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In the court of the tyrant, the fool mused on kindness.
The streets were the last kind place Sarmenti had known, because after all, they had raised him. To keep an eye for pickpockets and cutthroats, yes, to pack his lute before a watchman could roust him from a corner. But they had returned gifts. Sarmenti could treasure the moment a passerby was hooked by a good chorus, when Sarmenti knew he had them till his song ran out. The guileless grin of a child who might sit and watch him for hours – no coin to drop, but Sarmenti wouldn’t mind. The hawker who chatted with him when the crowds thinned and slipped him leftover bread and stew in the evening, and perhaps if he was lucky a hearth to sleep beside at night.
On the streets, above all, Sarmenti had been granted the kindness of dreams. When he wandered a city he had idly imagined fame and fortune and his songs on every balladeer’s tongue, or patronage from a handsome noble, or a summons to the palace in recognition of his skill.
The tyrant’s eye fell upon him, and Sarmenti smiled bitterly behind his mask.
A mask was one of the court’s rare kindnesses. Austere beneath his belled cap, it left Sarmenti’s face a careful blank: ash-white save for two light harlequin markings on each eye, like teardrops. It meant he did not have to fake pleasure as he stood up from the corner or hide the wince when his leg twinged from a rough scab knitting the skin. The duchess who had set her frilly ill-trained dog on him, dressed in pearls and sable, would not get to reap more satisfaction from his pain.
Sarmenti was somehow sure the tyrant could sense it – every forming scar, every pang of hunger, every bruise from a thrown cup. The thought felt ridiculous, as inflated with importance as he’d been his first day in the palace, when he’d believed he was there for anything but cruel amusement. Then again, was a mouse arrogant to feel a cat’s paw on its neck? Even the smallest prey could earn the focus of a thing with teeth.
The tyrant’s teeth were sharp and dark with wine, and they showed when he grinned. He raised his hand, and Sarmenti tensed involuntarily. But the man only gestured to the crowd.
“The people want a song, fool.”
Sarmenti looked across the court. Most of the nobility ignored him; however long it had been since he arrived, he was no longer a novel toy to play with. Of the heads that turned, some were his dedicated tormentors. The rest were newcomers: a fresh consort or two, a few visiting gentry, and a small detachment that looked foreign, orbiting a broad-chested man whose gold circlet marked his status. The tyrant liked to sign treaties on bad terms with weaklings and cowards. No deal today, then, was Sarmenti’s first thought. But it would be truly foolish to judge a man on sight.
“You honor me, sire.” It drew a titter from the crowd – milder than on that first day, when his words had swelled with earnest pride. They liked a joke less when Sarmenti was in on it. “But what would please them? Childe Edmund and the Beggar? The Cutpurse Litany? My inspiration runs thin, I fear…”
It was a lie. As he gripped his lute, his fingers fell into formation and his nails twitched against the strings – poised on the first dark note of a melody that never quite stopped drifting through his head. For a moment he could nearly see its pattern, strung across the court like hangman’s rope. His hand itched to play it. To draw the ropes tight around their necks.
The tyrant tapped his own fingers impatiently and the vision broke. Sarmenti rearranged his formation and strummed the opening chord of a ballad, drowning his dark song in the first verse of a weak satire on young love. Not anything he’d written, thank the gods; it would only debase him to cast his own work before this crowd. And in his deepest heart he feared his fingers could no longer move deftly enough. Perhaps they had been broken too many times.
The crowd turned back to their vacant conversation, and again Sarmenti sensed the tyrant’s amusement. In his first days he’d castigated himself for believing so stupidly that he’d been chosen for his talent. Now he suspected that he had been, because that made breaking him with indifference to it all the sweeter. Sarmenti had gotten warmer receptions from stone walls. The duchess was staring, and he knew it was not for his music but for a sign of the ache in his leg. One of the consorts ran wide eyes over him, but all Sarmenti found was pity at his starved body, his patched clothes. He turned away as he reached the chorus, and as he did he found his gaze landing on the foreigner.
The man was looking at him – not at his mask or at his motley, but his hands. Alone in the crowd, the stranger was watching him play.
