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

by Mark Lawrence

When you watch from a shaded veranda, sipping iced wine as the Red March summer paints lemons

onto garden boughs – that’s promise. When you have to toil a whole day in the dust to cover a thumb’s dista...

It occurred to me then that the Norseman truly hoped his family might yet survive. He thought this a rescue mission rather than just some matter of revenge. That made it even worse. Revenge is a business of calculation, best served cold. Rescue holds more of sacrifice, suicidal danger, and all manner of other madness that should have me running in the opposite direction.

‘Come now! You’ll offend Sally!’ I remonstrated. ‘If you’ve already got a bearded lady I can scarce believe she’s as comely as this young wench.’ That got the dwarf’s attention. ‘Well hello, Sally! Gretcho Marlinki at your service!’ I could feel Snorri looming behind me in the way that suggested my head might get twisted off in short order.

‘Cross my palm, stranger.’ I couldn’t tell if the creature was man or woman.

‘Don’t humour her.’ Daisy increased the speed of her waddle. ‘Cracked, that one is. Everything’s doom and gloom. Drives the punters away.’ ‘You’re quarry.’ The old woman called after us, then coughed as if a lung had burst. ‘Quarry.’ I couldn’t tell which of us she’d aimed the words at. ‘Save it for the peasants,’ I called back, but it left a chill. Always does. I expect that’s why prophecy sells.

‘So, you can’t ride then?’ ‘Never tried,’ he said. ‘You’ve never even sat on a horse?’ It seemed hard to credit. ‘I’ve eaten plenty,’ he said. ‘That doesn’t help.’

in the end Snorri and the horse reached an uneasy truce where they both adopted a fixed grin and got on with moving forward.

‘Not so much to tell. Awful place. The food’s bad, the men surly and ignorant, the women cross-eyed. And they’re thieves to a man. If you shake

Rhonish hand, count your fingers afterward.’ ‘You’ve never been there, have you?’

‘Did you not listen to what I said? Why would I go somewhere like that?’

was ever called on to swing a sword in earnest. Crashing in amongst those Scorron soldiers up in the Aral Pass raw terror washed away all my training in an instant. Those were great big angry men with sharp swords actually wanting to cut pieces off me. It’s not until you’ve seen a red gaping wound and all the complex little bits inside a man all broken up and sliced open, and known that they weren’t ever getting back together again, and vomited your last two meals over the rocks … it’s not until then that you understand the business of swords properly and, if you’re a sensible man you vow to have nothing to do with it ever again.

‘You can’t afford another sword!’ He couldn’t afford anything – he’d been a prisoner for months until his recent escape. Not the most lucrative of occupations.

‘I’m just more interested in the finer things in life, Snorri. If you can’t ride it

one way or another – and it doesn’t play dice, or cards, or pour from a wine bottle, then I’m really not that bothered. Especially if it’s foreign. Or heathen. Or both. But

this … thing … said something that...

I sipped my wine. A Rhonish red. Vile stuff, like vinegar and pepper.

One slip and the fjord would swallow her, the cold stealing both breath and strength.

Three more days riding through the continuous downpour that served as a Rhonish summer and I was more than ready to gallop back south toward the myriad pleasures of home. Only fear bound me to our course.

Fear of what lay behind and fear of what would happen if I got too far from Snorri.

a small, walled town named Chamy-Nix. The place sounded vaguely promising but proved to be a big let-down, just another wet Rhonish town, as dour and worthy as all the rest. Worse still, it was one of those damnable places where the locals pretend not to speak the Empire Tongue. They do of course, but they hide behind some or other ancient language as if taking pride in being so primitive.

but a definite blare that comes in handy for dressing down unruly servants, insubordinate junior officers, and of course as a last ditch means of intimidating men who might otherwise put a sword through me. Part of the art of survival as a coward is not letting things get to the point where that cowardice is exposed. If you can bluster your way through dangerous situations it’s all to the good, and a fine shouting voice helps immensely.

suspicion. It looked foreign. The floating suds made an island that put me in mind of some alien place where they’d never heard of Red March and cut princes no slack. That put a bad taste in my mouth before I’d even sipped it.

negotiate the food in whatever mangled tongue was required.

Meegan scared me the most though, smallest of the three but with long ropey arms and pale staring eyes that put me in mind of Cutter John. Beneath a pretence of casual interest all of them studied me with an intensity that set my teeth on edge.

startle the sheep in successive fields into waves of woolly panic.

Find a happy place, Jalan. I hopped around my boulder, trying to remember my last moments with Lisa DeVeer.

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.

I have to admit a small thrill at having the upper hand after what seemed like weeks of nothing but running, sleeping in ditches and being terrified.

‘And him?’ None of the solutions for Meegan looked good. I didn’t want to let him go, I didn’t want to keep him, but whilst I’ll do my fellow man down at every turn, I’ve no murder in 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 toward 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 look...

‘It took until now to for you 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.

‘Look, we’ll go back. My grandmother is the Red Queen, dammit. 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.

‘Oh, and that necromancer bitch.’ The idea of some death-sworn beauty lurking out among 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.

‘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.’

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.

We came to Ancrath along the border roads between Rhone and Gelleth. Snorri travelled with a native caution that kept us safe on several occasions, holding us back amid a wood as battle-ragged troops marched south, taking us into the corn when brigands rode by in search of wickedness. I was keener to avoid such encounters than Snorri but my senses were better honed to detecting the approach of trouble across a crowded feast hall or through the smokes of an opium parlour than on horseback across open country.

the angel that kept whispering to me wouldn’t approve, and you don’t want to piss off an angel that lives under your skin.

They’re the worst sort.

We crossed the Sane by the Royal Bridge, a fine broad construction sitting on great piles that must have survived the Thousand Suns.

the Old City where the money lived, looking out over what it owned.

‘The Falling Angel. Sounds about right.’

the place lay revealed to me. A dive indeed, and populated by a collection of the most dangerous-looking men I’d laid eyes on outside of a fighting pit …

The Nuban close by the hearth had perhaps travelled furthest. A powerfully-built man with tribal scars and a watchful gravitas about him. He caught me staring and flashed a grin.

‘Mercenaries,’ Snorri said. I noticed as he said it that almost every man in the place carried a weapon, most of them several weapons, and not the civilized man’s poniard or rapier but bloody great swords, axes, cleavers, knives for gutting bears; and the biggest crossbow

I saw cards and dice

aplenty but something told me that winning money off any of these men might be a shortlived pleasure.

Our ale arrived, smacked down in earthenware cups and frothing over the sides. They were poorly fashioned, made in a hurry for the lowest cost, the sort of cups that expected to get broken.