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

“I, erm, can leave you to it if you need a quiet moment.” The tight line of his lips in that black beard gave no indication that he was mocking me.

“You’re mocking me, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

I let go and gave my ankle an experimental wiggle. “Motherf—” Words became an inarticulate howl.

“Not fixed then?” Snorri asked.

I stood up slowly. It seemed that whatever I’d done to Meegan was, like tickling, something you can’t do to yourself. And all in all, healing Meegan had been a complete waste of effort given that Snorri had pushed him over the ledge a minute or two later. Perhaps it had been a one-off thing. I hoped so.

“You want some?” I held out a hand towards Snorri’s waist.

He took a sharp step back. “Best not. Bad stuff happens if we touch, and I’ve got a feeling it would be worse than last time.”

I remembered reaching for his hand as I slipped down the mountain. In retrospect the damage done to my ankle might have been the lesser of two evils. If I had managed to grab hold we might just have burned up like the dead man.

“What’s going on?” I held my hands up, palms towards me. “That dead man fried where I touched him. And you.” I looked back up at Snorri, angry now, scared and angry and in that moment not caring if he took offence. “You! There’s something wrong with you, Norseman. I’ve seen those black eyes. I saw . . . smoke, hell, I’ll call it what it is, I saw darkness swirl around you when you killed those men, like your axe was cutting the stuff out of the air.” I made the connection then. I should have seen it before. “And that’s what’s in you, isn’t it? Dark eyes, dark dreams. Darkness!”

Snorri hefted his axe, running a speculative eye along its length. For a moment I thought he might strike me down, but he shook his head and offered a grim smile. “It took you until now to understand? It’s the curse you brought on me. On us. Your witch, the Silent Sister. Her curse. That broken spell, that twin crack, running after you, dark and light. I got darkness—you got light—both whispering to us, and both of them wanting to get out.

“In the North the wise women say the world is a cloth, woven from many strands and stretched across what is real. The world we see is thin.” He held up a thumb and finger, almost touching. “Where it tears, deeper truths escape. And we are torn, Jal. We’re carrying wounds we can’t see. We’re carrying it north and the dead want to stop us.”

“Look, we’ll go back. My grandmother is the Red Queen, damn it. She can have this made right. We’ll go back and—”

“No.” Snorri cut me off. “I took the prince out of the palace, but the palace is still crammed firmly up the prince’s arse. You need to stop moaning about every hardship, stop chasing every woman you lay eyes on, and concentrate on surviving. Out here—” He waved the axe at the bleakness of the mountains. “Out here you need to live in the moments. Watch the world. You’re a young man, Jal, a child who’s refused to grow up. Do it now, or you’ll die a young man. Whatever is behind this pursuit, it all started in Vermillion. Whatever war is being fought there is being lost. The Dead King is trying to kill us because we’re taking the Sister’s strength north.”

I got to my feet. “So we stop going north! Go back. Make this right! It’s nonsense anyhow. It was all an accident. Just ill fortune. Nobody could have planned it. It’s all a mistake.”

“I saw her too, Jal. This Silent Sister of yours.” Snorri set the tip of his index finger just above his cheekbone. “She had one white eye.”

“Half blind, yes.” One pearly eye. I’d called her the blind-eye woman for years before I knew any other name.

Snorri nodded. “She sees the future. She looked too far and it blinded her. But she still has a second eye to look with. She looked through the might-have-beens and saw far enough to know you would escape, meet me and take her power north.”

“Hell.” There didn’t seem much else to say.

• • •

We found a route down from the mountains that did not allow the dead men to follow us, though it could be argued that it came closer to killing us both than they might have. I say “we,” but Snorri led the way. My navigational skills are more suited to the city, where I can find a low dive with unerring skill. On mountains I’m more like water. I head down, tumbling over rocks where necessary.

In their haste the retreating mercenaries hadn’t collected all of their fallen comrades’ mounts, and better still, we found Ron and Sleipnir browsing on the lower slopes. Neither horse was anything to boast about, but they were used to us, and we loaded them with the most useful items we’d managed to steal off the strays before driving them off. Sleipnir continued her placid munching at the saw grass while Snorri heaped his loot upon her, flinching only when he climbed aboard. To be fair, it looked as if they should take turns—I thought the Norseman fully capable of carrying his mare up the valley.