The Liar's Key (The Red Queen's War 2)

•   •   •

“We’ll get Fuella to put some salve on that cut.” A woman’s voice—my mother’s.

I taste blood. My blood. My mouth still stings from where Martus’s forehead struck me. Martus makes no concessions to my age in our play-fights. At eleven he would happily flatten me or any other seven-year-old and declare it a great victory. My middle brother, Darin, is only nine but has a touch more grace and merely overpowers me, or uses me as a distraction while he creeps up on our eldest brother.

“I’ve told you not to get involved in their battles, Jally, they’re too rough.” My hand in hers as she leads me along the Long Gallery, the backbone of Roma Hall.

“Oh,” she says, and tugs me, changing course, back along the gallery.

I struggle to free myself from the boy’s concerns, the sting of his swollen lip, the fury at Martus for heaping yet another defeat on him, the hot certainty that in the next battle he will give better than he gets.

•   •   •

It takes an effort to untangle my thoughts from the boy’s but doing so offers considerable relief. I wonder for a moment if I’ve fallen into some other child’s mind for nothing here is familiar or comfortable: he’s got no caution in him, this one, no fear, no guile. Just a raw sense of injustice and a fierce hunger to throw himself back into the fray. Not me at all. This boy could grow into Snorri!

Mother turns from the gallery, leading me along the west corridor. The Roma Hall, our home within the compound of the Crimson Palace, seems unchanged by the passage of years that have redesigned me root and stem.

I wipe my mouth, or rather the boy wipes his, and his hand comes away bloody. The action is none of mine—I share his vision and his pain but have no say in what course he takes. This seems reasonable, if not fair, for these things are happening fifteen years ago, and technically I have already exercised my will in the matter.

In fact, as events unfold before me I remember them. For the first time in an age I properly remember the long dark sweep of my mother’s hair, the feel of her hand around mine, and what that feeling meant to me at age seven . . . what an unbreakable bond of trust it was, my small hand in her larger one, an anchor in a sea of confusion and surprise.

We think that we don’t grow. But that’s because growth happens so slowly that it’s invisible to us. I’ve heard old men say they feel twenty inside, or that the boy who once ran wild, and with the recklessness of youth, still lives within them, bound only by the constraints of old bones and expectation. But when you’ve shared the skull of your child self you know this to be untrue—a romance, a self-deception. The child carrying my name around Vermillion’s palace sees the world through the same eyes as me, but notices different things, picks up on different opportunities, and reaches his own conclusions. We share little, this Jalan Kendeth and me, we’re separated by more than a gulf of years. He lives more fully, unburdened by experience, not yet crippled by cynicism. His world is larger than mine, though he has barely left the palace walls and I’ve trekked to the ends of the earth.

We turn off the west corridor, passing a suit of armour that reminds me of the battle for Ameroth Keep, and reminds Jally of a stag beetle he found two days ago behind the messenger stables.

“Where are we going?” The boy’s mind had been so caught up with the fight—with Martus’s forehead swinging down into his face . . . my face . . . that he hasn’t noticed until now that we aren’t heading toward the nursery and Fuella with her salve at all.

“To the palace, Jally. That will be nice won’t it?” Her voice holds a brittle tone, the cheerfulness forced past something so awkward that even a child couldn’t fail to see through it.

“Why?”

“Your grandmother asked us to visit.”

“Me too?” His first pang of anxiety at that, a cold finger of fear along the spine.

“Yes.”

I hadn’t heard my grandmother ask. The boy, whose thoughts I experience as a torrent of childish whispers playing behind my own narrative, thinks that maybe grown-ups have better ears than children and that when he’s grown he too may be able to hear his grandmother’s call across acres of palace compound, past a score of doors and through as many high walls. My own thoughts turn to the first moment of this dream, that “oh,” the tug of Mother’s hand, the sudden retreading of our steps. Had she in that instant remembered that the Queen of Red March wished to see her? That’s not the kind of fact a person misplaces. I wonder if instead she hadn’t heard a silent call of the type adults do not in general notice? I know my grandmother has a sister who likely can issue such summonses, but even so it probably requires a certain kind of person to hear them.