Prince of Fools (The Red Queen's War 1)

“You’ve got a boat,” I said.

“I was a mile downstream, free and clear.” Snorri tossed his sword in, stepped in after it, and picked up an oar. “Something happened to me.” He paused, staring for a moment into his hand, though it held only darkness. “Something . . . I was getting sick.” He sat and took both oars. “I knew I had to come back—knew the direction. And then I found you.”

I stood on the step. The Silent Sister’s magic had done this. I knew it. The crack had run through us, the light through me, the dark through him, and as Snorri and I separated, some arcane force tried to rejoin those two lines, the dark and the light. We had drawn away from each other, the river carrying Snorri west, and those hidden fissures started to open again, started to tear us both apart just so they could be free to run together once more. I remembered what happened when they joined. It wasn’t pretty.

“Don’t stand there like an idiot. Loose the rope and get in.”

“I . . .” The rowing boat moved as the current tried to wrest it from its mooring. “It doesn’t look very stable.” I’ve always viewed boats as a thin plank between me and drowning. As a sensible fellow I’d never entrusted my safety to one before, and close up they looked even more dangerous. The dark river slurped at the oars as if hungry.

Snorri nodded up at the steps, up towards the gap in the river wall they led to. “In a moment a man with a crossbow will stand there and convince you that waiting was a mistake.”

I hopped in sharp enough at that, Snorri deploying his weight to stop me turning the boat over before I managed to sit down.

“The rope?” he asked. Shouts rang out above us, drawing closer.

I pulled my knife, slashed the rope, nearly lost the knife in the river, tried again, and finally sawed at the strands until at last they gave and we were off. The current took us and the wall vanished into the gloom along with all sight of land.

SEVEN

“Are you going to be sick again?”

“Has the river stopped flowing?” I asked.

Snorri snorted.

“Then yes.” I demonstrated, adding another streak of colour into the dark waters of the Seleen. “If God had intended men to go on water he would have given them . . .” I felt too ill for wit and hung limp over the side of the boat, scowling at the grey dawn coming up behind us. “. . . given them whatever it is you need for that kind of thing.”

“A messiah who walked on water to show you all it was exactly where God intended men to go?” Snorri shook that big chiselled head of his. “My people have older learning than the White Christ brought. Aegir owns the sea and he doesn’t intend that we go onto it. But we do even so.” He rumbled through a bar of song: “Undoreth, we. Battle-born. Raise hammer, raise axe, at our war-shout gods tremble.” He rowed on, humming his tuneless tunes.

My nose hurt like buggery, I felt cold, most of me ached, and when I did manage to sniff through my twice-broken snout I could tell that I still smelled only slightly less bad than that dung heap that saved my life.

“My—” I fell silent. My pronunciation sounded comical; my nose would have come out “by dose.” And although I had every right to complain, it might rile the Norseman, and it doesn’t pay to rile the kind of man who can jump on a bear to escape a fight pit. Especially if it was you who put him in that pit in the first place. As my father would say, “To err is human, to forgive is divine . . . but I’m only a cardinal and cardinals are human, so rather than forgiving you I’m going to err towards beating you with this stick.” Snorri didn’t look the forgiving kind either. I settled for another groan.

“What?” He looked up from his rowing. I remembered the remarkable number of bodies he left in his wake coming in and out of Maeres’s poppy farm to get me. All with his weapon hand badly injured.

“Nothing.”

• • •

We rowed on through the garden lands of Red March. Well, Snorri rowed on, and I lay moaning. In truth he mostly steered us and the Seleen did the rest. Where his right hand clutched the oar he left it bloodstained.

Scenery passed, green and monotonous, and I slumped over the side, muttering complaints and vomiting sporadically. I also wondered about how I’d moved from waking beside the naked delights of Lisa DeVeer to sharing a shitty rowing boat with a huge Norse maniac all in the space between two dawns.

“Will we have trouble?”

“Huh?” I looked up from my misery.

Snorri tilted his head downstream to where several rickety wooden quays reached out into the river, a number of fishing boats tied up at them. Men moved here and there along the shore checking fish traps, mending nets.