Prince of Fools (The Red Queen's War) (22 page)

The keep stood in clear ground with courtyards marked out for training at horse and arms. It made an alarming contrast with the palace at Vermillion, and I suspect Grandmother would have swapped in a heartbeat. This was a place built for war, not built to look like it. A castle that had withstood sieges, and fallen to at least one of them, for if Snorri’s tales were to be believed, the Ancraths weren’t the first to reclaim the place after the tribes of men spread back into the poisoned lands.

“Nice castle.” Snorri gazed up at the Tall Castle while we waited for the great door of iron-banded oak before us to be opened.

The castle was tall. I couldn’t complain about that. Though it looked unfinished or more likely broken off. The thing didn’t taper or show any concession to height at all as a tower might these days. It simply launched itself straight up at the heavens and gave the impression that before the Thousand Suns had cut short its ambition, nothing shy of hitting the clouds would stop it.

“I’ve seen better,” I lied.

The door swung open and one of Olidan’s table-knights, in gleaming half-plate, offered me a bow.

“Prince Jalan, an honour to meet you. I am Sir Gerrant of Treen.” As he straightened I took a half step back. They’d obviously noted Snorri’s stature and decided to put forwards their biggest man to receive us. Sir Gerrant stood near as tall and broad with it, a handsome face divided by an ugly scar. He spread his arm out to the side, inviting us in. The smile on his scar-split lips looked genuine enough. “I’ll show you to your rooms. You come too, Stann.” He glanced back at the page. “Prince Jalan will need someone to fetch and carry for him.”

Sir Gerrant led us up a wide flight of steps and along several corridors. The architecture had an alien quality to it, as if those who made it a thousand years before were not men. Everywhere I saw the signs of more recent work, of efforts made to construct a more human habitation. Floors had been removed, rooms broadened and heightened, curves introduced with carved timber supports, though nothing the Builders made needed any reinforcement.

“I had the honour of meeting Prince Martus during his mission the summer before last.” Sir Gerrant opened another set of doors and held them for us. “Your family resemblance is remarkable.”

I bit back a sharp reply and grimaced. It’s true my brothers both share something of my looks—which came from Father’s side of the family, the gold in our hair at least—the height from Grandmother and the handsome from Mother, our father being a short and unprepossessing fellow who would look as suited to being an office clerk as he does to wearing the cardinal’s hat. Martus, though, was shaped with a blunt hand. Darin a touch better. The artist had perfected the design by the time he got to me.

We passed through one hall where ladies watched us from a high gallery. I rather suspected Sir Gerrant had been induced to parade us for their inspection. I played the game and affected not to notice. Snorri, of course, stared up openly, grinning. I heard giggles and one of their number stage-whispered, “Not another vagabond prince?”

My room, where we finally arrived, was well appointed and, whilst not quite as grand as a visiting prince might expect, a hundred times better than any accommodation I’d seen since hastily exiting Lisa DeVeer’s bedroom what seemed like a lifetime before.

“I’ll show your man here to a servant’s chamber, or Stann here can do it later,” Sir Gerrant said.

“Take him away,” I said. “And don’t let any of your men mess with him. He’s not house-trained and he’ll end up breaking them.” I shooed Snorri back into the corridor with fluttering motions of my fingers. He made no reply, only grinned infuriatingly and set off after Gerrant.

I slumped down in an upholstered chair. The first comfortable seat I’d sat in for an age. “Boots.” I lifted a leg and the page came over to start tugging off the first of them. That was something I’d really missed on the road. Being bone idle. Father was too cheap to staff the hall properly, but when we had important visitors he would import a decent number of servants. The ideal level is where if you drop something there’s a maid on hand to scoop it up almost before it hits the floor, and if you’ve an itch that might otherwise require a twist or a stretch, you have only to mention it before indentured fingernails have scratched it for you.

The boot came free with a jerk and the child staggered away, then returned for the next. “And then you can bring me some fruit. Apples and some pears. Conquence pears, mind, not those yellow Maran ones; all mush they are.”

“Yes, sir.” The second boot came free and he took both off to wait beside the door. Hopefully someone would give them a good polish before the morrow, or better still replace them with a nicer pair. The boy opened the door and stepped out. “I’ll get the fruit.”

“Wait a moment.” I leaned forwards in my chair, wiggling my toes. “Stann, ain’t it?” It occurred to me the scamp might prove useful.

“Yes, sir.”

“Fruit, and some bread. And find out where this lost prince everyone’s celebrating has got to. What’s his name, anyway?”

