I introduced myself as a down-at-heels nobleman since none of them would recognize a Red March prince and, thinking themselves mocked, would take offence. I suppose I could have held up a gold crown with Grandmother’s face on it and remonstrated about the family resemblance, but I didn’t have one. Or a silver crown. And the coppers mostly had the Iax Tower on them or King Gholloth, who reigned before Grandmother and looked nothing like his daughter or me.
Snorri said little at the inn, his tension clear, worried that word might have been sent to secure the borders against him. We spent the remainder of my coppers on a small meal of cabbage soup and mystery meat before moving on into Rhone, which despite my misgivings, seemed very much like Red March, except that the people tended to roll out their r’s in an annoying manner.
The first Rhonish town we came to coincided with our first evening. A sizable place with the dull but worthy name of Milltown. We rode at gentle pace along the muddy high street, a thoroughfare crowded with traders, travellers, and townsfolk. Snorri reined in towards a smithy open to the street and loud with hammers.
“We should get you a sword, Jal.” He’d taken to calling me Jal, not “my prince,” or “Prince Jalan,” or even “Jalan,” but “Jal.” I didn’t let him know it annoyed me because he’d just do it exactly the same amount of times but with a broader grin. “How are you with a blade?”
“Better than you are with a horse,” I said.
Snorri snorted and his mare joined in. He’d called her Sleipnir after some heathen nag, and they seemed to be getting on despite him riding like a big log stuck on a saddle, and weighing about the same as his steed. He dismounted, the effect not dissimilar to the aforementioned log falling off its perch.
“Show me?” He pulled out his sword and offered it hilt first.
I looked around. “You can’t just go swinging swords on the main street. Someone will lose an eye! And that’s only if the town-law aren’t on you first.”
Snorri looked puzzled, as if on the ice-coated slopes of the North it would be the most natural thing in the world. “It’s a blacksmith’s.” He waved to the ironmongery laid out beside us. “The smith makes swords. People must try them out here all the time.” The sword hilt poked my way again.
“I doubt it.” Hands firmly on the reins. I nodded down to the display tables—scythe blades, baling hooks, nails, and other domestic goods were all that lay before me. “Town this size might have a weapon-smith somewhere. This ain’t it, though.”
“Ha!” Snorri pointed to a sword hanging up back in the gloom under the awnings. “Smith!”
The smith emerged at Snorri’s booming, a short man, ugly with sweat, thick in the arms of course but with a surprising bookish look to him. “Evenin’.”
“I’ll test that blade.” Snorri pointed to the hanging sword.
“Repairing that for Garson Host,” the smith said. “Taking out the notches, putting a fresh edge on it. T’aint for sale.”
“Don’t humour him.” I nodded my approval at the man.
The smith bit his lip. I’d forgotten that Rhonish men always look for a chance to put a Red March man on his arse, and that common men like nothing better than seeing their betters knocked about. I would have been wiser to hold my tongue. Snorri might be a foreigner but at least he hadn’t committed the cardinal sin of being a foreigner from the country next door.
“Don’t s’pose Garson’ll mind if it’s three notches I knock out of the blade or five notches.” The smith went back and reached up to retrieve the sword.
Resigned to my fate, I dismounted and took the hilt that Snorri poked at me again. It happens that I’m not that bad a swordsman when my life’s not in danger. In the practice yard with dull blades and sufficient padding I could always hold my own well enough. More than well. But all those lessons went running down one leg on the only day I was ever called on to swing a sword in earnest. As we crashed in amongst those Scorron soldiers up in the Aral Pass, raw terror washed away all my training in an instant. Those were great big angry men with sharp swords actually wanting to cut pieces off me. It’s not until you’ve seen a red gaping wound and all the complex little bits inside a man all broken up and sliced open, and known that they weren’t ever getting back together again, and vomited your last two meals over the rocks . . . it’s not until then that you understand the business of swords properly and, if you’re a sensible man you vow to have nothing to do with it ever again. I remember nothing from the battle in the Aral Pass but frozen moments shuffled together—steel flashing, crimson arcs, horrified faces, one man choking on blood as he backed away from me . . . and the screaming, of course. I still hear that today. Everything else about the battle is a blank.