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

by Mark Lawrence

Across the room, through smoke and past the to-and-fro of bodies, a huge man was giving me the evil eye. He had the kind of blunt weapon of a face you could imagine breaking through a door, and he sat head and shoulders above

the men beside him. To the giant’s left a man who seemed too fat to be dangerous but somehow managed to look scary anyway, with a patchy beard straggling down over multiple chins, piggy eyes assessing the crowd whilst he chomped the meat off a bone. To the right was the only normal-sized man of the trio, looking somehow ridiculous in their shadow, and yet I’d be giving him the widest of berths. Everything about him said warrior. He ate and drank wit...

probably don’t want to see him...

this one a moustachioed fellow with an unlikely number of knives bound about his person.

It’s in my nature to absent myself from danger whenever possible, and relaxed or not, this brotherhood we’d fallen in with sweated danger from every pore.

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. Brother Rike favoured a shorter path to violence. He simply let out an animal roar and closed the final three paces at speed.

Snorri stood, letting the bench fall as Rike reeled back, then in one quick stride seized the man behind his head with both hands and rammed him face-first into the table. The impact sent my ale vaulting out of its cup and into my lap. Rike himself slid to the floor trailing a long red stain across the beer-soaked boards. The killer stood behind his fallen companion. Red Kent they called this one. His hand on the hatchet at his side, a question on his brow. ‘Ha! Let him sleep it off.’ Snorri

grinned at Kent and sat down. Brother Kent returned the smile and went back to sit with his fat companion.

There’s a certain arrogance expected of aristocracy and a life

of service had trained men such as the ones before me to respond to it. My brother Martus had a marvellous way of looking down his nose at even the tallest of underlings and I do a decent job of it myself.

It was Snorri who drew their attention of course: not the blasted prince of Red March deigning to grace their mean halls, but some freakishly large Norseman with ten acres of slope to his name. Something about the braids in his hair, or the arctic flash of his eyes, or perhaps the bloody great axe across his back, is apt to make any castle-dweller think for a moment that their defences have been breached.

reclaim the place after the tribes of men spread back into the poisoned lands.

Martus, though, was shaped with a blunt hand. Darin a touch better. The artist had perfected the design by the time he got to me.

if not for the fact that every inch of his exposed skin, which amounted to hands, neck and head, was tattooed with foreign scrawl. The letters even crawled up across his face, crowding his cheeks and forehead with dense calligraphy.

advise the king on more … unusual matters.’ ‘Hallelujah!’ Perhaps not the thing to say to someone with such heathen looks, but in the joy of discovering a man who might undo my curse I was prepared to overlook shortcomings such as being of distinctly foreign origin and failing to worship the right deity.

from my vantage point I could read what was written on the top of his head. Or at least I could if I knew the script. I guessed the writing to be from somewhere east and maybe south too. A long way east and south. A place where the writing looked like spiders mating.

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.

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.

My old life, the pleasures of the flesh, and of the gaming table, and sometimes the first on the second.

‘Kill the Norseman.’ It sounded more reasonable each time he said it. After all, it would save Snorri the discovery that his family were dead. All he had before him was a long trip to the worst news in the world.

sat opposite him now as he stood behind the ladder-back chair, fingers running over its rungs as if they were a harp on which a melody could be played. ‘So you’ll ask for his head.’ Not a question. Those mild eyes fatherly now. A father and friend. Though lord knows, not my father: he always seemed embarrassed by the whole business of father and son. Yes. Sageous was right. I started to say the words. ‘I’ll ask for his—’ The point of a sword emerged from Sageous’s

narrow chest, and not your common or garden sword either but one as brilliant as the dawn, bright as steel drawn from the white heat of the furnace. Sageous looked down at the point, astonished, and it advanced until a foot of gleaming blade stood from his chest. ‘What?’ Blood ran from the corners of his mouth. ‘This is not your place, heathen.’ Wings unfurled behind the man as if they were his own. White wings. White like summer clouds, eagle-feathered, broad

enough to bear a man skyward. ‘How?’ Sageous gargled blood now, spilling it down his chin with the word. The sword withdrew and a head unbowed, rising above the heathen, a face as proud and inhuman as those wrought in marble upon statues of Greek gods or Roman emperors. ‘He is of the light.’ And in a flash the...

Sageous’s corpse. A voice that came from outside the castle, huger than sound should be, loud enough to break stone. ‘Wake.’ It made no sense. ‘What—’ ‘Wake up.’ I blinked. Blinked again. Opened my eyes. Instead of blackness, post-dawn grey. I sat up, sheets still clinging to my sweat-soaked limbs. Be...

He wanted me to have Snorri killed. His arguments had seemed sound enough, but although

lost more money at the card table than I won, I’d spent enough time there to know when I was being played.

