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

Snorri ver Snagason stepped into view. “You!” he said.

The hooded robe he’d been wearing when I ran into him was half-torn from his shoulders; blood splattered his chest and arms and dripped from the scarlet sword in his fist. More of the stuff ran down his face from a shallow cut on his forehead. It wouldn’t be hard to mistake him for a demon risen from hell. In fact, in the flickering light, blood-clad and with battle in his eyes, it was quite hard not to.

“You?” The eloquence Snorri had demonstrated in Grandmother’s throne room had wholly abandoned him.

He reached for me, and I shrank back, but not far because that fucking table was in the way. As that big hand came close, I felt a tingle on my cheekbones, my lips, forehead, like pins and needles, a kind of pressure building. He felt it too—I saw his eyes widen. The direction that had led me, the destination that had drawn me on . . . it was him. The same force had led Snorri here and set him amongst Maeres’s men. We both recognized it now.

The Norseman slowed his hand, fingers an inch or two from my neck. The skin there buzzed, almost crackling with . . . something. He stopped, not wanting to find out what would happen if he touched me skin to skin. The hand withdrew, returned full of knife, and before I could squeal he set to cutting my bonds.

“You’re coming with me. We can sort this out somewhere else.”

Abandoning me amongst loops of sliced rope, Snorri returned to the doorway, pausing only to stamp on someone’s neck. Not Maeres’s, unfortunately. He ducked his head through, pulling back immediately, a quick bobbing motion. Something hissed past the entrance, several somethings.

“Crossbows.” Snorri spat on Daveet’s corpse. “I hate bowmen.” A glance back at me. “Grab a sword.”

“A sword?” The man clearly thought he was still in the wilds amongst the overly hairy folk of the North. I cast my eye across the carnage, looking behind the table. Cutter John lay sprawled, the stump of his arm barely pulsing, an ugly wound on his forehead. No sign of Maeres. I couldn’t imagine how he’d escaped.

None of them had any weapon more offensive than a six-inch knife; carrying anything larger within the city walls just wasn’t worth the trouble from town-laws. I took the dagger and kicked Cutter John in the head a few times. It really hurt my toes, but I felt it a price worth paying.

I hobbled back round the table holding my new weapon and earned a withering look from the Norseman. He picked up the door. “Catch.” I didn’t quite manage it. Whilst I hopped on my good foot, clutching my face and swearing nasally, Snorri quickly hacked the legs from the table and, bearing it like a huge shield, advanced towards the corridor. “Get my back!”

The fear of being left behind, and finding myself in Maeres Allus’s clutches again, spurred me into action. With some effort I picked up the door and together we propelled our shields into the corridor before stepping between them. Crossbow bolts thudded into both immediately, iron heads splintering partway through.

“Which direc—” Snorri was already too far away to hear me even if he hadn’t been shouting his battle cry. He’d stormed off down the corridor behind me. I followed as best I could, trying to hold the door across my back while I stumbled after him, keeping my head down, reaching over my shoulders to hold the door in place. Shouts and screams ahead indicated that Snorri had gotten to grips with his hated bowmen, but by the time I got there it was all blood and pieces. The main difficulty lay in not slipping over in the gore. Several more bolts hit the boards across my back with powerful thuds, and another skipped between my ankles, letting me know that I’d left a gap. Fortunately I had just ten yards to reach the exit. With the door scraping the floor behind me, and just the tips of my fingers exposed, I broke out into the night air. My traditional moment of triumph at escaping yet again was curtailed by a muscular arm that reached from the darkness and yanked me to one side.

“I’ve got a boat,” Snorri growled. Normally when you say someone growled something it’s just a turn of phrase, but Snorri really put something feral into his words.

“What?” I shook my arm free, or he let it go, a mutual thing, neither of us liking the burning needling sensation where his fingers gripped me.

“I’ve got a boat.”

“Of course you do, you’re a Viking.” Everything seemed rather surreal. Perhaps I’d been hit in the face one too many times since Alain made a grab for me in the opera house only an hour or two earlier.

Snorri shook his head. “Follow. Quick!”

He took off into the night. The sounds of men approaching down the warehouse corridor convinced me to give chase. We crossed a wide space stacked with barrels and crates, passed dozens of hanging nets, the sails of riverboats poking up above the river wall beside us. By moonlight we crossed a quay and descended stone steps to the water, where a rowing boat lay tied to one of the great iron rings set into the wall.