Prince of Fools (The Red Queen's War) Read Free Page B

your own, I hear.”
    “Yes, w—”
    “Idle, numerous, and breeding sedition in your numbers.” Grandmother rolled over Cousin Roland’s announcement before he could puff himself up. His smile died in that stupid beard of his, the one he grew to allow people at least the suspicion that he might have a chin. “Dark times are coming and this nation must be a fortress. The time for being children has passed. My blood runs in each of you, thin though it’s grown. And you will be soldiers in this coming war.”
    Martus snorted at that, though quiet enough that it would be missed. Martus had been commissioned into the heavy horse, destined for knight-general, commander of Red March’s elite. The Red Queen in a fit of madness five years earlier had all but eliminated the force. Centuries of tradition, honour, and excellence ploughed under at the whim of an old woman. Now we were all to be soldiers running to battle on foot, digging ditches, endlessly practising mechanical tactics that any peasant could master and that set a prince no higher than a potboy.
    “. . . greater foe. Time to put aside thoughts of empty conquest and draw in . . .”
    I looked up from my disgust to find Grandmother still droning on about war. It’s not that I care overmuch about honour. All that chivalry nonsense loads a man down and any sensible fellow will ditch it the moment he needs to run—but it’s the look of the thing, the form of it. To be in one of the three horse corps, to earn your spurs and keep a trio of chargers at the city barracks . . . it had been the birthright of young nobles since time immemorial. Damn it, I wanted my commission. I wanted in at the officers’ mews, wanted to swap tall tales around the smoky tables at the Conarrf and ride along the Kings Way flying the colours of the Red Lance or Iron Hoof, with the long hair and bristling moustache of a cavalryman and a stallion between my legs. Tenth in line to a throne will get you into a not-insignificant number of bedchambers, but if a man dons the scarlet cloak of the Red March riders and wraps his legs around a destrier, there are few ladies of quality who won’t open theirs when he flashes a smile at them.
    At the corner of my vision the blind-eye woman moved, spoiling my daydream and putting all thoughts of riding, of either kind, from my head.
    “. . . burning all dead. Cremation is to be mandatory, for noble and commoner alike, and damn any dissent from Roma . . .”
    That again. The old bird had been banging on about death rites for over a year now. As if men my age gave a fig for such things! She’d become obsessed with sailors’ tales, ghost stories from the Drowned Isles, the ramblings of muddy drunkards from the Ken Marshes. Already men went chained into the ground—good iron wasted against superstition—and now chains weren’t enough? Bodies must be burned? Well, the church wouldn’t like it. It would put a crimp in their plans for Judgment Day and us all rising from the grave for a big grimy hug. But who cared? Really? I watched the early light slide across the walls high above me and tried to picture Lisa as I’d left her that morning, clad in brightness and shadow and nothing more.
    The crash of the chamberlain’s staff on flagstones jerked my head back up. In fairness I’d had very little sleep the night before and a trying morning. If I hadn’t been caught a yard from my bedchamber door I would have been safely ensconced therein until well past noon, dreaming better versions of the daydream Grandmother kept interrupting.
    “Bring in the witnesses!” The chamberlain had a voice that could make a death sentence boring.
    Four guardsmen entered, flanking a Nuban warrior, scar-marked and tall, manacled wrist and ankle, the chains all threaded through an iron ring belted around his waist. That perked my interest. I misspent much of my youth gambling at the pit fights in the Latin Quarter, and I intended to misspend much of what life