Mark Lawrence - Prince of Fools

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 sweat, 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?