The Liar's key

SEVENTEEN

Snorri and the others caught us up on the side of some desolate Gelleth hill, moon-washed and covered with low scrub. Quite how they’d followed our trail in the dark I didn’t know-I’d been expecting them to catch up by day. The old bond that used to bind the northman and me still gave a sense of discomfort and a gist of direction once we had a mile or two between us, but hardly enough to navigate through the night across treacherous country.

“You did that!” Snorri’s first words to me.

“I did indeed get Gorgoth and his pungent friends out of a potentially violent confrontation, yes.” Snorri opened his mouth again, wide enough this time to presage a shout, but I forestalled him with a lifted hand. “No need to thank me. The Red Queen raised the princes of her house to keep a cool head in a crisis.”

“I just want to know how you did it!” Tuttugu pressed past Snorri, a hint of a grin in the thicket of his beard. “Poor Hakon didn’t look like he’d be sitting in the saddle any time soon.”

The sight of Kara’s face in the orichalcum glow stopped the laugh in my throat. The funny side of the situation didn’t appear to be pointing her way, and going by her murderous looks I’d be safer sleeping with the trolls.

Up at the head of the column Gorgoth issued some silent command and once more his subjects began to move. Grateful for the excuse, I turned my back on Kara and, after repositioning my pack, set off walking. I’d already petitioned Gorgoth to have a troll carry my gear, but he held some odd kind of reservation about the matter as if he thought it beneath a troll to carry the baggage of a prince of Red March. I guess that’s the sort of madness that sets in when you spend your life living in a dark cave. In any event he finally excused them on the basis they were apt to eat my rations, and then the pack and my spare cloak.

I grumbled to Snorri about it but he just laughed. “Does a man good to carry his own weight in the world, Jal. It’ll harden you up a bit too.”

I shook my head. “Seems the concept of nobility ends north of Ancrath. That one,” I nodded to the front of the column, “probably wouldn’t bend the knee if they made a new emperor and brought him a-visiting. Reminds me of a beggar in Vermillion, Fussy Jack they called him, or at least Barras Jon used to call him that. . anyhow, he’d hang out on Silk Street round the back of the opera house with his tin cup, showing off the stumps of his legs and shouting out for money at the honest folk passing by. Tossed him a coin or two myself. Probably. Barras told me he’d seen the man empty his cup on a cloth and clean each copper piece with a bit of felt, careful as all hell not to touch a single one of them until he’d wiped the stink off them. Barras said he tossed him a silver crown once, just to get him to catch it. Ol’ Fussy Jack, he let it fall, picked it up with his cloth and wiped it clean. Silver from the son of the Vyene ambassador just wasn’t good enough for him.”

Snorri shrugged. “They say all money’s dirty, one way or another. Seems this Jack might have had it right. We’ll find out for ourselves soon enough, headed for Florence.”

“Hmmm.” I decided to cover the fact I was going no further than Vermillion with a non-committal noise.

“All the money of Empire flows into Florence, sits a while in the vaults of some or other Florentine banker, then flows out again. I’ve never quite fathomed the reason why, but if money is dirty then Florence must be the most filthy corner of the Broken Empire.”

I considered educating Snorri on the finer points of banking, then realized I didn’t have a clue what they were, even though I’d spent a desperately dire year studying at the Mathema in Hamada-another torture heaped upon all the princes of Red March by the ruthless old witch who claims to be our grandmother.

And so we trudged on. The trolls might not have missed the Danes and their torches, and I didn’t much miss the Danes, but I did like it better when I could see where I was going. Kara gave the orichalcum to Snorri so we wouldn’t break our ankles, but even in his hands the light made little impression on the dark and empty spaces around us.

• • •

After many miles wending our way through wooded uplands, around villages with their barking dogs and hedgerows, and down through tangled valleys, we stopped in the predawn grey to settle ourselves in an isolated dell.

I went across to Kara to make some pleasantry but astonishingly she still seemed to be holding a grudge, turning on me so sharply I took a pace back.

“And what did you do to Hakon?” she demanded. Just like that, no circling around the subject, no insinuations. Most unsettling.

“Me?” I tried for injured innocence.

“You! He said you’d told him where I was.”

“You didn’t want him to know?” A little bitterness might have slipped into that one.

I should have stepped back two paces. The retort of her hand striking my cheek set a dozen trolls hissing at the night, taloned hands raised to strike. “Ah.” I touched fingers to my stinging face and tasted blood.

Discretion is the better part of. . something. In any event I took myself out of arm’s reach and spread my bedroll down on the far side of camp, muttering something about the anti-witch laws I’d be passing when I became king. I set myself down and stared angrily at the sky, not even taking a moment to be thankful that it wasn’t raining. I lay there with the copper taste of blood in my mouth and thought it would be a long time before sleep found me. I was wrong. It dragged me down in moments.

• • •

Sleep pulled me down and I kept falling, into a dream with no bottom to it. I fell through the stuff of imagination and into the empty spaces we all keep within us. On the very edge of some larger void I managed to catch hold of something-I caught hold of the idea that a terrible thing waited for me at the base of this endless drop and that I might yet escape it. I clung to the idea, dangling from it by a single hand. And then I remembered the needle, Kara’s needle driven through my palm, and the blood glistening along its length. I remembered the taste of it as they had set the needle to my tongue and the völva’s spell wrapped me, that taste filled my mouth again. The pain of the old wound stabbed through my palm once more, fresh as the moment it first came, and with a despairing yell I lost my grip and fell again into memories-and this time they were my own.

