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

Dead men moved towards the door of Snorri’s hut, stepping frozen-footed through the snow. Between the ver Lutens’ huts a hundred yards upshore, the Broke-Oar and a handful of his men stood with torches raised. Around them mire-ghouls found the rooftops, blowpipes ready.

From the shoreline voices barked orders, their accents strange, clipped like those of Brettan men. The Drowned Isles then, a raid from the Drowned Isles, guided in by Sven Broke-Oar. It made no sense.

The first dead man set his frost-black hands upon Snorri’s door. When Snorri had seen Emy that morning walking with a five-year-old’s lack of guile along the long-quay, he’d known a terror like no other. His child had been, in that moment, out of reach, alone with her danger. It hadn’t been the danger that unmanned him but his inability to stand between it and her.

“Thor. Watch me.” Snorri had never had much time for calling on gods. He might raise a flagon to Odin on feast day, or swear by Hel when they stitched his wounds, but in general he saw them as an ideal, a code to live by, not an ear to moan and complain into. Now, though, he prayed. And launched himself into the corpse-crowd before his door.

As Snorri broke cover he heard nothing above his own battle roar: not the ghouls’ sharp exhalations or the hissing flight of their darts. Even the sting as they punctured his shoulder, arm, and neck he barely noticed. He took the head from the closest of the dead men, the arm that reached for him, a hand, another head. All the time Hel felt heavier in his hands, as if the axe were stone. Even his arms grew heavy, muscles almost unable to bear the weight of the bones they wrapped. A black fist struck him, frostbitten knuckles hammering his temples. Hands caught hold around his knees, some fallen opponent still unable to die despite grievous wounds. Snorri started to fall, toppling to the side. With the last of his strength he launched himself to break the grip around his legs, rolling heels over head along the icy margins of his hut. The invaders pressed on towards the hut’s door in a tight huddle, leaving only the pieces of bodies shorn by his axe and a corpse near-severed at the spine but hauling itself towards him hand over hand.

A numbness ran through Snorri, deep as any that cold will put in a man. He couldn’t feel his limbs, though he saw his arms before him corpse-white and smeared with the dark ichor that lay still in the dead men’s veins. No part of him would move, though every fibre of his will demanded it. Only the sound of door planks splintering shocked his traitor body into rising. An avalanche hammered him back to the ground. Something on the roof of his hut—ghouls, shifting the snow as they scampered into position—and in one mass it fell, pressing him down with a soft but implacable hand.

Snorri lay helpless, the last of his strength gone, his naked body entombed in snow, waiting for death, waiting for the strangling grip of dead hands or the teeth of ghouls or the axe of one of the Broke-Oar’s reavers. No matter what the Broke-Oar was being paid, he would want no witnesses to this night’s shame.

A high shriek reached him, even through his cocoon of snow. Emy! Then Freja’s screams, her battle cry, a mother’s rage, the roar from Karl, his eldest, as he attacked. Every part of his mind howled for motion, every ounce of his will trying to force his arms to reach, legs to pump . . . but no piece of him moved. All that anger and desperation, yet only a sigh escaped the numbness of his lips, drooling into the blind white all about him.

• • •

The incessant tapping had woken him. The tap-tap-tap of rain. Rain pouring off the eaves, washing away the snow, taking the ice from his eyelids so he could open them to the day. He turned his head and the water ran from his eyes. The remains of the snow heap lay around him, a touch whiter than the marble of his flesh.

Snow makes a soft bed, but no man wakes from it. That was the wisdom of the North. Snorri had seen enough drunks frozen where they slept to know the truth of it. A groan escaped him. This was death. His dead body would shamble after the corpse legions, his mind trapped within. He had never thought that good men might watch helpless from behind dead eyes, in thrall to necromancers.

Still the water splattered across him, gushing from behind the fascia board, falling in a grey curtain all along the roof’s edge. It beat at his ear, ran across his chest, almost warm though icicles fringed the eaves, defying the thaw. He rolled clear across half-frozen ground. The motion took him by surprise, left him unsure whether he owned it or not.

The raid! As if Snorri’s mind were thawing too, memory began to leak behind his eyes. In a moment he found his feet, rain starting to clean the mud from his side. He stood, unsteady, a tremble running through him, the cold reaching him for the first time. “Gods no!” He stumbled forwards, reaching for the wall for support, though his hands had no more sensation in them than his feet.