“You know what would be good? Horses. That’s what.”

“Norsemen sail. We don’t ride.” Snorri looked embarrassed, or perhaps it was the sunburn.

“Don’t or can’t?”

He shrugged. “How hard can it be? You hold the reins and go forwards. If you find us horses, we’ll ride.” His expression darkened. “I need to be back there. I’ll sleep in the saddle if a horse will get me north before Sven Broke-Oar finishes his work in the Bitter Ice.”

It occurred to me then that the Norseman truly hoped his family might yet survive. He thought this a rescue mission rather than just some matter of revenge. That made it even worse. Revenge is a business of calculation, best served cold. Rescue holds more of sacrifice, suicidal danger, and all manner of other madness that should have me running in the opposite direction. It made breaking whatever spell bound us an even higher priority. By the look of his hand, which seemed worse from one hour to the next, with the infection’s spread now marked by a darkening of the veins, any spell-breaking would need to be done soon. Otherwise he might die on me and then my dire predictions concerning the consequence for one of us if the other expired might soon be put to the test. I’d made the claim as a lie, but it had felt true when I spoke it.

• • •

We trudged on through the heat of the day, forcing a path through a dry and airless conifer forest. Hours later the trees released us, scratched, and sticky with both sap and sweat. As luck would have it, we spilled from the forest’s margins directly onto a broad track punctuated with remnants of ancient paving.

“Good.” Snorri nodded, clearing the side ditch with one stride. “I’d thought you lost back there.”

“Lost?” I feigned hurt. “Every prince should know his realm like the back of . . . of . . .” A glimpsed memory of Lisa DeVeer’s back came to me, the pattern of freckles, the knobs of her spine casting shadows in lamplight as she bent to some sweet task. “Of something familiar.”

The road wound up to a plateau where innumerable springs chuckled from the eastern hills along stony beds and the land returned to cultivation. Olive groves, tobacco, cornfields. Here and there a lone farmhouse or collection of stone huts, slate-roofed and huddled together for protection.

Our first encounter was an elderly man driving a still more venerable donkey ahead of him with flicks of his switch. Two huge panniers of what looked to be sticks almost engulfed the beast.

“Horse?” Snorri muttered the suggestion as we approached.

“Please.”

“It’s got four legs. That’s better than two.”

“We’ll find something more sturdy. And not some plough-horse either. Something fitting.”

“And fast,” said Snorri.

The donkey ignored us, and the old fellow paid scarcely more attention, as if he encountered giant Vikings and ragged princes every day. “Ayuh.” And he was past.