strutting preening overgrown birds long overdue to be roasted on a spit; give him an airship any day, thank you-but for once he exercises restraint. He’s capable of doing it when it suits him, though it doesn’t suit him very often. “What problem might that be?”
“Would that we knew, but we remembered Lord Beoulve and Yunus when we learned of the letter’s contents.”
He admits he doesn’t know. Interesting. Atypical, but Judge Magister Zecht had something of a reputation for unorthodoxy, as he recalled. Many of the Judge Magisters did. The rank clearly encouraged eccentricity among those who’d achieved it, his yearmates at the Akademy concluded.
“And there appears to be an-attachment between the two of them,” Zecht continues, “far more than what their short period of acquaintance would suggest.”
Balthier props his boots up on the rickety table. It creaks, protesting the weight. He pays the noise no mind. “Perhaps they’re lovers?” he suggests. “And the lordling masquerades as a stableboy to hide from those who would never condone their star-crossed ardor.” It would make a decent enough play, some suitable amusement for an evening. Plenty of places for the ladies to clutch their handkerchiefs and sigh.
Zecht braces the heels of his palm on the edge of the table and pushes himself upright, walks around its perimeter and grabs Balthier’s collar and jerks him forward by it. “If you play the fool, I will be forced to treat you as one.” His voice is clear, measured, even: he states rather than shouts, lets the threat of his words bleed through in the force of his fist at Balthier’s throat, in the sharpness of his teeth. “Do we have an understanding?”
“We do,” Balthier says, and Zecht releases him; his chair settles against the ground again, and the din from the tavern below once more echoes in the back of his mind, an ambient noise to accompany the proceedings. He keeps his hands in his lap, drums his fingers on his knee. “So you wish me to spy on my lord? Learn more about his friendship with his charming chocobo-wrangler?”
“Yes,” Zecht says. “Talk to whomever you need to. See if Lord Beoulve’s ties to Rozarria are documented. Find out where his gil is going and to what ends it’s being used. Look for any Archadian allies he has in this business. We must not, cannot move against him until we know how far this web of treachery spans.”
“And if I do this, my obligation to Solidor and country is discharged?”
“Partially.”
“Of course.” He rubs the back of his neck. He has to tug his rings free of his hair; it’s gotten obscenely long in the back. He ought to cut it again. “And if I decide to thumb my nose at the lot of you and take off for Rozarria and beyond?”
Zecht smiles again, that sinuous curl of his lips. “Then Master Ralenson, Mistress Tyral, and all the others in your troupe will be penalized for harboring a fugitive and deserter. And I will not leave the matter at a mere fine.”
Perhaps he should have become a sky pirate. Alone in the clouds without a soul to bind him to the earth again, without another’s cares to shoulder or another’s troubles to consider.
It would be a lonely sort of life.
“I suppose we have an agreement, then.” He has little enough choice in the matter, and it chafes, chafes like an iron collar clamped around his neck and cinched tight. “How shall I report to you? Need I fill out form after form after form?”
“You needn’t,” Zecht says. “You’ll report either to me or to one of my subordinates. They’ll know to look for you. They’ll display the insignia of the Ninth-discreetly, I should hope. I trust you still remember what the emblem looks like.”
“All too well.”
“Think of it as an opportunity for adventure, Master Balthier.”
“My adventures tend to go better when they’re scripted,” he replies.
“Here’s your chance to improvise,” Zecht says.
“Within a framework.”
“Of course.” Zecht gets up from his chair and pauses, his hand over the bar. “The Ninth will contact you in a fortnight’s time. Be ready.”
“What should I do if I’m discovered?” he asks. “You found me out easily enough, it seems. What if others do the same?”
“Lie. You’ve practice at doing that, I know. I leave the nature of such lies to your imagination.”
