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

I stop, the orichalcum forgotten. “What is it . . . ?” Jally hasn’t the slightest idea. I know though. She’s pregnant and the child has a thousand times more talent in the womb than Kara has after all her years of training as a völva.

We stand there in the drawing room beneath a ceiling studded with star-shaped roundels, and watch one another.

“It will be all right, Jally.” A lie, whispered as if even Mother doesn’t believe it enough to say out loud. She smiles, pushing aside her hair and bends toward me. But I’m looking over her shoulder at the face of a man looming behind her. No smile there. I half recognize him but with the light streaming through the doorway to his rear his features are shadowed, offered only in rumour, hair so black as to be almost the blue of a magpie’s wing, with grey spreading up from the temples.

“J—” The rest of my name comes out bloody. Both of us look down at the blade that has emerged from her belly. In the next second she has fallen forward, pulling clear of the sword, now dripping in the man’s hand. Blood flows along the curves of the script set into the steel.

“Ssssh,” he says, and sets the cutting edge against the side of Mother’s neck where she lies bleeding on the Indus rugs. The man stands revealed now in his uniform, the tunic and breastplate of the general palace guard. His face is somehow blurred, for a broken second it wants to look like Alphons—the younger of the doormen—and when I refuse that it shifts toward old Raplo who winked at me that morning. I shake both away and see him clear, just for a moment. It’s Edris Dean, without the scar along his cheekbone, and too young for the grey, but greying even so.

Jally’s thoughts, that have for so long bubbled behind my own, childish and wide-roaming, have now fallen silent. He looks at Mother, at the sword, at Edris, and his mind is a smooth void.

“I knew you were coming . . .” I say it with Jally’s mouth.

“No you didn’t.” Edris pulls back his blade, slicing Mother’s throat. She starts to thrash, trying to rise. “No one ever does. That’s my talent, sure enough. Given by God Almighty himself. The future-sworn can’t see me, boy.” He holds the point of his sword toward me. “I cast no shadow on the days to come. Bedevils the fortune-tellers no end, to be sure. Keep telling me I won’t live to see the morning.”

“I’ll kill you myself,” I say, and I mean it. A strange sense of calm enfolds me.

“Do you say so?” Edris smiles. “Maybe. But first you have to die.” And he thrusts his sword into my chest. Some deeper part of Jally had us moving already, throwing himself backward, and a last twitch of Mother’s leg, either by accident or design, puts Edris off his attack. Even so, the point of his blade cuts between my ribs and I hit the ground screaming, blood soaking my tunic. Even as I scream the thrust of the blade toward my chest is replayed across the darkness behind eyes screwed tight. I glimpse runes, half-visible on the steel beneath my mother’s blood.

I hear a distant cry and as my head rolls to the side I see a huge guardsman tumble past Edris, his arm spurting blood where the assassin’s blade has cut him as he sidestepped. It’s Robbin, one of Mother’s favourites, a veteran of wars before I was born—perhaps before she was born. Edris moves to finish him but the man sweeps the blow aside with his longsword, bellowing, and launches his own attack. The sound is terrifying, the crash of blades, staccato footsteps thudding, harsh breaths rasped in. I can’t track the flickering swords. It’s growing dim, the sounds more faint. I meet Mother’s eyes. They’re dark and glassy. She doesn’t see me. Her hand is open, reaching for me in her last moment, the orichalcum cone sent spinning by a kick as the men fight and vanishing beneath a long couch against the far wall.

Over Mother’s head I see Edris is already carrying a wound in his side, something he earned on the way in. Now the tip of Robbin’s blade opens his cheek to the bone, painting his face scarlet. Edris repays the wild blow with a chop deep into the meat of Robbin’s thigh, just above the knee. The man staggers but doesn’t fall. Hop-stepping to stand between Edris on one side and my mother and me on the other, though we must both look dead. In fact I think we are. I hear faint shouts in the distance. Edris spits blood and shoots a disgusted look at Robbin, his glance falls quickly to the bodies on the floor. Decided, he spins on a heel and is out of the door with remarkable swiftness.

It’s dark now. Cold. Big hands lift me up but it’s all so far away.

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