Princess of Thorns by Unknown Read Free Book Online Page B

forest proper—where the trees are thinner and the unusually warm autumn sun hotter on our bare heads—by midmorning and continue east.
    We ride hard through the middle of the day, stopping only to water the horses and take a quick meal in the shade, sharing dried meat and crackers from Niklaas’s pack, accompanied by hard, sour apples I gathered as we traveled.
    Mercifully the ridge road is narrower and less trafficked than the road below. We see signs that someone has camped off the trail a few days’ past but meet not a soul the entire day. The scarcity of travelers isn’t surprising. The Boughtswords rule these woods, a state of being Niklaas says is encouraged by both Ekeeta and his father. The woods serve as a buffer between two kingdoms that have never entirely trusted each other, though they have been allies since before my grandfather’s time.
    “You’ve met Ekeeta, then?” Niklaas asks.
    “When we were little, my father would take Aurora and me to court on festival days. Ekeeta would give us toys and sweets, but I remember being afraid of her. Even then. Why my grandfather chose an ogre for his third wife is something that was never explained to my satisfaction.” I shift my weight forward on Button’s back, doing my best not to wince in pain.
    I don’t want Niklaas to know how raw I’m feeling after so many hours of riding without a saddle. The fact that my britches were damp for the first several hours of the ride hasn’t helped matters, but I would be feeling a lot less chafed if I’d taken the time to saddle Button before fleeing the mercenary camp.
    “Well, Ekeeta is a beautiful woman,” Niklaas says, pressing on, though the sun is sinking into the trees behind us, painting the forest in dreamy pink light. “All long legs and creamy skin and tits as pert as a girl’s a tenth her age.”
    I wrinkle my nose at his crass description as I shift my weight again, still unable to find a comfortable position. “Maybe. But she has disturbing fingers.”
    “Disturbing fingers?” he asks with a laugh.
    “Long and spindly like spider legs. Not to mention that she’s a monster who feeds on mortal souls. She may look human, but she isn’t.”
    Niklaas chuckles again. “At least the ogres stopped eating our flesh. That’s something, right?” He reins Alama in, giving Button and me the chance to pull even with them on the trail. “And a beautiful woman is a beautiful woman, disturbing fingers, questionable eating habits, or no.”
    I blink up at him. “You aren’t serious.”
    “Why not?” He grins as he leans forward to stroke Alama’s long white throat. “Men are fools when it comes to a pretty face.”
    “I’m sure there were prettier faces in the capital at the time,” I say. “Prettier and human. Grandfather could have had his pick of any woman in Mercar.”
    “Ah, but he didn’t want any woman. He wanted one particular woman.” He glances over at me, that increasingly familiar “big brother about to impart wisdom to the youngster” look in his eyes, the one that makes it practically impossible to resist rolling mine. “Women fall in love a dozen times before their fifteenth birthday, but when a man falls, he falls heart, body, and soul, and no woman but the one who has captured his imagination will do.”
    “Is that right?” I lift a brow in his direction.
    “It is,” he says. “The poor bastard becomes obsessed. Every bit of sense he possesses flees his head to set up camp in his britches, and there’s no reasoning with him until the spell is broken.”
    “Or until his imagination is captured by someone else,” I add.
    “Exactly.” Niklaas laughs; I squeeze the reins tighter. He may find man’s fickle nature amusing, but I don’t. Mother was Father’s second wife, but she may not have been his last. Father was gone more often the year before he was murdered. I remember the servants whispering, wondering why he packed silk in his saddlebags if he wasn’t going to