500 Kingdoms 3 - Fortune's Fool by Mercedes Lackey

Author:Mercedes Lackey
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2010-11-27T02:21:20+00:00

Fortune’s Fool

203

Armed with the knowledge that he was about to encounter the dreaded witch Baba Yaga, he needed to change his plans.

If he was going to encounter Baba Yaga, the best thing he could do would be to look as if he wasn’t worth a ransom.

Not that he had ever heard of Baba Yaga holding anyone for ransom. It wasn’t as if she couldn’t have anything she wanted. She wasn’t bound by the conventions of “good” witches to use her powers unselfishly. She could be just as selfish as she liked. He’d heard tales that inside that weird hut of hers it was like a hundred palaces rolled into one.

But at bottom she was an evil old peasant woman with more grudges than a cur had fleas, and when an evil old peasant woman of that sort got her hands on a prosperous-looking young man…the results were generally less than pleasant for the young man.

“I don’t suppose,” he asked as he finished the last of his meal, “you’d be able to keep my horse?”

The cave-witch considered that for a moment. “I don’t know why not. There’s a side cave I could use for a stable. There’s plenty of grazing. And if you aren’t back by autumn—”

“If I am not back by autumn,” he said a bit grimly,

“then I am dead, and you had best think about using my horse to get yourself as far from whatever is brewing in the north as possible.”

So he left his horse with his new friend, bundled his things on his back, and set off down the road. It wouldn’t 204

Mercedes Lackey

be the first time he’d traveled afoot. Even a Fortunate Fool can have accidents, though even accidents generally tended to be the sort that got him where he needed to be at the time he needed to be there. He didn’t expect to be afoot for too long, anyway.

And he hadn’t gotten more than a league down the road when it happened.

The road passed through an area of rocks, where the trees thinned out a bit. There was now open sky above him, rather than branches. The first thing he heard the moment he set foot on that stretch of road was a strange roaring sound. It was something like the wind in the trees—except that there was no wind. Then he heard a wild, high-pitched cackling that made the hair stand up on the back of his neck. It wasn’t sane, that laugh. In fact, it was the laughter of someone who never had more than a nodding acquaintance with sanity.

But he kept going, pretending he hadn’t heard, either, because he had decided that he was going to pretend to be a deaf-mute. He marched down the road, head high, foolish grin on his face as if he hadn’t a care in the world.

He pretended not to know that the roaring, and the cackling, were approaching him from behind. He forced himself not to react as it drew nearer and nearer.

And then—

He found

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