Prince of Fools

  I hopped in sharp enough at that, Snorri deploying his weight to stop me turning the boat over before I managed to sit down.

  “The rope?” he asked. Shouts rang out above us, drawing closer.

  I pulled my knife, slashed the rope, nearly lost the knife in the river, tried again, and finally sawed at the strands until at last they gave and we were off. The current took us and the wall vanished into the gloom along with all sight of land.

  SEVEN

  “Are you going to be sick again?”

  “Has the river stopped flowing?” I asked.

  Snorri snorted.

  “Then yes.” I demonstrated, adding another streak of colour into the dark waters of the Seleen. “If God had intended men to go on water he would have given them . . .” I felt too ill for wit and hung limp over the side of the boat, scowling at the grey dawn coming up behind us. “. . . given them whatever it is you need for that kind of thing.”

  “A messiah who walked on water to show you all it was exactly where God intended men to go?” Snorri shook that big chiselled head of his. “My people have older learning than the White Christ brought. Aegir owns the sea and he doesn’t intend that we go onto it. But we do even so.” He rumbled through a bar of song: “Undoreth, we. Battle-born. Raise hammer, raise axe, at our war-shout gods tremble.” He rowed on, humming his tuneless tunes.

  My nose hurt like buggery, I felt cold, most of me ached, and when I did manage to sniff through my twice-broken snout I could tell that I still smelled only slightly less bad than that dung heap that saved my life.

  “My—” I fell silent. My pronunciation sounded comical; my nose would have come out “by dose.” And although I had every right to complain, it might rile the Norseman, and it doesn’t pay to rile the kind of man who can jump on a bear to escape a fight pit. Especially if it was you who put him in that pit in the first place. As my father would say, “To err is human, to forgive is divine . . . but I’m only a cardinal and cardinals are human, so rather than forgiving you I’m going to err towards beating you with this stick.” Snorri didn’t look the forgiving kind either. I settled for another groan.

  “What?” He looked up from his rowing. I remembered the remarkable number of bodies he left in his wake coming in and out of Maeres’s poppy farm to get me. All with his weapon hand badly injured.

  “Nothing.”

  • • •

  We rowed on through the garden lands of Red March. Well, Snorri rowed on, and I lay moaning. In truth he mostly steered us and the Seleen did the rest. Where his right hand clutched the oar he left it bloodstained.

  Scenery passed, green and monotonous, and I slumped over the side, muttering complaints and vomiting sporadically. I also wondered about how I’d moved from waking beside the naked delights of Lisa DeVeer to sharing a shitty rowing boat with a huge Norse maniac all in the space between two dawns.

  “Will we have trouble?”

  “Huh?” I looked up from my misery.

  Snorri tilted his head downstream to where several rickety wooden quays reached out into the river, a number of fishing boats tied up at them. Men moved here and there along the shore checking fish traps, mending nets.

  “Why should—” I remembered that Snorri was very far from home in lands he had probably only glimpsed from the back of a slave wagon. “No,” I said.

  He grunted and set an oar to angle us into deeper water where the current ran fastest. Perhaps in the fjords of the frozen North any passing stranger was game and you became a stranger ten yards from your doorstep. Red March enjoyed ways a touch more civilized, due in no small part to the fact that my grandmother would have anyone who broke the bigger laws nailed to a tree.

  We carried on past various nameless hamlets and small towns that probably had names but held too few distractions ever to make me care what those names were. Occasionally a field hand would rest fingers on hoe, chin on knuckles, and watch us pass with the same vacancy that the cows used. Urchins chased us from time to time, following along the banks for a hundred yards, some throwing stones, others baring their grimy arses in mock threat. Washerwomen splatting husbands’ second smocks against flat stones would raise their heads and hoot appreciatively at the Norseman as he flexed his arms against the oars. And finally on a lonely stretch of river where the Seleen explored her floodplain, with the sun hot and high, Snorri deflected us beneath the broad fringe of a great willow. The tree leaned out across lazy waters at the extreme of a long meander and encompassed us beneath its canopy.

  “So,” he said, and the prow bumped up against the willow trunk. The hilt of his sword slipped from the bench and clunked on the planks, blade dark with dried blood.

