Red Heir - Lisa Henry Page 0,56

throw caution to the wind and try to help you. I even trust that he was going to take you back to Delacourt and put you on a ship to somewhere safe. But suddenly he’s part of this? He’s willing to ride into Callier and die for this? Now that, I don’t trust.”

“Have you never had nothing left to lose?” Quinn asked softly, and Loth figured that he wasn’t talking about Ser Greylord anymore. “Sometimes, when there’s been a sword dangling over your head for so long, you just reach a point where you’re so sick of it that you just want to cut the string yourself, you know?”

“Is that what you think is happening here?”

“I think...” Quinn hummed again. “I think I’ve spent the last five years of my life locked up in Delacourt. I think that I’d very much like to look my uncle in the eye and remind him whose son I am. I want to hear him admit he killed my father and my mother. His own sister, Loth.”

“And what good will it do you to hear him admit it?”

Quinn tensed. “I want him to know how much I hate him. And then I want him to die.”

Quinn’s dreams of revenge didn’t feel so hot now, not that Loth knew exactly how they’d play out.

“You don’t have an army,” Loth pointed out. “You have Ser Greylord, who has nicely agreed to accompany us on what he absolutely believes is a suicide mission. You have Ada, who fully intends to hand you over to the benefactor, who we’re fairly certain is Lord Doom, who wants you dead. You have Calarian, who seems to like you enough personally, but, politically, would slit your throat and use your blood to paint banners for the revolution. You have Scott, who doesn’t know what’s going on even when he’s not concussed, and you have Dave. And Dave is about the only one here who would actually have your back in a fight.”

“And you,” Quinn said softly. “I think you proved that already.”

“That was an aberration,” Loth said, pushing down the warmth that rose up in him at Quinn’s praise. He sat up a little straighter in the saddle nonetheless. “Please don’t ever count on that. I’m sure my natural cowardice will come back in full force any moment now. And Quinn, even if it didn’t, I’m a pickpocket with a meat cleaver. Lord Doom has actual trained soldiers.”

“Technically, you’re a scribe. And he has my actual trained soldiers,” Quinn said. “They swore an oath to the crown. That’s me.”

Loth turned that over in his brain for a moment. “You’d risk your life on the fact that they’d do the right thing when it counts? That’s a hell of a gamble.”

He took his hand from the reins and pressed it to his abdomen, where Quinn’s cold fingers were now resting. He squeezed Quinn’s fingers, the small gesture saying more, he hoped, than his words. Because at the heart of this whole thing wasn’t a figurehead, or a prince, or a crown. At heart there was a young man made of flesh and blood, who Loth hoped to know for longer than a few more days. It made him restless, and uneasy, and angry, and a hundred other different emotions he couldn’t prise apart, let alone name.

Loth didn’t give a fuck about the kingdom, but he thought he might just give one about Quinn.

Quinn pressed a kiss to the nape of Loth’s neck. “I know,” he said quietly.

And then he sank into silence, and nothing Loth said could draw him out of it again.

They clopped down the dark road, with the haunting calls of the owls echoing behind them.

An hour or so after their fight with the bandits, they stopped in the town where Ser Greylord had left his men hunting rumours of redheaded princes. They handed the bandit leader and his survivors over to the local constabulary, which in this small town seemed to consist of a man with one leg and a woman with a pitchfork. Then they waited anxiously while Ser Greylord rounded up his soldiers and spoke to them. Well, Loth was anxious. Quinn seemed strangely unaffected, though he did grip his kitchen knife tightly until Ser Greylord announced that his soldiers were now coming with them. It meant they were safe from bandit attacks, Loth supposed, but not that they were safe from, well, soldiers. Loth didn’t trust them as far as Dave could throw them, and Ser