“So as much as it tempts me to break with societal rules and pit the arm of a prince of Red March against a . . . a hauldr, I’m concerned that I wouldn’t survive your death.” From his frown I could see that it might be a risk he was willing to take if no better alternative were on offer, so to forestall him I added, “But as it happens I’ve always had a hankering to visit the North myself and see firsthand just how reaving is done. And besides, my grandmother worries so about these dead ghost-men of yours. It would put her heart at ease to have the business sorted out. So I’d best come with you.”
“I mean to travel fast.” Snorri’s frown deepened. “I’ve left it too long already and the distance is great. And be warned: It will be a bloody business when I get there. Slow me down and . . . but you were moving pretty quick when you crashed into me.” His brow smoothed, thunderclouds clearing, and that smile lit him up, half-wild, half-friendly, and all dangerous. “Besides, you’ll know more about the terrain than me. Tell me about the men of Rhone.”
And just like that we were travelling companions. I’d bound myself to his quest for rescue and vengeance in some distant land. Hopefully it wouldn’t take too long. Snorri could save his family, then slaughter his enemies to the last man, necromancer, and corpse monster, and that would be that. I’m good at self-deception but I couldn’t manage to make the plan sound like anything other than a suicidal nightmare. Still, the icy North was a long way off—plenty of opportunity to break the spell that bound us together and run away home.
Snorri took up the oars again, paused, then, “Stand a moment.”
“Really?”
He nodded. I’ve good balance on a horse and none at all on water. Even so, not wanting to fall out with the man within moments of our new understanding, I got to my feet, arms out to steady myself. He tipped the boat, a sharp deliberate move, and I pitched into the river, grasping desperately at willow twigs as a man about to drown will clutch at straws.
Above the splashing I could hear Snorri having a good old laugh to himself. He was saying something too: “. . . clean . . . together . . .” But I could only catch the odd word since drowning is a noisy business. Eventually, when I’d given up trying to save myself by swallowing all the water and had slipped below the surface for the third and final time, he snagged my waistcoat and hauled me back in with distressing ease. I lay in the bottom flopping about like a fish and retching up enough of the river almost to swamp the boat.
“Bastard!” My first coherent word before I remembered quite how big and murderous he was.
“I couldn’t have you come to the North smelling like that!” Snorri laughed and steered back out into the current, the willow trailing its fingers over us in regret. “And how can a man not know how to swim? Madness!”
EIGHT
The river took us to the sea. A journey of two days. We slept by the banks, far enough back to escape the worst of the mosquitoes. Snorri laughed at my complaints. “In the northern summer the biters are so thick in the air they cast a shadow.”
“Probably why you’re all so pale,” I said. “No tan and blood loss.”
I found sleep elusive. The hard ground didn’t help, nor did the itchiness of anything I used to soften it. The whole business reminded me of the misery that had been the Scorron Campaign two summers earlier. It’s true I wasn’t there more than three weeks before returning to be feted as the hero of the Aral Pass and to nurse my bad leg, strained in combat, or at least in inadvertently sprinting away from one combat into another. In any event, I lay on the too-hard and too-scratchy ground looking at the stars, with the river whispering in the dark and the bushes alive with things that chirruped and rustled and creaked. I thought then of Lisa DeVeer and suspected that few nights would pass between now and my return to the palace when I wouldn’t find occasion to ask myself how I ended up in such straits. And in the smallest hours of the night, feeling deeply sorry for myself, I even found time to wonder again if Lisa and her sisters might have survived the opera. Perhaps Alain had convinced his father to keep them home as punishment for the company they’d been keeping.
“Why don’t you sleep, Red March?” Snorri spoke from the darkness.
“We’re in Red March, Norseman. It only makes sense to call someone by their place of origin when you’re a long way from it. We’ve been through this.”
“And the sleeping?”
“Women on my mind.”
“Ah.” Enough silence that I thought he’d dropped off, then, “One in particular?”
“Mostly all of them, and their absence from this riverbank.”
“Better to think of one,” he said.
For the longest time I watched the stars. People say they spin, but I couldn’t see it. “Why are you awake?”
“My hand pains me.”
“A scratch like that? And you a great big Viking?”