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

“Big.” Snorri shook his head. He went to the rowing boat and made a slight bow, muttering. Some damn heathen prayer, no doubt, as if the thing needed thanking for not drowning us. Finished at last, he turned and gestured for me to lead the way. “Rhone. And by swift roads.”

“They’d be swifter if we had horses.”

Snorri snorted as if offended by the idea. And waited. And waited some more.

“Oh,” I said, and led off, though in truth my expertise ended with the knowledge that Rhone lay north and a little west. I hadn’t the least clue about local roads. In fact, past Marsail I would struggle to name any of the region’s major towns. No doubt Cousin Serah could reel them off pat, her breasts defying gravity all the while, and Cousin Rotus could probably bore a librarian to death with the populace, produce, and politics of each settlement down to the last hamlet. My attentions, however, had always been focused closer to home and on less worthy pursuits.

We left the broad strip of cultivated floodplain and climbed by a series of ridges into drier country. Snorri ran with sweat by the time the land levelled out. He seemed to be struggling; perhaps a fever from his wound had its hooks in him. It didn’t take long for the sun to become a burden. After a mile or three of trekking through stony valleys and rough scrub, and with my feet already sore, my boots already too tight, I returned to the subject of horses.

“You know what would be good? Horses. That’s what.”

“Norsemen sail. We don’t ride.” Snorri looked embarrassed, or perhaps it was the sunburn.

“Don’t or can’t?”

He shrugged. “How hard can it be? You hold the reins and go forwards. If you find us horses, we’ll ride.” His expression darkened. “I need to be back there. I’ll sleep in the saddle if a horse will get me north before Sven Broke-Oar finishes his work in the Bitter Ice.”

It occurred to me then that the Norseman truly hoped his family might yet survive. He thought this a rescue mission rather than just some matter of revenge. That made it even worse. Revenge is a business of calculation, best served cold. Rescue holds more of sacrifice, suicidal danger, and all manner of other madness that should have me running in the opposite direction. It made breaking whatever spell bound us an even higher priority. By the look of his hand, which seemed worse from one hour to the next, with the infection’s spread now marked by a darkening of the veins, any spell-breaking would need to be done soon. Otherwise he might die on me and then my dire predictions concerning the consequence for one of us if the other expired might soon be put to the test. I’d made the claim as a lie, but it had felt true when I spoke it.

• • •

We trudged on through the heat of the day, forcing a path through a dry and airless conifer forest. Hours later the trees released us, scratched, and sticky with both sap and sweat. As luck would have it, we spilled from the forest’s margins directly onto a broad track punctuated with remnants of ancient paving.

“Good.” Snorri nodded, clearing the side ditch with one stride. “I’d thought you lost back there.”

“Lost?” I feigned hurt. “Every prince should know his realm like the back of . . . of . . .” A glimpsed memory of Lisa DeVeer’s back came to me, the pattern of freckles, the knobs of her spine casting shadows in lamplight as she bent to some sweet task. “Of something familiar.”

The road wound up to a plateau where innumerable springs chuckled from the eastern hills along stony beds and the land returned to cultivation. Olive groves, tobacco, cornfields. Here and there a lone farmhouse or collection of stone huts, slate-roofed and huddled together for protection.

Our first encounter was an elderly man driving a still more venerable donkey ahead of him with flicks of his switch. Two huge panniers of what looked to be sticks almost engulfed the beast.

“Horse?” Snorri muttered the suggestion as we approached.

“Please.”

“It’s got four legs. That’s better than two.”

“We’ll find something more sturdy. And not some plough-horse either. Something fitting.”

“And fast,” said Snorri.

The donkey ignored us, and the old fellow paid scarcely more attention, as if he encountered giant Vikings and ragged princes every day. “Ayuh.” And he was past.

Snorri pursed his blistered lips and walked on, until a hundred yards farther down the road something stopped him in his tracks. “That,” he said, looking down, “is the biggest pile of dung I’ve seen in my life.”