Mark Lawrence - Prince of Fools

“Ah.” Broke-Oar glanced back at his men, all of them listening. There could be scant entertainment in the Black Fort. Even the coals they burned must have been hauled in by sled at great effort. “Well, he’s safe enough, as long as you carry on being no threat.”

“I didn’t tell you his name.” Snorri tugged at his ropes.

The Broke-Oar merely raised a brow. “You think the son of the great Snorri ver Snagason hasn’t been telling anyone who’ll listen how his father will storm our gates with an army to rescue him? Apparently you’ll take all our heads with an axe and roll them across the fjord.”

“Why do you have them?” Snorri met the man’s gaze. His pain helped distract him from thoughts of Egil’s trust in a failed father.

“Ah, well.” Sven Broke-Oar pulled over a chair and sat with his axe across his knees. “Out at sea a man’s a small thing, his ship not much bigger, and we go where the weather wills. We run before the storm. We rise and fall with the waves. Skinny fisherman off the Afrique coast, big Viking with a hundred kills to his name out on the Devouring Sea, it’s all the same-we’re driven by the wind.

“Here’s the thing, Snorri ver Snagason. The wind has changed. It blows from the Isles now and there’s a new god making the weather. Not a good god, not a clean one, but that’s not ours to change. We’re at sea and we bow our heads to our tasks and hope to stay afloat.

“The Dead King holds the Isles now. He broke Jarl Torsteff’s strength there, and that of the Iron Jarl, of the Red Jarls of Hardanger. All driven back to their ports.

“Now he comes for us, with dead men, our dead amongst them, and monsters from beyond death.”

“You should fight them!” Snorri found himself straining, useless against the ropes’ strength.

“How is that working out for you, Snorri?” A hardness around his eyes, something bitter and difficult to read. “Fight the sea and you drown.” He hefted the axe on his lap, finding comfort in its weight. “The Dead King is persuasive. If I brought this wife and son of yours here, to this room, held a hot iron to their faces. . you might find me persuasive, no?”

“Vikings don’t make war on children.” Snorri knew defeat. Better to have let the ice claim him than come here to fail his family.

“The Undoreth leave orphans and widows untouched when they raid?” A snort of derision at that from the men around the hearth. “Snorri Red-Axe has adopted the sons and daughters of the many men he’s sent on their final voyage?”

Snorri had no answers. “Why are they here? Why take captives? Why here?”

The Broke-Oar only shook his head, looking older now, closer to fifty than to forty. “You’ll sleep better not knowing.”

• • •

“The dreams I’ve had.” Snorri raised his head at the end of the tavern table. Aslaug looked out at us from his eyes, now beads of jet glimmering and bloody with the last light of the setting sun. You could imagine them watching from the web and believe for a moment the tale of Loki, the god of lies, cleaving to a jötnar beauty with nothing but a spider’s shadow to betray her true nature. “Such dreams.” That gaze fell cold upon me. “Hard to imagine them darker still.”

I felt Baraqel move beneath my skin and half-expected that glow to start, ready for light to fracture through the scars I still bore from the Gowfaugh, for radiance to bleed from beneath my nails. Across the length of the table, that crackling force we knew from brief contacts began to build. I knew it now for the energy between Aslaug and Baraqel, between avatars of darkness and light, ready for war.

I wanted to ask why, to echo Snorri’s demand of the Broke-Oar: Why? I wanted to know how he came to be sold and to what end. Most of all, though, I wanted Aslaug to look away, and so I lowered my gaze and held my peace. The others around the table saw or sensed the strangeness that had come over their countryman and kept silent also-though perhaps their quiet held a touch of mourning in it for the Undoreth.

“Einhaur was sacked too?” A quin, breaking the moment.

“Before they came to Eight Quays?” Another.

“What of Dark Falls?” Tuttugu.

“It must be all of them.” Arne Dead-Eye kept his gaze on the table. “Or we would have heard the tale a dozen times by now.”

Every man at the table, save Snorri, took their ale and drank until they had no more.

“The enemy is there, past the Black Fort,” Snorri said. The night pooled around him, darker than it should be while the sun still sank in the west, not yet swallowed by the sea. “We will go there. Kill everyone. Raze their works. Show them a horror darker than death.”

The northmen lowered their tankards, watching Snorri with uneasy fascination. I looked out to sea once more, west, along the coast to where the burning rim of the sun still beaded the horizon with red jewels. Fewer, fewer, gone.

“I said, Undoreth, we will paint the snows with Hardanger blood!” Snorri surged to his feet, freed by the sunset, eyes clear, the table scraping back across the stones. “We will take back what we love and show these Red Vikings how to bleed.” He raised his axe above his head. “We are of the Undoreth, the Children of the Hammer. The blood of Odin runs in our veins. Storm-born we!”

And where Aslaug left the northmen unmoved with her dark threats, Snorri ver Snagason had them on their feet in a moment, roaring their defiance at the evening sky, pounding the table until the wood splintered and the tankards leapt.

“More ale!” Snorri sat at last, thumping the table one more time. “We drink for the dead.”

“Will you come with us, Prince Jalan?” Tuttugu asked, taking a tall flagon from the server, the head of foam as white as the quins. “Snorri says they call you a hero in your homeland, and your foes named you ‘Devil.’”

“Duty compels me to see Snorri to his homeland.” I nodded. When a course of action is forced upon you it’s best to accept it with grace and milk it for whatever you can get, right up to the moment the first opportunity to weasel out of the deal presents itself. “We’ll see what these Hardanger scavengers make of a man of the Red March.” Hopefully I’d find a way for it not to be a corpse.

“What makes us think we’ll fare any better with nine than Snorri did with one?” Arne Dead-Eye wiped ale foam from his moustache, his voice morose rather than fearful. “The Broke-Oar had enough men to lay waste to Einhaur and every village along the Uulisk.”

“Fair question.” Snorri reached out to point at Arne. “First understand that there were very few men at the Black Fort, and it’s not a place that could ever be garrisoned to its capacity. Every meal eaten there must be hauled across the ice. Every log or sack of coal must be carried there. And what is there to defend against? Slaves labouring beneath the Bitter Ice, digging tunnels in search of a myth?

“Second, we will go better prepared, not dressed in what could be scavenged from ruins in the moment. We will go with clear heads, the murder in our hearts locked away until it is needed.

“Third and finally. What else are we to do? We are the last of the free Undoreth. Anything that survives of our people is there, on the ice, in the hands of other men.” He paused and set his broad hands upon the table, staring at the spread of his fingers. “My wife. My son. All my life. Each good thing I have done.” Something twitched at his mouth and became a snarl as he stood, voice growing towards a roar once more.

“So I’m not offering you victory, or a return to your old lives, or the promise that we will build again. Just pain, and blood, and red axes, and the chance to make war upon our enemies together, this last time. What do you say?”