“Jorg, sir. Prince Jorg.” And he was off without waiting for a dismissal, or even shutting the door behind him.

“Jorg, eh?” It struck me as odd now that I thought about it. Last night none of the Brothers had so much as mentioned this lost prince, gathered anew to his father’s bosom. The whole of Crath City had seemed wrapped in the celebration of the prodigal’s return and somehow we had found the only tavern in sight of the Tall Castle where nobody wanted to talk about it. Most odd.

A shadow at the doorway caught my attention and I let go my musings. “Yes?” Had young Stann been running
from
rather than running
to
? The man in the doorway didn’t look very frightening, but he must have been approaching along the corridor when Stann broke and ran . . .

The fellow before me would have been the most unremarkable of men, giving even my dear father some competition in the “ordinary” stakes, if not for the fact that every inch of his exposed skin, which amounted to hands, neck, and head, was tattooed with foreign scrawl. The letters even crawled up across his face, crowding his cheeks and forehead with dense calligraphy.

An uncomfortable silence built in the aftermath of his arrival, and certainly at home I would have been tempted to damn his eyes and demand that he speak up or get out, possibly encouraging him to one or the other with the aid of whatever was close enough at hand to throw. I’d spent too long on the road, though, where any given peasant might stab me for looking at his sister wrong, and my old instincts had rusted up.

“Yes?” Even though it was his place to explain, not mine to ask.

“My name is Sageous. I advise the king on more . . . unusual matters.”

“Hallelujah!” Perhaps not the thing to say to someone with such heathen looks, but in the joy of discovering a man who might undo my curse, I was prepared to overlook shortcomings such as being of distinctly foreign origin and failing to worship the right deity. Snorri shared those faults, after all, and despite my misgivings had proved to have several redeeming features.

“People are not always so pleased to see me, Prince Jalan.” A small smile on his lips.

“Ah, but not everyone needs a miracle.” I got to my feet and advanced on the man, pleased to find I towered over him. I guessed him to be about forty and from my vantage point I could read what was written on the top of his head. Or at least I could if I knew the script. I guessed the writing to be from somewhere east and maybe south too. A long way east and south. A place where the writing looked like spiders mating. I’d seen the like before in my mother’s chambers. Sageous tilted his head to meet my gaze and I forgot all about his inconvenient script, lack of stature, even the spice-stink of him that had just reached my nostrils. All of a sudden those unremarkable eyes of his became everything that mattered. Twin pools of contemplation, calm, brown, ordinary . . .

“Prince Jalan?”

I shook my head to find the damnable little man snapping his fingers in front of my face. If I hadn’t wanted something from him, I’d have kicked his arse all the way to the Triple Gate. Well, if he hadn’t been a sorcerer as well. Not people to rub the wrong way. Rubbed the right way, though . . . as with Aladdin’s lamp, I might get my wish. At least I knew now that he wasn’t a charlatan with the mirrors and the smoke and the quick hands.

“Prince Jal—”

“I’m fine. Came over dizzy for a second. Come in. Sit. I need to ask you about something.” I pinched the bridge of my nose and blinked a few times to refocus as I walked a less-than-straight path back to my chair. “Sit.” I waved at another seat.

Sageous took an elegant ladder-back but stood behind it rather than following my bidding. Tan fingers ran over wood so dark as to be almost black, investigating each polished and gleaming curve as if seeking meaning. “You’re a puzzle, Prince Jalan.”

I bit back on my opinion and resisted damning him for his impudence.

“A puzzle of two pieces.” The heathen watched me with those placid eyes of his. He released the chair and ran his fingers over his forehead, brows, cheekbones, cheeks. Everywhere his fingertips touched it seemed that for a heartbeat the tattooed script grew darker, like fissures through his flesh into some inner blackness. He cocked his head, then looked back towards the corridor. “And the second piece is close by.”

“I would have expected no less of someone from whom a king such as Olidan seeks counsel.” I flashed my best grin, the one that says “amiable bluff hero with the common touch.” “The truth is I got caught up in some foul spell along with the Norseman I’ve brought with me. We’re bound together by the magics. If we get too far apart, bad things happen to us. And all I want to do is have someone unbind us so we can go our separate ways again. The man who could do that would find me a very generous prince indeed!”

Sageous looked far less surprised than I had expected. Almost as if he’d heard the story already. “I can help you, Prince Jalan.”

“Oh, thank God. I mean, thank any god. You don’t know how hard it’s been, yoked to that brute. I thought I was going to have to trek all the way to the fjords with him. Cold does not agree with me at all. My sinus—”

Sageous raised a hand and cut off my babbling. Unconscionable that he should interrupt a prince, but it’s true that the relief of it all had overloosened my tongue.

