Tyrant Trouble

CHAPTER 2

  “Do not touch your knife. Turn slowly,” a voice behind me said.

  I stiffened, my arms raised. The voice that spoke was soft, the words barely audible, his accent nothing I recognized.

  Park ranger? What, had they already arrested Roman and crew and had come looking for me? I did a quick think and started readying a sobbing explanation about how I barely knew them and was shocked, absolutely shocked, to discover they had brought along booze and drugs on what I had thought was to be a commune with nature. That sounded right. I turned slowly as commanded, my arms above my head.

  And then I looked up at my captor.

  He was young, still closer to boy than man, looked about college freshman age. Beneath a thick mass of yellow hair was a knockout face, sky blue eyes, wide mouth and square jaw, thick neck. His skin was sunburned beneath a scattering of freckles on his shoulders.

  “Who are you, girl?” he whispered.

  His question snapped my mind back to my situation. Who was I, indeed? How long since I had been asked that question?

  “Hail, Conan the Barbarian,” I said because although he looked nothing like the film version, was much better looking, actually, he was dressed in a costume Arnold would have envied. Classy outfit, killer boots, tooled leather belt. “What's up? Is there a medieval fair going on?”

  “Your name?” he said again.

  Okay, I could play games. Let's see, what were the rules? Oh right, wicked sorcerers used people's names to control them, therefore always give an alias.

  Something that meant astrologer or fortuneteller? Gypsy Sue? No, something more glamorous, right? Maybe this fair had good food. I'd been to a few and run into cold hot dogs and warm coke but never mind, I could hope.

  “Stargazer,” I said and grinned at him.

  He did not return my grin. Maybe barbarians aren't supposed to grin and this guy was taking his role-playing way too seriously. “Come toward me slowly. Make no sound. I will not harm you.”

  Yeah, I'd heard that one before. Still, out here in the woods with no one else in sight, I figured I'd humor the guy. In his hand he held a heavy broadsword, the kind used by barbarians to slay their enemies in every film I could remember and, unfortunately, it didn't look fake. Probably the edges were dull but still, the thing could leave a hell of a bruise.

  He stood above me at the edge of the stream bank, half concealed by brush. After I waded out of the stream and climbed the bank, he reached toward me and plucked my knife from my belt. I'd forgotten all about it, that silly Swiss pocket knife that I had dug out of my pack to use to cut berries. Moving swiftly, he tucked it inside his boot, then hung his sword on his own belt.

  “Okay, play time is over, fella. That knife was a gift and I want it back,” I muttered.

  He grabbed me and turned me away from him so that he could pull my backpack off of my shoulders. When he let go of me, I turned to face him again and watched in silence as he reached into the pack, felt through the contents.

  Big deal, all that remained in my pack was a clean tee shirt, my comb, my toothbrush and my billfold. He glanced at each item, looked puzzled, and then replaced everything except the billfold. He flipped it open and pulled out my credit card.

  “I can't believe this!” I stormed. “Muggers in a national forest!”

  He slid the card back into the billfold, dropped it back into the pack, then dug into the bottom and came up with the last item, my cellphone.

  When he pressed his fingers into the keys, the phone lit up. His eyes went wide and those blond eyebrows practically disappeared into his hairline as he dropped the phone into the damp ferns.

  “Hey!” I shouted and a bunch of other words I keep meaning to remove from my vocabulary because honestly, they sound juvenile, but by the time I'd made it through a string of them, I found the phone, picked it up, wiped it off against my shirt front and then thought, why not 9-1-1? If he was a fruitcake, I could use some help here. But when I pressed the keys, the roaming light faded and goodbye battery.

  Okay, make the best of it, look at the guy and figure out the best route away.

  We were the same height. Oh, that's right. Arnold-style barbarians aren't tall, so maybe that's why this guy picked this costume. Not tall, no, but he seemed much larger than me because he was solid and hard-muscled and if his intentions were unpleasant, I was going to have to count on my wits.

  He wore gold arm bands above his elbows and at his wrists, and his fingers were covered with gold rings. Some of the gold almost looked real, although it had to be costume jewelry considering the size of each piece.

  His woven vest was open in front and tied with laces that crisscrossed on his chest. More of that nice yellow hair gleamed like sunshine against his bare skin. He wore pants tucked into boots laced to his knees; kind of sexy, really.

  “You are from the land beyond the mist,” he said. “How did you come here?”

