Mark Lawrence - Prince of Fools

I looked my steed over, patted his neck, felt the meat over his ribs. A decent enough nag. Snorri stood woodenly beside his as if worried she might bite him.

“My thanks,” I said, and swung up into the saddle. Twenty in gold was a fair enough price. A touch steep, but fair under the circumstances. I felt better mounted. God gave us horses so we could run away faster.

“Best be quick on your path-you’re at the centre of a storm, young prince, and no mistake.” Taproot nodded as if it had been me talking and him agreeing. “There are hands aplenty in this matter, many fingers in the pot. All stirring. A grey hand behind you, a black hand in your path. Scratch a little deeper, though, and you might find blue behind the black, red behind the grey. And deeper still? Does it go deeper? Who knows? Not this old circus-keeper. Perhaps everything goes deeper than deep, deep without end. But I’m old, my eyes grow dim, I only see so far.”

“Um.” It seemed the only sensible reply to his outpouring of nonsense. I could see now who trained up the circus fortune-teller.

Taproot nodded at my wisdom. “Let us part friends, Prince Jalan. The Kendeths have been a force for good in Red March.” He held out his thin hand and I took it quick enough, for I guessed it pained him to keep it still so long. “There!” he said. “I was sorry to hear of your mother’s death, my prince.” I released his hand. “Too young-too young she was for the assassin’s blade.”

I blinked at him, nodded, and nudged my new horse on down the lane. “Come on, Snorri.” Over my shoulder. “It’s like rowing a boat.”

“I’ll walk a little first,” he said, and followed on, leading his nag by the reins.

I’ll admit some regret in leaving the circus behind. I liked the people, the air of the place, even on the move. And of course the dancers. Despite that, I had a small smile on my lips. It was good to know that even Taproot’s vast stock of information failed him from time to time. My mother died of a flux. I touched the lump made by the locket under my jacket, Mother’s picture inside. A flux. The contact made me uneasy all of a sudden, my smile gone.

• • •

We got to the main road and turned back along the path we’d first taken, guided by directions from the midget cardsharp at the gate. Neither of us spoke until we reached the pile of elephant dung that had first alerted me to the circus’s proximity.

“So, you can’t ride, then?”

“Never tried,” he said.

“You’ve never even sat on a horse?” It seemed hard to credit.

“I’ve eaten plenty,” he said.

“That doesn’t help.”

“How difficult can it be?” he asked, making no move to find out.

“Less difficult than jumping onto bears and off again, I suspect. Luckily I’m the finest horseman in Red March and a great teacher.” I pointed at the stirrup. “Put your foot in there. Not the foot you first thought of-the other one. Step up, and don’t fall off.”

Lessons continued slowly and to his credit Snagason did not fall off. I did worry that he might cave in the horse’s ribs with those oh-so-muscly legs of his, but in the end Snorri and the horse reached an uneasy truce where they both adopted a fixed grin and got on with moving forwards.

By the time the sun had passed its zenith I could tell the Norseman was suffering.

“How’s the hand?”

“Less painful than the thighs,” he grunted.

“Perhaps if you loosened your grip a little and let the poor horse breathe. .”

“Tell me about Rhone,” he said.

I shrugged. We wouldn’t reach the border until the next evening and the last mile would suffice to tell him anything worthwhile about the place, but it seemed he needed distraction from his aches and pains.

“Not so much to tell. Awful place. The food’s bad, the men surly and ignorant, the women cross-eyed. And they’re thieves to a man. If you shake a Rhonish hand, count your fingers afterward.”

“You’ve never been there, have you?” He shot a narrow look back at me, then lurched to keep his place in the saddle.

“Did you not listen to what I said? Why would I go somewhere like that?”

“I don’t understand it.” He risked another glance back. “Rhonish kings founded Red March, did they not? Wasn’t it the Rhonish who saved you from Scorron invasion? Twice?”

“I hardly think so!” Now he mentioned it, though, it did trigger a faint memory of too-hot days in the Grey Room with Tutor Marcle. “I suspect a prince of Red March knows a little more about local history than some. . hauldr off the frozen slopes of a fjord.” I’ll admit to sleeping through most of Marcle’s history lessons, but I probably would have noticed a thing like that. “In any event, they’re a bad sort.”

To change the topic of conversation, and because every time I glanced back my imagination hid monsters in the shadows, I brought up the topic of pursuit.

“When I ran into you, the fissure, the crack that was chasing me. . it came from the Silent Sister’s spell.”

“You told me this. The spell she placed to kill everyone at this opera of yours.”

“Well. . it would have killed everyone, but I don’t think that was the reason she cursed the place. Maybe she wasn’t out to destroy us all-maybe she had her target and the rest of us were just in the way. Could whatever she was after have chased us to the circus?”

Snorri raised his brows, then frowned, then shook his head. “That unborn was new-formed, from Daisy’s child. It didn’t follow us there.”

That sounded a touch more hopeful. “But. . it didn’t just happen by chance, surely? Aren’t these things supposed to be very rare? Someone made that happen. Someone trying to kill us.”

“Your Red Queen was gathering tales of the dead. She knows Ragnarok is hard upon us-the last battle is coming. She’s drawing her plans against the Dead King and likely he’s drawing his plans against her. The Dead King may know about us, he may know we’re headed north, dragging the witch’s magic with us. He may know we’re bound for the Bitter Ice where his dead are gathering. He may want to stop us.”

Whilst I’d successfully steered the conversation away from Rhone, Snorri had told me absolutely nothing to ease my mind. I chewed on all that he’d said for the next few miles and very sour it tasted. We were pursued, I knew it, blood to bone. That thing from the opera stalked us, and in running before it we plunged headlong into whatever the Dead King placed in our path.

• • •

A day later we met our first examples of the type of Rhonishmen I’d been warning Snorri against. A guard post of five Rhone soldiers attached to a sizable inn that straddled the border. Red March’s own guard post of four men adjoined the opposite end of the inn, and the two groups dined together most evenings on opposing sides of a long table through which the border ran, marked across the planks by a line of polished nail heads.

I introduced myself as a down-at-heels nobleman since none of them would recognize a Red March prince and, thinking themselves mocked, would take offence. I suppose I could have held up a gold crown with Grandmother’s face on it and remonstrated about the family resemblance, but I didn’t have one. Or a silver crown. And the coppers mostly had the Iax Tower on them or King Gholloth, who reigned before Grandmother and looked nothing like his daughter or me.

Snorri said little at the inn, his tension clear, worried that word might have been sent to secure the borders against him. We spent the remainder of my coppers on a small meal of cabbage soup and mystery meat before moving on into Rhone, which despite my misgivings, seemed very much like Red March, except that the people tended to roll out their r ’s in an annoying manner.