“There is, as in many things, an easy way and a hard way.”

“The easy way sounds easiest,” I said, leaning forwards, for the heathen spoke very soft.

“Kill the other man.”

“Kill Snorri?” I jolted back, surprised. “But I thought if he—”

“On what grounds did you think this, Prince Jalan? A sensible man may fear certain possibilities, but don’t let fear turn possibility into certainty. If either of you dies, the curse will die with you and the other may carry on unencumbered.”

“Oh.” It did seem silly that I had been so sure of what would happen. “But I can’t kill Snorri.” I didn’t want him dead. “I mean, it would be very difficult. You’ve not met him. When you do, you’ll understand.”

Sageous shrugged, the slightest raising of shoulders. “You are in King Olidan’s castle. If he commanded the man dead, then the man would die. I doubt he would refuse a prince’s request for the life of a commoner. Especially a man from the ice and snow, given to the worship of primitive gods.”

My early enthusiasm escaped me in a long sigh. “Tell me the difficult way . . .”

I
woke in a cold sw
eat, the bed warm around me. For a moment I wondered which tavern I was in. I even thought for one instant that Emma might be lying beside me, but my questing fingers found only linen sheets. Fine linen. The castle. I remembered and sat up, blind night on every side.

Nightmares had been chasing me, one into the next, and my heart still pounded from the exercise, but I couldn’t recall any details. Nothing came to me save the memory of something dreadful stalking me through dark places, so close I felt its breath on my neck, felt it clutching, snagging my shirt . . .

“Castle, Jal; you’re in a castle.” My voice rang thin as if I were in some vast and empty space.

The candle I’d left burning must have blown out—not even a scent of it remained. I had tinder and flint, but they were in a saddlebag wherever Ron had been stabled.

“You’re too big a boy to be scared of the dark.” The fear in my voice convinced me I was better off keeping silent. I listened for any sound other than my own breathing, but none reached me.

I threw myself down into the pillow, pulled the sheets about me, and to distract myself from night terrors I concentrated on my last exchange with Sageous.

“The difficult way?” he had asked, as if surprised I would consider it. “The difficult way would be to complete the spell’s work for it. Each enchantment is an act of will that strives towards completion. The desires of the most powerful, when spoken, when enunciated along the paths that their art has graven within the fabric of what is, become like living things. The spell will twist and turn; it will change, consider, conspire until it achieves the aim that formed it.

“The spell is incomplete because the target remains. Destroy that target, and the enchantment, this curse that bends you to its own ends, will fade away.”

I had thought of the eyes behind that mask.

“Kill Snorri, you say?” The easy way did sound easier.

The eyes that had glittered behind the slits in that porcelain work of masquerade, those same eyes had watched me through my nightmares. My skin crawled with the possibility of that scrutiny even now. The linen sheets I held were a child’s protection, and even steel armour would offer no salvation against this horror. Kill Snorri?

“A simple matter that I can arrange for you, my prince.” Everything the heathen said sounded reasonable.

“No, truly, I can’t. He’s become something of a f—” I bit that off. “Something of a trusted retainer.”

Sageous had shaken his head, lines of text blurring before my eyes. “This is a madness you have fallen into, my prince. The barbarian has taken you prisoner—a hostage to his own fortunes—and drags you into terrible danger. A wise man, Lord Stoccolm, wrote of this many centuries ago. By degrees the prisoner comes to see his captor as a friend. You have fallen into his dream, Prince Jalan. Time to wake up.”

And lying there in the silent dark of that room, with nothing but two handfuls of sheets for protection from the conviction that the nameless horror from Vermillion stood watching at the foot of my bed, I did try to wake. I ground my teeth and tried either to sleep or to wake—but only the memory of Sageous’s voice offered any escape.

“You merely need ask King Olidan for his protection—I will carry the message—and come morning this Norseman will occupy a pauper’s grave down by the river. You will wake a free man, ready to return to the life you were snatched from. Free to take up your old ways as if nothing had happened.”

I had to admit it had sounded very tempting. It still did. But my tongue kept refusing the words. Perhaps that too was part of this Stoccolm’s disease. “But he’s . . . well, a loyal retainer.” And of course, whilst I may be a liar and a cheat and a coward, I will never, ever, let down a loyal retainer. Unless, of course, it requires honesty, fair play, or bravery to avoid doing so—or an act that in some other manner mildly inconveniences me. “I see your point . . . still, there must be another way. Can’t you do something? A man with your skills?”