He chews on the inside of his lower lip. There’s a difference between fabrication and falsehood, he knows that, he relies on the distinction, his work functions because of that distinction. But he sees little point in elucidating the difference now, and Zecht would humor him but not believe him, not truly listen, because he knows what Balthier’s answer will be, must be, and damn him for cutting through the wordplay to get at the truth. Really, what sort of Archadian is he? “One more question, if you don’t mind.” Balthier steeples his fingers together in front of his mouth, his rings clicking.
Zecht shakes his head. “Were you this inquisitive at the Akademy?”
“Quite so,” he retorts. “Considering the manner in which I’ve been recruited to your service, I have little incentive to report the truth about Lord Beoulve to you. How do you know you can trust me?” Perhaps Zecht’s logic will finally show a hole, a weakness he can exploit, a gap he can slide through.
“You will have your little show of defiance, I suppose,” Zecht says. “You’re not the only agent we’ve assigned to watch Lord Beoulve. If we find discrepancies between their reports and yours, we’ll take them into account.”
Thorough sort of bastard, isn’t he? “If you’ve got other men and women doing my job, I don’t see why my role is so vital.”
“Multiple perspectives,” Zecht says. “You’ll see elements of this affair that our other agents may miss, and they’ll take note of details that might elude you.”
“And we’ll all be wiser in the end,” Balthier mutters.
“I hope so.” Zecht presses a few hairs in his false beard back into place. “Time to play the pirate king once more.” At last, he pulls the door open.
Balthier rubs his thumb against the patch of skin between his eyebrows. He suspects the headache building there now will be followed by many, many others.
***
“And what did the lord Reddas want with you?” Meric asks him next evening, ten minutes before the start of The Lady’s Last Resort. The backstage area is, as usual, thrown into an ordered sort of confusion; actors dab powder puffs on their faces to set their makeup and do their best not to spill any powder on their costumes, the young apprentices run every which way fetching props and tying laces and fastening buttons for the overburdened senior players, and a constant stream of whispers fills the air and serves as a background noise to Meric’s strained commands.
Balthier fumbles with the clasps on his vest; the copper fastenings have tarnished over time, leaving them a dull and sickly green. “He advised me to pick my fights more carefully in the future.”
“That can’t have been all-Gwynne, will you help me lace up this damned dress? Thank you-” Kait grimaces as young Gwynne tugs the laces tight, strapping Kait into a wine-colored velvet monstrosity of a dress, complete with heavy folds and billowing sleeves and frayed silver trim. “You were upstairs with him for quite some time.”
He sighs. “Lord Reddas grew enamored of me and tried to lure me to his bed, and I, foolish man, resisted him, pleading my virtue.”
Kait snorts.
“Niniver! Keep your hands away from Kait’s wardrobe and get back to repairing Balthier’s doublet!” Meric strikes his temple with the heel of his palm. “These apprentices-”
“-will be the death of you, I’m sure,” Kait says. “Gwynne, mind that you don’t catch my hair in the stays. Really, Meric, is there anything that won’t be the death of you? It’s a miracle you’re still alive."
" Five minutes!” Meric calls to the actors, all of whom acknowledge him with a whispered “thank you” and then go back to their previous bits of business: adjusting wigs, walking through dances and duels with their partners in those scenes, mending stockings, trading stories. "And I know it is.” Meric tugs his cuffs down. “I’d best go and beg the audience’s forgiveness for what we’re about to do.”
“The Lady’s Last Resort ought to do well,” Kait says, “though we might have done better had we put Balthier in the dress.”
“There are some sacrifices I will not make for my art.” Balthier resumes buckling his boots. The curled toes pinch his feet, but he knows better than to complain. “Who’s in attendance?”
“We have a respectably sized audience tonight,” Meric says, “or so Rollys reports. Three-quarters full for once, and three of Lord Beoulve’s men are here: a messenger and two guards.”
“Oh?” Kait asks. “And what’s the message?”
Meric shakes his head. “He won’t give it to us until after the evening’s performance.”
“Interesting,” Balthier says. “Might the news affect our performances for the worse?”
