The Wheel of Osheim (The Red Queen's War 3)

Kara looked up at me as she passed, a faint smile on her lips. “You think you’re so different, Prince Jalan?”

I frowned at that, about to contradict her, but the witch had the right of it. People’s expectations drew me north, against every instinct I owned, a bond every bit as tight as the Sister’s magic. The word “prince,” the name “Kendeth,” the story of the Aral Pass, all of them snares I’d been caught up in. Certainly I’d tried to use them, escape them, twist them . . . but as I twisted I’d turned into something new. Just like Baraqel. Just as unsuspecting.

The surviving horses proved easy to round up. Perhaps they were as scared of being alone out in the wilds as I was, but all three came nosing back onto the road not long after we assembled there. We rode on along the dark road, just to put distance between us and the unborn’s remains. None of us liked the idea of sleeping with it lying out there, unseen but close.

“Come on.” I hauled Hennan up behind me on Murder, noting quite how much heavier the lad had grown. I nudged the stallion into a walk, pulling him away from Kara’s mount. “Easy. And no biting or I’m changing your name to Deserter.”

A couple of minutes later we reached the ruin of the cardinal’s procession. The road lay like the floor of a charnel house, spare pieces of men that the unborn hadn’t the time to incorporate decorated a hundred yard stretch of the cobbles. Snorri closed his fist about the orichalcum and hid the worse of it from us.

“Wait.” I drew up as we reached the shattered remains of Cardinal Gertrude’s sedan. “I need a moment.” I swung out of the saddle and remembered how all of me hurt. Careful placement of each foot brought me to the wreckage without stepping in anything that used to be a person. I turned over several of the larger pieces, picking up a number of splinters before finding what I was looking for. I wiped the corpse blood from my hands and hauled the cardinal’s luggage over to the others.

“You’re still hoping to find the seal?” Kara asked.

“It was the bait. The prince would have kept it to use again if this ruse failed. But he wouldn’t have wanted it on him or any of his dead.”

“He killed them all just to trap you?” Hennan asked, looking awkward perched on Murder’s flanks.

“Probably enjoyed doing it. Good cover too for heading north, stand the dead men back up and walk the high road. Who’s going to stop a cardinal? And the unborn know I need something like . . . this!” I pulled out the seal from a tight-bundled bag of purple vestments. “If I’m hoping to survive an encounter with my sister.” I turned it over in my hand, a cubic inch of silver ornately wrought on four sides, formed into a ring on the fifth and carved into a seal on the sixth and opposite side. Stamped into a blob of cooling wax such a seal could authorize the burning of a heretic, found a monastery, or recommend a sinner for sainthood. I tried it on each finger, managing to work it past the knuckle of the ring finger on my left hand. Fortunately Cardinal Gertrude had been a woman of some girth and pudgy digits. “And of course the cherry on the top of this little plan was that the threat of a Papal Inquisitor, with their famously low view of heathens, was likely to mean I presented myself alone.”

I stood, discarding the bag, having found no other symbols of the cardinal’s office. I might have looted the golden crucifixes if I’d been alone, or perhaps even before an audience of non-believers, but heading toward Osheim didn’t seem like a good time to rile the Almighty.

“This fine fellow saved me.” I slapped Murder’s neck. “Well, and you Snorri, and Baraqel.”

Kara coughed into her hand.

“And Kara. Hennan too probably. And the other horses.” I stared at her to see if she was satisfied. “Anyway. If Murder hadn’t been quite so good at running away the hero of the Aral Pass may have met a sticky end right here.”

TWENTY-EIGHT

Charland reminded me of the Thurtans. Which is never a good thing. The peasants were muddier and rougher than one might encounter in more civilized southern climes but at least we weren’t so far north that we’d slipped out of Christendom. By and large your Christian peasant knows his place better than the heathen, being more likely to tug the forelock and respect the God-given authority of a nobleman. In the north few jarls are more than two generations away from the bloody-handed reaver who carved out the miserable clutch of rocks they currently claim to rule.

Fortunately, apart from being dank and overburdened with streams, lakes, ponds, rivers, bogs, marshes, fens, and mires, Charland had been blessed with ten years of unbroken peace. This meant that with coin in one’s pocket one could cross large distances in short order on well-maintained roads, and find half-decent accommodation each evening.