  “I flew over the top of a mountain, us stargazers have invisible wings,” I said, “and landed in your stupid stream.”

  My wet shorts and dripping hair itched. To hide my fear, I pulled my long hair forward over my shoulder and slowly twisted it to wring out the water.

  He frowned, caught my wrist in a firm grip, and said, “Come with me but make no noise or they will kill you.”

  Reason enough to be silent, I decided. What kinds of games were going on here? Some kind of paintball battle? He led me away from the stream along a path through the woods where the trees pressed together and their leaves hid the sun.

  “If you cry out, my guards will hear you. I cannot always control them.”

  He half dragged me, pulling me along like a child, and his action cleared my mind. He was much stronger than I, but maybe dumber? If I kept my thoughts clear, could I outwit him? It probably depended on who his playmates were and how close it was to dinnertime and the end of the game. My heart calmed its pounding.

  “Why do your friends want to kill me?” I asked. “Do they score a point for every limp body? Hey, I can do limp.”

  His eyes widened with curiosity.

  “I don't care if you live or die, but first I want to speak with you. I know from your dark hair that you are from the outlands. Only once before have outlanders come here and that was long ago and they are gone. You did not come that way. Still, I do not believe you can fly.”

  I avoided his stare by looking over his shoulder, and said nothing. His act was way too complicated and he obviously had no plan to step out of character for me. Oh. Maybe this was a really large fair and he thought I was a participant.

  “I'm not with the fair,” I said. “If you could just take me to the nearest road, I can thumb a ride.”

  His lower lip jutted out. “You must be hungry with nothing to eat but berries. I will give you food if you will tell me how you came here.”

  When I didn't answer, because honestly, how had I managed to get this lost, he shrugged and reached into a pouch strung to his belt, an honest-to-God leather pouch, which must have been lined with plastic. Anyway I hoped so, because he pulled out a hunk of cheese and a long brown piece of something or other.

  He held them out to me. “Here, eat this.”

  The cheese had a pungent odor, but it was food I recognized. I sniffed it, broke a small bit off of a corner and tasted it, not believing myself because probably the bacteria count was off the scale.

  “Yes, thanks,” I said and palmed it, figuring I'd drop it in the ferns when he looked away.

  Thing is, this guy was creeping me out and it seemed wise to humor him. He stood silently, watching me, then handed me the brown piece, some sort of smoked meat, maybe? I could not guess what to do with it. It felt hard and dry in my hands, and had an unpleasant odor.

  “What is this?”

  “Dried mutton,” he said.

  I handed it back to him. “Thanks, anyway, I'm a vegetarian.”

  His eyebrows shot up, wrinkling his forehead. “You are what?”

&
nbsp; So we were still game-playing.

  I bowed my head and said, “Kind sir, I do not eat meat because I am not a barbarian.”

  “What is a barbarian?” he asked.

  “You -” I began, then stopped. Whoops? Had I misread the costume? Did he think he was someone in a Shakespearean play, Romeo, MacBeth? Okay, he was Danish blond, but the costume didn't look like any Hamlet I'd ever seen. How far did he want to carry the word play? “Barbarians are wolves, this is the forest and I am Little Red Riding Hood. Now can we move on out of here? Bugs are chewing my hide.”

  He nodded. “Soon I will be missed and my guards will search for me. I must return to my camp and you must return with me. Do exactly as I tell you, Stargazer, and I may choose to let you live.”

  Again he caught my wrist and I felt the heat and sweat in his hand. Was there something he feared? Certainly not me, not the way he held on to me. He hurried me through the woods until we reached the clearing. In its center stood this humongous horse and who knew they let those things into national forests?

  A pseudo-barbarian I could manage, but not a horse.

  It threw back its huge head, opened its jaws baring wide yellow teeth, and made a terrible sound. Its long white tail switched around its hind legs. I figured it would rear up and come pounding down on me with its hooves.

  “Come along, girl.”

  “No!”

  He peered into my face, his mouth curled up at the corners, and he laughed. “Are you afraid of my horse?”

  “Had a really bad experience once,” I mumbled, not much wanting to elaborate.

  I fell off a pony at Woodland Park Zoo when I was about five and everyone laughed at me and to this day I do not consider horses my friends.

  “You must ride on my horse,” he said. “He will not hurt you. See? He is as gentle as a lamb.”

  He walked up to the horse and scratched behind its ears. The horse dropped its head and pressed its nose into the guy's shoulder.

