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

by Mark Lawrence

Somewhere back at the house a hound bayed, and that put the fear in me. I’m a good runner any day of the week. Scared shitless I’m world class.

stayed put, lacking any orders. I find the important thing in running away is not how fast you run but simply that you run faster than the next man.

Unfortunately my lads did a piss-poor job of slowing the

Scorrons down and that left poor Jal running for his life with hardly twenty years under his belt and a great...

In any event, the borderlands aren’t the place to stretch a warhorse’s legs and I kept a gap between us by running through a boulderfield at breakneck speed. Without warning I found myself charging into the back of a pitched battle between a much larger force of Scorron irregulars and the band of Red March skirmishers I’d been scouting on behalf of in the first place. I rocketed into the midst of it all, flailed around

with my sword in blind terror trying to escape, and when the dust settled and the blood stopped squirting, I discovered myself the hero of the day, breaking the enemy with a courageous attack that showed complete disregard for my own safety.

The DeVeers’s wall was a high and forbidding one but it and I were old friends: I knew its curves and foibles as well as any contour Lisa, Sharal, or Micha might possess. Escape routes have always been an obsession of mine. Most barriers are there to keep the unwashed out, not the washed in.

I’m nine parts bluster and one part greed and so far not an ounce of murder.

merchant-princes’

That didn’t sound good. I set off sprinting in the direction of the palace, sending rats fleeing and scattering dungmen on their rounds, the dawn chasing after me, throwing red spears at my back.

My grandmother hates it with a passion. She’d be happier behind granite barricades a hundred feet thick and spiked with the heads of her enemies.

the Holy Cow, she calls her. As Father’s

He’d been fat back in those days. The flesh hung off him now as the reaper closed in for the final swing,

There’s power in a name. ‘Prince’ has served me very well – something to hide behind when trouble comes,

huge out-of-place things stolen from some still-grander palace by one of my distant and bloody-handed relatives.

The guards eyed me as if I might be bird crap that had sailed uninvited through a high window to splat before them.

My campaign to befriend every guard in the palace had never penetrated as far as Grandmother’s picked men: they thought too much of themselves for that. Also they were too well paid to be impressed by my largesse, and perhaps forewarned against me in any case.

place has no escape routes. Guards, guards, and more guards, along with the scrutiny of that awful old woman who claims to be my grandmother.

elbowed my way in between my brothers near the front of the group. I’m a decent sized fellow, tall enough to give men pause, but I don’t normally care to stand by Martus and Darin. They make me look small and, with nothing to set us apart, all with the same dark-gold hair and hazel eyes, I get referred to as ‘the little one’. That I don’t like. On this occasion, though, I was prepared to be overlooked.

It was the blind-eye woman. She scares the hell out of me.

I’d seen her. An ancient woman, so old it turned my stomach to look at her. She crouched in the shadow of the throne, hunched up so she’d be hidden away if you looked from the other side. She had a face like paper that had been soaked

then left to dry, her lips a greyish line, cheekbones sharp. Clad in rags and tatters, she had no place in that throne room, at odds with the finery, the fire-bronzed guards and the glittering retinue come to see my name set in place upon me. There was no motion in the crone: she could almost have been a trick of the light, a discarded cloak, an illusion of lines and shade.

I wanted to look back at the old woman. Was she still there? Had she moved the moment my eyes left her? I imagined how she’d move. Quick like a spider. My stomach made a tight knot of itself.

My glance flickered back to the hag. Still there, exactly the same, her face half-turned from me, fixed on Grandmother. I hadn’t noticed her eye at first, but now it drew me. One of the cats at the Hall had an eye like that. Milky. Pearly almost. Blind,

my nurse called it. But to me it seemed to see more than the other eye.

couldn’t look away. I stood there sweating. Barely able to keep from wetting myself. Too scared to speak, too scared even to lie. Too scared to do anything but sweat and keep my eyes on that old woman. When she moved, I nearly screamed and ran. Instead just a squeak escaped me.

‘Don-don’t you see her?’ She stole into motion. So slow at first you had to measure her against the background to be sure it

wasn’t imagination. Then speeding up, smooth and sure. She turned that awful face toward me, one eye dark, the other milk and pearl. It had felt hot, suddenly, as if all the great hearths had roared into life with one scorching voice, sparked into fury on a fine summer’s day, the flames l...

hunched but tall. And thin, l...

I’ve followed everyone else’s example and pretended not to see the blind-eye woman. Perhaps they really don’t see her because Martus and Darin are too dumb to act and poor liars at that, and yet their eyes never so much as flicker when they look her way. Maybe I’m the only one to see her when she taps her fingers on the Red Queen’s shoulder. It’s hard not to look when you know you shouldn’t.

stood alone in knowing that she waited at the Red Queen’s side each day. Other people’s eyes seemed to avoid her just as I always wished mine would.

Handsome or not, though, her eyes would turn any man’s bowels to water. Flinty chips of dispassion. And no crown for the warrior queen, oh no. She sat near-swallowed by a robe of blacks and scarlets, just the thinnest circlet of gold to keep her locks in place, scraped back across her head.

Grandmother’s words came so thick with disappointment that you felt it reach out and try to throttle you.

She shook her head, as if we were all of us an experiment in horse-breeding ...

Bodies must be burned? Well the church wouldn’t like it. It would put a crimp in their plans for Judgment Day and us all rising from the grave for a big grimy hug.

I misspent much of my youth gambling at the pit-fights in the Latin Quarter, and I intended to misspend much of what life remained to me there too. I’ve always enjoyed a good fight and a healthy dose of bloodshed, as long as it’s not me being pummelled or my blood getting spilled. Gordo’s pits, or the Blood Holes down by Mercants, got you close enough to wipe the occasional splatter from the toe of your boot, and offered endless opportunity for betting.

Ancient dead clad in pale gold and grave goods from before the Builders’ time.

age was against him.

Some men have a special kind of clumsiness that announces itself in every move they make.

I’ve a great eye for a fighter. He walked in like murder, and when they jerked him to a halt before the chamberlain he snarled.

He told his story with an orator’s skill. I’ve heard tell that the winter in the North is a night that lasts three months. Such nights breed storytellers.

‘My home was in Uuliskind, at the far reach of the Bitter Ice. I tell you my story because that place and time are over and live only in memory. I would put these things into your minds, not to give them meaning or life, but to make them real to you, to let you walk among the Undoreth, the Children of the Hammer, and to have you hear of their last struggle.’ I don’t know how he did it but

when he wrapped his voice around the...

wove a kind of magic. It set the hairs pricking on the backs of my arms, and damned if I didn’t want to be a Viking too, swinging my axe on a longboat sailing up the Uulisk Fjord...

dead beasts freed from the ice cliffs that held them far to the north from times before Odin first gave men the curse of speech.

‘When the gates of Niflheim open to release the winter, and

the frost giants’ breath rolls out across the North, the dead come with it, taking whoever they c...

Twice guardsmen startled from their alcoves, one even calling a challenge before deciding I was more ass than assassin.

layered in his official robes and beetling toward us with the sort of self-importance that only minor functionaries can muster.

He stopped trying to get past me and sighed. ‘What is it that you want, Prince Jalan?’