The fellow before me would have been the most unremarkable of men, giving even my dear father some competition in the “ordinary” stakes, if not for the fact that every inch of his exposed skin, which amounted to hands, neck, and head, was tattooed with foreign scrawl. The letters even crawled up across his face, crowding his cheeks and forehead with dense calligraphy.
An uncomfortable silence built in the aftermath of his arrival, and certainly at home I would have been tempted to damn his eyes and demand that he speak up or get out, possibly encouraging him to one or the other with the aid of whatever was close enough at hand to throw. I’d spent too long on the road, though, where any given peasant might stab me for looking at his sister wrong, and my old instincts had rusted up.
“Yes?” Even though it was his place to explain, not mine to ask.
“My name is Sageous. I advise the king on more . . . unusual matters.”
“Hallelujah!” Perhaps not the thing to say to someone with such heathen looks, but in the joy of discovering a man who might undo my curse, I was prepared to overlook shortcomings such as being of distinctly foreign origin and failing to worship the right deity. Snorri shared those faults, after all, and despite my misgivings had proved to have several redeeming features.
“People are not always so pleased to see me, Prince Jalan.” A small smile on his lips.
“Ah, but not everyone needs a miracle.” I got to my feet and advanced on the man, pleased to find I towered over him. I guessed him to be about forty and from my vantage point I could read what was written on the top of his head. Or at least I could if I knew the script. I guessed the writing to be from somewhere east and maybe south too. A long way east and south. A place where the writing looked like spiders mating. I’d seen the like before in my mother’s chambers. Sageous tilted his head to meet my gaze and I forgot all about his inconvenient script, lack of stature, even the spice-stink of him that had just reached my nostrils. All of a sudden those unremarkable eyes of his became everything that mattered. Twin pools of contemplation, calm, brown, ordinary . . .
“Prince Jalan?”
I shook my head to find the damnable little man snapping his fingers in front of my face. If I hadn’t wanted something from him, I’d have kicked his arse all the way to the Triple Gate. Well, if he hadn’t been a sorcerer as well. Not people to rub the wrong way. Rubbed the right way, though . . . as with Aladdin’s lamp, I might get my wish. At least I knew now that he wasn’t a charlatan with the mirrors and the smoke and the quick hands.
“Prince Jal—”
“I’m fine. Came over dizzy for a second. Come in. Sit. I need to ask you about something.” I pinched the bridge of my nose and blinked a few times to refocus as I walked a less-than-straight path back to my chair. “Sit.” I waved at another seat.
Sageous took an elegant ladder-back but stood behind it rather than following my bidding. Tan fingers ran over wood so dark as to be almost black, investigating each polished and gleaming curve as if seeking meaning. “You’re a puzzle, Prince Jalan.”
I bit back on my opinion and resisted damning him for his impudence.
“A puzzle of two pieces.” The heathen watched me with those placid eyes of his. He released the chair and ran his fingers over his forehead, brows, cheekbones, cheeks. Everywhere his fingertips touched it seemed that for a heartbeat the tattooed script grew darker, like fissures through his flesh into some inner blackness. He cocked his head, then looked back towards the corridor. “And the second piece is close by.”
“I would have expected no less of someone from whom a king such as Olidan seeks counsel.” I flashed my best grin, the one that says “amiable bluff hero with the common touch.” “The truth is I got caught up in some foul spell along with the Norseman I’ve brought with me. We’re bound together by the magics. If we get too far apart, bad things happen to us. And all I want to do is have someone unbind us so we can go our separate ways again. The man who could do that would find me a very generous prince indeed!”
Sageous looked far less surprised than I had expected. Almost as if he’d heard the story already. “I can help you, Prince Jalan.”
“Oh, thank God. I mean, thank any god. You don’t know how hard it’s been, yoked to that brute. I thought I was going to have to trek all the way to the fjords with him. Cold does not agree with me at all. My sinus—”
Sageous raised a hand and cut off my babbling. Unconscionable that he should interrupt a prince, but it’s true that the relief of it all had overloosened my tongue.
“There is, as in many things, an easy way and a hard way.”
“The easy way sounds easiest,” I said, leaning forwards, for the heathen spoke very soft.
“Kill the other man.”
“Kill Snorri?” I jolted back, surprised. “But I thought if he—”