  “I'll walk.”

  “No. You cannot. You do not understand. If you walk into the camp my men will attack you before I can stop them. No, you must ride on my horse so they will know you are mine.”

  “And why should that stop them?”

  'You will see. Whatever I say, you must agree with me.”

  He dragged me over to the horse and pulled my hand toward it until my fingers touched its nose. It was warm and oddly soft beneath its coarse mat of hair, probably a nice horse, yes, but I still didn't want it as a friend.

  “There, Stargazer. He is not wild. His name is Banner and if you speak softly to him, he will love you.”

  I managed to say, “Never much wanted to be loved by a horse.” Though, God knows, I'd had a few pigs fall for me.

  Before I realized what he had in mind, the guy pressed his hands around my waist and lifted me off my feet as though I was no heavier than a backpack. My whole body went cold with fear when he sat me on the horse. Beneath me it twitched and snorted and I figured it would at any moment rise up and buck me off. Its hot, heavy odor nauseated me. The guy jumped up behind me, stretched his arms around me and caught the reins.

  “Hold onto his mane,” he said, and when I did not move, he added, “The hair on his neck.”

  “Oh, is that the mane,” I grumbled and considered grabbing the ears.

  Oh yeah, don't make jokes around the obviously mentally deranged. Drugs? No, drugs were what was back on the picnic table and none of that crowd was up to jumping onto a tall horse. I grasped the coarse mane in my hands and hoped Banner would not be annoyed. What followed was plain old pain and my mind deserted me.

  The horse lurched forward and I bounced and jerked on its back, held there in the circle of strong arms, while we pounded through the forest. Wind blew my hair across my eyes and branches caught at me, but we rushed on, crashing through the trees. The forest blurred around me, green shadows shot with sunlight. I expected at any moment to be thrown to the ground, every bone in my body shattered.

  The horse shuddered and stopped. I flew forward against its neck and the boy pulled me back, his hands pressing hard against my ribs.

  When my mind stopped whirling, I looked down at a circle of faces. Their surprise raised all of their pale eyebrows so they looked like copies of each other, all staring with their mouths open, all blond and heavyset and wearing matching costumes. How much time did these folks spend on rehearsing?

  “I claim her as my captive,” he said to them, and they all looked at him and they all listened. “Any man who touches her will die.”

  Right, and that's the cue to drag me from the horse, beat the kid, tie me to a stake and dance around singing rude songs. Or was that some other sort of gathering? Instead, they backed away from us, still staring but not arguing.

  Only one of the men stepped forward and said, “Will you take her to your father?”

  “When it pleases me,” he answered.

  I said, “Enough's enough, I need aspirin and I need it now.”

  Maybe they were all deaf. Or I was suddenly invisible. No one acknowledged my heartrending request.

  The man who had spoken shook his head. His hair was sun-streaked blond on the top and underneath it was several shades darker. Did he wear it that way to his day job? “You must take her now. I will travel with you. I cannot guarantee your safety with a captive in your tent.”

  “Artur, I am able to care for myself,” the boy said. His voice was low but shook with fury.

  “Well enough for you, my prince. If she kills you, it is I who will die a painful death at the hands of your father.”

  Okay, a clue, the barbarian was supposed to be a prince of something.

  His princely and slightly sweaty arm tightened around me, his ringed fingers digging into my waist. He raised his other hand to hold up his sword.

  “Look at her! She is a priest of the Daughter. Dare you touch her?”

  The men leaned toward me and their eyes narrowed. The one called Artur shook his head slowly. In his expression I saw recognition and then fear, but I could not imagine why and it seemed unfair that no one handed me a script. Right after aspirin, I needed a script. Because it hit me then, all the matching makeup and costumes, this had to be a low budget film, probably an entry for an amateur contest.

  “I will take her to my tent,” my captor said. “Tomorrow I will take her to Kovat.”

  The horse walked slowly through the camp, me and Prince Whatever still stuck on its back.

  Between the tents stood a dozen or more gamers or actors and every one of them staring at me. They wore sleeveless leather tunics. The bulging muscles of their arms were banded in metal bracelets and they were a great ad for their favorite gym. Some wore belts covered with metal discs and a few wore silver hoops that looked as though they were passed right through their ear lobes, taking the whole costume craze a bit far.

  A stench rose from their sweat soaked bodies that was worse than the smell of the horse, and was that the result of TV reality shows meeting costume fairs? If they wanted a guest lecturer on their program, I could explain about soap and deodorant and I knew a couple of slick methods for removing sweat stains from fabric.