‘In my homeland they call you the Devil of the Aral,’ she said. ‘The Red Prince.’ ‘They do?’ I tried the words again, removing the surprise from my voice. ‘They do.’ A nod against my shoulder. ‘Sir Karlan survived the battle in which you fought, and escaped to the North. At court he told us how you battled without fear – like a madman, striking down man after man. Sir Gort among them.

Sir Gort was the son of my father’s cousin. A warrior of some renown.’ ‘Well …’ I guessed some tales grew in the telling and that too much fear might sometimes look like no fear at all. Either way, the queen had given me a gift and it was beholden to me to milk it. ‘My people do call me the hero of the pass. I supposed it’s fitting that the Scorrons call me the devil. I will wear the name with pride.’

Fear can be an excellent anaesthetic. Certainly the sudden appearance of two mean-faced men in Ancrath livery with bare steel in their hands gets rid of ball-ache double quick. A catapult could have ejected me from that chair no faster and I was clattering down the servant stair before you could say ‘adultery’, door slamming behind me.

I reached my room, panting and still in panic. Snorri had abandoned the chair I’d placed him in and now lay sprawled on the bed. ‘That

was quick.’ He raised his head. ‘We should probably leave,’ I said, realizing as I looked about for my belongings that I didn’t actually have any. ‘Why?’ Snorri swung his legs over the side of the bed and sat up, the structure creaking alarmingly beneath him. ‘Uh …’ I leaned back out into the corrido...

‘We could leave anyway. I mean. I spoke to the king’s magician last night and he wasn’t that helpful—’ ‘Hah!’ Snorri sat down again with a thump. ‘That old dream-witch! We’ll have to look elsewhere for help, Jal. His power’s broken. The boy smashed Sageous’s totem a couple of days back. Some kind of glass tree. Jorg pushed it over in the throne room. Pieces of it everywhere!’ ‘Where— where do you get all this stuff?’ ‘I talk to people, Jal. While

the queen’s sticking her tongue in your ear I’m busy listening instead. Prince Jorg undid Sageous’s power, and boldly.

‘He killed the king’s champion, the Captain of the Guard, Sir Galen. That’s who Sareth’s sister was in mourning for.’ ‘You’re going to tell me it wasn’t by poisoning his

mead?’ ‘Single combat.’ ‘We’re leaving.’ I called it from the corridor.

‘She’s a child yet. And I’m a married man.’ ‘She was seventeen if she was a day. And I thought you Vikings operated under ship-rules?’

‘If you get there by ship there are no rules,’ I said.

‘We’re men as any other. Some good. Some bad. Most in between.’

‘Snow’s not good. It’s just cold water gone wrong.’

‘Mountains. The mountains are beautiful.’ ‘Mountains are inconvenient lumps of rock that get in people’s way.

‘We’d better, because I’m not going any further east.’ East of Maladon was Osheim, and nobody went to Osheim.

Osheim was where the Builders built the Wheel, and every fairytale that ever launched a nightmare starts ‘Once upon a time, not far from the Wheel of Osheim’.

‘Hmmm.’ I didn’t like the sound of that. When your sole travelling companion is a seven foot maniac with an axe it can be unsettling to hear that he’s starting to believe the devil that whispers in his ear when the sun sets. Even so, I didn’t argue the point. Baraqel had told me the same thing that morning. Perhaps when an angel whispered to me at sunrise I

should start believing what he said.

‘Someone is seeding our path to stop us, but they’re not chasing us.’ ‘But the thing in Vermillion – it escaped, Sageous said we would meet it, he—’ ‘He told me the same thing.’ Snorri nodded. ‘You don’t want to believe much that man says, but I think he’s

right. It did escape. I suspect the creature you saw in the opera house was an unborn, one grown old in its power, the target of the Silent Sister’s spell. Probably an important lieutenant to the Dead King. A captain of his armies maybe.’ ‘But it’s not following us?’ It was following us. I knew it. ‘Did you not listen to the dream-witch, Jal?’ ‘He said a lot of things … Mostly about killing you – and how I could go home if I did.’ ‘The curse, the Silent Sister’s

spell? Why’s it still on us?’ That did ring a bell. ‘Because the unborn wasn’t destroyed. The enchantment is an act of will. It needs to complete its purpose.’ I crossed my arms, pleased with myself. ‘That’s right. And we’re heading north and the spell is giving us no problems.’ ‘Yes.’ I frowned. This was going somewhere bad. ‘The unborn isn’t ...

A man can drown in the grass seas of Thurtan. In the swaying green, wind-rippled, with twenty miles and more of cold bog and saw-grass on every side, it can seem that you’ve been set adrift in an ocean without end.

It might be said that the whole course of my own adventure sprang from a die that should have rolled a five or a two, landing instead with a single snake eye pointing at me, a pitiless eye watching me plunge further into Maeres Allus’s debt.