Prince of Fools

FIFTEEN

Nights spent on mountains are not to be recommended. Nights where the dark is full of the sounds of dead men trying to climb up to where you’re shivering under thin blankets, even less so.

In the end the morning came. That’s what matters.

“So you healed that man.” Snorri led the way across the mountain face, looking for a way down that would not be accessible to the corpses in our wake.

“No, I didn’t.” Deny everything was a policy I’d adopted at an early age. “Shit!” I missed my footing and set my boot down harder than intended. The white-hot needles of pain lancing up from my ankle let me know that getting down off the mountain was going to hurt.

“He had a rip in his arm deeper than the cut I’ve got on my belly.”

“No. Just his jerkin. Big hole in his jerkin, little scrape on his arm. He bled a lot. That’s probably what fooled you. I just wiped the blood away some.” I could see where this was going. Snorri wanted the same treatment. Well, no. The cut on Meegan’s arm had sucked out too much of my energy as it was. A whole night with the DeVeer sisters might have left me more go in my legs. Snorri’s injuries would leave me crawling. “Sorry but I- Ouch! Christ bleeding, that hurt!” A light knock of ankle against boulder.

“Of course,” said Snorri, “a man who could erase a gash like that would have mended his own ankle by now. I must have been mistaken.”

I took three more painful steps whilst that one sank in, then sat on the nearest suitable boulder, “You know, it does hurt quite a lot. I’ll just try to rub some life back into it.” I tried to be surreptitious about it, but he just stood there watching, with his arms folded, like some big suspicious Norseman. The thought of walking down on a sound ankle proved too much temptation. With teeth gritted and jaw set, I bound both hands around the joint and strained. Snorri raised a brow. I reached for whatever magic had burned in me and pushed harder.

“I, erm, can leave you to it if you need a quiet moment.” The tight line of his lips in that black beard gave no indication that he was mocking me.

“You’re mocking me, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

I let go and gave my ankle an experimental wiggle. “Motherf-” Words became an inarticulate howl.

“Not fixed then?” Snorri asked.

I stood up slowly. It seemed that whatever I’d done to Meegan was, like tickling, something you can’t do to yourself. And all in all, healing Meegan had been a complete waste of effort given that Snorri had pushed him over the ledge a minute or two later. Perhaps it had been a one-off thing. I hoped so.

“You want some?” I held out a hand towards Snorri’s waist.

He took a sharp step back. “Best not. Bad stuff happens if we touch, and I’ve got a feeling it would be worse than last time.”

I remembered reaching for his hand as I slipped down the mountain. In retrospect the damage done to my ankle might have been the lesser of two evils. If I had managed to grab hold we might just have burned up like the dead man.

“What’s going on?” I held my hands up, palms towards me. “That dead man fried where I touched him. And you.” I looked back up at Snorri, angry now, scared and angry and in that moment not caring if he took offence. “You! There’s something wrong with you, Norseman. I’ve seen those black eyes. I saw. . smoke, hell, I’ll call it what it is, I saw darkness swirl around you when you killed those men, like your axe was cutting the stuff out of the air.” I made the connection then. I should have seen it before. “And that’s what’s in you, isn’t it? Dark eyes, dark dreams. Darkness!”

Snorri hefted his axe, running a speculative eye along its length. For a moment I thought he might strike me down, but he shook his head and offered a grim smile. “It took you until now to understand? It’s the curse you brought on me. On us. Your witch, the Silent Sister. Her curse. That broken spell, that twin crack, running after you, dark and light. I got darkness-you got light-both whispering to us, and both of them wanting to get out.

“In the North the wise women say the world is a cloth, woven from many strands and stretched across what is real. The world we see is thin.” He held up a thumb and finger, almost touching. “Where it tears, deeper truths escape. And we are torn, Jal. We’re carrying wounds we can’t see. We’re carrying it north and the dead want to stop us.”

“Look, we’ll go back. My grandmother is the Red Queen, damn it. She can have this made right. We’ll go back and-”

“No.” Snorri cut me off. “I took the prince out of the palace, but the palace is still crammed firmly up the prince’s arse. You need to stop moaning about every hardship, stop chasing every woman you lay eyes on, and concentrate on surviving. Out here-” He waved the axe at the bleakness of the mountains. “Out here you need to live in the moments. Watch the world. You’re a young man, Jal, a child who’s refused to grow up. Do it now, or you’ll die a young man. Whatever is behind this pursuit, it all started in Vermillion. Whatever war is being fought there is being lost. The Dead King is trying to kill us because we’re taking the Sister’s strength north.”