A flicker of pride ignited in Sarmenti, and almost without noticing he responded with an instinct honed on street corners. He paused a half-beat and hit the next chord harder, hammering his callused fingertips on the lute’s neck. He left a gap at the end of one rhyme for a flourish, plucking a run of quick ascending notes. When the chorus ended he let his voice fall silent, forgetting the insipid lyrics and picking up the melody with his instrument, striking the lute’s courses with precision and catching a nod of approval from the stranger–
Sarmenti was too engrossed to dodge the heavy goblet before it struck true at his head.
His hand jerked through the strings as he tried too late to block the projectile. The world went blank for a split second; when it returned he saw everything doubled, blinking away a trickle of red that felt warmer and thicker than wine. He took a step back and skidded on the newly slick floor, and he supposed the court had at least taught him to fall gracefully, because he kept the lute safe as he hit the stone.
Sarmenti pushed himself up to one elbow and set the lute beside him. From the near side of the long table, the man who’d hit him watched. It had been a few weeks since Sarmenti had seen this one. He was a merchant with high guild standing, a great donor to charity when he could do it in public among people who mattered. Among the servants he was known to be a pig, and to his wife and children, it was rumored furtively, a terror. He surveyed Sarmenti’s stained clothes and skewed cap, and then he laughed – loud and echoing, more heartily than he ever had at a joke.
It was nothing. Not the worst abuse Sarmenti had endured. But his skin flushed with rage. He could imagine what the stranger saw now: not a musical virtuoso, only an idiot doing pratfalls for the court. He couldn’t bear to find the man’s eyes and confirm the suspicion – but the anger surged inside him, and nor could he let it go. Face still burning, he showed teeth behind the mask and raised a mock salute to the merchant, hesitating only for a moment.
“What a shot! You’ve practiced the art of striking the unarmed.” Sarmenti propped himself higher so he could squarely meet his eyes. “But I hear you usually like smaller targets.”
Sarmenti had never wanted to be a humorist. It was not hard, however, to grasp there were two forms of true jest: the absurd falsehood, and the truth one wasn’t supposed to say aloud.
The smile faded from the merchant’s face. His eyes flicked to one side and the other, as if he was doing the thing Sarmenti had not, confirming what his fellows thought of him. Then he laughed again, forced and poisonous.
“My hand slipped. I seem to have dropped my cup.” The merchant’s voice gathered strength. “Bring it to me, fool.”
Sarmenti felt the fine line he’d crossed like the snapping of his lute’s gut strings. And he knew better than to ask the tyrant for a reprieve. He closed his fingers around the goblet and stumbled to his feet, focusing on the slightly blurry floor. The anger had deserted him, leaving only an empty space where fear should be. He wondered if the stranger was still watching.
The merchant waited patiently as Sarmenti approached. He stretched a hand out for the goblet, and Sarmenti knelt and prayed that this little humiliation was enough. Then the man yanked the vessel from him and swung it across his face.
There was no way to shield himself. Sarmenti fell against the floor again, and he kept his hands balled into fists as the merchant kicked him, sending a razor of pain through his chest. He tried to go limp and feign unconsciousness, to make the man tire of him. When he closed his eyes, his fingers twitched for his lute.
The song was coursing through his head as the blood pounded in his ears. He heard each note of it clearly, like the sharpening of a knife. And if he could draw the tune out it would cut – slash every man and woman in the court to ribbons, and none of them would ever laugh at him again.
(All of them? something asked quietly inside him. He hurt too badly to know what it meant.)
There were no strings for him to play on. The merchant’s shoe landed on his hand, and the song shattered as his knuckles were crushed against the floor. A different instinct kicked in – Sarmenti begged. Told the man he couldn’t help his tongue sometimes, he wasn’t even sure what he’d said, really, hadn’t they declared him mad just weeks ago? He cut himself down until there was nothing for his attacker to aim at. The third jest, the false jest: letting the powerful smirk at a thing they already believed.
When they were done laughing they let him take his lute and slink into the shadows, too dazed and miserable for a proper exit. He needed somewhere to examine the damage – and more than that, to figure out where that brief burst of courage had come from. He thought they’d burned it all from him.
