Mark Lawrence - Prince of Fools

“Ignorant what?” asked Snorri without rancour.

“Huh?” I looked up from cleaning the locket. One of the diamonds had come loose, perhaps from hitting the bowl. It came free in my fingers and I held it up. “Let’s get some real food.” Mother wouldn’t begrudge me. And so it began.

Already the gleam of the thing was attracting attention. A man watched intently from the bar, a man with short iron-grey hair save for a peculiar broad strip, darker than a raven’s wing, across the top, as though the years had missed that part. I hid the locket away sharpish and he smiled, but kept on looking as if I’d been the object of his interest all along. For a moment I felt a shudder of recognition, though I’d swear I never met the man. The déjà vu passed as my fingers left the locket, and I busied myself with my ale.

• • •

Snorri spent the last of his money on a bigger bowl of slop, more ale, and a few square yards of space on the floor of the tavern’s communal sleeping hall. The hall seemed to serve as a method to prevent loss of drunks who might otherwise wander off in search of a spot to sleep and wake closer to some competing tavern. By the time we were ready to retire, the remaining locals were busy roaring out songs in Old Rhonish.

“Alley wetter, Jonty’s alley’s wetter!” boomed Snorri, rising from his seat.

“A fine singing voice you have, to be sure.” This from a man close by, nursing a pewter cup that brimmed with dark liquor. I looked up to find it was the fellow with the blue-black strip amidst his greying hair. “Edris Dean I am. Traveller myself. Will you be heading north in the morning?” He stepped from the bar and leaned in to be heard above the song.

“South,” Snorri said, the humour gone from him.

“South. Do you say so?” Edris nodded and sipped his drink. He had a hard look about him under the smile. A smile that not only reached his eyes but filled them with good humour-which is a difficult trick to pull if you don’t mean it. Even so, something in the thin-seamed scars along his arms, pale through the dirt, made me nervous. That and the quick but solid build of the body wrapped by the worn leather jerkin, and the knives at each hip-and not the kind for eating, more the kind for opening a bear from gut to growl. He had a thick ridge of scar on his cheek too, an old one, running along the bone. That one drew my eye and made me hate him, though I couldn’t say why.

Edris smacked his lips and called across to two men he’d been with at the bar. “South, he says!”

Both men joined us. “My associates. Darab Voir and Meegan.” Darab looked to have a touch of Afrique in his mix, swarthy and a bruiser, overtopping me by an inch or so, with the blackest eyes and ritual scar patterns on his neck vanishing down into his tunic. Meegan scared me the most, though, smallest of the three but with long ropey arms and pale staring eyes that put me in mind of Cutter John. Beneath a pretence of casual interest, all of them studied me with an intensity that set my teeth on edge. They marked Snorri too, and I found myself wishing he hadn’t stowed his axe with the horses.

“Stay. Have another ale. This lot are only getting warmed up.” Edris waved at the tables, where the singing had reached a whole new level.

“No.” Snorri didn’t smile. Snorri had smiled at the bear; now he looked grim. “We’ll sleep well enough, song or no song.” And with that turned his broad back on the trio and walked off. I managed an apologetic grin, spread my hands, and backed away after him, instinct not allowing me to present the space between my shoulder blades to them.

In the gloom of the next hall it was easy enough to find Snorri-he made the largest lump.

“What was that about?” I hissed at him.

“Trouble,” he said. “Mercenaries. They’ve been watching us half the night.”

“Is this about the locket?” I asked.

“I hope so.”

He was right; any alternatives I could imagine were worse than robbery. “Why would they tip their hand? Why be so obvious?” It made no sense to me.

“Because they don’t mean to act now. They might hope to spook us into unprepared action, but failing that it’s just to give us a night or two without sleep-to wear at our nerves.”

I settled down close by, kicking aside the outstretched arm of a rather pungent human-shaped lump and the legs of another. Tomorrow I’d sell that diamond and put an end to this nightly misery of choosing between stench and lice, or cold and rain. I made a pillow of my cloak and set my head on it. “Well,” I said. “If they meant to spook us, it’s working.” I kept my eyes on the arch into the barroom and the shapes in silhouette that passed back and forth. “Damned if I’m sleeping. I wo-”

A familiar rumbling snore cut across me.

“Snorri? Snorri?”

Never having been troubled by a conscience before, I was far from sure what to expect of one, and so when for a minute or two each day at dawn a voice began to whisper to me to be a better man, I decided the shock of recent events had finally woken mine. My conscience had a name-Baraqel. I didn’t like him much.

From the moment I jerked into the waking world that morning, suddenly terrified that I’d fallen asleep with Edris and his murderers waiting close by, to the moment we left town under a brightening sky, I had been looking over my shoulder.

“You won’t miss them,” Snorri said.

“No?” There was no part of Rhone I would miss. Though perhaps now with my purse fat and jingling once more, the nation might open her arms to me and deign to show a visiting prince a good time.

“There’ll be too many to hide.” Snorri’s voice wobbled with the gait of his steed, jolting up and down when the mare picked up the pace.

“How do you know that?” Annoyance coloured my question. I didn’t like the open reminder of our troubles. With Snorri troubles were always put front and centre and dealt with. My style was more to shove them under the rug until the floor got too uneven to navigate, and then to move house.

“He was too confident, that Edris. There’ll be a dozen of them at least.”

“Shit.” A dozen! I squeezed my nag along that little bit faster. I’d named the gelding Ron, after the Amazing Ronaldo whose ill-advised bet with Snorri had financed the early part of our trip.

We rattled along up the valley at a decent pace, fast enough to startle the sheep in successive fields into waves of woolly panic. It had to be said that, as uninspiring as Chamy-Nix was, the surroundings viewed with the morning coming up red and rosy behind them were quite stunning. Rhone gets hilly as you work your way north. Hills become mountains, mountains become peaks, and from Chamy-Nix you can see the white heights of the Aups, mountains so tall and so legion that they divide the empire more surely than a blade. In many senses the empire had always been broken and the Aups were the sword that divided it.

An hour later, gaining height and with our path back to Chamy-Nix laid out behind us, I spotted the pursuit. “Hell, that looks like a lot more than a dozen!” And a dozen was a lot more than we could handle. In fact, if it had been only Edris, Darab, and Meegan, that would have been too many. My stomach folded around itself in a cold knot. I remembered the Aral Pass. There’s no way any sensible person could view the prospect of someone else attempting to open them with a sharp edge as anything but terrifying. I found myself eyeing up the larger rocks in the hope I might hide beneath one of them.

“Twenty. Near enough.” Snorri looked back up the track and nudged Sleipnir on. He’d told me the original bearer of the name in his heathen tales had sported eight legs. It’s possible that on such an overendowed beast even Snorri stood a chance of outpacing the band on our trail. On any regular mount, though, it was never going to happen.