Prince of Fools - Mark Lawrence

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Scorron peasants.

      I entered the Hall – really a collection of halls, staterooms, a ballroom, kitchens, stables, and a second floor with endless bedchambers – by the west port, a service door meant for scullions and such. Fat Ned sat at guard, his halberd against the wall.

      ‘Ned!’

      ‘Master Jal!’ He woke with a start and came perilously close to tipping the chair over backwards.

      ‘As you were.’ I gave him a wink and went by. Fat Ned kept a tight lip and my excursions were safe with him. He’d known me since I was a little monster bullying the smaller princes and princesses and toadying to the ones big enough to clout me. He’d been fat back in those days. The flesh hung off him now as the reaper closed in for the final swing, but the name stuck. There’s power in a name. ‘Prince’ has served me very well – something to hide behind when trouble comes, and ‘Jalan’ carries echoes of King Jalan of the Red March, Fist of the Emperor back when we had one. A title and a name like Jalan carry an aura with them, enough to give me the benefit of the doubt – and there was never a doubt I needed that.

      I nearly made it back to my room.

      ‘Jalan Kendeth!’

      I stopped two steps from the balcony that led to my chambers, toe poised for the next step, boots in my hand. I said nothing. Sometimes the bishop would just bellow my name when he discovered random mischief. In fairness I was normally the root cause. This time however he was looking directly at me.

      ‘I see you right there, Jalan Kendeth, footsteps black with sin as you creep back to your lair. Get down here!’

      I turned with an apologetic grin. Churchmen like you to be sorry and often it doesn’t matter what you’re sorry about. In this case I was sorry for being caught.

      ‘And the best of mornings to you, your excellency.’ I put the boots behind my back and swaggered down toward him as if it had been my plan all along.

      ‘His eminence directs me to present your brothers and yourself at the throne room by second bell.’ Bishop James scowled at me, cheeks grey with stubble as if he too had been turfed out of bed at an unreasonable hour, though perhaps not by Lisa DeVeer’s shapely foot.

      ‘Father directed that?’ He’d said nothing at table the previous night and the cardinal was not one to rise before noon whatever the good book had to say about sloth. They call it a deadly sin but in my experience lust will get you into more trouble and sloth’s only a sin when you’re being chased.

      ‘The message came from the queen.’ The bishop’s scowl deepened. He liked to attribute all commands to Father as the church’s highest, albeit least enthusiastic, representative in Red March. Grandmother once said she’d been tempted to set the cardinal’s hat on the nearest donkey but Father had been closer and promised to be more easily led. ‘Martus and Darin have already left.’

      I shrugged. ‘They arrived before me too.’ I’d yet to forgive my elder brothers that slight. I stopped, out of arms’ reach as the bishop loved nothing better than to slap the sin out of a wayward prince, and turned to go upstairs. ‘I’ll get dressed.’

      ‘You’ll go now! It’s almost second bell and your preening never takes less than an hour.’

      As much as I would have liked to dispute the old fool he happened to be right and I knew better than to be late for the Red Queen. I suppressed a sneer and hurried past him. I had on what I’d worn for my midnight escapades and whilst it was stylish enough, the slashed velvets hadn’t fared too well during my escape. Still, it would have to serve. Grandmother would rather see her spawn battle armoured and dripping blood in any event, so a touch of mud here and there might earn me some approval.

       3

      I came late to the throne room with the second bell’s echoes dying before I reached the bronze doors, huge out-of-place things stolen from some still-grander palace by one of my distant and bloody-handed relatives. The guards eyed me as if I might be bird crap that had sailed uninvited through a high window to splat before them.

      ‘Prince Jalan.’ I rolled my hands to chivvy them along. ‘You may have heard of me? I am invited.’

      Without commentary the largest of them, a giant in fire-bronze mail and crimson plumed helm, hauled the left door wide enough to admit me. My campaign to befriend every guard in the palace had never penetrated as far as Grandmother’s picked men: they thought too much of themselves for that. Also they were too well paid to be impressed by my largesse, and perhaps forewarned against me in any case.

      I crept in unannounced and hurried across the echoing expanse of marble. I’ve never liked the throne room. Not for the arching grandness of it, or the history set in grim-faced stone and staring at us from every wall, but because the place has no escape routes. Guards, guards, and more guards, along with the scrutiny of that awful old woman who claims to be my grandmother.

      I made my way toward my nine siblings and cousins. It seemed this was to be an audience exclusively for the royal grandchildren: the nine junior princes and singular princess of Red March. By rights I should have been tenth in line to the throne after my two uncles, their sons, my father and elder brothers, but the old witch who’d kept that particular seat warm these past forty years had different ideas about succession. Cousin Serah, still a month shy of her eighteenth birthday, and containing not an ounce of whatever it is that makes a princess, was the apple of the Red Queen’s eye. I won’t lie, Serah had more than several ounces of whatever it is that lets a woman steal the sense from a man and accordingly I would gladly have ignored the common views on what cousins should and shouldn’t get up to. Indeed I’d tried to ignore them several times, but Serah had a vicious right hook and a knack for kicking the tenderest of spots that a man owns. She’d come today wearing some kind of riding suit in fawn and suede that looked better suited to the hunt than to court. But, damn, she looked good.

      I brushed past her and elbowed my way in between my brothers near the front of the group. I’m a decent sized fellow, tall enough to give men pause, but I don’t normally care to stand by Martus and Darin. They make me look small and, with nothing to set us apart, all with the same dark-gold hair and hazel eyes, I get referred to as ‘the little one’. That I don’t like. On this occasion, though, I was prepared to be overlooked. It wasn’t just being in the throne room that made me nervous. Nor even because of Grandmother’s pointed disapproval. It was the blind-eye woman. She scares the hell out of me.

      I first saw her when they brought me before the throne on my fifth birthday, my name day, flanked by Martus and Darin in their church finest, Father in his cardinal’s hat, sober despite the sun having passed its zenith, my mother in silks and pearls, a clutch of churchmen and court ladies forming the periphery. The Red Queen sat forward in her great chair booming out something about her grandfather’s grandfather, Jalan, the Fist of the Emperor, but it passed me by – I’d seen her. An ancient woman, so old it turned my stomach to look at her. She crouched in the shadow of the throne, hunched up so she’d be hidden away if you looked from the other side. She had a face like paper that had been soaked then left to dry, her lips a greyish line, cheekbones sharp. Clad in rags and tatters, she had no place in that throne room, at odds with the finery, the fire-bronzed guards and the glittering retinue come to see my name set in place upon me. There was no motion in the crone: she could almost have been a trick of the light, a discarded cloak, an illusion of lines and shade.

      ‘… Jalan?’ The Red Queen stopped her litany with a question.

      I had answered with silence, tearing my gaze from the creature at her side.

      ‘Well?’ Grandmother narrowed her regard to a sharp point that held me.

      Still I had nothing. Martus had elbowed me hard enough to make my ribs creak. It hadn’t helped. I wanted to look back at the old woman. Was she still there? Had she moved the moment my eyes left her? I imagined how she’d move. Quick like a spider. My stomach made

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