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

“Stars.” Snorri stabbed a finger at the midnight-blue heavens.

“I remember those.” Not long ago I’d been watching them on a hot night, leaning out from Lisa DeVeer’s balcony and lying. “Those there are the lovers,” I had told her. Pointing at some random piece of sky. “Roma and Julit. It takes an expert to spot them.”

“And is it good luck when they shine on us?” Lisa had asked, half-disguising a smile that made me think she might well know more astrology than I’d given her credit for.

“Let’s find out,” I had said, and reached for her. And they did turn out lucky that night. Even so, I suspected myself a victim of Grandmother’s insistence on education for all. It’s hard on a chap when the women he wishes to impress are better schooled than he is. I suspect my cousin Serah could name every constellation in the sky while penning a sonnet.

“I wasn’t captured on the Uulisk slopes,” Snorri said.

I frowned at the stars, trying to make sense of that. “What?”

“What I told your queen would lead her to believe that I had been.”

“Had been what?” I was still trying to see what this had to do with stars.

“I said Broke-Oar sailed up the Uulisk. That they fell upon us there, that the Undoreth were broken, my children scattered. I said he took me to his ship in chains.”

“Yes,” I said, trying to remember any of it. I recalled that the throne room had been stuffy, that my legs ached with standing, that I’d lost a night’s sleep and found a hangover. The details of Snorri’s tale, not so much—except that I had thought he’d been lying the horns off his Viking hat and now he seemed to be telling me that he really had been.

“When the spring comes to the Uulisk it comes in a rush, ready for war!” Snorri said, and he told his story, with the fire crackling at our backs and our eyes upon the innumerable stars. He spun the tale out into the darkness, weaving pictures with his voice, too bright, too vivid to look away from.

• • •

He had woken that morning to the groaning of the ice. For days black water had glimmered at the fjord’s centre. Today, though, today the thaw would come in earnest and with the sun’s first touch, reaching down across the high ridges of Uuliskind, the shore ice groaned in protest.

“Get up! Up you big ox!” And Freja pulled the furs from the cot, letting cold air nip at his flesh. Snorri groaned as the ice had groaned. Some forces of nature cannot be resisted. Outside, the ice grumbled and surrendered to the authority of the spring thaw; inside, a husband gave way before a mother ready to sweep away a whole winter’s worth of filth and to throw the shutters wide. Neither were to be withstood.

Snorri reached for his shirt and breeches, yawning wide enough to crack his jaw. Freja worked around him, twisting aside with practised ease when his hands sought her hips.

“You behave, Snorri ver Snagason.” She started to lift the bedskins and tug out the heather beneath. “There’s those pens want fixing on the Pel slope. Spring’ll have the he-goats nosing around the she-goats.”

“This he-goat wants his she-goat,” Snorri snorted, but he stood and made for the door. Freja was right, as always. The fences wouldn’t keep kids in or wolves out. Not as they stood. Not how the winter had left them. He took his iron-toothed saw from the wall. “Ver Magson will have staves. I’ll promise him a barrel of salted hake.”

“You’ll promise him half a barrel, and check the timber first,” Freja said.

Snorri shrugged and kept his mouth pressed closed on a smile. He took a roll of seal hide, his steel knife, a whetstone. “Where are the children?”

“Karl’s off string-fishing with the Magson boy. Emy went out to look for her peg doll, and Egil”—Freja toed a lump in the bed furs up against the wall—“Egil is still sleeping and needs to wake up!” Her voice rose into a command and the lump shifted, muttering some complaint, a shock of red hair now just visible at the far end of the furs.

Snorri tugged on his boots, took his sheepskin from the hook, patted his battle-axe secured high above the lintel, and pushed open the door. The cold hit him at once, but it lacked its winter bite—this was a wet cold and, soon enough, spring would wrestle it round to mild.

The rocky slope ran from his doorstep past a half dozen other stone-built huts to the Uulisk’s ice-locked shore. The fishing boats slouched in their winter berths, cradled in timber above the worst of the snow. Eight quays led out over the ice, strutting on pine legs, planking warped by too many harsh seasons. The town had been named for them, Eight Quays, back in an age when eight was a number to boast of. Einhaur, six miles seaward, had twenty and more, but Einhaur had been nothing but ice and rock when Snorri’s grandfather’s grandfather had settled the shore at Eight Quays.