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

“Well that’s good.” I took a gulp from my own pewter cup. “Does a man no good to drink by himself. Especially not after what I’ve been through.” I felt very maudlin, as a man in his cups is wont to do without lively music and good company.

“I’m a very long way from home,” I said, suddenly as miserable and homesick as I had ever been.

“Me too.”

“Red March is a thousand miles south of us.”

“The Renar Highlands are further.”

For some reason known only to drunkards that angered me. “I’ve had a hard time.”

“These are hard days.”

“Not just today.” I drank again. “I’m a prince you know.” Quite how that would get me sympathy I wasn’t sure.

“Liba is straining at the seams with princes. I was born a prince too.”

“Not that I’ll ever be king . . .” I kept to my own thread.

“Ah,” the stranger said. “My path to inheritance is also unclear.”

“My father . . .” Somehow my train of thought slipped away from me. “He never loved me. A cold man.”

“My own has that reputation too. Our disagreements have been . . . sharp.” The man drank from his flask. The light caught him again and I could see he was young. Even younger than me.

Perhaps it was relief at being safe and drunk and not being chased by monsters that did it, but somehow all the grief and injustice of my situation that there hadn’t been time for until now bubbled up out of me.

“I was just a boy . . . I saw him do it . . . killed them both. My mother, and my . . .” I choked and couldn’t speak.

“A sibling?” he asked.

I nodded and drank.

“I saw my mother and brother killed,” he said. “I was young too.”

I couldn’t tell if he were mocking me, topping each of my declarations with his own variant.

“I still have the scars of that day!” I raised my shirt to show the pale line where Edris Dean’s sword had pierced my chest.

“Me too.” He pushed back his sleeves and moved his arms so the moonlight caught on innumerable silvery seams criss-crossing his skin.

“Jesus!”

“He wasn’t there.” The stranger pulled back into the shadow. “Just the hook-briar. And that was enough.”

I winced. Hook-briar is nasty stuff. My new friend seemed to have dived in headfirst. I raised my cup. “Drink to forget.”

“I have better ways.” He opened his left hand, revealing a small copper box, moonlight gleaming on a thorn pattern running around its lip. He might have better ways than alcohol but he drank from his flask, and deeply.

I watched the box, my eye fascinated by the familiarity of it—but, familiar or not, no part of me wanted to touch it. It held something bad.

Like my new friend I drank too, though I also had better ways of burying a memory. I let the raw whisky run down my throat, hardly tasting it now, hardly feeling the burn.

“Drink to dull the pain, my brother!” I’m an amiable drunk. Given enough time I always reach the point where every man is my brother. A few more cups and I declare my undying love for all and sundry. “I’m not sure there’s a bit of me that isn’t bruised.” I lifted my shirt again, trying to see the bruising across my ribs. In the dark it looked less impressive than I remembered. “I could show you a camel footprint but . . .” I waved the idea away.

“I’ve a few bruises myself.” He lifted his own shirt and the moonlight caught the hard muscles of his stomach. The thorn scars patterned him there too, but it was his chest that caught my eye. In exactly the spot where I have a thin line of scar recording the entry of Edris Dean’s sword my drinking companion sported his own record of a blade’s passage into his flesh, though the scar was black, and from it dark tendrils of scar spread root-like across his bare chest. These were old injuries though, long healed. He had fresher hurts—better light would show them angry and red, the bite of a blade in his side, above the kidney, other slices, puncture wounds, a tapestry of harm.

“Shit. What the hell—”

“Dogs.”

“Pretty damn vicious dogs!”

“Very.”

I swallowed the word “bastard” and cast about instead for some claim or tale that the bastard wouldn’t instantly top.

“That sibling I mentioned, killed when I saw my mother killed . . .”

He looked up at me, again just the one eye glittering above his burn scar, the other hidden. “Yes?”