  “Look . . . about the fight pits . . . I—” Much of the morning of my maiden voyage had been spent planning the smooth denials that now refused to stutter from my tongue. In between the vomiting and the complaining I’d been rehearsing my lies, but under the focused gaze of a man who appeared to be more than ready to slaughter his way through any situation, I ran out of the spit required for falsehoods. For a moment I saw him staring up at Maeres from the pit floor. “Bring a bigger bear?” I remembered the smile he had on him. A snort of laughter broke out of me and, fuck, yes it hurt. “Who even says that kind of thing?”

  Snorri grinned. “The first one was too small.”

  “And the last one was just right?” I shook my head, trying not to laugh again. “You beat Goldilocks to the punch line by one bear.”

  He frowned at that. “Goldilocks?”

  “Never mind. Never mind. And Cutter John!” I sucked in a huge breath and surrendered to the joy of the memory, of escaping that goggle-eyed demon and his knives. The mirth bubbled out of me. I doubled up, gasping with hysterical laughter, beating the side of the boat to stop myself. “Ah, Jesu! You took the bastard’s arm off.”

  Snorri shrugged, holding back another grin. “Must have gotten in my way. Once your Red Queen changed her mind about letting me go, she put her city at war with me.”

  “The Red Qu—” I caught myself. I’d said it was the queen’s order that he be sent to the pits. He had no reason not to believe me. Remembering the anchor points of any web of lies is part of the basics when practising to deceive. Normally I’m world class at it. I blamed my failure on extenuating circumstances. I had, after all, escaped from Alain DeVeer’s frying pan into the fire of the opera only to plunge from that into something even worse. “Yes. That was . . . harsh of her. But my grandmother is known as somewhat of a tyrant.”

  “Your grandmother?” Snorri raised his eyebrows.

  “Um.” Shit. He hadn’t even noticed me in the throne room and now he knew me for a prince, a prize hostage. “I’m a very distant grandson. Hardly related at all, really.” I raised a hand to my nose. All that laughing had left it pulsing with hurt.

  “Take a breath.” Snorri leaned forwards.

  “What?”

  He snaked out an arm, catching my head from behind, fingers like iron rods. For a second I thought he was just going to crush my skull, but then his other hand blocked my view and the world exploded in white agony. Pinching the bridge of my nose with finger and thumb, he pulled and twisted. Something grated and if I’d had anything left to vomit I’d have filled the boat with it.

  “There.” He released me. “Fixed.”

  I hollered out the pain and surprise in one burst, trailing into coherence at the end of it, “. . . Jesu fuck me with a cross!” The words came out clear, the nasal twang gone. I couldn’t bring myself to say thank you, though, so I said, “Ouch.”

  Snorri leaned back, arms resting on the sides of the boat. “You were in the throne room then? You must have heard the tale we prisoners were brought in to tell.”

  “Well, yes . . .” Certainly bits of it.

  “So you’ll know where I’m headed, then,” Snorri said.

  “South?” I ventured
.

  He looked puzzled at that. “I’d be more at ease going by sea, but that may be hard to arrange. It might be I need to trek north through Rhone and Renar and Ancrath and Conaught.”

  “Well, of course . . .” I had no idea what he was talking about. If there had been a word of truth in his story he wouldn’t want to go back. And his itinerary sounded like the trek from hell. Rhone, our uncouth neighbour to the north, was always a place best avoided. I’d yet to meet a Rhonish man I’d piss on if he were on fire. Renar I’d never heard of. Ancrath was a murky kingdom on the edge of a swamp and full of murderous inbreds, and Conaught lay so far away there was bound to be something wrong with it. “I wish you luck of the journey, Snagason, wherever you’re bound.” I held my hand out for a manly clasping, a prelude to a parting of our ways.

  “I’m going north. Home to rescue my wife, my family . . .” He paused for a moment, pressing his lips tight, then shook off the emotion. “And it went poorly the first time I left you behind,” Snorri said. He eyed my outstretched hand with a measure of suspicion and extended his own cautiously. “You didn’t feel that just now?” He touched his own nose with his other hand.

