“What?” He looked up from his rowing. I remembered the remarkable number of bodies he left in his wake coming in and out of Maeres’s poppy farm to get me. All with his weapon hand badly injured.

“Nothing.”

• • •

We rowed on through the garden lands of Red March. Well, Snorri rowed on, and I lay moaning. In truth he mostly steered us and the Seleen did the rest. Where his right hand clutched the oar he left it bloodstained.

Scenery passed, green and monotonous, and I slumped over the side, muttering complaints and vomiting sporadically. I also wondered about how I’d moved from waking beside the naked delights of Lisa DeVeer to sharing a shitty rowing boat with a huge Norse maniac all in the space between two dawns.

“Will we have trouble?”

“Huh?” I looked up from my misery.

Snorri tilted his head downstream to where several rickety wooden quays reached out into the river, a number of fishing boats tied up at them. Men moved here and there along the shore checking fish traps, mending nets.

“Why should—” I remembered that Snorri was very far from home in lands he had probably only glimpsed from the back of a slave wagon. “No,” I said.

He grunted and set an oar to angle us into deeper water where the current ran fastest. Perhaps in the fjords of the frozen North any passing stranger was game and you became a stranger ten yards from your doorstep. Red March enjoyed ways a touch more civilized, due in no small part to the fact that my grandmother would have anyone who broke the bigger laws nailed to a tree.

We carried on past various nameless hamlets and small towns that probably had names but held too few distractions ever to make me care what those names were. Occasionally a field hand would rest fingers on hoe, chin on knuckles, and watch us pass with the same vacancy that the cows used. Urchins chased us from time to time, following along the banks for a hundred yards, some throwing stones, others baring their grimy arses in mock threat. Washerwomen splatting husbands’ second smocks against flat stones would raise their heads and hoot appreciatively at the Norseman as he flexed his arms against the oars. And finally on a lonely stretch of river where the Seleen explored her floodplain, with the sun hot and high, Snorri deflected us beneath the broad fringe of a great willow. The tree leaned out across lazy waters at the extreme of a long meander and encompassed us beneath its canopy.

“So,” he said, and the prow bumped up against the willow trunk. The hilt of his sword slipped from the bench and clunked on the planks, blade dark with dried blood.

“Look . . . about the fight pits . . . I—” Much of the morning of my maiden voyage had been spent planning the smooth denials that now refused to stutter from my tongue. In between the vomiting and the complaining I’d been rehearsing my lies, but under the focused gaze of a man who appeared to be more than ready to slaughter his way through any situation, I ran out of the spit required for falsehoods. For a moment I saw him staring up at Maeres from the pit floor. “Bring a bigger bear?” I remembered the smile he had on him. A snort of laughter broke out of me and, fuck, yes it hurt. “Who even says that kind of thing?”