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

Grandmother cocked her head to the side at that, as if seeking a new angle to view me from. I’d seen her offer the same look in the still-smoking ruins of Ameroth Castle fifty years before.

“We felt the curse released. We felt the unborn ended. Out in the wilds they are weaker, away from people on which to feed . . . So tell me, did Snorri ver Snagason find what he sought after he’d laid his enemies low?”

I paused. Always a bad idea if you plan to lie. Did she know what the Dead King was hunting beneath the Bitter Ice? Did she know that we found it? The important thing was not to get myself into trouble . . . and trouble could come from being caught in a lie, but also from earning myself some kind of further task. “His family were all killed,” I said. True though perhaps not what she wanted to know. Snorri wasn’t seeking the key in any event—neither of us were.

The Silent Sister held out her hand again, closed about something. I held my breath and refused to meet her eyes. Slowly her fingers unfolded, revealing a long black key, Loki’s key.

“Ah, yes, he found that.” I didn’t feel safe enough to lie. A damned unpleasant feeling. They say that the truth will set you free, but I find it normally hems me into a corner. “Snorri has the key.” This time however an immediate sense of relief flooded me. I’d told them. It wasn’t my problem any more. Grandmother had armies, assassins, agents, cunning and fearless men and women who would sort things out.

“And?” the Red Queen prompted, her face tight. The Sister’s copy of Loki’s key faded to a stain across the whiteness of her palm.

“He’s taking it to a mage named Kelem, in his mines. Has some crazy idea to unlock a door the old man can show him . . . and . . . uh . . . get his family back.”

“What?” A boom of disbelief that had me scuttling backward so quickly I stepped on my cloak and went crashing down on my arse. As the reverberations echoed through the throne room I swear I heard a hiss issue from Silent Sister’s dark mouth. “Where . . .”

Grandmother rose from her throne, looking more terrible than Skilfar ever had. She seemed to be struggling with the question, struggling to draw in air and frame her outrage. “Where is Snorri ver Snagason now?”

“Uh . . .” I shuffled further back, not feeling it safe to get back on my feet. “H-he should be about twenty miles down the road to Florence. I left him outside Vermillion yesterday noon.”

Grandmother clasped her hand to her face, reaching for the arm of her throne with the other. “The key was on my doorstep? Why—”

She broke off her question and I didn’t feel it a good moment to volunteer that nobody had ever mentioned that she wanted the damn key.

“Marth.” The Red Queen lowered her hand and looked to the grey-haired woman to the right of her throne. “Organize a hundred riders. Send them out to bring the Norseman back here. He shouldn’t be hard to miss, about six foot eight, black hair and beard, pale-skinned. Is that right, boy?”

I’d been demoted to “boy” again. I picked myself up and dusted down my cloak. “Yes. He’s travelling with a fat ginger Viking and a blond völva from the Utter North.”

“Even better. Spread the net wide. Don’t lose him.”

TWENTY-ONE

Grandmother dismissed me from her throne room with no more ceremony than she had afforded the courtiers. A short walk, three sets of doors closing at my heels, and I stood once more in the blazing sun of a hot Red March afternoon. No duties, no calls on my time, no responsibilities—“Hennan!” I remembered the boy and with surprise found that it gave me a sense of purpose I welcomed.

•   •   •

“Ballessa!” Back in the slightly cooler confines of Roma Hall I set to finding Hennan, and that meant finding Ballessa first. The doughty mistress of my father’s household knew where each pin lay. “Ballessa!” I’d been striding through the ground floor rooms shouting for a while now and, tired, I flomped down in one of the leather armchairs in Father’s study. Innumerable worthy tomes on theology crowded the shelves. The books held no interest for me, excepting that I knew Father had hollowed out the twelve-volume works of St. Proctor-Mahler to hide whisky, two long salt-glazed earthenware jugs of it, stoppered tight. Also the legends on the top row may read “The path to Heaven” and “Saving the fallen, one soul at a time” and the like, but the etchings within were perhaps the most pornographic to be found in the city.

“Jayne!” I saw the housemaid trying to sneak past unobserved.