  “’Course I bloody felt it!” It was quite possibly the most painful thing I’d ever experienced, and that from someone who learned the hard way not to jump into the saddle from a bedroom window.

  He brought his hand closer to mine and a pressure built against my skin, all pins and needles and fire. Closer still, and more slow, and my hand started to pale, almost to glow from within, while his darkened. With an inch between our extended palms it seemed that a cold fire ran through my veins, my hand brighter than the day, his looking as if it had been dipped in dark waters, stained with blackest ink that collected in every crease and filled each pore. His veins ran black while mine burned, darkness bled from his skin like mist, a wisp of pale flame ghosted across my knuckles. Snorri met my gaze, his teeth gritted against a pain that mirrored mine. Eyes that had been blue were now holes into some inner night.

  I gave one of those yelps that I always hope will go unnoticed and whipped my hand away. “Damnation!” I shook it, trying to shake the pain out, and watched as it shaded back to normality. “That bloody witch! Point taken. We won’t shake on it.” I gestured to a gravel beach on the outer edge of the meander. “You can drop me off there. I’ll find my own way back.”

  Snorri shook his head, eyes returning to blue. “It was worse when we got too far apart. Didn’t you notice?”

  “I was rather distracted,” I said. “But, yes, I do recall some problems.”

  “What witch?”

  “What?”

  “You said ‘bloody witch.’ What witch?”

  “Oh nothing, I—” I remembered the fight pits. Lying to the man on this point would probably be a mistake. I was lying out of habit, in any case. Better to tell him. It might be that his heathen ways could lead to some kind of solution. “You met her. Well, you saw her in the Red Queen’s throne room.”

  “The old völva?” Snorri asked.

  “The old what?”

  “That crone at the Red Queen’s side. She’s the witch you’re talking about?”

  “Yes. The Silent Sister, everyone calls her. Most don’t see her, though.”

  Snorri spat into the water. The current took it away in a series of lazy swirls. “I know this name, the Silent Sister. The völvas of the North speak it, but not loudly.”

  “Well, now you’ve seen her.” I still wondered at that. Perhaps the fact that we could both see her had something to do with her magic failing to destroy us. “She set a spell that was to kill everyone at the opera I went to last night.”

  “Opera?” he asked.

  “Better not to know. In any event, I escaped the spell, but when I forced my way through, something broke, a crack ran after me. Two cracks, interwoven, one dark, one light. When you grabbed hold of me, the crack caught up and ran through both of us. And somehow stopped.”

  “And when we separate?”

  “The dark fissure ran through you, the light through me. When we pull them apart it seems the cracks try to tear free, to rejoin.”

  “And when they join?” Snorri asked.

  I shrugged. “It’s bad. Worse than opera.” However nonchalant my words might be, though, and despite the heat of the day, my blood ran colder than the river.

  Snorri set his jaw in that way I’d come to recognize as consideration. His hands quietly strangled the oars. “So your grandmother sentences me to the fight pit and then you bring down her witch’s curse on me?”

  “I didn’t seek you out!” The nonchalance I’d been striving for wouldn’t come from a dry mouth. “You stopped me dead in the street, remember?” I regretted using the word dead immediately.

  “You’re a man of honour,” he said to no one in particular. I looked for the smirk and found nothing but sincerity. If he was acting, then I needed lessons from the same place he’d gotten his. I concluded that he was reminding himself of his duties, which seemed odd in a Viking whose duties traditionally extended to remembering to pillage before raping, or the other way around. “You’re a man of honour.” Louder this time, looking right at me. Where the hell he got that idea, I had no notion.

  “Yes,” I lied.

  “We should settle this like men.” Absolutely the last words I wanted to hear.

