Prince of Fools (The Red Queen's War)

I opened one eye. The sky still kept an echo of the day though the sun had set. Already the cold had rolled down from the peaks. Damn. Still on the mountain. “Bugger.” The word came out in thin slivers. Snorri let my head slide back onto my pack and moved away.

 

“What are you doing?” Not enough of the question emerged for him to respond. I gave up and let the air wheeze back into my lungs. A charred hand rose before my face and I yelped, flinching from it before realizing it was my own. The strange disconnected feeling persisted as I edged into an upright position and started to pick pieces of blackened skin from my palm. Not my skin, but fragments from the dead thing that had tried to kill me. The pieces of skin, part crispy, part wet, fell amongst the rocks, too heavy for the wind to take. Memories of the attack were just as broken and unwelcome. Trying not to think about it didn’t help. I kept seeing the light bleeding out from beneath my hand, blinding and without heat. How did it burn without heat?

 

“What are you doing?” Perhaps Snorri would distract me. My voice came louder this time, and he looked up.

 

“Cleaning the wound. Damn thing bit me.”

 

I could see teeth marks in the flesh above his hip. “The sword cut looks worse.” A red furrow sliced through the ridged topography of his abdomen.

 

“Bites are dirty wounds. Better to be skewered through the arm by a sword than bitten on the hand by a hound.” Snorri squeezed the damaged flesh again, producing a rush of blood that ran down over his belt. He grimaced and reached for his water flask, tipping some of our last reserves over the injury site.

 

“What the hell happened?” Most of me didn’t want to know, but apparently my mouth did.

 

“Necromancy.” Snorri took a needle and thread from his pack, something he must have acquired at the circus. Both were covered in an orange paste. Some heathen conceit to keep ill humours out of the wound, no doubt. “No unborn here,” he said. “But a powerful necromancy to return the dead so soon after death.” Another stitch placed. My stomach lurched. “And for the necromancer to not even be present!” He shook his head, then nodded to a spot behind me. “I expect our friend knows more.”

 

“Buggeration!” Twisting my neck to look reminded me that someone had filled it with broken glass. I edged my whole body around by degrees, keeping my head facing front and centre. Finally Meegan came into view, pale eyes goggling at me over a gag of knotted cloth. Snorri had bound him hand and foot and sat him with his back to a boulder. Saliva clung to the stubble on his chin and his arms trembled, from fear or the cold or both.

 

“So how are you going to make him talk?” I asked.

 

“Beat him about, I expect.” Snorri glanced up from his stitching. The needle looked ridiculously small in the great paws of his hands, and at the same time far larger and more pointy than anything I’d want to have to push through my own flesh.

 

I sniffed. The place stank of death and the wind couldn’t scour it clean. “Edris!” The memory hit me like cold water. I reached for my sword and couldn’t find it.

 

“Gone.” Snorri sounded a touch disappointed. “The bodies we threw down got up again and scared his lot off. I watched them go.”

 

“Hell! More of those things?” I’d rather face Edris than another of those grinning corpses with their refusal to play dead and their penchant for throttling me.

 

Snorri nodded, dipped to bite through the thread, then spat it out. “Can’t climb, though. They weren’t great at it when they were alive. Now?” He shook his head.

 

I had no desire to look over the edge and see their faces staring up at me, raw fingers clutching at the rocks, climbing, sliding back, climbing again. I remembered the look in those eyes as the thing choked me. Bile rose at the back of my throat. Something different had watched me from those eyes, something far worse than whatever had looked out through them for all the years prior to those last minutes.

 

Meegan might have scared me back in the tavern, studying me as if I were an insect he would enjoy pulling legs off, but on the mountain he proved one of the least worrying things to look at. “Beating him’s apt to knock him senseless again. And your idea of a beating would probably kill an ox.”

 

“We can’t kill him,” Snorri said. “Who knows what we’d get?”

 

“I know that.” I set my forehead in my hand, reminding myself just how much bigger Snorri was than me. “And now he does too. Which isn’t helping our cause.”

 

“Oh.” Snorri placed another stitch, drawing two ragged edges of his belly together. “Sorry.”

 

“I say we take his boots off and light a small fire under his feet. He’ll know his only chance of getting off this mountain is to be able to walk. And it won’t take long to loosen his tongue.”

 

“Look around.” Snorri gestured with the knife he was using to trim a bandage. “No wood. No fire.” He frowned. “That last corpse I threw over, though . . . the arms were burned. How did you do that?” Narrowed eyes focused in on my hands, still blackened.

 

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