  As several of the kids I worked with at the Center were young teens, I knew how to be very firm with this lecture.

  Swords hung from their belts and some of them held tall spears. Ribbons of yellow and red fluttered from the spears and from the tops of the tent poles.

  My captor slid off the horse, pulled me after him, then caught me before I fell sprawling on the ground. He half-carried, half-dragged me into his tent, one arm around me, his other hand hard on my wrist. While the men watched, a few with their lips pulled back from their teeth in wide frat boy grins, I kept my face quiet. This was the nuttiest bunch I had ever met and until I figured them out, the low profile approach seemed best.

  Once the tent flap dropped behind us, I glanced about, saw no one else, and lifting the wrist he still grasped, I bit hard on his
hand.

  He gasped. I twisted away from him, swung to face him and stared directly into his eyes, my teeth clenched. Until I figured out that group outside, I decided to refrain from kneeing him.

  “You are my prisoner! You have no right to bite me!” he cried.

  His face contorted in anger and pain. I suppose I should not have lost control, but he really did look like a little kid cheated in a game of hide-and-seek.

  I laughed, then clapped my hands over my mouth.

  “Dare you laugh at me?” He stared at the half circle of red marks my teeth left on his skin.

  “Well, gosh oh golly, you forgot to tell me the rules,” I snapped back.

  “You are my slave. I may treat you as I please. I captured you and that is the law.”

  “Oh please. I am no slave, for sure not yours, and you're sounding more like a sexist pig every minute,” I shouted, unable to control my anger.

  Yes, yes, I know anger is a weakness, but this guy was rapidly becoming my undoing.

  He stared, wide-eyed. “Have you no slaves in the outlands?”

  “Okay, fella, define slave.”

  “A captive caught fair, from another tribe. A slave must do whatever its master tells it to do.”

  “Really bad casting,” I said, “and anyway, I am a priest. You said so.”

  “That might work later. For now, you are my slave.”

  His tent was the size of a large room and contained a table covered with wooden bowls and flasks of pounded metal. The floor was piled with cushions, blankets, and sheepskins and was one a bearskin? Huh, didn't know those were legal. The tent held no hiding places but at least it separated me from that very smelly crowd outside.

  “Tell me what a priest is and who the Daughter is and how I must act and what must I say?” If I could keep him talking, I might think of a shortcut to the final curtain.

  He shrugged, moving nearer to me than I liked, but I tried not to act nervous. Weird makes me nervous because it's hard to know where a weird stranger is headed. He was probably harmless, but maybe not. I made myself think of him as Prince, a tad better than thinking of him as The Barbarian.

  The typecasting worked because he did look a bit like a short version of a Disney prince, handsome enough if I ignored the frown. His hair looked rather like a dandelion, pale yellow, thick, and tumbled about his forehead and ears, chopped off in jagged layers.

  “The Daughter is our guide to the Sun. We have built the Sun a great temple so one day he may find us. She has promised he will come north and we will never more suffer winter,” he said.

  “Uh-huh?”

  “It has been promised by the Daughter. She came to us with her beloved, and they told us many things. Now they have returned to their father, the Sun, and left us to darkness. We watch at the temple for their returning, knowing they have not forgotten the line of Kovat. They guard us even now and will one day return.”

  I had not heard such bad lines since I once heard a crazy neighbor say he could send the ghosts of the dead to Hell and the ghosts would return with messages. Maybe that could be worked into this script.

  The role assigned to me was a puzzle. “Why did you say I was a priest?”

  He smiled, looking pleased with himself. “I knew my men would believe it.” He caught my chin in his hand and turned my head so that I had to stare into his eyes. “You look enough like the Daughter that I knew they would believe me.”

  “Is that why you brought me here? Because I look like whoever plays this Daughter person?”

  “It is why I did not kill you when I saw you in the stream.”

  Rewind time. I did not like the word kill. At first I thought it was some scorekeeping thing and I can fall over and howl and tremble and then go stiff. I used to do that back in the days of Aliens versus Astronauts on the playground. Something else was going on here. I needed to have “kill” and “dead” defined.

  Before I could ask, a man backed into the tent through the flap and turned slowly. He carried in his hands a heavy tray covered with food which he placed on the table. Although he was blond like the others, he was dressed differently, wearing rough wool cloth, and around his ankles were metal bands. A chain ran between them so that he could walk but not run. He bowed to my captor, cast a frightened glance at me, stared at the floor and backed out of the tent.