“Or perhaps this messenger places pleasure before business,” Kait says. She tosses her curls back from her brow and fixes her diadem in place, a gaudy gift from-she won’t say where, but Balthier assumes it’s a present from a past admirer, and a cheap one, too; the jewels are glass replicas. “Well, we’ll have time to contemplate the message’s contents later.”
“Right, yes.” Meric shifts his weight from foot to foot. “The prologue. Of course. Balthier, mind you don’t clock Rollys’s jaw when you draw your sword tonight.”
“Really,” Balthier mutters, “he should have gotten out of the way faster.”
Meric darts out the door and onto the stage, shaking his head until he vanishes from sight. The crowd greets him with a swell of noise, applauses and whistles mixed with cat-calls and several, ah, creative phrases. A hush of sorts falls over the backstage area, and several actors cross to corners of the room, delivering their speeches at half-volume to the weathered wooden walls. Kait and Balthier walk to the props table: Kait to make sure her fan’s in place, and Balthier to make sure none of the other players mistakenly picked up the letter he’s supposed to carry into his first scene, when Lord Horner receives the lover's confession meant for Sharpmore the merchant.
“I doubt he slept enough last night,” Kait says quietly. She paces; her skirts are voluminous, cumbersome, and she can’t sit in them, not properly. She hovers over chairs and rustles the fabric around, but she never manages to lower herself enough.
“Is he fretting about the company’s fortunes again?”
She nods, her lips pale beneath the rouge. “He’s worried that Lord Beoulve’s men are here to announce the dissolution of the Linberry Players.”
“They can’t.” Balthier pauses, tapping his chin. “Could they?”
“They can’t prevent us from operating a theatre company, but if Lord Beoulve withdraws his patronage, we can’t call ourselves the Linberry Players any longer.” A roar of laughter from the audience, the echoes loud enough to set the floor beneath them reverberating. “Meric must be making a good impression.”
“I suppose he’s rewritten the old prologue.” Balthier remembers it: he found it simpering, a plea for the audience’s tolerance.
“Yes, I suppose he has.” She presses her palm to the rough wood of the stage door, her eyes half-closed. “If Lord Beoulve-if he withdrew his support. I wouldn’t be surprised, I don’t think. He’s been stingy enough with his patronage lately.” Her smile flashes across her face, transient as-transient as a wisp of a cloud over the face of the moon, to borrow a metaphor from The Alchemist’s Gambit. He always was fond of that one.
“Stingy?” Balthier asks, but Kait continues on, delivering her speech to an audience he can’t see.
“You remember Lord Beoulve, don’t you?” she asks. “Fair-haired, clean-shaven, the saddest blue eyes I’ve ever seen.” For a moment, she stands on the precipice of-something, some revelation powerful enough to leave an audience breathless. “I would, however,” she says, rubbing the bridge of her nose, “understand if you did not recall him. He hasn’t attended one of our performances in, oh, a year.”
“He never asked after me,” Balthier says. A year? Interesting timing, that. If Rozarria hadn’t claimed it first, would some of Lord Beoulve’s errant gil have found its way to the Linberry Players’ coffers? He wonders. Oh, he wonders. “Did we anger him a year ago?”
“I don’t see how we could have given offense,” she says. “We performed The Sorrows of Alyse that evening. His favorite. And he sent me a dozen Galbana lilies afterwards.” She twitches her head to the side, enough to clear it but not enough to dislodge her diadem, and resumes her pacing. “Perhaps he’s found a more diverting pastime than the theatre.”
“Perhaps.” I suppose Rozarrian plots are more exciting than the ones we stage, at any rate. “But what spectacle could prove more entertaining than our fair selves?”
Kait snorts. “He’s made new friends, I think. I suppose his new friends have other concerns than the theatre. I would expect as much, given the company he now keeps.”
Bless Kait. She’s going to make this task of his a sight easier.
