Prince of Fools

We camped in the lee of any outcrop we could find and burned charcoal from our packs to put a little warmth into our food. The snows south of the Bitter Ice would thaw occasionally. Maybe two years would pass, maybe five, but eventually a particularly high summer would melt them back to bare rock in all but the deep places, and so the ice we walked on was never thick enough to cover every rise and fold of the land. The Bitter Ice itself, however, that glacial sheet never melted, though it might retreat a mile or three over the course of lifetimes. And the land beneath it hadn’t seen the sun in centuries, maybe since Christ walked the world. Maybe never.

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.