Prince of Fools (The Red Queen's War 1)
The door lay flat, torn off its leather hinges, the interior beyond strewn with bed furs, broken pots, scattered corn. Snorri staggered in, searching through the furs with blunt fingers, seized by a shivering beyond his control, tossing the bedding aside, dreading to find nothing, dreading to find something.
In the end he discovered only a pool of blood on the hearthstone, dark and sticky and smeared by feet. Against the whiteness of his fingers the blood regained its crimson vitality. Whose blood? How much spilled? Nothing left of his wife, of his children, but blood? At the door, a clump of red hair caught his attention, snagged by a crack in the support, made to dance by the wind. “Egil.” Snorri reached for his son’s hair with bloodstained hands. Convulsions overtook him and he fell back, thrashing and trembling amongst the hides of grey wolf and black bear.
How many hours it took for the ghouls’ poison to leave him, Snorri could not have said. The venom that had preserved him in the snow, slowing his heart and drawing back life into the tightest core, now restored all sensation as it left his system. It put an edge on each of the senses, heightening the pain of returning circulation, making a misery of the cold despite being wrapped with many furs, even putting fresh barbs on a grief that already seemed beyond enduring. He raged and he shook and by slow degrees both warmth and strength returned to his limbs. He dressed, tying laces with still-numb fingers in an ecstasy of fumbling, pulled his boots on, crammed the last of the winter stores into his travel pack, dry hake and black biscuit, salt in a wrap of sealskin, fat in an earthenware jar. He took his travelling skins, seal in two layers, trapping the down of the cliff gull. Above it he wore a wolfskin, a grey beast that like the dark bears travel north with the summer and retreat before the snows. It would be enough. Spring had won her war, and like the summer wolf Snorri would strike north and take what he needed.
“I will find you,” he promised the empty room, promised the dent in the bed where his wife had slept, promised the roof above them, the sky above it, the gods on high.
And ducking the lintel, Snorri ver Snagason left his home to find his axe amidst the thaw.
• • •
“And did you find it?” I asked, imagining his father’s axe lying there in the melting snow, and Snorri lifting it with awful purpose.
“Not first.” The Norseman’s voice put so much despair into just two words I couldn’t ask him to speak more and held my peace, but a moment later he spoke on unprompted.
“I found Emy first. Discarded on a midden heap, limp and ragged, like a lost doll.” No sound but for the crackle of the fire beside us. I wanted him to keep silent, to say nothing more. “The ghouls had eaten most of her face. She still had eyes, though.”
“I’m so sorry.” And I was. Snorri’s magic had reached into me again and made me brave. In that moment I wanted to be the one to stand between the child and her attackers. To keep her safe. And failing that, to hunt them to the ends of the earth. “Death must have been a kindness.”
“She wasn’t dead.” No emotion in his voice now. None. And the night felt thick around us, the dark deepening into blindness, swallowing stars. “I pulled two ghoul-darts from her and she started to scream.” He lay down and the fire dimmed as if choked by its own smoke, though it had burned clean enough when set. “Death was kind.” He drew a sharp breath. “But no father should have to give such a kindness to his child.”
I lay down too, no care for the hard ground, damp cloak, empty stomach. A tear made its way along the side of my nose. Snorri’s magic had left me. My only desire lay south, back in the comforts of the Red Queen’s palace. An echo of his misery rang in me and confused itself with my own. That tear might have been for little Emy—it might have been for me—it probably was for me, but I’ll tell myself it was for both of us, and perhaps one day I’ll believe it.
TWELVE
On the morning after Snorri’s tale of horror in the North, we neither of us spoke of it. He broke his fast in a sombre mood, but by the time it came to ride on, his good humour had returned. Much of the man was a mystery to me, but this I understood well enough. We all practise self-deception to a degree; no man can handle complete honesty without being cut at each turn. There’s not enough room in a man’s head for sanity alongside each grief, each worry, each terror that he owns. I’m well used to burying such things in a dark cellar and moving on. Snorri’s demons might have escaped into a quiet moment the night before while we sat watching the stars, but now he’d harried them back into some cellar of his own and barred the door once more. There’s tears enough in the world to drown in, but Snorri and I knew that action requires an uncluttered mind. We knew how to set such things aside and move on.