I got to my feet. “So we stop going north! Go back. Make this right! It’s nonsense anyhow. It was all an accident. Just ill fortune. Nobody could have planned it. It’s all a mistake.”

“I saw her too, Jal. This Silent Sister of yours.” Snorri set the tip of his index finger just above his cheekbone. “She had one white eye.”

“Half blind, yes.” One pearly eye. I’d called her the blind-eye woman for years before I knew any other name.

Snorri nodded. “She sees the future. She looked too far and it blinded her. But she still has a second eye to look with. She looked through the might-have-beens and saw far enough to know you would escape, meet me and take her power north.”

“Hell.” There didn’t seem much else to say.

• • •

We found a route down from the mountains that did not allow the dead men to follow us, though it could be argued that it came closer to killing us both than they might have. I say “we,” but Snorri led the way. My navigational skills are more suited to the city, where I can find a low dive with unerring skill. On mountains I’m more like water. I head down, tumbling over rocks where necessary.

In their haste the retreating mercenaries hadn’t collected all of their fallen comrades’ mounts, and better still, we found Ron and Sleipnir browsing on the lower slopes. Neither horse was anything to boast about, but they were used to us, and we loaded them with the most useful items we’d managed to steal off the strays before driving them off. Sleipnir continued her placid munching at the saw grass while Snorri heaped his loot upon her, flinching only when he climbed aboard. To be fair, it looked as if they should take turns-I thought the Norseman fully capable of carrying his mare up the valley.

“We should look out for Edris and his friends,” I said. Not that I’d stopped doing exactly that at any point. “Oh, and that necromancer bitch.” The idea of some death-sworn beauty lurking out amongst the rocks was unsettling. That she could frighten Edris with just a look, return the dead, and might well slip into our camp in the middle of night was the stuff of nightmare-not that I planned to sleep again. Ever. “And Maeres might yet have an agent on our tail. . and if those corpses know where to-”

“How about we just look out for trouble?” And Snorri led the way north.

• • •

We spent another night on high ground, our beds as cold and stony as the one before, the shadows just as threatening. Worse-if it could get worse-as the sun set Snorri grew distant and strange, his eyes drinking in the gloom and growing even blacker than they had been when slaughtering his foe and painting the slopes red. The way he looked at me just before the last burning piece of the sun fell behind the mountain’s shoulder made me consider hobbling away as soon as he slept. Though minutes later he seemed returned to his old self and reminded me to aim downslope if nature called in the night.

With the mountains demoted to scenery, we followed the borderlands, first along the border with Scorron, which would soon be the border with Gelleth. Snorri kept his eyes always fixed on the horizon, hunting the north, mine always turned south, towards home, and to look for what dangers might be on our heels. Borderlands offer swift travel to those not seeking to cross over as the folks there are often occupied with their neighbours and not so keen to question travellers, to detain them, or to seek taxes from them. Such lands are, however, unhealthy places to linger. Many of my own worst experiences occurred on Red March’s border with Scorron-all of them in fact, until I met Snorri.

In the province of Aperleon the kingdom of Rhone meets the duchy of Gelleth and the principality of Scorron. Monuments to the dead of a hundred battles crowd the elevations, most in ruin, but the land is lush and people return to resettle it time and again, as people are wont to. Snorri led the way along the approach to the town of Compere, famed for its cider and for the quality of tapestries woven there. Where he learned this stuff I couldn’t say, but the Norseman would always win some new fact or other from even the shortest of exchanges with passersby.

The summer found us at last and we rode in bright sunshine, sweating beneath our travel-stained rags, throwing dark shadows and swatting at flies. We saw few people, then fewer still, all steering away upon their own paths, drawing back as if we might carry contagion.

Further on, the land took on a neglected air. Ron and Sleipnir plodded placidly between high hedgerows, Snorri’s white skin turned red in the sun, and for a moment I started to feel at ease, lulled by the heat and the arable peace. It didn’t last. We soon found fields untended and overgrown, farmhouses empty, their animals gone. In one place churned earth, an abandoned helm, a crow-pecked hand. A chill returned to me, despite the warmth of the day.