Sarmenti’s cot felt miles away, and he doubted the tyrant was done for the night. He ended up on a recessed bench in the outside courtyard, sitting behind a fountain that piped sparkling-clear water into a moonlit pool.
His vision had cleared and the cut on his forehead had dried up; if the brain behind it had been damaged, well, the court thought it had gone long ago. His ribs would hurt when he sang next time, but he doubted they were more than cracked. His strained right hand was the greatest liability; he kept it stiff to minimize the damage to its tendons, gritting his teeth at the throbbing in his knuckles. Still, it was nothing he hadn’t gone through already, and none of it hurt as badly as having an audience snatched away from him.
He picked up his lute and examined it. It had gathered a few more scratches and two of its strings had snapped, dangling forlornly off the edge of the soundboard. He tried not to think about what would happen when it finally broke.
A long time ago Sarmenti had thought the tyrant might grow bored and release him. With every passing day his hope dimmed. Laid before him was a future of slow and inevitable decay – his body wasting and his talent withering under cruel hands and a ruthless gaze. He’d left once and the palace guards had found him, and on rainy days the scars never stopped aching. The tyrant had promised to shear his fingers off next time he tried.
If only he could go mad. At least that would be a kind of escape.
Heavy footsteps clacked on the cobblestones, and Sarmenti stiffened. He stilled his breath as they grew nearer, dreading the merchant or one of the crueler nobles. Instead, the stranger from the foreign retinue approached him, stopping a few paces from the bench. And Sarmenti found himself almost wishing for the nobles. At least he knew what to expect from them.
“If you wanted to make sport of me, I’m afraid somebody beat you to it, literally,” he said, feigning carelessness. “Wait, that doesn’t work – I mean, they beat me to – but that doesn’t make sense…”
The stranger lifted a hand slightly. “I wished to make sure you were safe, is all. If my presence bothers you, I won’t impose.”
Sarmenti sighed. It was a bad night to be alone.
“No – stay,” he said reluctantly. “Sit beside me.”
The moon was nearly full, and in its light he could see the stranger clearly. The man had tanned skin and pronounced features, and his bulk suggested muscle beneath a gold-trimmed jacket. He sat, adjusting the circlet in a way that seemed self-conscious.
“I enjoyed your performance. It was a pity to see it cut short.”
A cheap rejoinder wormed into Sarmenti’s mind – what are you talking about, that was the grand finale! But the idea of delivering it repulsed him. He only inclined his head in thanks.
“I’d offer to finish it for you, but my lute’s strings are more fragile than my skull.”
His companion didn’t smile at the joke, and they sat in tense silence. Sarmenti cast around for something entertaining to say, but it had been too long since anyone wanted anything from him but self-deprecation – and the stranger, he sensed, would find it ill-timed.
“I haven’t seen you in court before,” he said finally.
“A diplomatic visit. Your king was good enough to play host.”
Sarmenti nodded, flinching as the motion jarred his ribs. The stranger frowned.
“I have salve and poultices back in my guest quarters. I could draw a hot bath for your aches…” The man stopped, as if he’d read Sarmenti’s expression through his mask. “I mean nothing untoward, of course. I would not…”
Sarmenti scoffed. “It wouldn’t matter. We could be saints and the court would never let you hear the end of bedding a mad fool. Nor let me hear the end of being bedded by you.”
“I am coming to care little what they think of me.”
“That’s because you, sire, get to leave.”
The retort slipped out, and he waited for a slap or an insult. The man only looked saddened.
“I’m sorry. It was thoughtless of me.” He looked back to the courtyard, empty but for the two of them. “And my name is Baldwin. There’s no need to stand on ceremony.”
It had been a long time since anyone offered their name to Sarmenti. He knew those of the nobles, but only secondhand. The servants avoided him, as if afraid the court’s abuse might be contagious. Now Baldwin raised his brows, expectant.
“You don’t expect me to call you fool, do you?”
“I don’t expect you to call me anything.” Sarmenti regretted the words once he’d spoken them, but by then it was too late to take them back. His face itched, and he rubbed at his mask. It was not quite quick enough to avoid Baldwin’s notice.
“You’re bleeding.”
