Mark Lawrence - Prince of Fools

Fjórir was still sitting where I left him when I came back empty-stomached and trembling. The whole boat continued to threaten to capsize at each surge of the waves, but nobody else seemed concerned.

“That’s. . That’s a hell of a cut you’ve got there,” I said.

“Ripped it on a loose spear in a storm off the Thurtans.” Fjórir nodded. “Nasty, though. Gives me no peace.”

“I’m sorry.” And I was. I liked the quins. They were that sort. And soon they’d be quads.

“Snorri says you’re good with wounds.” Fjórir returned to his theme. He seemed unaccountably cheerful about the whole business, though I wouldn’t bet on him lasting the week.

“Well, I’m not.” I peered at the mess with morbid fascination. “You seem less worried about it than I am.”

“The gods are taking us in order. Youngest first.” Again that grin. “Atta fell to ghouls in Ullaswater. Then a dead man pulled Sjau into the bog at Fenmire. Sex took an arrow from a Conaught bowman. So Fimm’s next, not me.”

And all of a sudden I found myself scared as hell. Snorri I understood. I didn’t share his passions or bravery, but I could feel them as greater or lesser versions of my own emotions or thinking. The man before me looked like one of us on the outside, but inside? The gods had put the Torsteff octuplets together differently from other men. Or at least this one. Perhaps the parts he was missing were present twofold in one of his brothers. Or maybe when the eight started dying, each death left the survivors more broken. Fjórir still had the amiability, the immediate sense of dependability, but I couldn’t know what else might be missing behind that too-easy grin and those wide, ice-blue eyes.

“I don’t know why Snorri said that-I’m no doctor. I don’t even-”

“He said you’d try to weasel out of it. He said for you to do what you did in the mountains.” Fjórir held his arm out for me, no hint of trepidation on his face.

“Go on!” Snorri shouted from the back of the boat. “Do it, Jal!”

Pressing my lips tight against revulsion, I extended a hand without enthusiasm, holding it several inches above the injury. Almost immediately a warmth built in my palm. I snatched the hand back. My plan of faking it seemed unlikely to succeed now-the reaction had been far stronger and more immediate than with Meegan’s wound back in the Aups.

“The last person I did this to, Snorri threw off a cliff a moment later.”

“No cliffs at sea. That felt good. Do it again.” Fjórir had no guile in his eyes, like a child.

“Ah, hell.” I stuck my hand back out, as close to the rotting flesh as I could without risk of being slimed. Within seconds I could see the glow from my hand, as if it were a white handprint through that blustery northern day into the desert blaze of the Indus. My bones buzzed with whatever ran through them and the heat built. The wind grew icy around me; the weakness from my vomiting became enfeeblement to the point that even holding my hand up was a labour of Hercules. And suddenly I wasn’t holding anything up. The boat revolved around me and I pitched into darkness.

A bucket of cold and salty water hauled me back into the waking world.

“Jal? Jal?”

“Is he going to be all right?”

A reply in their heathen tongue.

“. . soft, these southerners. .”

“. . bury at sea-”

More nonsense words in northern gibberish.

Another bucket. “Jal? Talk to me.”

“If I do, will you stop pouring seawater over me?” I kept my eyes shut. All I wanted to do was lie very still. Even moving my lips seemed too much effort.

“Thank the gods.” Snorri paused. I heard a heavy bucket being put down.

They left me alone to dry after that. I sprawled on the bench until a particularly big wave rolled me off. Then I lay against the hull. Occasionally I called on Jesu. It didn’t help much.

The light was failing by the time I found the strength to haul myself up and sit on the spot where I’d fallen from. Fjórir brought me over some dry fish and cornmeal cake, but I couldn’t do much more than glance at it. My stomach still rolled with each wave and made no promise to keep anything I gave it.

“My arm’s better!” Fjórir held it out by way of proof. The wound still looked ugly but free of infection now, and healing. “My thanks, Jal.”

“Don’t mention it.” A weak murmur. I guessed he really was invulnerable until poor Fimm took his place in line. Hopefully he’d pay me back by putting his invulnerable self between me and harm’s way.

• • •

The sun set and Snorri spent that time in the Ikea ’s prow, staring north, his black eyes no doubt hunting the Norsheim coast. My strength made no return; if anything, I grew weaker as the night fell. I tried some dry bread and water, donated them to the sea, and dropped into a dreamless slumber.

Dreamless at least until I started dreaming of angels.

I stood in the predawn, on the hills just beyond Vermillion’s farmlands, looking down at the Seleen snaking westward towards the distant sea. Baraqel stood above me, on the hilltop, statued against the sky, unmoving until the rays of the rising sun lit his shoulders.

“Hear me, Jalan Kendeth, son of-”

“I know who I’m son of.”

The angel had far more gravitas about him now than he had in his early visits. As if he spoke more with his own voice than the one I’d fashioned for him back when he was nine parts imagination.

“The time will soon come when you will need to remember where you sprang from. You sail into the land of sagas-a place where heroes are needed, and made. You will need your courage.”

“I don’t think remembering my father will help there. The good cardinal would turn and run if a goat blocked his path. It wouldn’t have to be a big one either.”

“It’s in the nature of children to see past the strengths of their parents. Time to grow up, Jalan Kendeth.” He lifted his face to me, golden-eyed, glowing with the dawn.

“And what’s so great about being brave? Skilfar had the right of it. We’re all running around each according to our nature, some cunning, some honest, some sly, some brave-but what of it?”

Baraqel flexed his wings. “Your grandmother spoke to her sister of you. ‘Has he the mettle? Has he the courage required?’ An ‘idle, shallow boy, full of bluster but ringing hollow,’ she called you, Jalan. ‘A mind blunted by sloth, blinkered by a dry wit,’ she said, ‘but whet it and that mind could take an edge. Had we but world enough and time what we might make of the child. . but we have neither world nor time. Our cause is narrowing to a point not so many miles distant, a second not so many years hence and in that spot, in that moment, will come a test on which the world will turn.’ These are the words she drew you with.”

“I’d be surprised if she knew which one I was. And I’m sharp enough when I need to be. Bravery is just a different kind of broken. The quins are missing whatever it is a man needs in order to feel fear. Snorri’s scared of being a coward. There’s a wyrm like that in their heathen stories, Oroborus, eating its own tail. Scared of being a coward, is that what bravery is? Am I brave because I don’t fear being afraid? You’re of the light; the light reveals. Shine a bright enough light on any kind of bravery and isn’t it just a more complex form of cowardice?”

I stood a moment, the heels of my palms pressed to my forehead, hunting the words.

“Humanity can be divided into madmen and cowards. My personal tragedy is in being born into a world where sanity is held to be a character flaw.” I ran out of words under his gaze.

“Cleverness builds ever more elaborate structures of self-justification,” he said, judgment spilling from his mouth. “But in the end you know what is and what is not right. All men do, though they may spend their years trying to bury that knowing, burying it beneath words, hatreds, lusts, sorrow, or any of the other bricks from which they build their lives. You know what is right, Jalan. When the time comes, you’ll know. But knowing is never enough.”