The castle of Rewerd’s Curse-the ancestral seat of the House Wainton-stands on a high bluff of pale rock some miles from Compere Town. It watched us with empty eyes, the walls black with smoke, the cliffs beneath it still stained a rusty colour as if the blood of the last defenders had poured from the gates and overflowed the plateau. The sun had started to sink behind the fortification, making serrated silhouettes of the battlements and sending its shadow questing towards us, an accusing finger, long and dark.

“This is fresh.” Snorri drew a long breath through his nose. “You can smell the char.”

“And the rot.” I regretted sniffing so deeply. “Let’s find another path.”

Snorri shook his head. “You think any path is safe? Whatever happened here has passed.” He pointed to a faint haze ahead, indistinct trails of smoke rising to join it. “The fires have all but burned out. You’ll find more peace in ruins than in any other place. The rest is all waiting to be ruins. Here it’s already happened.”

And so we rode on and came by evening to the desolation of Compere.

• • •

“This was vengeance.” The walls had been toppled, standing nowhere higher than three stones atop each other. “Punishment.” I stepped over the rubble. Heat still rose from the ground. Beyond a forest of blackened spars a carpet of cinders marched into the distance until the drifting smoke overwrote it.

“Murder.” Snorri towered at my shoulder, a stillness in him.

“They never meant to hold this place,” I said. “Whoever ‘they’ were.” It could have been Gelleth troopers, a raid out of Scorron, or even a Rhonish army reclaiming what had been taken. “I’ve never seen the like.” I knew the Hundred’s squabbles left such damage in their wake, but I’d not seen it, not like this.

“I have.” Snorri passed me by, striding on into the remnants of what had once been Compere.

We made camp in the ruins. Swirls of ash and cinder stung our eyes and made the horses cough, but night was upon us and Snorri proved unwilling to press on. At least we didn’t have to choose between the risk of a fire and a cold camp. Compere came with its own fires. Dying beds of embers in the main, but giving off a great heat.

“I’ve seen worse.” Snorri repeated himself, pushing aside the stew he’d prepared. “At Eight Quays the Islanders made swift work and moved on. At Orlsheim, farther up the Uulisk, they took their time.”

And in the ruins Snorri once more stole me away to the North, winding his tale around the night.

• • •

Snorri followed the raiders’ tracks through the thaw. Their ships had gone, perhaps to some secluded cove to shelter from both storm and hostile eyes. He knew they would be planning a return to collect the Drowned Isles necromancers, their troops, and their captives. Even in the spring the interior was an inhospitable place this far north. The Broke-Oar would have told them that. How many of the captives might be on the ships and how many with the raiders, Snorri couldn’t tell. The raiders, though, he could follow, and eventually they would lead him to their ships.

Orlsheim lay three miles farther inland, on the edge of the Uulisk where the fjord started to taper and pine forests reached almost to the water on gentler slopes than those at Eight Quays. The Brettans had left a broad trail, burdened as they were by many captives. Apart from Emy there had been only a handful of dead: three babes in arms, chewed and discarded, and Elfred Ganson, missing a leg and left to bleed out. Snorri guessed any others killed in the fighting would just have been added to the ranks of the necromancers’ servants and set stumbling ahead to Orlsheim. How Elfred came to lose a leg Snorri couldn’t guess, but it had at least saved him the horror of a living death.

Where the settlement at Eight Quays had been stone-built, the houses of Orlsheim were timber, some rude constructions of logs and wattle, others clinker-built of planks like the longboats themselves, defying the weather with the same obstinacy that the Vikings’ ships offered the sea. Smoke had signalled Orlsheim’s destruction even from the doorstep of Snorri’s home, but not until the last few hundred yards had he imagined the fire to be so all-consuming. Even the great mead-hall of Braga Salt had left no more than a heap of embers, every roof beam consumed, its eighteen pillars each thicker than a mast and deep carven with saga tales, all devoured by the flames.