“Past tense. I bled.”
Baldwin unwound a scarf from his neck. Before Sarmenti could stop him, he dipped its edge in the fountain and sat back on the bench.
“I don’t need your help to clean myself.”
“Everyone needs someone to care for them.”
Not him, Sarmenti started to say; he had been born to nothing and he had made a life from it. The thought rang hollow. On the streets there had been strangers to smile at him. A companion, sometimes, enchanted by his songs. It had never lasted, but to know that he would never have it again…
Baldwin reached out. Sarmenti didn’t stop him. He slid his belled cap back from his head and felt the night breeze find purchase in his hair. Then, slowly, Baldwin lifted off the mask.
It was the first time Sarmenti had bared his face willingly for any of them, and he could guess what it revealed. His lip and forehead were split and his cheek stung from the merchant’s blow. His skin felt stiff and tight when he moved, coated with blood and wine dregs. He started to turn away.
“Hold still.”
The words fixed him motionless as Baldwin began to draw the cloth over his face. The man put a light hand to his jaw for leverage, and Sarmenti tried to remember the last time anyone had touched him gently. Suddenly his eyes stung – he blinked rapidly to keep the tears from pooling in them.
“Did I hurt you?”
Sarmenti muttered dissent, afraid that Baldwin would stop. He shut his eyes and felt the cool fabric dab away his tears along with the blood and alcohol, and by the time his face was clean he could control himself again.
“I’ve ruined your scarf,” he said.
“It was not your fault. Your patron should be more careful with you.”
The mask was waiting on the bench, still specked with filth. Sarmenti left it be. He had almost forgotten the way fresh air felt on his face, forgotten the soft dusting of mist descending after sunset and the bracing chill when he inhaled. The courtyard smelled of roses, he could tell now. And mingled with it was something woody and exotic: the scent of Baldwin’s clothes.
“So, sire – I mean, Baldwin. What misfortune brought you to our kingdom?”
Baldwin folded the scarf and tucked it into his jacket. He thinned his lips.
“A certain blockaded route has long slowed trade for my people. I had hoped to sort the matter out before…”
“Before what?”
“It matters little.” Baldwin shook his head. “I suppose I should ask you my chances. If it’s worth whiling another few nights here to persuade him.”
Sarmenti hesitated. He thought of more evenings talking in the courtyard, of Baldwin staying till Sarmenti’s hand had healed and he could play again. The songs he would regale the man with, the smile he could draw from him with a clever instrumental, the way he could even imagine Baldwin applauding – an audience of one, but it would be enough.
“He will draw your hopes out to the last day and savor crushing them,” he said.
“Ah.” Baldwin frowned, and Sarmenti watched his dream of companionship dissolve. “Thank you. I appreciate your candor.”
“Is that not the purpose of a fool?”
“If so, it seems wasted on this court. And I still don’t wish to call you that.”
If we got what we wished for, thought Sarmenti, I would not be within fifty leagues of this hell, and it is possible I would be dead. But he found unexpectedly that he wanted to please Baldwin. He could not give him a song; he could at least give him a name.
“Sarmenti.”
Baldwin mouthed the word as if he was learning it by heart. His eyes fell on Sarmenti’s lute between them, and he traced a finger along one of the broken strings.
“Have you got more catgut in that suit of yours?”
“Yes, but not fingers that can use it.”
Baldwin rolled the snapped gut over delicately.
“You could let mine try.”
Sarmenti remembered too late that Baldwin could see his skepticism. He cleared his throat and remembered what it was like to be honestly embarrassed – he hoped the man had not misread his expression as contempt.
“Do you play?” he asked.
“Not half as well as you. I have occasionally passed the time with it.”
He was loathe to trust a stranger with his lute, never mind a noble. Baldwin’s hands were blunt and large-palmed, none of a musician’s long-fingered reach. But he touched the instrument with a care Sarmenti himself had stopped giving it – too used to knowing that would be only grounds for ridicule. Left-handed and clumsy, Sarmenti fished strings from his pocket and let Baldwin stretch them out. The man wrapped them around the lute’s bridge and threaded each one through its peg, thumbing them softly as he wound them into tune.
“There.”
