“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?”

“We’re made of meat just like other men. This needs cleaning, stitching. Done right and I’ll keep the arm. We’ll leave the boat when the river widens, then skirt the coast. I’ll find someone in Rhone.”

He knew there would be a port at the mouth of the river, but if the Red Queen had marked him for death then it would be madness to go there seeking treatment. The fact that Grandmother had ordered his release and that the port of Marsail was a renowned centre of medicine, with a school that had produced the region’s finest doctors for close on three hundred years, I kept to myself. Telling him would unravel my lies and paint me as the architect of his fate. I didn’t feel good about it, but better than I would if he decided to trim me with his sword.