Snorri pressed on, leaving the Uulisk shores when the raiders’ tracks turned to skirt Wodinswood, a dense and unwelcoming forest that reached for fifty miles and more until the foothills of the Jorlsberg defeated it. Men called Wodinswood the last forest. Turn your face north and you would find no more trees. The ice would not admit them.

And on the margins of that forest, where he had so often come in search of the reindeer who browse the tree moss, Snorri found his eldest son.

• • •

“I knew him the moment I saw him,” Snorri said.

“What?” I shook my head, ridding myself of the dream the Norseman had woven. He addressed me directly now, demanding a response, demanding something-perhaps just my company in this moment of rediscovery.

“I knew him, my son. . Karl. Though he lay far ahead. There’s a deer trail up alongside the Wodinswood from the Uulisk, broadened into mud by the raiders, and he lay sprawled beside it. I knew him from his hair, white-blond, like his mother. Not Freja, she bore me Egil and Emy. Karl’s mother was a girl I knew when I wasn’t much more than a boy myself: Mhaeri, Olaaf’s daughter. We weren’t but children, but we made a child.”

“How old?” I asked, not really knowing if I meant him or the boy.

“We must have been fourteen summers. She died bringing him into the world. He died just stepping into his fifteenth year.” The wind changed and shrouded us in thicker smoke. Snorri sat without motion, head bowed over his knees. When the air cleared, he spoke again. “I rushed to him. I should have been cautious. A necromancer could have left his corpse to waylay anyone trailing them. But no father has that caution in him. And as I came closer I saw the arrow between his shoulders.”

“He escaped, then?” I asked, to let him take his pride in that at least.

“Broke free.” Snorri nodded. “A big lad, like me in that, but more of a thinker. People always said he thought too much, said I’d always be the better Viking however strong he grew. I said he’d always be the better man, and that mattered more. Though I never said it to him, and I wish now that I had. They’d had them in iron shackles, but he broke free.”

“He was alive? He told you?” I asked.

“He had a breath left in him. He didn’t use it to tell me how he escaped, but I could see the iron marks on him and his hands were broken. You can’t escape slave shackles without breaking bones. He only had four words for me. Four words and a smile. The smile first, though I saw it through tears, biting down on my curses so I could hear him. I could have been there quicker, I could have run, found him hours earlier. Instead I’d gathered my belongings, my weapons, as if I were going on a hunt. I should have run them down the moment the snowbank gave up its hold. I-” Snorri’s voice had grown thick with emotion and now broke. He bit the word off and ground his jaw, face twitching. He lowered his head, defeated.

“What did Karl say?” I couldn’t tell you where along the way I’d started to care about the Norseman’s story. Caring was never my strong suit. Perhaps it was the weeks together on the road that had done it, or more likely some side effect of the curse that chained us together, but I found myself hurting with him, and I didn’t like it one bit.

“They want the key.” Spoken to the ground.

“What?”

“That’s what he said. He used his last breath to tell me that. I sat with him but he hadn’t any more words. He lasted another hour, less than that maybe. He waited for me and then he died.”

“A key? What key? That’s madness-who would do all that for a key?”

Snorri shook his head and held up a hand as if begging quarter. “Not tonight, Jal.”

I pursed my lips, looked at him hunched before me, and swallowed all the questions bubbling on my tongue. Snorri would tell me or he wouldn’t. Perhaps he didn’t even know. Either way, it was of no great consequence for me. The North sounded more terrible by the minute, and whilst I was sorry for Snorri’s losses I had no intention of chasing dead men across the snow. Sven Broke-Oar had taken Freja and Egil to the Bitter Ice. And Snorri seemed to think his wife and son were still alive there now-and perhaps they were. Either way, that was a matter between Snorri and the Broke-Oar. Somewhere between us and the northern ice would be a means to unlock the two of us, at which point I’d be off before the G of Good-bye had cleared the Norseman’s beard.

We sat in silence. Or almost silence, for it seemed as if Baraqel’s voice spoke just beyond the edge of hearing, gentle and full of music. After a time I lay down and set my head on my pack. Sleep took me quick enough, and as it caught hold the voice came more clearly so that in the moments before dreaming washed over both me and the voice, I could almost make out the words. Something about honour, about being brave, about helping Snorri find his peace. .

“Bugger that,” I replied. Words muttered half-asleep over slack lips-but heartfelt nonetheless.