• • •

“We’ll get Fuella to put some salve on that cut.” A woman’s voice-my mother’s.

I taste blood. My blood. My mouth still stings from where Martus’s forehead struck me. Martus makes no concessions to my age in our play-fights. At eleven he would happily flatten me or any other seven-year-old and declare it a great victory. My middle brother, Darin, is only nine but has a touch more grace and merely overpowers me, or uses me as a distraction while he creeps up on our eldest brother.

“I’ve told you not to get involved in their battles, Jally, they’re too rough.” My hand in hers as she leads me along the Long Gallery, the backbone of Roma Hall.

“Oh,” she says, and tugs me, changing course, back along the gallery.

I struggle to free myself from the boy’s concerns, the sting of his swollen lip, the fury at Martus for heaping yet another defeat on him, the hot certainty that in the next battle he will give better than he gets.

• • •

It takes an effort to untangle my thoughts from the boy’s but doing so offers considerable relief. I wonder for a moment if I’ve fallen into some other child’s mind for nothing here is familiar or comfortable: he’s got no caution in him, this one, no fear, no guile. Just a raw sense of injustice and a fierce hunger to throw himself back into the fray. Not me at all. This boy could grow into Snorri!

Mother turns from the gallery, leading me along the west corridor. The Roma Hall, our home within the compound of the Crimson Palace, seems unchanged by the passage of years that have redesigned me root and stem.

I wipe my mouth, or rather the boy wipes his, and his hand comes away bloody. The action is none of mine-I share his vision and his pain but have no say in what course he takes. This seems reasonable, if not fair, for these things are happening fifteen years ago, and technically I have already exercised my will in the matter.

In fact, as events unfold before me I remember them. For the first time in an age I properly remember the long dark sweep of my mother’s hair, the feel of her hand around mine, and what that feeling meant to me at age seven. . what an unbreakable bond of trust it was, my small hand in her larger one, an anchor in a sea of confusion and surprise.

We think that we don’t grow. But that’s because growth happens so slowly that it’s invisible to us. I’ve heard old men say they feel twenty inside, or that the boy who once ran wild, and with the recklessness of youth, still lives within them, bound only by the constraints of old bones and expectation. But when you’ve shared the skull of your child self you know this to be untrue-a romance, a self-deception. The child carrying my name around Vermillion’s palace sees the world through the same eyes as me, but notices different things, picks up on different opportunities, and reaches his own conclusions. We share little, this Jalan Kendeth and me, we’re separated by more than a gulf of years. He lives more fully, unburdened by experience, not yet crippled by cynicism. His world is larger than mine, though he has barely left the palace walls and I’ve trekked to the ends of the earth.

We turn off the west corridor, passing a suit of armour that reminds me of the battle for Ameroth Keep, and reminds Jally of a stag beetle he found two days ago behind the messenger stables.

“Where are we going?” The boy’s mind had been so caught up with the fight-with Martus’s forehead swinging down into his face. . my face. . that he hasn’t noticed until now that we aren’t heading toward the nursery and Fuella with her salve at all.

“To the palace, Jally. That will be nice won’t it?” Her voice holds a brittle tone, the cheerfulness forced past something so awkward that even a child couldn’t fail to see through it.

“Why?”

“Your grandmother asked us to visit.”

“Me too?” His first pang of anxiety at that, a cold finger of fear along the spine.

“Yes.”

I hadn’t heard my grandmother ask. The boy, whose thoughts I experience as a torrent of childish whispers playing behind my own narrative, thinks that maybe grown-ups have better ears than children and that when he’s grown he too may be able to hear his grandmother’s call across acres of palace compound, past a score of doors and through as many high walls. My own thoughts turn to the first moment of this dream, that “oh,” the tug of Mother’s hand, the sudden retreading of our steps. Had she in that instant remembered that the Queen of Red March wished to see her? That’s not the kind of fact a person misplaces. I wonder if instead she hadn’t heard a silent call of the type adults do not in general notice? I know my grandmother has a sister who likely can issue such summonses, but even so it probably requires a certain kind of person to hear them.

We are let out through the main doors of Roma Hall by the doormen, Raplo and Alphons. Raplo gives me a wink as I pass. I remember it now, clear and crystal, the wrinkling of his skin around the wink of that green eye. He died five years later-choked on a partridge bone, they said. A silly way for an old man to end a long life.

In the courtyard the sun dazzles on pale paving slabs, the heat enfolding-a Red March summer, golden and endless. I listen to the whirr of the boy’s thoughts, struck by how at odds his desires for the season are to mine. He sees exploration, battle, discovery, mischief. My vision is of indolence, dozing beneath the olive trees, drinking watered wine and waiting for the night. Waiting to scatter my silver across the hot dark streets of Vermillion, spilling from one pool of light and decadence to the next. Fight-pits, bordellos, card halls, and any social gathering that will have me, so long as the hosts are of sufficiently high rank, and the noble ladies broad-minded.

We walk across the plaza beneath the watchful gaze of sentries on the walls of the Marsail keep. Guards look down from the turrets of Milano House too, the stone pavilion where the heir sits among his luxuries, waiting for Grandmother to die. Uncle Hertet rarely leaves Milano House, and when he does the sun paints him as old as the Red Queen, and less hale.

