Mark Lawrence - Prince of Fools

“Jesus! You people will be the death of me.” And I slapped my palm to Ein’s stab wound-harder than necessary.

In an instant my hand flared, too bright to look at, and every ache I had became an agony, my ribs something beyond comprehension. I snatched my hand back almost immediately, panting and cursing, blood and drool dripping from my mouth.

“Good. Now Tuttugu!” And I felt myself dragged. I watched through one eye as Ein struggled to sit up, poking at the unbroken but bloodstained skin where the knife had slid beneath his ribs.

Snorri set me beside Tuttugu and we met each other’s gaze, both of us too weak for talking. The Viking, who had been pale to start with, now lay as white as frost. Snorri pulled Tuttugu around, moving him without effort despite his girth. He tugged Tuttugu’s hand clear of the stomach wound and drew in an involuntary breath.

“It’s bad. You’ve got to heal this, Jal. The rest can wait, but this will sour. The guts are cut inside.”

“I can’t do it.” I’d more easily stab a knife through my hand or put a hot coal in my mouth. “You don’t understand. .”

“He’ll die! I know Arne was too far gone, but this, this is a slow death-you can stop it.” Snorri kept talking. It washed over me. Tuttugu said nothing, only watched me as I watched him, both of us lying on the cold stone floor, too weak to move. I remembered him on the mountainside overlooking Trond, telling me he would run from every battle if only his legs were longer. A kindred soul, almost as deep in his fears as me, but he’d gone to war in the Black Fort even so.

“Shut up,” I told Snorri. And he did.

Ein came to join him, moving with an old man’s care.

“I can’t do it. I really can’t.” I pointed my gaze towards my free hand. The other still clutched my sword for some reason; it was probably glued on by all the gore. “I can’t do it. But no man should go to Valhalla with brothel rash.” Again, pointing with my gaze.

Finally Ein took the hint. I screwed both eyes shut, gritted my teeth, clenched what could be clenched, and he grabbed my forearm, setting my hand against the rip in Tuttugu’s belly.

It made healing Ein seem like a simple thing.

I woke before the heat of a fire. My side ached like a bastard, but the heat felt wonderful and if I didn’t move a single muscle it was almost comfortable.

Gradually other hurts made themselves known. A throbbing pain in my thigh, a stabbing pain in my arm, a generalized wretchedness from all the muscles I could name and many I couldn’t.

I opened an eye. “Where’s Snorri?”

They’d laid me out on one of the long tables at the end closest to the hearth. Ein and Tuttugu sat before the fire, Tuttugu binding a splint about his knee, Ein sharpening his axe. Both had cleaned and stitched their wounds, or had the other do it.

“Burning the dead.” Tuttugu pointed towards the far door. “He’s building a pyre on the wall.”

I tried to sit up and lay back cursing. “There’s not enough wood, surely? Why not leave them to freeze?”

“He found the wood store, and he’s been knocking doors off hinges, ripping down shutters.”

“But why?” I asked, not sure I wanted an answer.

“Because of what will be coming from the Bitter Ice,” Ein said. “He doesn’t want the bodies raised against us.” He didn’t say that his last three brothers lay amongst them, but something in his face told it anyway.

“If they’re frozen they won’t be able to. .” I tried to sit again. Sitting is an important precursor to running away.

“Might not freeze in time,” Tuttugu said.

“And Snorri doesn’t want anything left to be defiled after. .” Ein set his whetstone down and admired his edge in the firelight.

Between them the two men I’d saved had managed to make my blood run cold. That “in time” and that “after” were not encouraging. A corpse would freeze solid overnight.

“We’re expecting. . trouble. . before morning?” I tried to make it not sound like whining, and failed.

“No ‘we’ about it. It’s what Snorri says. He says they’re coming.” Tuttugu tightened the bindings about his knee and whimpered in pain.

“How does he know?” I made a third attempt to sit, galvanized by fear, and succeeded, ribs grating.

“Snorri says the dark told him.” Ein set his axe down and looked my way. “And if he doesn’t end this in the dark, then you’ll have to do it in the light.”

“This-” I eased down from the table and the pain cut me off. “This is madness. He finds his wife and child, and then we go!” I left off the “finds them dead or alive” part. “Broke-Oar is dead-it’s done.”

Without waiting to be contradicted, I hobbled off towards the far door. The blood smears, drying to black and deepest scarlet now, showed the way. Where Snorri found the energy to drag approaching thirty corpses out along that corridor and onto the fort wall I didn’t know, but I did know that he would have neither the fuel, stamina, nor time to add the frozen dead of Olaaf Rikeson’s army to his pyre.

The stairs up to the outer door were slippery with blood, already freezing where it had dripped from one step to the next. Opening the door, I found the night lit with a vast blaze, the wind trailing orange flame out over the battlements. Even with all that heat not twenty yards off, the cold bit me immediately, the alien cold of a landscape that held in it nothing for men or for any other living thing.

Snorri stood silhouetted against the inferno. I could see corpses and timbers, some black against the hot glow, others melting into it. Even the wind’s strength couldn’t keep the scent of roasting flesh from my nostrils. The walkway ran with hot fats, burning even as they spilled down the inner wall.

“It’s done, then?” I had to raise my voice above the crackle of the fire and the wind’s discontent.

“They’re coming, Jal. The dead men from the Bitter Ice, the necromancers who herd them, Edris and the rest of the Broke-Oar’s following.” He paused. “The unborn.”

“What the hell are you doing out here, then?” I shouted. “Search for your wife and let’s be gone.” I ignored the fact that I could barely walk the length of the corridor and that if his child were here we couldn’t march across the Uplands with him. Such truths were too uncomfortable. Besides, the woman and boy were probably dead, and I would rather die trying to cross the ice than facing necromancers and their horrors.

Snorri turned away from the fire, eyes red with smoke. “Let’s go in. I’ve spoken the words. The flames will carry them to Valhalla.”

“Well, not Broke-Oar and his bastards,” I said.

“Even them.” Snorri glanced back at the blaze, a half-smile twisting his split lip. “They died in battle, Jal. That’s all it takes. When we arm against the jotün and the jotnär at Ragnarok, all men with fire in their blood will stand together.”

We walked in side by side, Snorri matching my snail’s pace as I hobbled down the stairs, mis-stepping once and uttering every foul word I knew until I reached the bottom. “We can’t stay here, Snorri.”

“It’s a fortress. Where better to stay when your enemies march?”

He had me there.

“How long was I out? How much time is left?”

“It’s two hours until dawn. They’ll be here before that.”

“What will we do?” Sven Broke-Oar had been bad enough. I had no desire to wait to see whatever it was that had terrified a monster like him.

“Barricade ourselves in the gatehouse. Wait.”

As much as I liked the idea of defence, it didn’t sound like Snorri. His very name meant “attack.” To hold back sounded like an admission of defeat. But the man was all done in. I could see that. I could no more heal his wounds than I could my own. Just walking beside him set the air crackling with uncomfortable energies. Even with a yard between us, my skin crawled as if somewhere in the marrow of my bones, that crack, the one the Silent Sister’s magic had fractured into the world-between worlds-as if that crack were seeking to break out. It wanted to run through me and join its dark twin as it broke from Snorri, to join together and race towards the horizon, splitting and splitting again until the world lay shattered.