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

by Mark Lawrence

I’ve always found hitting a man from behind to be the best way to go about things.

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

They call it a deadly sin but in my experience lust will get you into more trouble and sloth’s only a sin when you’re being chased.

It’s good to steer a man in the direction they intended to go. It blurs the line between what he wants and what you want.

You would think it best to save your breath for running, but I often find screaming helps.

A hero attacks in the moment, a good coward runs in it. The rest of the world waits for the next moment and ends up as crow food.

Keep still and your troubles find you.

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.

There’s tears enough in the world to drown in,

Part of the art of survival as a coward is not letting things get to the point where that cowardice is exposed.

Whatever you do in dangerous situations the main thing is to do it quickly.

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.

Generally, even when a fight is inevitable, both parties take a short while to warm to the idea. A disparaging remark is aimed, the reply ups the stakes, someone’s mother is a whore, and an instant later – whether the mother was in fact a whore or not – there’s blood on the ground.

It’s always better to sit on your dignity in private than to stand on it in public.

Life has ways of getting under your skin, spoiling your fun with too much information. Youth is truly the happiest time where we roll in the bliss of ignorance.

He wanted me to have Snorri killed. His arguments had seemed sound enough, but although I lost more money at the card table than I won, I’d spent enough time there to know when I was being played.

Justice is blind. Love is blind.

Still, perhaps that’s all lives are, all the world is, a collision of vast conflagrations, each sparked from nothing.

Cold has its own taste. It tastes of a bitten tongue. It coils around you, a living thing, a beast that means to kill you, not with wrath, not with tooth nor claw, but with the mercy of surrender, with the kindness of letting you go gentle into the long night after such a burden of pain and misery.

All our lives are tales. Some spread, and grow in the telling. Others are just told between us and the gods, muttered back and forth behind our days, but those tales grow too and shake us just as fierce.’

Now I’m a good-looking fellow. No doubts about that. Good thick hair, honest smile, face in order, but this interloper could have stepped from some frieze of the sagas, chiselled to perfection. I hated him with a rare and instant passion.

Each hour became a process of taking a dull future and squeezing it into a dull past through the narrow slot of the moment

‘We’re fucked up.’ I raised my hand to wipe the blood from my mouth.

The unborn launched itself forward. We clasped hands. The world fractured. Night interlaced day. Pretty much everything exploded.

‘Christ!’ I blasphemed. May as well die with a final sin on my lips.

His gaze met mine as he reached to close the other end. ‘Will it die with us? Will this be an end to it?’ I nodded, and he closed finger and thumb on the other end.