Heat suffuses the boy and I bathe in it, remembering what it’s like to be truly warm. My hand grows sweaty within Mother’s grasp, but neither the boy nor I wish to let go. She’s new to me again, this lost mother of mine with her skin the colour of tea and her talent for hearing silent voices. I may be older, changed by the years into something very different from the boy trailing in her wake-but I have no intention of letting go.

Jally’s thinking of the blind-eye woman and that touch of hers which stole his senses and left him dark for so long. The fear she puts in him is like pollution in a clear spring. It’s wrong and it makes me angry, an unconflicted rage of a kind I’ve not felt in a long time-perhaps since I last knew my mother’s hand was there for the taking. The shadow of the Inner Palace falls across us and I realize that I’ve lost all recollection of this visit that now unfolds before me. The story I’ve told myself so often is that after presentation to the Red Queen at the age of five it wasn’t until the age of thirteen that I came before her again, a formal introduction at the Saturnalia feast with my brothers and cousins whispering at the margins of the great hall, Martus seeking takers for his bet that I would faint again.

We pass the looming facade of the Inner Palace and keep going.

“Grandmother lives in there. .” Jally points back to the golden portals of the Red Queen’s palace.

“We’re seeing her in the Julian Palace.”

The building in question rises before us across the broad square dedicated to our nation’s many victories. The Poor Palace everyone calls it. A foolish number of years ago it was the seat of kings, then some name I’ve forgotten decided it wasn’t good enough for him and built a better roof over his throne. So now it houses impoverished aristocrats who’ve thrown themselves upon the Red Queen’s mercy. Lords who’ve fallen on hard times and are too old or too inbred to mend their fortunes, generals who’ve grown ancient while putting young men in the ground, even a duke ruined by gambling debts-a cautionary tale to be sure.

We climb the steps to the great doors, Mother waiting patiently as Jally labours up them, his legs-my legs-a touch too short to take them in his stride, though mostly it’s reluctance that holds him back. The doors themselves tower into the shadowed heights beneath the portico, huge slabs of rosewood depicting, in inlaid brass, the long march of our people from the east to claim the promised lands as the shadows of a thousand suns retreated. The red march that gave our kingdom its name.

Two guards, half-plate gleaming, elaborate poleaxes held to the side, blades skyward, affect not to notice us, though Mother has married a son of the queen. They’re Grandmother’s personal guard, loath to show deference to anyone but her. They’re also a sign that she might truly be waiting for us in the Poor Palace.

The left door opens on noiseless hinges as we approach, just wide enough for us to slip within, a grudging acknowledgment of our right to enter. Inside we pause, sun-blind in the comparative gloom of the reception hall. As my vision clears I see at the far end of the foyer an old man, bent by age but very tall. He shambles toward us from the bank of votive candles by the opposite wall. His tunic is mis-tied and grey from too many washes, the stubble of his beard white against dark red skin. He seems uncertain.

“Come away, Ullamere.” A young woman, a nurse maybe, comes from the far doorway and steers the ancient out of sight. As he turns a pale scar is revealed, so broad I can see it even at this distance, running from the bridge of his nose past the corner of his mouth.

Mother turns from the aisle of marble columns, from the mosaiced splendour of the floor, and takes a small, unguarded arch leading onto a tight spiral of steps. Winding our way up the stairs makes me dizzy. Jally counts them to keep his fear at bay, but the Silent Sister’s colourless face keeps surfacing between the numbers. I hate her on his account with an intensity I’ve never quite managed on my own.

“A hundred and seven!” And we’re there, a small landing, a heavy oak door, a narrow window showing only sky. I know it for the tower room atop the western spire, one of two rising spear-like above the entrance to the Poor Palace. This is deduction rather than experience for I’ve never climbed these steps-or at least I had thought that I hadn’t until this moment of recollection.

“Wait here, Jalan.” Mother directs me to one of the two high-backed chairs to the side of the entrance. I clamber into the seat, too nervous to complain, and the door opens. Just like the grand portals this door opens narrowly-few doors it seems are flung wide in royal circles-this one reveals the angular features of Nanna Willow. Mother slips through and the old woman closes the door behind her, shooting me a hard look through the thinning gap. Clunk-and I’m alone on the landing.

I say the boy and I share nothing save a name. . but he’s off that chair and crouched with his ear to the door fast enough. I would perhaps have been slower, more scared of being caught, but I’d have listened even so!

“-why make me bring Jalan? You know how badly he reacted when-”

“That was. . unfortunate. But he must be tested again.” An old voice, deeper, and more stern even than Nanna Willow’s but still a woman’s. My grandmother then.

“Why?” Mother asks. A pause, perhaps remembering herself. “Why must he be, your highness?”

“I didn’t have you brought all the way from the Indus to question me, Nia. I bartered dynasties with your cantankerous raja to make a match for my fool of a son in the hope that if I bred eastern wolf with Red March ass the promise of my line might out once more in a third generation.”

“But you tested him, your highness. He doesn’t have what you hoped for. He’s a sensitive boy and it took so long for him to recover. . Is it really necessary for him-”

“The Lady Blue has thought him important enough to send assassins after. Perhaps she has seen in her crystals and mirrors something that my sister missed in her own examination.”

“Assassins?”

“Three so far, two this month. My sister saw them coming, and they were stopped. Not without cost though. The Lady Blue has dangerous individuals in her employ.”

“But-”

“This is the long game, Nia. The future burns and those who might save us are children or have yet to be born. In many futures the Ancraths are the key. Either the emperor comes from their line or finds his throne because of the deeds of that house. They carry change with them, these Ancraths, and change is needed. The future-sworn agree that two Ancraths are required-working together. The rest is harder to see.”

