Mark Lawrence - Prince of Fools

On the long march through an icy waste, no one talks. You keep your mouth closed to seal the heat in your body. You cover your face and watch a white world through the slit that remains. You put one foot before the next and hope that it’s a straight line you’re plotting-letting the rise and fall of the sun guide your progress. And while you try to force your body along the straightest path, the paths your mind follows become increasingly twisted. Your thoughts wander. Old friends revisit. Old times catch you up once more. You dream. With your eyes open, and with the plod and plod of numb feet to punctuate each minute, you dream.

I dreamed of Great-Uncle Garyus, lying broken in his high tower, older than sin and smelling only slightly better. His nurses cleaned him, carried him, fed him, took away a measure of his dignity every day, though he never seemed to lack for more.

Garyus probably would have thanked any god that could give him even a day of walking, even in a place like this. And even at the end of a day of such labour, bone-cold, bone-tired, hunched within my misery, I wouldn’t have swapped with him.

My great-uncle had lain there year upon year, placed by age and infirmity on death’s doorstep. The Red Queen had told us that there really was a door into death, and it seemed that Garyus had been knocking on it since the day he’d come broken into the world.

In my dreams I returned to that day with the sun slanting in past his shutters, when Garyus had folded my hands around that locket in his own, large-knuckled, liver-spotted, and tremulous. “Your mother’s likeness,” he had said. “Keep it safe.” And safe meant secret. I knew that, even at six.

I’d sat and watched that old and broken man. Listened to his stories, laughed at them as children do, sat silent and round-eyed when the tales turned dark. Most of that time I never knew him as my great-uncle. And none of that time did I know him as brother to the Silent Sister-though of course it seemed only right the Sister should be someone’s sister.

I wondered if Garyus were scared of his twin, the blind-eye woman, his silent sister. Could a person be scared of their twin? Would that be like being scared of yourself? I knew that many men were scared of themselves, frightened that they would let themselves down, that they would run rather than fight, choose the dishonourable path, the easy path rather than the hard. Me, I trusted myself always to do what was right-for Jalan Kendeth. The only times I scared myself were the rare occasions I was tempted to stand and fight, those few times when anger had gotten the better of me and almost stepped me into danger.

How much did Garyus, there in his tower with his stories and gifts for children, know of his sisters’ battles? I looked at those memories now as a puzzle. Was there another way to see them? Like those trick drawings where everything is obvious until someone tells you “the lump is a dent” and suddenly you see it-what was a bump is now a hollow, pushed in, not standing out-they all are, every rise and hollow reversed, the image has changed, its meaning flipped around, and try as you like you can’t see it as before: solid, unambiguous, worthy of your trust.

Did Garyus know his younger sister thought she knew where death’s door lay?

“Jal.” A tired voice. “Jal.”

I thought of Garyus, the Red Queen’s brother, eyes aglitter in that narrow bed. Older than her, surely? Had he known her plans? How much of all this had that crippled old man set in motion?

“Jal!”

Shouldn’t he have been king? Wouldn’t he have been King of the Red March if he weren’t broken so?

“JAL!”

“What?” I stumbled, almost fell.

“We’re stopping.” Snorri, bowed and tired, the ice wastes making mock of his strength just as it did of all men’s strength. He raised a hand, pointing within his glove. I followed his direction. Ahead of us the walls of the Bitter Ice rose without preamble: sheer, beautiful, taller than my imagination.

• • •

We ate despite the effort it took, fumbling with dead fingers to make a spark, using the last of our kindling, lighting the charcoal to heat a pot and knowing there would be no heat but what our bodies made from then on.

That night for the longest time I didn’t sleep. The skies grew clear overhead and stars dazzled down upon us as the temperature fell away. Each breath hurt, drawing frozen razors of air into my chest. Death seemed both near and inviting. I shivered despite the furs, despite layers and more layers. And when at last dreams took me down I held no surety of ever waking.

In some dead hour past midnight the silence woke me. The unrelenting wind had for once relented, dropping away to nothing. I cracked open an eye and stared into the darkness. The miracle came suddenly and without warning. In one moment the sky lit with shifting veils of light, rolling through the colours, first red, then an eerie green, next a blue I’d not seen before. And always shifting, from one serpentlike form to the next. The silence and the scale of it kept the breath in my chest. The whole sky overwritten, a hundred miles and more of the heavens dancing with glory to some tune that only angels hear.

I know now that it must have been a dream, but in that moment I believed it with all my heart, and it filled me with wonder and with fear. Nothing before or since has made me feel so small, and yet that great and dancing mystery of light, huger than mountains, played out above an empty wasteland to no audience but me. . it made me feel, just for the briefest time. . significant.

In the morning Fimm did not rise.

“Now it is my turn.” Fjórir sewed his brother into his sleeping sack with a long bone needle and gut thread.

“Will he rise?” I eyed the sack, half-expecting it to move.

Snorri shook his head, solemn. Behind him Tuttugu rubbed his eyes. Of all of us the quins, now quads, seemed least moved.

“He’s frozen,” Snorri said.

“But.” My face felt too solid for frowning. “But you found a dead man struggling after a day or more in a snowbank.”

“The necromancers inject them with an elixir. Something of oils and salts, the Broke-Oar said. It keeps them from locking solid.” Snorri had told me this before, but the cold had frozen my memory.

“This army beneath the ice. . Olaaf Rikeson’s troops-the Dead King’s men-will need to thaw them and treat them in this manner. Unless they have some new magics it doesn’t seem possible. The effort involved to drag them frozen to the south, or to bear sufficient fuel north. .” I thought of the other part to the tale Snorri had told. The key that would open the frost giants’ gates-Loki’s gift. The key that would open anything. “Perhaps all they ever wanted was Rikeson’s key. That one thing.” And for some reason that thought worried me more than an army of corpses rising from the ice.

• • •

Snorri had aimed west of the fort so that the line of the Bitter Ice could lead us east towards it. If he had steered us wrong, then we were walking away from the fort into the ice-bound wastelands of the interior, where we would all die without the least inconvenience to anyone. Death seemed certain either way, and if turning back alone offered even the slightest hope of survival, then I would have been off without delay. Unfortunately, as Tuttugu had discovered in battle, running away is sometimes the least safe option, and whilst dying was the last thing I wanted to do, dying by myself seemed somehow worse.

I staggered on, across the unending whiteness, wondering if the Silent Sister had already watched my suffering when she looked beyond tomorrow. I crunched the ice, feet numb, the wind’s keening filling my head. Had she counted out each frozen step or just seen the great white shape of our trek across the snows? How many possibilities had lain strewn across the future for her? And how many of them saw us dead? Foot before foot, too cold for shivering, dying by degrees. Perhaps in some futures the crack that chased me had caught and destroyed me before I even reached Snorri; in others he may have killed me as I ran into him. Did she know for certain that her spell would find a home in us, be carried north to the very edge of the Bitter Ice? Did she know whether her magics would wither inside us or take root and grow into more than they had been? Was she certain, or was she maybe, like her great-nephew, a gambler always ready to roll those dice one time too many? I saw her narrow smile in my mind’s eye, and it did little to warm me. Foot before foot. Endlessly on.