Mark Lawrence - Prince of Fools

The castle of Rewerd’s Curse-the ancestral seat of the House Wainton-stands on a high bluff of pale rock some miles from Compere Town. It watched us with empty eyes, the walls black with smoke, the cliffs beneath it still stained a rusty colour as if the blood of the last defenders had poured from the gates and overflowed the plateau. The sun had started to sink behind the fortification, making serrated silhouettes of the battlements and sending its shadow questing towards us, an accusing finger, long and dark.

“This is fresh.” Snorri drew a long breath through his nose. “You can smell the char.”

“And the rot.” I regretted sniffing so deeply. “Let’s find another path.”

Snorri shook his head. “You think any path is safe? Whatever happened here has passed.” He pointed to a faint haze ahead, indistinct trails of smoke rising to join it. “The fires have all but burned out. You’ll find more peace in ruins than in any other place. The rest is all waiting to be ruins. Here it’s already happened.”

And so we rode on and came by evening to the desolation of Compere.

• • •

“This was vengeance.” The walls had been toppled, standing nowhere higher than three stones atop each other. “Punishment.” I stepped over the rubble. Heat still rose from the ground. Beyond a forest of blackened spars a carpet of cinders marched into the distance until the drifting smoke overwrote it.

“Murder.” Snorri towered at my shoulder, a stillness in him.

“They never meant to hold this place,” I said. “Whoever ‘they’ were.” It could have been Gelleth troopers, a raid out of Scorron, or even a Rhonish army reclaiming what had been taken. “I’ve never seen the like.” I knew the Hundred’s squabbles left such damage in their wake, but I’d not seen it, not like this.

“I have.” Snorri passed me by, striding on into the remnants of what had once been Compere.

We made camp in the ruins. Swirls of ash and cinder stung our eyes and made the horses cough, but night was upon us and Snorri proved unwilling to press on. At least we didn’t have to choose between the risk of a fire and a cold camp. Compere came with its own fires. Dying beds of embers in the main, but giving off a great heat.

“I’ve seen worse.” Snorri repeated himself, pushing aside the stew he’d prepared. “At Eight Quays the Islanders made swift work and moved on. At Orlsheim, farther up the Uulisk, they took their time.”

And in the ruins Snorri once more stole me away to the North, winding his tale around the night.

• • •

Snorri followed the raiders’ tracks through the thaw. Their ships had gone, perhaps to some secluded cove to shelter from both storm and hostile eyes. He knew they would be planning a return to collect the Drowned Isles necromancers, their troops, and their captives. Even in the spring the interior was an inhospitable place this far north. The Broke-Oar would have told them that. How many of the captives might be on the ships and how many with the raiders, Snorri couldn’t tell. The raiders, though, he could follow, and eventually they would lead him to their ships.

Orlsheim lay three miles farther inland, on the edge of the Uulisk where the fjord started to taper and pine forests reached almost to the water on gentler slopes than those at Eight Quays. The Brettans had left a broad trail, burdened as they were by many captives. Apart from Emy there had been only a handful of dead: three babes in arms, chewed and discarded, and Elfred Ganson, missing a leg and left to bleed out. Snorri guessed any others killed in the fighting would just have been added to the ranks of the necromancers’ servants and set stumbling ahead to Orlsheim. How Elfred came to lose a leg Snorri couldn’t guess, but it had at least saved him the horror of a living death.

Where the settlement at Eight Quays had been stone-built, the houses of Orlsheim were timber, some rude constructions of logs and wattle, others clinker-built of planks like the longboats themselves, defying the weather with the same obstinacy that the Vikings’ ships offered the sea. Smoke had signalled Orlsheim’s destruction even from the doorstep of Snorri’s home, but not until the last few hundred yards had he imagined the fire to be so all-consuming. Even the great mead-hall of Braga Salt had left no more than a heap of embers, every roof beam consumed, its eighteen pillars each thicker than a mast and deep carven with saga tales, all devoured by the flames.

Snorri pressed on, leaving the Uulisk shores when the raiders’ tracks turned to skirt Wodinswood, a dense and unwelcoming forest that reached for fifty miles and more until the foothills of the Jorlsberg defeated it. Men called Wodinswood the last forest. Turn your face north and you would find no more trees. The ice would not admit them.

And on the margins of that forest, where he had so often come in search of the reindeer who browse the tree moss, Snorri found his eldest son.

• • •

“I knew him the moment I saw him,” Snorri said.

“What?” I shook my head, ridding myself of the dream the Norseman had woven. He addressed me directly now, demanding a response, demanding something-perhaps just my company in this moment of rediscovery.

“I knew him, my son. . Karl. Though he lay far ahead. There’s a deer trail up alongside the Wodinswood from the Uulisk, broadened into mud by the raiders, and he lay sprawled beside it. I knew him from his hair, white-blond, like his mother. Not Freja, she bore me Egil and Emy. Karl’s mother was a girl I knew when I wasn’t much more than a boy myself: Mhaeri, Olaaf’s daughter. We weren’t but children, but we made a child.”

“How old?” I asked, not really knowing if I meant him or the boy.

“We must have been fourteen summers. She died bringing him into the world. He died just stepping into his fifteenth year.” The wind changed and shrouded us in thicker smoke. Snorri sat without motion, head bowed over his knees. When the air cleared, he spoke again. “I rushed to him. I should have been cautious. A necromancer could have left his corpse to waylay anyone trailing them. But no father has that caution in him. And as I came closer I saw the arrow between his shoulders.”

“He escaped, then?” I asked, to let him take his pride in that at least.

“Broke free.” Snorri nodded. “A big lad, like me in that, but more of a thinker. People always said he thought too much, said I’d always be the better Viking however strong he grew. I said he’d always be the better man, and that mattered more. Though I never said it to him, and I wish now that I had. They’d had them in iron shackles, but he broke free.”

“He was alive? He told you?” I asked.

“He had a breath left in him. He didn’t use it to tell me how he escaped, but I could see the iron marks on him and his hands were broken. You can’t escape slave shackles without breaking bones. He only had four words for me. Four words and a smile. The smile first, though I saw it through tears, biting down on my curses so I could hear him. I could have been there quicker, I could have run, found him hours earlier. Instead I’d gathered my belongings, my weapons, as if I were going on a hunt. I should have run them down the moment the snowbank gave up its hold. I-” Snorri’s voice had grown thick with emotion and now broke. He bit the word off and ground his jaw, face twitching. He lowered his head, defeated.

“What did Karl say?” I couldn’t tell you where along the way I’d started to care about the Norseman’s story. Caring was never my strong suit. Perhaps it was the weeks together on the road that had done it, or more likely some side effect of the curse that chained us together, but I found myself hurting with him, and I didn’t like it one bit.