“I know nothing of Ancrath. And my son isn’t some piece to move on your gaming board!” Mother’s anger surfaces now. If the Red Queen scares her she isn’t letting it show. She is the daughter of a king. At night she sings me old songs from her homeland, of marble palaces set with jewels, where peacocks strut and beyond the gates lie tigers and spice. “Jalan is not your toy, any more than I’m some broodmare you bought at market. My father is-”

“That’s exactly what you are, my dear. Your royal father sold you west. Raja Varma took my rubies and silver rather than pay your weight in gold as dowry to some local satrap in order that he might overlook the taint in you that I so value. And I paid the price because in many futures your child stands at the right hand of the emperor, laying waste his enemies and restoring him to the throne.”

“You-” I take my ear from the door and the thickness of timber reduces the rest to angry but indistinct denial. Some cold dread pulls me from my eavesdropping. Now it turns me toward the archway and the stairs beyond, just as if a hand had settled upon my neck and steered me, icy fingered.

She stands upon the topmost step, bone-thin, bone-white, the dead skin around her mouth wrinkled into some awful smile. I can’t tell what colour her eyes might be, only that one is blind and the other a drowning pool. The sun splashes across the floor, the wall, the chairs, but the archway where she stands is so deep in shadow she might almost be a trick of the light.

I run. In this we are in accord, the boy and I. One swift kick sends the chair skittering across the flagstones. I chase it and when it stops I’m up and climbing, fear boosting me so that I gain the seat in one stride, the back in the next, and as it topples I launch toward the window. I’ve not been in the west spire before but I’ve been in the east. The young Jalan assumes they are the same. I pray it.

I’ve learned to fear a lot of things as I grew. Most things perhaps. Heights though, they still thrill me. I hang on to the stonework as I swing through the window, feet searching for the ledge that should be down and to the left. The boy doesn’t look to check but slides lower, letting the window’s edge slip through his hands. He lets go and a moment later his boots find purchase. We stand flattened to the outer wall, the windowsill above our head, arms wide to embrace the stones, a three-inch ledge supporting us.

By degrees I circle round to the gargoyle, twin to the ugly demon that watches the realm from the side of the east spire, just below the highest window. There are a series of such demons set in a descending spiral on both spires, all of the same design but as individual as people, each with its twin in the corresponding spot on the other spire. I know their faces better than I know those of my small tribe of cousins. My fingers tremble but it’s the fear of the blind-eye woman that puts the tremor there rather than of the fall beneath me.

I drop from ledge to gargoyle, slide around horns and barbs to reach the supporting ledge, circle to the next, drop again. This is how I discovered the old man in the tower-only then I was climbing upward, and nearly a year younger. It’s a wonder I didn’t die.

Great-uncle Garyus lives, or is kept, in the east spire. When I first climbed there I was too young to understand the danger. And besides, the spires were made for climbing. There can be few towers in the empire with so many handholds, so much ornamentation placed at convenient intervals. It had seemed like an invitation. And even at an early age escape obsessed me. If the guards and nurses at the Roma Hall took their eye off me for more than a second I was off, running, hiding, climbing, learning all the ways out, all the ways in. Any high window drew me. Except the one in the west spire-that always looked like a devouring mouth, just waiting for me to clamber in.

I reach the palace roof and scamper up the tiled slope, over the serrations of the crest, and down toward the east spire. The dark slates are burning hot, scorching my hands. I try to keep my arms and legs clear, sliding on my arse, feeling the heat even through my trousers. Sweat-slick palms lose traction on the slate. I slide faster with nothing to grip, jolting my spine. A misjudged effort to slow myself turns me sideways and in a heartbeat I’m tumbling, rolling down the roof toward the drop. Arms flail, the world blurs, I’m screaming.

• • •

Thump. Something hard stopped my tumble, taking away in one painful crunch all the momentum the slope thrust upon me. The impact wrapped me around the immovable object that arrested my fall, and I lay there moaning. Somehow I’d become entangled in an old blanket-a damp old blanket-and it seemed to be raining.

“Jal!” A man shouting.

“Jal!” Another man, closer.

I moaned a little louder, though not much. My lungs had yet to refill after being so rudely emptied of air. Seconds later hands found me, pulling the wrappings from around my head. I found myself staring up at Snorri’s face, framed by dripping black hair, with trees rising on all sides, terrifyingly tall and stark against a grey sky that seemed too bright.

“Whu,” I managed. It seemed sufficient to convey my feelings.

“The trolls dropped you.” Tuttugu, head thrusting into view, obscuring the sky, wet ginger hair dripping around a concerned expression. “Luckily you hit a tree.”

I puzzled this new definition of “lucky.”

“Did I fall off the roof?” I still wasn’t really following the conversation. Tuttugu looked confused. “You’ve lost weight,” I told him. Perhaps not relevant to the situation, but it was certainly true that the road’s hardships had stripped a few pounds from the man.

The Vikings exchanged a glance. “Let’s get him back up,” Snorri said.

With a distinct lack of tenderness they unwrapped me from the tree. A tall conifer with sparse branches-others like it dotted the slope. Snorri hefted me to my feet, gasping as he straightened, as if it pained him. He looped my arm over his shoulder and helped me up toward a ridge maybe fifty feet above us. The troll column stood there, black and watching, Gorgoth at the front, Kara to the rear where Snorri angled me. It looked to be late evening with the shadows thickening toward night. Hennan watched from the back of a troll as we drew close. It seemed they had taken to passing him about their number. It hadn’t struck me before that although there were both he-trolls and she-trolls in our merry band they hadn’t a child amongst them.