Again the shake of the head, so slow and slight that you could almost believe the sorrow. “Not without great risk, my prince, to myself and to you.” He turned those mild eyes on me and I felt the draw of them immediately, as if at any moment he could pull me in to drown. “There is a third way. The blood of the person who placed the curse on you.”

“Oh, I couldn’t—” The thought of that old witch unmanned me almost as much as the creature at the opera did. “The Silent Sister is too cunning and Grandmother dotes on her.”

Sageous nodded as if expecting this. “She has a twin. One whom fate may place in your path. The blood of the twin will accomplish the same goal. It will quench the spell’s fire.”

“A twin?” It was hard to imagine two such monsters. The blind-eye woman had always seemed so singular.

“She is named Skilfar.”

“God damn it all!” I’d heard of Skilfar. And anyone you’ve heard of is trouble. That’s bankable wisdom, that is. The Wicked Witch of the North—I’m sure I’d heard Grandmother call her that, smiling as if she’d said something clever. “Damn it all.” Killing Snorri would be hard. I’d been happy to spend his life in the blood pits against the possibility of coin. But now I knew him and it put a different shine on things. In fact, it soured the whole business of the pits. All the men there had lives, and I wasn’t sure I’d ever be able to enjoy the sport again knowing that. Life has ways of getting under your skin, spoiling your fun with too much information. Youth is truly the happiest time where we roll in the bliss of ignorance.

“Your old life, my prince. Returned to you.”

My old life, the pleasures of the flesh, and of the gaming table, and sometimes the first on the second. It had been shallow and balanced on Maeres’s knife edge, but sometimes shallow is more than enough. You can drown in deep. “I’ll sleep on it,” I had said.

Except that I couldn’t sleep. Instead I lay in the cold sweat that fear had wrapped me in and stared at the night. Snorri’s death, the monster’s destruction, the blood of the Silent Sister or her northern twin. None of them easy. Each hard in its separate way.

“Ask the king for the Norseman’s head,” Sageous had told me. “It’s the easiest way.”
Aren’t you good at easy?
That’s what the writing seemed to say—offered up on his palms.
Aren’t you good at leaving?

If I were good at leaving I would know where the blasted door was. I normally kept good tabs on such things, plotted my escape routes, got the lay of the land. But when the heathen left the room, a great weariness wrapped itself around me and I fell into the bed like a stone into the deepest pool.

“Kill the Norseman.” It sounded more reasonable each time he said it. After all, it would save Snorri the discovery that his family were dead. All he had before him was a long trip to the worst news in the world. Didn’t he greet battle like an old friend, eager to meet his end?
“Kill the Norseman.”
I couldn’t tell if I’d said it or Sageous.

I had sat in the softness of the great chair, facing the heathen, listening to his truths. Had sat? Was sitting? I sat opposite him now as he stood behind the ladder-back chair, fingers running over its rungs as if they were a harp on which a melody could be played. “So you’ll ask for his head.” Not a question. Those mild eyes fatherly now. A father and friend. Though lord knows, not
my
father; he always seemed embarrassed by the whole business of father and son.

Yes. Sageous was right. I started to say the words. “I’ll ask for his—”

The point of a sword emerged from Sageous’s narrow chest, and not your common or garden sword either but one as brilliant as the dawn, bright as steel drawn from the white heat of the furnace. Sageous looked down at the point, astonished, and it advanced until a foot of gleaming blade stood from his chest.

“What?” Blood ran from the corners of his mouth.

“This is not your place, heathen.” Wings unfurled behind the man as if they were his own. White wings. White like summer clouds, eagle-feathered, broad enough to bear a man skyward.

“How?” Sageous gargled blood now, spilling it down his chin with the word.

The sword withdrew and a head unbowed, rising above the heathen, a face as proud and inhuman as those wrought in marble upon statues of Greek gods or Roman emperors. “He is of the light.” And in a flash the blade took the heathen’s head, shearing through his neck as a scythe takes grass.

“Wake up.” Not a voice from the angel that loomed above Sageous’s corpse. A voice that came from outside the castle, huger than sound should be, loud enough to break stone. “Wake.”

It made no sense. “What—”

“Wake up.”

I blinked. Blinked again. Opened my eyes. Instead of blackness, postdawn grey. I sat up, sheets still clinging to my sweat-soaked limbs. Behind the pale ghosts of lace curtains, the sky lightening in the east.

“Baraqel?”

