“What’s going on?” I held my hands up, palms towards me. “That dead man fried where I touched him. And you.” I looked back up at Snorri, angry now, scared and angry and in that moment not caring if he took offence. “You! There’s something wrong with you, Norseman. I’ve seen those black eyes. I saw . . . smoke, hell, I’ll call it what it is, I saw darkness swirl around you when you killed those men, like your axe was cutting the stuff out of the air.” I made the connection then. I should have seen it before. “And that’s what’s in you, isn’t it? Dark eyes, dark dreams. Darkness!”

Snorri hefted his axe, running a speculative eye along its length. For a moment I thought he might strike me down, but he shook his head and offered a grim smile. “It took you until now to understand? It’s the curse you brought on me. On us. Your witch, the Silent Sister. Her curse. That broken spell, that twin crack, running after you, dark and light. I got darkness—you got light—both whispering to us, and both of them wanting to get out.

“In the North the wise women say the world is a cloth, woven from many strands and stretched across what is real. The world we see is thin.” He held up a thumb and finger, almost touching. “Where it tears, deeper truths escape. And we are torn, Jal. We’re carrying wounds we can’t see. We’re carrying it north and the dead want to stop us.”

“Look, we’ll go back. My grandmother is the Red Queen, damn it. She can have this made right. We’ll go back and—”

“No.” Snorri cut me off. “I took the prince out of the palace, but the palace is still crammed firmly up the prince’s arse. You need to stop moaning about every hardship, stop chasing every woman you lay eyes on, and concentrate on surviving. Out here—” He waved the axe at the bleakness of the mountains. “Out here you need to live in the moments. Watch the world. You’re a young man, Jal, a child who’s refused to grow up. Do it now, or you’ll die a young man. Whatever is behind this pursuit, it all started in Vermillion. Whatever war is being fought there is being lost. The Dead King is trying to kill us because we’re taking the Sister’s strength north.”

I got to my feet. “So we stop going north! Go back. Make this right! It’s nonsense anyhow. It was all an accident. Just ill fortune. Nobody could have planned it. It’s all a mistake.”

“I saw her too, Jal. This Silent Sister of yours.” Snorri set the tip of his index finger just above his cheekbone. “She had one white eye.”

“Half blind, yes.” One pearly eye. I’d called her the blind-eye woman for years before I knew any other name.

Snorri nodded. “She sees the future. She looked too far and it blinded her. But she still has a second eye to look with. She looked through the might-have-beens and saw far enough to know you would escape, meet me and take her power north.”