  “Here’s the thing, Snorri.” I eyed the various escape options open to me. I could jump overboard. Unfortunately I’d always viewed boats as a thin plank between me and drowning, and swimming as the same again but without the plank. The tree offered the next best option, but willow fronds aren’t climbing material unless you happen to be a squirrel. I selected the last option. “What’s that over there?” I pointed to a spot on the riverbank behind the Norseman. He didn’t so much as turn his head. Shit. “Ah, my mistake.” And that was me out of options. “As I was saying. The thing is. The thing. Well, honestly.” The thing had to be something. “Um. I’m afraid that when I kill you, the crack will run out of you just the same as it would if we got too far apart. And then—boom—a split second later I’d be too far apart. So tempting as it is to pit my princely fighting skills against those of a . . . what is your rank? I never found out.”

  “Hauldr. I own my land, ten acres from Uulisk shore to the ridge top.”

  “So as much as it tempts me to break with societal rules and pit the arm of a prince of Red March against a . . . a hauldr, I’m concerned that I wouldn’t survive your death.” From his frown I could see that it might be a risk he was willing to take if no better alternative were on offer, so to forestall him I added, “But as it happens I’ve always had a hankering to visit the North myself and see firsthand just how reaving is done. And besides, my grandmother worries so about these dead ghost-men of yours. It would put her heart at ease to have the business sorted out. So I’d best come with you.”

  “I mean to travel fast.” Snorri’s frown deepened. “I’ve left it too long already and the distance is great. And be warned: It will be a bloody business when I get there. Slow me down and . . . but you were moving pretty quick when you crashed into me.” His brow smoothed, thunderclouds clearing, and that smile lit him up, half-wild, half-friendly, and all dangerous. “Besides, you’ll know more about the terrain than me. Tell me about the men of Rhone.”

  And just like that we were travelling companions. I’d bound myself to his quest for rescue and vengeance in some distant land. Hopefully it wouldn’t take too long. Snorri could save his family, then slaughter his enemies to the last man, necromancer, and corpse monster, and that would be that. I’m good at self-deception but I couldn’t manage to make the plan sound like anything other than a suicidal nightmare. Still, the icy North was a long way off—plenty of opportunity to break the spell that bound us together and run away home.

  Snorri took up the oars again, paused, then, “Stand a mom
ent.”

  “Really?”

  He nodded. I’ve good balance on a horse and none at all on water. Even so, not wanting to fall out with the man within moments of our new understanding, I got to my feet, arms out to steady myself. He tipped the boat, a sharp deliberate move, and I pitched into the river, grasping desperately at willow twigs as a man about to drown will clutch at straws.

  Above the splashing I could hear Snorri having a good old laugh to himself. He was saying something too: “. . . clean . . . together . . .” But I could only catch the odd word since drowning is a noisy business. Eventually, when I’d given up trying to save myself by swallowing all the water and had slipped below the surface for the third and final time, he snagged my waistcoat and hauled me back in with distressing ease. I lay in the bottom flopping about like a fish and retching up enough of the river almost to swamp the boat.

  “Bastard!” My first coherent word before I remembered quite how big and murderous he was.

  “I couldn’t have you come to the North smelling like that!” Snorri laughed and steered back out into the current, the willow trailing its fingers over us in regret. “And how can a man not know how to swim? Madness!”

  EIGHT

  The river took us to the sea. A journey of two days. We slept by the banks, far enough back to escape the worst of the mosquitoes. Snorri laughed at my complaints. “In the northern summer the biters are so thick in the air they cast a shadow.”

  “Probably why you’re all so pale,” I said. “No tan and blood loss.”

  I found sleep elusive. The hard ground didn’t help, nor did the itchiness of anything I used to soften it. The whole business reminded me of the misery that had been the Scorron Campaign two summers earlier. It’s true I wasn’t there more than three weeks before returning to be feted as the hero of the Aral Pass and to nurse my bad leg, strained in combat, or at least in inadvertently sprinting away from one combat into another. In any event, I lay on the too-hard and too-scratchy ground looking at the stars, with the river whispering in the dark and the bushes alive with things that chirruped and rustled and creaked. I thought then of Lisa DeVeer and suspected that few nights would pass between now and my return to the palace when I wouldn’t find occasion to ask myself how I ended up in such straits. And in the smallest hours of the night, feeling deeply sorry for myself, I even found time to wonder again if Lisa and her sisters might have survived the opera. Perhaps Alain had convinced his father to keep them home as punishment for the company they’d been keeping.