The cold rain started to clear my head and I remembered the slap Kara had given me. By the time we reached her I felt exhausted. “What happened?” I asked, aiming the question at anyone listening.

“Hit a bump and you tumbled out.” Tuttugu gestured toward what appeared to be a crude travois laid down on the trail.

“Can’t see a bump myself,” Snorri said. “Trolls dragged you for four days. Probably thought they could tip you out and nobody would notice.”

Kara stepped closer and started to squeeze bits of me through my tunic. They all hurt. “You’re fine,” she said, looking slightly apologetic. She wiped at some graze on my cheek with a piece of cloth smelling of lemons.

“Ouch!” I tried to push her hand away but she proved persistent. “I was dreaming again. . What the hell kind of spell did you put on me, völva?”

Kara frowned and put her cloth away, stuffing it into a little leather pouch. “It’s a simple enough working. I’ve never seen it have this much effect on someone. I. . I don’t know.” Her frown deepened and she shook her head. “I guess the Silent Sister had her reasons for choosing you as Snorri’s partner to hold her magic. You must have an affinity for it, or a susceptibility. I could test you tonight. .”

“You can keep that orichalcum stuff away from me is what you can do.” I flomped down on the heap of bracken covering the network of bark strips that joined the travois poles. “I’ve had enough of witches. North, south, young, old, I don’t care. I’m swearing off them.” I put my head back, spitting out the rain. “Let’s go!” I saw the smallest smile twitch across Kara’s lips at that, in defiance of her will, and to my surprise the trolls bent to their task, dragging me along as the whole column resumed its trek.

For a few minutes I lay with eyes closed, struggling to recapture the dream. The word “assassin” had been in the air, perhaps the key took that memory from me and unlocked a might-have-been, perhaps Taproot’s condolences for my mother had been balanced on rumours of the three visiting murderers that the Red Queen buried. Dreams though, like sleep, are elusive when you’re hunting them, and sneak upon you when you’re not. After a while the rain splattering my face became irksome and I sat up, wiping my face.

“Four days?” I looked from Snorri to Tuttugu, tramping along behind the trolls. “How come I didn’t soil my-” Glancing down I discovered I wasn’t wearing my old trousers but instead some sort of rough kilt. “Oh.”

“Hungry?” Snorri fished out some strips of dried meat and held them toward me.

I rubbed my stomach. “Not for that.” But I took them anyway and started to chew, discovering within moments that “hungry” was too small a word to cover it. It takes a lot of chewing to get through dried meat, so that kept me busy for a while. I call it meat rather than beef or pork or venison, because once it’s been adulterated against decay it’s really not possible to say what animal died to put it in your hand. Probably a donkey. The taste is similar to leather, of the kind that’s been worn as a shoe for several hot weeks. The texture is too. “Any more?”

• • •

“So where are we?”

I’d feigned weakness all night and planned to carry on doing so as long as the trolls would drag me. The travois was hardly a royal carriage but it beat walking. Now though as dawn broke, and the trolls spread out through the forest to hunt, and Snorri hung an oiled cloth between the branches to keep off the worst of the weather, I started to take more of an interest in proceedings.

“Central Gelleth.” Kara squatted down beside me. Tuttugu was sitting on a log nearby, tending a small fire above which a cauldron of stew simmered, hanging from an iron tripod. “According to Gorgoth you can plot a path from one side of the country to the other that never leaves the forests. A good thing too. The land’s in uproar, marauding army units everywhere, levies summoned by a dozen nobles all battling away. There’s been some kind of disaster around Mount Honas-they say the duke’s dead and all his armies burned. .”

“Mount Honas?” I’d never heard of it. But I knew the duke was a relative of mine, albeit distant. “Burned, you say? Damn fool of him to go poking around a volcano!”

“It’s not a volcano. His castle was built on it. Some kind of ancient weapon blew the mountain apart. Huge areas of forest to the north have been incinerated and miles beyond that trees are dying. While you were sleeping we spent two days walking through dead trees. Gorgoth said it’s Jorg Ancrath’s work.”

“Christ.” I remembered when Queen Sareth set me up to challenge the little bastard to a duel. Only he wasn’t so little after all, a six-foot stone-cold murderer, fourteen going on forty. “How long until we reach Rhone?”

“Less than a week. The town of Deedorf’s just ten miles off. We’re making good progress.”

“Mmm.” In truth I wasn’t that interested in where we were, what really concerned me was how far we had to go to reach civilization. One wet forest was very much like the next, be it haunted by Thurtan peasants hunting truffles, Gelleth charcoal men, Rhone loggers, or the charmingly rustic Red March foresters. They could all go hang as far as I was concerned. “This curse you put on me-”

“This enchantment you begged me to work,” interrupted Kara. “Yes. What about it?”

“I was close. Very close. Just before those trolls tried to kill me. .” I lowered my voice and became serious. “I dreamed of things I didn’t remember, but now I do. And I got close to the day she died. The summer when I turned eight. I might even have been dreaming of the actual day.” I took Kara’s hand, she flinched but let me hold her. “How do I get back to it? I need to finish this.” I can’t deny that the thought that I might sleep my way across the whole of Gelleth had occurred. Even better, I might then slumber another two weeks as Snorri and Tuttugu dragged me south through Rhone, and not wake until the Norsemen delivered me to the gates of Vermillion. With luck I might pass the entire excursion off as a nightmare and never think of it again. But those hopes aside-the desire to know the truth about my mother’s death drove me, the need to lay to rest the lies Loki’s key had infected me with. The thing had set a curse upon me and I would know no peace until the itch had been scratched-the boil lanced.