Rollys and Gwynne rush past the two of them with breathless apologies; Balthier imagines them pink-cheeked and panting on the stage, launching into the introductory song without enough breath to support their voices. The first few phrases falter, but then he hears their high piping voices, Rollys’s sweet tenor and Gwynne’s soft alto, and the crowd seems to approve.
“Do tell,” Balthier murmurs to Kait.
“Teysa tells me he’s been seen about Archades with Lady Kaesa, of House Rinhardt.” She twirls one of her curls around her finger, thinking. “Though I confess I’m surprised he has time for her, as he seems quite attached to a young man in his employ. Quite attached, Teysa says." Kait's tone is droll. "She heard it from Lord Beoulve’s cook, who heard it from gods know where.”
And thank the gods for gossiping servants, Balthier silently adds. Of course, with streetears offering a pretty sum for tidbits about their masters, it’s hard to keep them silent. It was an old lament of his father’s, about how his most secret projects were never as secret as he would have liked them to be. His thrice-damned father. He doesn’t need to be thinking of such things now.
“Though why all of this should be of any concern to you, I don’t know,” Kait says, fixing him with her best stare (and she has a number of very good ones).
“Oh, I’m a hopeless gossip.” Balthier laces his finger behind his head. “You know that, Kait.”
“Indeed. Oh hell, that’s my cue.” And with that, she gathers up her skirts and half-runs, half-waddles to the stage door, the tips of her slippers peeking out from the swathes of velvet.
He lingers by the stage door. The guards and that messenger, why are they here? What do they know? And that’s always the question, isn’t it, whether you’re in Archades or Balfonheim or Nabradia or Rozarria or in the midst of the vast uncharted wastes of the Cerobi Steppe: what do you know?
What does he know about House Rinhardt? His sister Viruna married a Richese, and House Richese is-a branch of House Rinhardt? Related to them through years of intermarriage? Something along those lines. Genealogy was, likely still is, Viruna’s specialty and not his; he read books on engineering underneath his desk when his tutor tried to lecture him on the great Houses of Archadia. House Richese has a seat in the Senate, he does remember that, but it’s a minor one, he thinks House Beoulve is in considerably higher standing, or it was the last time he bothered to check. He doesn’t imagine the jostling for position among the Houses has changed their actual status much. Solidor governs the empire, the Senate bickers, the spires of Archades stretch closer and closer to the sky, and the city stagnates, drained of its vitality, its pulse, its blood.
The Rinhardts. Of course. He rubs his forehead and curses Zecht’s ancestors, whoever they may be. Their ancestral lands are somewhere in the Tchita Uplands, yes? Close to the Nabradian border-
“-than die a fool in Fortune’s bosom,” Kait says, and the audience laughs. They always laugh when she wants them to; she commands their attention, directs it, controls it. And that’s his cue.
He strides onstage, his chest thrown out, walking with a bowlegged sort of gait. “And I would die in your bosom, Lady, for I’d be a fool indeed to spurn what it offers.” The audience howls, either at his lines or at the feathers stitched to the back of his vest that make it look as though he’s growing a tail from the base of his spine. “I have sampled Fortune’s milk; it is too bitter for my tastes, but I wager yours is sweeter.”
“Why, Lord Horner,” Kait says, snapping her fan out and holding it steady in front of her face, “Fortune’s fruits are far more ample, and I wonder if you have sampled them fully if you glorify my little treasures so.”
Balthier bends at the waist, leaning in and jutting his neck forward, his eyes wide and his upstage hand held at his ear. “Madam, you do yourself an injustice, for indeed your treasures overflow all restraints.”
The audience signifies their approval of the repartee, Balthier allows himself a small bow, and beneath the crystals’ steady glow overhead, slathered in makeup and draped in heavy old clothes; here, with his voice pitched higher and his stance broadened, it is easy to forget about Zecht and Lord Beoulve and Rozarria and clashes among the great states. There is only the stage, which now resembles a drawing room, only the stage and the audience, and in this realm, he leads the action.