  “Uh, he's joking, right?” I asked.

  Prince grinned. “He is a slave who behaves as a slave should.”

  “I will carry trays for you, if that's what you want. Only I hope you don't expect me to do the cooking. You wouldn't want to eat it.”

  “You cannot prepare food? What can you do?”

  “I am a priest of the Daughter, whatever that is,” I said solemnly, hoping to distract him while I considered escape routes.

  “Eat your meal. I will go out with my men.”

  He sounded annoyed. I hoped he was. If I could manipulate his emotions so easily, that could be useful. I'd offer to rewrite the storyline for these amateurs except more and more I was getting this odd message that they didn't know they were playacting.

  After he did a sharp turn on his heel and strode out, leaving me alone in the tent, I wandered over to the table to pick through the food. There were berries and cheese and hunks of whole grain bread and some really dark, bitter beer in a flask. By now I was so hungry, I decided to trust in the beer to defeat the bacteria.

  I waited in the tent until a woman entered, dressed much as the male slave, carrying a bowl of water. She, too, was weighted with ankle bands and a chain. She was the first woman I had seen in the camp.

  Quickly I asked, “Who are you?”

  Her face closed in what honestly resembled fear and I said, “You're good! Hey, are there hidden cameras? You folks making a film?”

  She would not speak, stuck with the mute bit, and I gave up for the night. I dropped my pack by the table and pulled out my toothbrush. When I poured water from a flask into a bowl and managed to wash a bit, she looked startled.

  “I don't suppose there are showers around here?”

  No, but wow, she pointed to this big old crock thing that apparently served as a toilet and I remembered another reason why I hated camping.

  My shorts and shirt had dried from my excursions into the stream, but were badly stained with mud and berry juice.

  “I can sleep in these, can't make them any worse,” I said, hoping talk about clothing was harmless enough to earn a reply. I even added a smile.

  Keeping her gaze lowered, she pointed at the mound of blankets and sheepskins in the corner, then left, backing out as the other slave actor had done.

  The room filled up with shadows as the sunlight filtering through the tent faded into night. I was too weary to worry any longer about running away. Tomorrow, when I knew my captor better, I would figure this out. And when I got back to town, I planned on throwing a hissy fit in the middle of the store that sold me my useless cellphone.

  Now I dropped down on the blankets. Beneath my fingers I felt the tight curls of sheep's wool, not the best smelling bed, but it was soft.

  Unable to sleep, I stared up into the darkening tent and wished I'd never left the city, wished I'd remembered country air is unhealthy. Wished I knew a quick and permanent way to avoid Darryl. Why me? I muttered over and over to myself, like a chant, because counting sheep while lying on a dusty sheepskin is not at all conducive to sleep.

  Through my weary stupor I heard Prince return to the tent. He moved around slowly, walking softly, dropping something on the floor. There was a rattle of metal on wood as though he set a mug on the table. And then his footsteps approached me.

  I kept my eyes closed, hoping if he saw me sleeping he would be satisfied I was settled for the night and would go away. I heard his breath as he leaned over me and I stopped breathing.

  He dropped down on the bedding beside me, and although he was not actually touching me, I felt the near heat of his body, felt his breath on my face as he l
eaned close to me. If I had to, I could probably do a little street fighting but in the end he was a lot stronger so my best bet was to figure out which would work with this one, insults or flattery? I tried to remain silent but must have made some small noise.

  Far from friends, alone with a guy whose intentions I did not want to think about, my indrawn breath of frustration was loud enough for him to hear. His hard hand clamped over my mouth.

  “Cry out and my guards will rush in to slay you,” he whispered.

  Perhaps remembering the bite I had given him earlier, he removed his hand. I opened my eyes and stared into his face, which was much too close to mine. In the darkness I could see his light eyes.

  Okay, I'd go for distraction first. “Why should men obey a boy?”

  “I am not a boy. I am nineteen years, which is as old as you, I think.”

  The fear in the slaves' faces had looked awfully convincing and that worried me. And knowing Goldilocks was three years younger than me did not exactly fill me with confidence because it meant he had a whole lot of teen hormones pushing him.

  Before I lost my courage, I said, “Go on then, kill me, sweetie, because that's the only way you're going to score.”

