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

As a prince I’d been taught that good opposes evil. I’d been shown the good, shining in chivalric honour, and the evil hunched about its wrongness, crowned with horns. And always I wondered where I fitted into this grand scheme, little Jalan built of petty wants and empty lusts, nothing so grand as evil, nothing closer to good than imitation. And now it seemed that the blind-eye woman of my childhood terrors was in fact a great-aunt of mine. Indeed, if Great-Uncle Garyus was the true king, then surely the Silent Sister, older than my grandmother, was his heir?

I knuckled my eyes through the stiff leather of my face guard, trying to knead the tiredness from them, perhaps the confusion too. I blinked to clear my blurred vision. Embers from the bone-fire danced on the wind, out against the blackness of the ice plain. Despite the wind, they hung there. Another blink, and another, wouldn’t clear them.

“Ah, hell.” Through numb lips.

Lanterns.

They were coming.

TWENTY-NINE

Snorri watched the advance through a crack he’d opened in the shutters. I felt the wind’s knife even at my place by the fire.

“They’re coming to the front gate.”

“How many?” I asked.

“Two dozen, a few more perhaps.”

I had been expecting an army, but it made sense that there were so few. Supporting any significant numbers out here on the edge of survival would be a huge undertaking, and pointless if there were dead men to do the bulk of the labour. But that made me wonder once again about the captives. They had sold the men south. I’d not given it much thought before, but surely if they wanted captives for digging in the ice then . . . It made no sense at all—they would have killed any captives they kept and let them serve the same purpose in death, tireless and requiring no sustenance.

“There are no captives!” I spoke it aloud—not a whisper, not a shout, just a statement.

“About fifty dead ranked behind those . . . at least that’s all I can see in their lights, but it’s a tight-packed group.” Snorri continued his report. “There may be necromancers and Island men amongst them—I can’t tell.”

“What—” I couldn’t find the right words. “Why—” If there were no captives . . . where were Freja and little Egil?

“Men coming to the doors.” Snorri crossed over to the central murder-hole. “Oil.”

Ein came across with the iron bucket of oil they’d had heating on the fire. Carrying it with padded tongs. Apparently boiling water would freeze and spread as it fell, landing as a dust of ice crystals.

Three muffled thuds from below as someone hammered on the great door. Snorri pulled the cover of the murder-hole clear and Ein poured. When the bucket was empty Snorri replaced the cover, muting the screams.

“What now?” Tuttugu, wide-eyed, recovered enough to be terrified.

“Jal, back to the roof to watch,” Snorri said.

“The steps will kill me if nothing else does.” I shook my head and made what speed I could up the coiled stair.

From the roof I could see what Snorri had described, and nothing more. Perhaps what he saw had been the sum of them. Heart pounding, and shaking with both the cold and with the thought of what the dark might hide, I made a circuit of the guard wall. Nothing. No other light. Nothing to see at all. That worried me, both in general and for some other reason I couldn’t quite put my finger on.

For long minutes only the wind howled, the Vikings held their ranks in the lee of the walls, the dead behind them, and nothing moved. A dread grew in me, but it hardly required any extra malign influence for that. There were dead things out there, wanting us to share their state; only a madman wouldn’t be quaking.

With only the lights to watch, I watched the lights. I wondered how I could ever have fooled myself they were just embers from the bone-fire blown out across the ice field. The mind spends half its time in self-deception, it seems. Or maybe I’m deceiving myself . . . I watched the lights a moment longer, then slapped my brow. It’s not often that people actually do slap their brow when a sudden realization illuminates their skull from the inside, especially without an audience. But I did it. And then I ran down the icy stairs, two and three at a time, swearing at the pain with each impact.

“What? What is it? What did you see?” All three of them together as I hunched over my hurt, clutching my ribs, fighting to draw breath.

“Give him some room.” Snorri, stepping back.

“I—” The cut on my leg had broken past the stitches Ein had set there while I slept, blood running down my thigh.