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

“Three times.” I lifted up my shirt. And there, just below the left pectoral muscle, a white scar an inch and a half long. I used to say that Martus cut me with a kitchen knife—and I believed it. More recently I claimed it as a war wound from the Aral Pass. I knew that one to be a lie. Now I knew it for Edris’s, the thrust of the same sword that ran my mother through, her and my unborn sister both. And cut her throat. Sister? I couldn’t say how I knew the child would have been my sister . . . but I did. A sorceress to play the role that the Silent Sister foresaw for her, a key piece to put into play on the board of Empire, sitting between the Red Queen and the Lady Blue.

I touched my fingers to the scar, remembering the pain and the shock of it. How long they had tended young Jally on his deathbed I couldn’t say, but I’m sure a different boy left it. A boy who either had no memory of the past weeks or who set whatever wild talent that lay within him to burning out all trace of the events. I had sympathy with that choice, if it was a choice he’d made. I would make the same decision even now if I knew how. Or at least be tempted to.

“And the first time? When he gave you that scar, who else did Edris cut?” Snorri asked, Tuttugu and Hennan moving in behind him, stew forgotten.

“My mother.” I gritted my jaw to say it but a breath hitched in as I saw her fall again and the word cracked.

“I’ll kill him for my grandfather.” Hennan sat cross-legged, looking down. The child had never sounded so serious.

Snorri looked down too and shook his head. A moment later he patted his chest where the key lay beneath his jerkin. “He’ll come for me soon enough. Then I’ll kill him for all of us, Jal.”

EIGHTEEN

Nearly six months spent north of Rhone had improved my opinion of the country considerably. For one thing they knew what summer was about here. We walked south through long hot days and I basked in the sunshine whilst the others turned red and burned. Tuttugu proved the worst of them with the sun. At one point it seemed as though most of his exposed skin was attempting to peel off, and he moaned about it non-stop, crying out at the slightest slap on the arm—even going so far as to suggest some of them weren’t entirely accidental.

The sun also burned off the dark mood that had enfolded me for days after I woke. It didn’t reach the cold core of certainty that I would have to kill Edris Dean, but it rolled back the shadows the memory cast and left me with recollections of my mother that would have been lost forever if not for Kara’s magics. Whilst we kept moving it seemed that the past was content to trail behind me, not forgotten but not getting in the way of each moment. For the first day or two I thought the dream’s discoveries would drive me mad, but oddly with the passing of a week I felt more at ease in my own darkening skin than I had for years. Almost a form of contentment. I attributed it to the ever-narrowing gap between me and home.

Perhaps it was spending time trapped in my own head with the younger me but I seemed to have more of a rapport with Hennan on the last weeks of our journey. We started to pass through actual towns and I taught the lad a few tricks with a pack of cards I picked up. Just simple finesses, enough to bilk Snorri and Tuttugu out of their few coppers and some chore duties around camp.

“I’m sure one of you is cheating . . .” Snorri rumbled that evening when saddled with an extra night watch and the task of gathering firewood for the fifth time in a row.

“That’s a common misconception among losers,” I told him. “If you call the application of intelligence and a shrewd assessment of the statistical odds cheating then yes, both I and Hennan are cheating.” In fact if you called “not playing in accordance with the rules” cheating, then we would both have to raise our hands to that also. “The rules of poker, Snorri, have outlasted the most basic information about the society and age in which they were constituted,” I continued. The important thing when denying cheating is to continue—to not stop speaking until the conversation has travelled so far from its roots that none of the listeners can remember what the original point of contention was. “What a civilization manages to keep from that which went before says as much about it as what it leaves to the next age.”

Snorri furrowed his brow. “Why is there an ace up your sleeve?”

“There isn’t.” It was a king, and there was no way he could have known it was there—just a lucky guess.

Continuation is a good policy, but sometimes it turns out that a barbarian is too stubborn to be led and you end up doing two night watches and gathering firewood all week. Snorri asked me what sort of lesson I thought my behaviour might provide Hennan with—a rather better one than would be taught by seeing a prince of Red March reduced to manual labour I thought, but at least I took satisfaction in the fact that my pupil’s cheating went undetected, a credit to my teaching.