  He sighed, he actually sighed, and sounded weary of my arguments. Was he regretting that he hadn't just left me in the stream?

  “I am not going to harm you, Stargazer.”

  Okay, he was stripped to the waist but he'd kept his pants on so maybe I was being unfair to judge him. But why lie down next to me, why not sleep across the tent from me?

  As though he read my mind, he said, “I feel safer with you beside me than across the tent.”

  He pressed a weight across my throat and from its hard cold touch I knew it was the blade of his broadsword. He settled down beside me, not quite touching me but close enough that I could feel his body heat, saying in a low voice I could barely hear, “If you try to escape, I will cut off your head. Now go to sleep.”

  “Pleasant dreams to you, too, fella.”

  Sure, he was joking about the beheading thing, but what if his hand slipped? What if I rolled over too quickly? An accident could leave me just as dead.

  I lay motionless with the sword across my neck, wondering what I dared do. Was I to spend the rest of this insane fiasco sleeping beneath a sword?

  He wasn't noisy, I'll say this for him. His sleep breathing was closer to low humming than snoring. When he moved slightly, I drew in my breath. If he rolled over in his sleep, would his sword slit my throat? How was I supposed to sleep? I turned my head to peer at him through the shadows and whispered, “Could you move the sword?”

  He continued to snore softly. As my sight adjusted to the night, I saw the outline of his head. In sleep his face was smooth planes, free of expression and very young, short thick white lashes pressed above the line of cheekbone, his wide mouth open. His face rolled slightly away from me and his pale hair fell back from his ear. Something glittered. I focused on the shine until I could see its shape. In his earlobe he wore a small gold ring.

  A pity I had never read his horoscope so I could better judge what to expect of him and how to maneuver around his whims. Now I was more puzzled by the sword on my neck.

  Moving very slowly and carefully, I edged upward, steadying the sword with my hand so it would not shift. The blade was wide and heavy and sharpened on both edges. It was definitely capable of doing really messy things to my windpipe. I knew even in his sleep he grasped the hilt.

  When I had moved until the blade rested across my shoulders instead of my neck, I stopped, afraid to move more. With the weight off my throat, I could sort of think, and all my thoughts turned to the same question. Now that I had marched myself into an impossible situation, how was I supposed to get out?

  My mind grew as heavy as his sword and without meaning to, I fell asleep.

  In the morning when I woke he was gone. Another silent woman in slave costume brought me food and water. I washed and changed into my clean shirt and stuffed the dirty one in my backpack. As I was picking through the unappetizing food, sleep-buddy returned to the tent, scooped up my backpack from the floor, grabbed my wrist, and, without a word or even a look at me, dragged me outside to toss me on his horse.

  He jumped up behind me, kicked his heels into the horse's sides and we sped out of the camp. The guys who were playing guards were unhappy, with deep scowls and stage whisper muttering.

  I had heard the angry voices outside the tent before Prince Whatsit returned from wherever he'd gone, brushed aside the tent flap and stomped toward me.

  The guard called Artur, who seemed to be in charge, had argued that he wanted several of his men to ride with us. The prince had hissed at him, sounding rather like an angry cat, threatening the man with dreadful punishments. I did not understand why these grown men were putting up with the kid. Had they drawn lots for casting and he'd lucked out, got to play spoiled ruler?

  We crashed through the trees following a stream bed until we were beyond sight and hearing of the camp. Then he pulled on the reins to slow his horse to a walk. Banner shook his head and made odd snorting noises, as did the guy.

  Mumbling more to himself than to me, he said, “How dare he speak to me that way. I will have him broken. I will put up with him no longer. I am a man now and within my rights. I will give orders to suit my wishes without some stupid guard forever stopping me.”

  “Game's over,” I said. “Or not. But there's no point trying to impress me.”

  His fingers grasped my shoulder and he shook me, as though I were the offending guard, saying, “I am their ruler's son, do you understand?”

  “Yes, I get that. You're Prince Charming or whatever, which means daddy is a king. That's easy. So where to now?”

  “My father is a warlord, not a king. My name is Tarvik. My father's line goes back seven generations. The first son of the line of Kovat is always known as the Garnet Prince.”

  “Weird, I mean, not like Shakespeare, not Dungeons and Dragons, oh! Surely I am wrong here, but let me ask. All those blonds, are you supposed to be Vikings? If you are, I don't think you've quite got the costumes right.”

  “My father is Kovat the Slayer, the greatest warlord in all the lands.”