Kara bit her lip, vertical furrows appearing between her eyebrows. It made her look much younger. “Blood is the trigger.”

I lifted a hand to ward her off. “You don’t have to hit me again!”

“Bite your tongue.”

“What?”

“Bite your tongue.”

I tried but it’s not easy to deliberately hurt yourself. “I canth geth any bluth,” I told her, tongue trapped painfully between my teeth.

“Bite it!” Kara shook her head, despairing of me. Without warning she reached up and knocked my chin.

“Jesu that hurt!” I had a hand to my mouth, fingers reaching in to check my tongue was still attached. They came away scarlet and I could do nothing but stare at them, the colour filling my vision and my mind.

• • •

For a moment I don’t know where I am or why my mouth aches. I crashed into the eastern spire feet first and everything went grey. My mouth hurts and when I take my hand from it crimson drips from my fingers. I must have bitten my tongue in the impact-an ungentle arrival but a kinder greeting than I would have got from the ground had I gone over the edge of the roof.

The need to get away from the blind-eye woman proves more pressing than the need to moan and groan, so I wipe my hands off and get to my feet. Sweaty, tired, and too hot I begin the climb to Garyus’s window. In later years I often took the stairs, particularly if the weather proved inclement. But even in the months before I left the city with Snorri, when I found time between rising in the afternoon and setting out into Vermillion with my band of reprobates in search of sin, I’d scale the spire once in a while. Old habits are hard to break and in any event I like to keep my hand in. When a lady invites you from her bedroom window it’s good to know how to climb.

Arms trembling with fatigue, tunic sweat-soaked and torn, I haul myself through the window to Garyus’s landing. Sometimes an attendant waits there but today it lies deserted, the door to his chamber standing ajar. My ungainly collapse through the window has not gone without notice. I hear Garyus’s cough and then,

“A young prince or an incompetent assassin? Best show yourself in either way.” Words from a thick tongue, hard to understand at first but I’ve learned the knack.

I step in through the narrow gap, nose wrinkling at the faint stink. There’s always an air of bedpans here though the breeze thins it. Over the years I came to understand it as more honest than the perfumes of court. Lies smell sweet-the truth often stinks.

Garyus is propped up in his bed, lit by sunlight through a small high window, a jug and goblet on the table beside him. He turns his misshapen head toward me. It looks as if it were pumped too full of brains, his skull a tuberous root vegetable, swelling above his brow, thin hair seeking purchase on shiny slopes.

“Why Prince Jalan!” He fakes surprise. Garyus has never once objected to me climbing his tower, though juggling scorpions would be a safer pastime. I think perhaps a man who has never walked, never held control over his own ups and downs, doesn’t understand the danger of the fall in the same visceral way that grips any watcher seeing another hanging by fingertips.

“I’m running away,” Jally announces.

Garyus raises a brow at that. “I’m afraid you’ve come to a dead end, my prince.”

“The Red Queen is after me,” Jally says, glancing back at the doorway. He half expects to see the dead white face of blind-eye woman peering through the gap.

“Hmmm.” Garyus struggles a little further up his pillows, arms too thin and too twisted to make the job easy. “A subject shouldn’t run from his queen, Jalan.” He regards me for a moment, eyes wide and watery, each iris a deep and calming brown. He fixes me with a shrewd look, as if he’s seen past the child to the man lurking inside. “And perhaps you do too much running away? Hey now?”

“She made Mother bring me to the other tower. The one where the witch lives. Said she was going to let her touch me again.” Jally shudders and I flinch inside him-we both remember the Sister’s hand settling upon ours. Paper and bones.

A frown, upon the deformity of Garyus’s forehead, quick then gone. The smile returns to his lips. “I’m honoured that you should seek sanctuary with me, my prince, but I’m just an old man, bound to his bed in the Poor Palace. I’ve no say in the doings of the queen or of witches in towers. .”

Jally opens his mouth and finds no suitable words. Somehow, deep down, his opinion and expectations of the man before him are totally at odds with the facts clearly on display. In the years that follow this, although I call on Garyus most months, that faith in him erodes into pity, until by the time I reach twenty I consider my visits a kindness, some secret duty that a last shred of decency binds me to. By the end it was the act of visiting that made me feel better about myself. At the start it was Garyus himself. Somewhere along the way I stopped listening to what he said and started listening to my pride. Even so, it was only ever in his presence, as now, that I saw myself unfiltered by self-deception. As I grew older the effect wore off more quickly, so that at the end any epiphany would have faded to vague discomfort before I’d made it back across the plaza to the Roma Hall. Even so, perhaps it was those moments of clarity, more than anything, that kept drawing me there.

“You should go back, Prince Jalan. The queen may be a scary old lady but she won’t allow harm to come to her grandson, will she now? And the Silent Sister. . well, neither of us please the eye, so don’t judge our hearts by our hide. She sees too much and perhaps it twists her way of understanding what you and I see, but there’s a purpose to her, and-”

“Is she good?” Jally asks. I’ve felt the question building behind his lips. He knows she isn’t and wants to hear if Garyus will lie.

