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

“So, you can’t ride, then?”

“Never tried,” he said.

“You’ve never even sat on a horse?” It seemed hard to credit.

“I’ve eaten plenty,” he said.

“That doesn’t help.”

“How difficult can it be?” he asked, making no move to find out.

“Less difficult than jumping onto bears and off again, I suspect. Luckily I’m the finest horseman in Red March and a great teacher.” I pointed at the stirrup. “Put your foot in there. Not the foot you first thought of—the other one. Step up, and don’t fall off.”

Lessons continued slowly and to his credit Snagason did not fall off. I did worry that he might cave in the horse’s ribs with those oh-so-muscly legs of his, but in the end Snorri and the horse reached an uneasy truce where they both adopted a fixed grin and got on with moving forwards.

By the time the sun had passed its zenith I could tell the Norseman was suffering.

“How’s the hand?”

“Less painful than the thighs,” he grunted.

“Perhaps if you loosened your grip a little and let the poor horse breathe . . .”

“Tell me about Rhone,” he said.

I shrugged. We wouldn’t reach the border until the next evening and the last mile would suffice to tell him anything worthwhile about the place, but it seemed he needed distraction from his aches and pains.

“Not so much to tell. Awful place. The food’s bad, the men surly and ignorant, the women cross-eyed. And they’re thieves to a man. If you shake a Rhonish hand, count your fingers afterward.”

“You’ve never been there, have you?” He shot a narrow look back at me, then lurched to keep his place in the saddle.

“Did you not listen to what I said? Why would I go somewhere like that?”

“I don’t understand it.” He risked another glance back. “Rhonish kings founded Red March, did they not? Wasn’t it the Rhonish who saved you from Scorron invasion? Twice?”

“I hardly think so!” Now he mentioned it, though, it did trigger a faint memory of too-hot days in the Grey Room with Tutor Marcle. “I suspect a prince of Red March knows a little more about local history than some . . . hauldr off the frozen slopes of a fjord.” I’ll admit to sleeping through most of Marcle’s history lessons, but I probably would have noticed a thing like that. “In any event, they’re a bad sort.”

To change the topic of conversation, and because every time I glanced back my imagination hid monsters in the shadows, I brought up the topic of pursuit.

“When I ran into you, the fissure, the crack that was chasing me . . . it came from the Silent Sister’s spell.”

“You told me this. The spell she placed to kill everyone at this opera of yours.”

“Well . . . it would have killed everyone, but I don’t think that was the reason she cursed the place. Maybe she wasn’t out to destroy us all—maybe she had her target and the rest of us were just in the way. Could whatever she was after have chased us to the circus?”

Snorri raised his brows, then frowned, then shook his head. “That unborn was new-formed, from Daisy’s child. It didn’t follow us there.”

That sounded a touch more hopeful. “But . . . it didn’t just happen by chance, surely? Aren’t these things supposed to be very rare? Someone made that happen. Someone trying to kill us.”

“Your Red Queen was gathering tales of the dead. She knows Ragnarok is hard upon us—the last battle is coming. She’s drawing her plans against the Dead King and likely he’s drawing his plans against her. The Dead King may know about us, he may know we’re headed north, dragging the witch’s magic with us. He may know we’re bound for the Bitter Ice where his dead are gathering. He may want to stop us.”

Whilst I’d successfully steered the conversation away from Rhone, Snorri had told me absolutely nothing to ease my mind. I chewed on all that he’d said for the next few miles and very sour it tasted. We were pursued, I knew it, blood to bone. That thing from the opera stalked us, and in running before it we plunged headlong into whatever the Dead King placed in our path.

• • •

A day later we met our first examples of the type of Rhonishmen I’d been warning Snorri against. A guard post of five Rhone soldiers attached to a sizable inn that straddled the border. Red March’s own guard post of four men adjoined the opposite end of the inn, and the two groups dined together most evenings on opposing sides of a long table through which the border ran, marked across the planks by a line of polished nail heads.