Mark Lawrence - Prince of Fools

“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.