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

“You’re worried I’ll drop it in the sea?” I asked.

“You might.”

“I won’t.” Hand held out.

Snorri raised a brow. A simple but eloquent expression. I had been known to lie before.

“We came as close to dying for this thing as men can come, Snorri. Both of us. I have a right.”

“It wasn’t for the key.” Voice low, eyes seeing past me now. “We didn’t go for the key.”

“But it’s all we got,” I said, angry that he should deny me.

“It’s not a thing you want to touch, Jal. There’s no joy in it. As a friend I say don’t do this.”

“As a prince of Red March I say give me the fucking key.”

Snorri lifted the thong from about his neck and with a sigh dangled the key into my palm, still retaining the tie.

I closed my hand about it. For the briefest moment I considered ripping it free and arcing it out across the water. In the end I lacked either the courage or the cruelty to do it. I’m not sure which.

“Thank you.” The thing seemed to shift in my grasp and I squeezed it to force one form upon it.

There isn’t much I remember about my mother. Her hair—long, dark, smelling of softness. I recall how safe her arms felt. I remember the comfort in her praise, though I could summon none of the words to mind. The sickness that took her I recollected as the story I told about it when people asked. A story without drama or tragedy, just the everyday futility of existence. A beautiful princess laid low by common disease, wasted away without romance by a flux. Isolated by her contagion—her last words spoken to me through a screen. The betrayal a child feels when a parent abandons them returned to me now—still sharp.

“Oh.” And without transition the key was no longer a key. I held my mother’s hand, or she held mine, a seven-year-old boy’s hand encompassed in hers. I caught her scent, something fragrant as honeysuckle.

Snorri nodded, his eyes sympathetic. “Oh.”

Without warning the boat, the sea, Snorri, all of it vanished, just for the beat of a heart. A blinding light took its place, dazzling, dying away as I blinked to reveal a familiar chamber with star-shaped roundels studding the ceiling. A drawing room in the Roma Hall where my brothers and I would play on winter nights. Mother stood there, half bent toward me, a smile on her face—the face in my locket, but smiling, eyes bright. All replaced a moment later with the boat, the sky, the waves. “What?” I dropped the key as though it had bitten me. It swung from Snorri’s hand on the thong. “What!”

“I’m sorry.” Snorri tucked the key away. “I warned you.”

“No.” I shook my head. Too young she was for the assassin’s blade. Taproot’s words, as if he spoke them in my ear. “No.” I stood up, staggered by the swell. I closed my eyes and saw it again. Mother bending toward me, smiling. The man’s face looming over her shoulder. No smile there. Half-familiar but not a friend. Features shadowed, offered only in rumour, hair so black as to be almost the blue beneath a magpie’s wing, with grey spreading up from the temples.

The world returned. Two steps brought me to the mast and I clung for support, the sail flapping inches from my nose.

“Jal!” Snorri called, motioning for me to come back and sit before the sweep of the boom took me into the water.

“There was a blade, Snorri.” Each blink revealed it, light splintering from the edge of a sword held low and casual, the fist at his side clenched about its hilt. “He had a sword!” I saw it again, some secret hidden in the dazzle of its steel, putting an ache in my chest and a pain behind my eyes.

•   •   •

“I want the truth.” I stared at Kara. Aslaug hadn’t arrived with the setting sun. To me, that was proof enough of the völva’s power. “You can help me,” I told her.

Kara sighed and bound the tiller. The wind had fallen to a breeze. The sails would soon be furled. She sat beside me on the bench and looked up to study my face. “Truth is rarely what people want, Prince Jalan.”

“I need to know.”

“Knowledge and truth are different things,” Kara said. She brushed stray hair from her mouth. “I want to know, myself. I want to know many things. I braved the voyage to Beerentoppen, sought out Skilfar, all in search of knowing. But knowledge is a dangerous thing. You touched the key—against Snorri’s strongest advice—and it brought you no peace. Now I advise you to wait. We’re aimed at your homeland. Ask your questions there, the traditional way. The answers are likely not secrets, just facts you’ve avoided or misplaced whilst growing up.”