Baldwin strummed the open courses, and the sound rang over the courtyard. Sarmenti smiled. It felt odd and unfamiliar on his face.
“Well?” he asked as Baldwin made to put it down. “Why string the thing if someone isn’t going to play it?”
“It would be foolish to perform before an expert.”
“Then we will be fools together.”
Sarmenti’s old instincts told him that he had the man. He only had to wait.
Wordlessly, Baldwin shrugged and took the lute in hand. Sarmenti set his expectations graciously low; he would be impressed if the man could play some simple chords. Then Baldwin struck up the tune, and grace was the last thing that came to mind.
The song was simple compared to Sarmenti’s own. It had none of the flash and bombast of a player looking for an audience. The melody was clear and winsome, built on an odd progression he’d heard among far-traveling musicians. Baldwin looked serene as he played it – lost in the notes he was creating. It was the music of a man who played without ambition, but with joy.
What might have happened, Sarmenti thought, if he had made his reputation in a different land? He imagined a summons to a court where he was met with care and not spit wine. A king who had delighted in his talent and not his misery. He could no longer summon the old visions – gold and crowds and hearing his own songs on street corners. Merely what it might look like to enchant someone with his work one more time.
Baldwin played the music out, letting the last note fade on its string.
“I never thought it a sad song,” he said.
Only then did Sarmenti realize he was crying.
He wanted to beg again. Take me with you when you leave. I’ll play for you as long as you want. I’ll never ask for anything. He did not need a head for politics to understand what would happen. The tyrant would never stoop to war over a creature like him, but he could make Baldwin’s people suffer with a thousand little cuts for spiriting away his plaything. Sarmenti had never considered himself one for heroics – he was more than content to sing of them, thank you very much. Even so, he would not loose that kind of cruelty for his freedom.
“It’s been a long time since I heard a new one. That’s all.”
Baldwin drew a breath. Sarmenti watched his lips form a word. He wondered, against reason, if the man had just reached the same line of thought as him. And if he was offered an escape, Sarmenti knew he would not be strong enough to refuse.
If Baldwin found the same thread, he followed it to the same inexorable terminus. “I wish there were more I could offer you,” he said, and the sentence he spoke was not the one he had begun. “You deserve better than this.”
Relief tasted like poison in Sarmenti’s throat.
“You can’t know that,” he said. Thinking of the song he’d stolen in the graveyard, of his arrogance that first time in the palace, those desires that seemed so petty now.
“I say this kindly – but I trust my own judgment more than yours.”
Baldwin handed the lute back, and as Sarmenti reached for it, he caught the other man’s hand in passing. But I mean nothing untoward, Baldwin had said. It would be uncouth to suggest anything to the contrary. So Sarmenti let go and came away with his instrument, Baldwin’s warmth lingering on his skin.
“You should retire for the night,” Sarmenti told him. “It becomes unpleasantly raucous here in the small hours.”
“And what of you?”
“A fool must eat.” Scraps from the tables, if he was lucky, while the servants cleaned. “Don’t worry about me. I always find my way out.”
Sarmenti stood gingerly and took up his mask, but he delayed donning it again. He caught a glimpse of his reflection in the fountain – had he always looked so sad?
“Perhaps we’ll have a reason to meet again someday,” he said offhandedly, offering the obvious lie he’d once given companions when they parted ways.
Baldwin seemed to consider the suggestion seriously. As if there were a chance a king could be dragged back to this cursed court, or that a poor musician could make it out.
“If we do,” he said, “I will ask you to play for me.”
“Of course. By my count I owe you a song.”
Sarmenti watched Baldwin retreat across the courtyard and disappear into the guest wing. He fitted the mask back on, stifling the scent of wood and roses with the stink of wine and blood. As he passed through the colonnades, the dark song drifted into his mind again, calling on him to smash the pillars down and crush the whole court, to mix marble shards with bone.
Instead he held the lute loosely and hummed the melody Baldwin had played him. Though his right hand could not pick the strings, his left found the patterns easily, and it would be no trouble once he was healed. The tyrant and his sycophants would not deserve to hear it. But it would be a good thing to remember – if only in the kindness of a dream.