The Wheel of Osheim (The Red Queen's War 3)

I clutched the key tight and the black ice of it slid beneath my grasp. The screens went dark.

“Wouldn’t that be a fine joke now?” Loki stood beside me. “W-what do you want?” I tried to move away without releasing the key.

“Me?” Loki shrugged. “I’m finished when you break my key, and it will break when its job is done. Turn it left, turn it right. Make up your mind, Jalan.”

“I . . . I don’t know.” Sweat ran down me, my hand pale from loss of blood, trembling. “Was the Lady Blue telling the truth when she—”

“Truth?” Loki threw up his hands, fingers fluttering. “Lies are our foundation—we each start with a lie and build a life upon it. Lies are more durable than the truth, more mutable, able to change to meet requirements.”

“I need the truth. You set me on this path with the truth when you showed me my mother die. The key didn’t drop me in the desert at random . . . it was all part of a plan. Meeting Jorg Ancrath, finding the steel to kill Maeres Allus. You were building me for this task, just as you built the key and sent it out in the world to gather strength.”

“Perhaps.” Loki shrugged. “The facts are a liar’s best friends. So many truths are uncovered in the search for a plausible lie. Why not work with them?” He turned to gesture at the chamber, a hall of wonders, strewn with death. “What a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive. The Great Scott wrote that, back when the moon wore a younger face.” A sigh. As the darkness smoked about the key in my grasp Loki seemed to diminish, growing older, the light within him fading. “This was my first work and it is, I will admit, tangled. Where’s the coward that would not dare to fight for such a land? Another of the Great Scott’s lines—and here you are, my coward. Do you dare?”

“ButshouldI—”

“I don’t care!” Loki boomed across me, haggard now, and ill. “Only know that you don’t need the truth. The truth didn’t set you free. It was a lie. You didn’t see your mother die. You weren’t in the room. You weren’t even in Roma Hall that day.”

“What?”

“I lied to you.”

“What . . .”

“Hate, courage, fear . . . all lies. Don’t look for reasons. Do what you feel. Not what you feel to be right—just what you feel.”

“I have the scar . . .” My free hand moved toward my chest where Edris’s sword had caught me that day.

“You did that climbing a fence.”

“You lying bast—”

“Yes, I know. Now hurry up could you? I’m falling apart here.”

I looked back past the false god, a thing made real by the dreams of men, and saw, standing at the blood-smeared window to the other room, the hulking figure of my friend, only his eyes clearly visible where a hand had wiped the glass clean.

I turned the key.

THIRTY-THREE

Garyus was buried as a king in the cathedral of Our Lady in Vermillion. The funeral procession wound from Victory Plaza in the palace out across the city, along the Corelli Line overlooking the river and down toward the Appan Gate. We had snow, the first snow to fall in Vermillion in eight years, as if the city had dressed for the occasion, covered up its scars and stains and dirt for just one day to see the old man laid to rest.

I carried the coffin with my cousins, and Captain Renprow filled in the sixth space. The Red Queen appointed him to the honour for carrying Garyus up into the Blue Lady’s tower through magics no other soldier had survived, and for the heroics he displayed in getting my great-uncle to Blujen in the first place a week earlier, against Renprow’s own strong advice, it must be said.

“For this, Marshal Renprow, we thank you. We thank you for carrying our brother.”

“He carried me, your majesty.” Renprow bowed. “And it was my honour.”

“He carried us all.” The Red Queen nodded and bowed her face. “For many years.”

We set his coffin in a sepulchre of white marble within the cathedral, bound by magics that would secure him from any necromancy. I said the words over him in his resting place. I think I spoke them clearly and with meaning.

“Be at peace, my brother.” Grandmother laid her hand upon the cold stone, and beside her, seen by no one else but me, the Silent Sister put her own pale hand where her twin’s name was graven, and from her dark eye a single tear fell, sparkling.

I came to see Snorri leave from the river docks. I had bought him a boat. A good one, I hoped. I called it The Martus. Darin left a child to carry his line and a wife who loved him. Martus needed something, and a boat to carry his name into the world was the best I could offer.