Red Heir - Lisa Henry Page 0,1

have a lot of fun trying. Redheads were so easy to make blush—in all sorts of places.

Loth looked at the boy and made a contemplative sound, and yes, even the weight of his gaze was enough to make his victim’s cheeks flush pink.

“Hmmm.” Loth mused aloud. “I doubt you’re a whore, although you’re definitely pretty enough—I’d pay at least a gold coin.”

The young man’s mouth dropped open, his face went beet red, and his eyes widened, in mortification or scandal, Loth wasn’t sure which.

“Actually, I take that back. With a prissy attitude like yours, you’d need to pay me, not the other way around. You’re more frigid than an ice giant’s ballsack, aren’t you?” Loth held one finger up when it looked like his cellmate was about to interject. “And before you ask, that wasn’t a question, it was a speculation, so it doesn’t count.”

The boy might have been frosty, but his glare was pure fire.

“Hmm.” Loth sucked on his teeth for a moment. “I wonder if it’s an arrestable offence in this part of the kingdom to be a rude little twat. Because in that case, you may be looking at the death penalty. I’ll bet it’s something incredibly base though and suited to your low station. Like turnip theft, or horse buggery.”

The young man's lips thinned and Loth could see the internal struggle going on.

It was a struggle that the youngster inevitably lost when Loth added, “Just out of interest, were you the buggerer or the buggeree? Was there some sort of harness, or do you carry a footstool with you? The height difference intrigues me, so do tell.”

“How dare you!” he burst out. “I am a political prisoner, not a—a—”

“Lover of horses?” And oh, but wasn’t that interesting? Because Loth had no doubt that this scruffy, grubby little mouse, despite his appearances was, in fact, no peasant. He might have looked like one, but his accent gave him away. And, unlike Loth, that accent probably wasn’t faked. “Political, you say? Do tell. Are you the illegitimate spawn of a ranking official? Are you perhaps a spy?”

“No, and no,” the boy said, outrage magically vanishing. “That’s two questions,” he observed, quietly smug. “One more and you have to be quiet.”

Perhaps he wasn’t as dim as he appeared.

Loth grinned. This was definitely entertaining, and he had no intention of being quiet regardless of what he’d said earlier, so he resolved to come up with the most ridiculous thing he could, just to see the boy stammer and sputter and blush some more. “You do look like you’ve been here rather a long time. And you don’t have the features of a commoner. Plus, you’re awfully bossy for a little slip of a thing. Could it be, I wonder? Is it possible that you, my little grub, are in fact the long-lost Prince Tarquin of Aguillon, rumoured to have been locked away by his uncle?”

He was teasing of course. Despite the rumours perpetuated by idiots and bards—same thing, really—Loth would bet the entire contents of his purse (two silver pieces and a loose button) that Prince Tarquin wasn’t lost, and instead was exactly where his uncle had left him—in several pieces in an unmarked grave. That was politics for you.

The boy narrowed his eyes and jutted his chin out. “And what if I were?” he demanded mulishly.

Loth hummed thoughtfully. “No, you’re definitely a horse fucker.”

The boy roared in rage and leapt at Loth, despite the futility of such a gesture. His chains brought him up short, about halfway across the cell.

Really though, he should have been glad, because if he’d still been sitting where he was a moment later, he would have been crushed by the collapsing wall as an orc barrelled through it.

Loth coughed and squinted through the clouds of dust. Where there had once been a wall, there was now a mountain of rubble, with an orc standing on top of it. He was big and ugly by human standards—possibly he was very attractive to other orcs—with two teeth in his bottom jaw protruding from between his lips like tusks. He was mostly bald as well, apart from a few tufts on top of his head, and the same sort of green as a rather anaemic tree frog.

“Whoops,” he said, in a voice that rumbled like thunder.

A second figure climbed up beside him. This one was human. He was a young man with broad shoulders, a heroically wide stance that really must have been straining the seams of