Confidence Game by Michelle M. Welch

Author:Michelle M. Welch [Welch, Michelle M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fantasy, Fiction
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-18T05:00:00+00:00

27

ARON JANNES WAS SITTING UPSIDE DOWN ON A chair, his back in the seat, his legs extending upward, his head hanging down and his hair brushing the ground. His guard was sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of him. She was teaching him how to cheat at cards.

“I can’t wait to go back to school and try this,” Aron boasted, gawking at the cards that he could barely see from his reversed vantage point.

“I thought you weren’t going back to school,” Elzith said.

Aron humphed. “Father will make me. Unless I can be a guard like you!” he suggested hopefully.

“You can’t.”

He frowned. “Then I’m going back, I guess. But I can cheat everybody!”

“How do you know they haven’t already cheated you?” Elzith asked, folding the deck. “That’s why I’m showing you this, if you haven’t figured it out. People are going to cheat you, and you have to recognize it. I’d advise you to think hard before you cheat someone else, though. There’s always a price, and you stand to lose more than you gain.”

Aron flipped his legs down and turned himself out of the chair. “So why are you telling me this?”

Elzith looked at him. He liked that; no one else ever did it. Servants and common people weren’t allowed to look at him because of whose son he was. They bowed their heads and dragged their eyes on the ground. When his father and his teachers and other men in charge talked to him, to give him rules and scold him, they never looked at him. They looked down on top of his head, they looked around him, but never right at him. Even when his mother looked at him, Aron thought she was seeing someone else. She looked somewhere near his chin, like he was shorter, like he was five or six. “Well, like it or not,” Elzith said, straight into his eyes, “and that goes for both of us—I’ve been put into the position of mentoring you, and this is what mentors do.”

“Right,” Aron said, and he stretched on his belly on the floor, took the deck of cards, and started stacking them into a castle.

“He is maddening,” Elzith was saying. She’d picked up a knife and taken the bowl of vegetables right out of Tod’s hand, depositing a sack in his hands instead. “But he’s not as bad as everyone says.”

Tod opened the sack and found a loaf of bread and a cut of meat wrapped in butcher’s parchment. “Of course, your idea of bad is a bit different from everyone else’s.”

Elzith nodded. “Granted. Most people don’t have to compare things against getting stabbed or shot at. And I’m told Aron has improved since my arrival. He’s gone a whole week now without a fit of any sort.”

“He’s getting attention,” Tod mused. As he emptied the contents of the sack, he saw Elzith looking up at him, waiting for him to say more. Tod tried to put his words together and went on. “He wasn’t before, and it was making him angry.

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