“A lowly dream-smith thinking he could sully one of the light-sworn!” Baraqel sounded smug. Then in a more serious tone, “I see a hand behind him, though. With a more deadly touch . . . blue fingered. The L—”

“T-that was you? But, you’re so . . . well . . . such a pain.” I slid from the bed, each part of me aching as if I’d spent the night wrestling a Barbary ape. The room lay bare, the angel confined to my head again.

“I speak in the voice you give me, Jalan. I’m limited by your imagination, shaped by your conceits. Each of your failings diminishes me, and they are many. I—”

The last burning edge of the sun broke the horizon, turning a whole forest to gold. And the silence was golden. Baraqel had had his moment. I returned to the comfortable chair, pulling on my trews, but found I didn’t want to sit in it. I looked at the ladder-back and imagined Sageous there as he’d been in my dream, head severed and just starting to drop. He wanted me to have Snorri killed. His arguments had seemed sound enough, but although I lost more money at the card table than I won, I’d spent enough time there to know when I was being played.

 • • • 

B
y the time I’d washed and dressed, the day had entered stage east, cocks crowed, people with jobs to do bustled about them, and below the Tall Castle Crath City shook itself awake. A timid tapping turned me from my contemplation at the window.

“What?”

“It’s S-Stann, Your Majesty.” A pause. “Did you need a dresser or should I—”

“Go get my Viking and bring him here. We’ll take breakfast where they serve the best stuff.”

He scampered away, the sounds of his retreat fading. I sat on the bed and pulled out my locket. A patchwork thing now, each gem I’d sold leaving an empty socket to stare at me in blind accusation. It seemed fitting. Justice is blind. Love is blind. Another gem would buy me back to Vermillion in the comfort of a fine carriage. One more would buy wine and company at every stop. Two more sockets to watch my passage, to watch me leave a friend in a pauper’s grave and return to the shallows. I wondered if Baraqel saw my soul when he looked at me. Did it look like this? Bartered away, a little each day, buying a coward’s path through the margins of life?

“Still,” I told myself. “Better a long ignoble life of shallow pleasures than a short stab at heroism, ending with a short stab. And just because one man plays another doesn’t always mean that it’s not the right direction for both of them.” I thought of the cold North, and the horror-laden stories Snorri told of it, and shivered.

“Jal!” Snorri filled the doorway and his grin filled his face. “You look worse after a night alone in silk sheets than after a night at the Angel wrestling with your friend who likes to bite.” Behind him Stann hovered in the corridor, trying to find a way past.

I stood up. “Come on. We’ll let the boy find us some breakfast.”

The two of us trailed Stann, matching his jog with an easy stride. “Food can be brought to your rooms, my lords.” He said it over his shoulder, catching his breath.

“I like to mingle,” I said. “And I’m a royal highness to you, boy. He’s a . . . hauldr. The correct address for one of that station is ‘Oi you.’”

“Yes, Your Royal Highness.”

“Better.”

Another corridor, another turn, and we came through an arch into a sizable hall boasting three long tables. Men ate at two of the tables, guests by the look of them, or figures of some rank within the castle. None of them royalty but not common folk. Stann indicated the unoccupied table. “Your Royal Highness.” He eyed Snorri up, biting his lip, hopping from one foot to the other in his indecision, doubting now that the Norseman’s rank warranted a place at any of the tables.

“Snorri will eat with me,” I said. “Special dispensation.”

Stann breathed a sigh of relief and showed us to our chairs.

“I’ll have eggs, scrambled with a pinch of salt, a pinch of black pepper, and then a fish. Kipper, mackerel, something smoked. The Viking will probably have a pig, lightly killed.”

“Bacon.” Snorri nodded. “And bread. The blacker the better. And beer.”

The boy ran off, repeating his orders as fast as he could.

Snorri leaned back in his chair and yawned mightily.

“How did you sleep?” I asked.

He grinned and gave me an appraising look. “I had strange dreams.”

“How strange?”

“I dream of Loki’s daughter each night. If a dream makes Aslaug’s appearances seem ordinary, then you can imagine it to be very strange.”

“Try me.”

“A small man covered in scribble spent the night trying to convince me to kill you this morning. At least most of the night . . . until Aslaug ate him.”

“Ah.”

We sat in silence for a minute, until a serving man arrived with two flagons of small beer and a loaf of bread.

“So?” I asked, more than a little tense. A long knife lay between us, next to the bread.

“I decided against it.” Snorri reached out and broke the loaf in half.

“Good.” I relaxed with a sigh.

“Better to wait until we’re out of the castle, then do it.” He chomped down on the bread to hide his grin. “And you? How’d you sleep?”

“About the same,” I said, but Snorri had lost interest, his gaze drawn to the doorway.