“Well, don’t children ask the most complicated questions?” Lips wetted with a thick tongue. “She’s better than the alternative. Does that make sense? The word ‘good’ is like the word ‘big.’ Is a rock big? Who knows. Is this particular rock big? Ask the ant, ask the whale, both have different answers, both are right.”

“Is Grandmother good?” A whisper. Jally is too young for these answers. He listens to the tone of Garyus’s voice, watches his eyes.

“Your grandmother is fighting a war, Jalan. She’s been fighting it all her life.”

“Who against?” Jally’s noticed no war. He watches the soldiers drill and march, parade on high days and holy days. He knows Scorron is the enemy but we don’t fight them any more. .

“A thousand years ago the Builders put a slope under us all, Jalan.” A woman’s voice behind me, old but strong. “The world’s sliding toward a fall. Some of us have been enjoying the ride too much to worry about that drop, or they think there will be something for them at the bottom of it. Others want to undo the deed that set us sliding in the first place. That’s the war.”

For a moment I think of that hot roof slipping beneath me, the desperate scrabbling at the tiles as the edge rushed toward me, the relief when I managed to steer into the east spire. Had she seen all that? I don’t want to ask if she plans for us all to fall.

I make a slow turn. The Red Queen fills the doorway, her gown a deep crimson, bone spars rising above her shoulders to spread a fan of the material behind her. A necklace of jet sets stark black shapes across her chest, diamonds and rectangles. She looks old, but tough, like a rock that has weathered countless storms. There’s no kindness in her eyes. I can see Mother behind her, winded by the stairs, tiny in comparison, and Nanna Willow with her.

“Come, Jalan.” My grandmother beckons me, turning to leave. She doesn’t offer her hand.

“Use a lighter touch,” Garyus says. He coughs, thick with phlegm, tries to rise, then flails an arm at a shelf on the wall opposite. “The copper box.”

Grandmother steps into the room. “It’s a crude measure at best.”

I stand gaping, amazed that the Red Queen would let an old cripple in the Poor Palace address her so.

“It says enough to tell you if the boy needs closer inspection.” Garyus waves at the shelf again.

Grandmother gives a curt nod and Nanna Willow hurries to the box. It’s small, only just big enough to fit my fist in, no lock or latch, embossed with thorn patterns.

“Only what’s inside,” Garyus directs.

Nanna Willow opens it-schnick-it makes a satisfying sound as the lid comes free. She stands without motion for a moment, her back to us, and when she turns her eyes are bright, almost as if she were on the edge of tears, perhaps struck by some old memory at once both bitter and sweet. In her hands the box is open and a glow escapes, visible as her body casts it into shadow.

“The blinds, if you wouldn’t mind.” Garyus looks toward my mother who seems more surprised than the queen at being set tasks by this stranger, but after a moment’s hesitation she goes to use the long stick beside the shelf to draw the cloth across the high window. The room is plunged into a half-light. Nanna Willow tips the contents of the box into her hand, closes the lid, and replaces it on the shelf. In her palm is some piece of shaped silver, a solid cone with little runes incised around it. The whole thing glows like a coal from the fire but with a whiter light, and the runes burn.

“If you could let your son hold the orichalcum, Princess Nia,” Garyus asks. In the shifting glow of the metal cone his face becomes something monstrous, but no worse than the gargoyles that supported me in my climb.

Mother takes the orichalcum from Nanna Willow’s hand and immediately the glow becomes brighter, more white, though shifting as if waves were rippling through it. She holds it at arm’s length as if it might explode and brings it to me, passing Garyus in his bed. The glow becomes momentarily stronger still as she nears him. Grandmother steps back when Mother approaches us.

“Here, Jally. It won’t hurt you.” Mother holds the cone out to me, her thumb on the base, the point against her forefinger. I’m not convinced. The way she keeps it from her body suggests it might bite.

I take it despite my misgivings, and as I do the thing ignites, too bright to look at. I turn my head away, almost dropping the cone, and in my effort not to look I stab myself with the sharp end behind the knuckle. Keeping my gaze averted I now see the cone’s illumination as light and shadow on the walls. When Nanna Willow held it the glow was a steady thing but now it’s as if I hold a hooded lantern spinning on a cord, sweeping a beam of brilliance across the walls, throwing first the queen’s face into sharp relief, then Mother’s, leaving Grandmother in darkness.

“Set it on the table, Jalan,” Garyus says. “On this plate.” And so I do.

The light dies from it immediately, leaving only a faint glow, and the runes still burning bright as if carved through onto some hot place where the sun dazzles on desert sands.

“Unstable.” Grandmother steps closer, bending in to see. Despite their interest both she and Garyus are careful not to touch the orichalcum. “Conflicted.”

Unbidden, Nanna Willow comes to turn the plate, rotating the orichalcum so the queen can see all the runes, seven in total.

“Brave. Cowardly. Generous. Selfish. It’s almost as if he were two people. .” Grandmother shakes her head, turning to look at me as if I were some unsatisfactory meal set before her.

“His character is not the issue,” Garyus tells her. “Jalan lacks the stability needed for training, and yes he’s strong, but to fill the role my sister saw for Nia’s child would require an extraordinary talent, something that might be pitted against the likes of Corion, or Sageous, Kelem or Skilfar. The Blue Lady is simply misled. Perhaps she has lost too many reflections and her mind has broken.”

Mother comes and sets her hand to my hair, a brief touch as she takes the cone and returns it to the box on the shelf.

“Perhaps you’re right.” A low rumble from the Red Queen that sounds more like a threat than an admission. “Take the boy, Nia. Keep close guard on him though.”

