Prince of Fools (The Red Queen's War, #1)

by Mark Lawrence

The silent ones are apt to kill you. The more sound and fury there is, the less murderous the animal. True of men too.

I have, I must confess, a very honest face. Bluff and courageous, it’s been called. I’m easy to mistake for a hero, and with a little effort I can convince even the most cynical stranger of my sincerity. With people who know me, that trick becomes more difficult. Much more difficult.

“Well . . .” I didn’t want to contradict Maeres. My eyes slid to the man beside him. Maeres is a slight fellow, unremarkable, the kind of little man you might find bent over the ledgers at some merchant’s office. Neat brown hair, eyes that are neither kind nor cruel. In fact, remarkably similar to my father in age and appearance. Maeres’s companion, though, he looked like the sort of man who would drown kittens recreationally. His face reminded me of the skulls in the palace catacombs. Stretch skin over one and press in some pale staring eyes, and you’d have this man, his smile too wide, teeth too long and white.

“I’m always one to sit and chat. It’s my burden. Watch me. Gossip runs through my veins and I must feed the habit. Tell me, my prince, is your grandmother well? How is her heart?” “Well she’s got one, I suppose.”

We all practise self-deception to a degree; no man can handle complete honesty without being cut at each turn. There’s not enough room in a man’s head for sanity alongside each grief, each worry, each terror that he owns. I’m well used to burying such things in a dark cellar and moving on.

My father used to admonish me to excel in all things. Excellence in cowardice means being quick off the mark. If you want to run away fast, then the first thing to do is take off in whatever direction you happen to be facing.

It’s often said that cowards make the best torturers. Cowards have good imaginations, imaginations that torment them with all the worst stuff of nightmare, all the horrors that could befall them. This provides an excellent arsenal when it comes to inflicting misery on others. And their final qualification is that they understand the fears of their victim better than the victim does himself. All this might be true, but I’ve always found myself too scared that somehow, some way, any victim of mine might escape, turn the tables, and work the same horrors on me. Basically the cowards who make good torturers are less cowardly than me.

“Let him join his friends.” Snorri knotted a hand in the ropes around Meegan’s wrists and hoisted him to his feet. “Hey now, that hardly seems fair. He was going to kill—” Snorri took three strides, dragging Meegan to the edge where the rock fell away in a single steep step . . . and pushed him over. “Those friends.” Meegan’s wail of despair ended with a wet thunk and the sound of something, or things, running towards the place he hit. Snorri met my shocked gaze. “I try to be a fair man, to live with honour, but come against me armed and looking to take my life, and you will not walk away again.”

“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.”

“Ha.” I slapped him on the shoulder and wished I hadn’t, my hand crackling with painful magics. “Can you think of anyone less likely than me to listen to an angel, Snorri?”

And of course, whilst I may be a liar and a cheat and a coward, I will never, ever, let down a loyal retainer. Unless, of course, it requires honesty, fair play, or bravery to avoid doing so—or an act that in some other manner mildly inconveniences me.

By the time a man reaches the Bitter Ice he will have seen nothing but a world in shades of white for day upon day. He will have walked upon ice sheets and seen no tree or blade of grass, no rock or stone, heard no sound but that of his own loneliness and the mockery of the wind. He will believe there is in all the world no place more cruel, no place less suited to the business of living. And then he will see the Bitter Ice.

“Pah.” I stood and dusted myself down. “I’d want better soldiers. Look: I felled seven of them while fighting blind.” Snorri nodded. “Though to be fair you did have a screaming girl to help you.” He glanced back down the tunnel. “I wonder where she ran off to.” “Eat dung, Norseman.” I started off between the rows.

There are no other choices for you, Prince Jalan, and when there are no choices all men are equally brave.”

“Step carefully on the ice.” Skilfar called after us as if she had an audience. “Two heroes, one led willy-nilly by his cock, the other northward by his heart. Neither bringing their brain into any decision of import. Let us not judge them harshly, my soldiers, for nothing is truly deep, nothing holds consequence. It’s from the shallows that emotions born of simple wanting arise to steer us as they have always steered man, steered the Builders, steered the gods themselves, towards true Ragnarok, an end to all things. A peace.”

“Duty compels me to see Snorri to his homeland.” I nodded. When a course of action is forced upon you it’s best to accept it with grace and milk it for whatever you can get, right up to the moment the first opportunity to weasel out of the deal presents itself.

“We’ll see what these Hardanger scavengers make of a man of the Red March.” Hopefully I’d find a way for it not to be a corpse.

“Humanity can be divided into madmen and cowards. My personal tragedy is in being born into a world where sanity is held to be a character flaw.”

“I ain’t laying on hands down there! I’m a prince of Red March, for God’s sake! Not some travelling apothecary-cum-faith-healer!”

At the dockside I was pleasantly surprised to find the North wasn’t all hairy men in animal skins. There were also hairy women in animal skins.