And as easily as that we’re dismissed.

“What’s an assassin?” Jally asks before reaching the stairs.

• • •

For a moment I glimpsed branches, lattice-worked across a bright sky, sliding past. A sense of bodies moving around me, a face leaning in, indistinct.

• • •

“Bite your tongue.”

I look up from the crimson carpet. “Sorry, Mama.”

“Queen Alica is your sovereign and you must never speak ill of her, Jally.” Mother kneels to be on a level with me.

“She’s mean,” I say. Or rather, I said it fifteen years ago and now I remember the moment, the feeling of the word, my mother still above me though kneeling, disapproval painted on her face, trying not to smile.

“Sometimes a queen has to be. . hard, Jally. Ruling a land is difficult. The gods know I have a trouble enough getting three young boys through each day.” The gods. Sometimes Mother forgets herself. Father says there is only one God, but then that’s his job. Grandmother must have staked a lot by the bloodlines to match her cardinal to a heathen, converted from her many gods, glorious in their variety of form and virtue, to our singular invisible deity. How much did that dispensation from Roma cost the treasury I wonder? Father may have a cathedral and a fat book full of God’s own wisdom, but Jally likes Mother’s stories better, told in a soft voice by his bedside. She places a kiss on my forehead and stands again.

We’re back in the Roma Hall, in one of the galleries on the first floor. The north gallery, by the slant of the sun through its tall windows. These have glass, dozens of small panes of Attar glass leaded together, each with a faint green hue. When I was very young I called it the Green Sky Room.

“What’s wrong with your hand, Mama?” She’s standing with her right hand in her own shadow and it looks wrong. . a touch too bright. She looks down and quickly folds her arms, a guilty motion. Jally stares up at her and I watch. She’s the same woman that I see in my locket. Not much more than thirty and seeming younger, long dark hair, dark eyes, beautiful. The picture I have is by a very skilled artist but somehow it doesn’t capture her. It’s only when these memories flow through me that I remember how far she travelled to be my mother, how alone she must have felt in a strange land. Grandmother may have picked Mother for her blood but whatever heritage she carried in her veins it made little impact on my appearance or that of my brothers. She may have darkened the gold of our hair but to look at us there’s nothing of the Indus to see. The blond comes from Gabron, Grandmother’s third husband, or from her father or grandfather, Gholloths one and two, passed down to our father-though he hides it beneath a cardinal’s hat often as not, along with his bald spot-and on down to us. “Your hand looks. . different.”

“Nothing’s wrong with it, Jally. Let’s get you back to Nanna Odette.”

Where her fingers can be glimpsed behind the other arm I can see the glow, more pronounced now.

“Stealing is bad,” Jally says. I suppose it’s true-though I wouldn’t let it stop me-but I can’t see the relevance.

“It’s borrowing.” Mother brings her hand out and opens it. The orichalcum is glowing in her palm, brighter than it was in Garyus’s room, the light more steady. “But you’re right, Jally, it was wrong not to ask.” She leans forward. “Can you give it back to him and not say where you got it? He won’t be cross with you.” She looks worried and that makes Jally afraid. He nods slowly, reaching out to take it.

“I won’t say, Mama.” He says it in a solemn tone, confusion filling him. He’s sad but he doesn’t know why. I could tell him that he’s seen for the first time his mother do wrong, his mother be afraid and without certainty. It’s a hurt every child must suffer as they grow.

Mother shakes her head, keeping the orichalcum in her grasp. “A moment.” She turns away from me, goes toward the doorway that opens onto a chamber I call the Star Room, and steps inside. I follow to the threshold, peering through the crack in the door that she failed to close properly. She has her back to me. From the motion of her arm I can see she is moving her hand down from her chest to her belly. The glow gets brighter, throwing black shadows in all directions, brighter still, and suddenly it’s a glare, like a flash of lightning, painting the whole room with an intensity that allows no colour. Mother drops the orichalcum cone with a shriek and I burst in through the door after her. As I run around her to discover what she’s hiding I see she has both hands folded over her stomach, one atop the other. Tears are running from eyes screwed tight.

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.

• • •

It’s dark now. Cold. Big hands lifted me.

“I’ll kill him myself!” It came out as a whisper though I’d tried to shout it.

“Kara! He’s waking up!” Snorri’s voice.

I opened my eyes. They felt sore. The sky above us lay deepest purple, shading into night.

“I’ll kill the fucker.” Someone must have given me acid to drink-each word hurt.

“Who are you and what have you done with Jalan Kendeth?” Snorri loomed across me grinning, thrusting a water flask at me.

I would have hit him but my arms had no strength, none of me did.

“H-how long?” I asked.

“More than a week.” Kara moved in looking concerned, holding the orichalcum up to inspect my face. She stared into each eye, lifting my brows with her thumb to make them wide.

“Give me that!” I managed to get my hand on hers and with a frown she let me take the metal bead.

“Odin!” Tuttugu just arriving with an armload of deadfall dropped it to shield his eyes. Hennan hid behind him. The orichalcum pulsed and guttered in my grip, lancing brilliant beams out into the night and sweeping them randomly across the nearby tree-line, sending strange bright shapes sliding across the grass. I dropped it and let my arm fall.

“It was true. .” Something reached up along the rawness of my throat and choked me so I could say no more. Instead I rolled to the side, face to the ground, buried in my arm. Young Jally’s emotion still filled me-the little boy I didn’t know any more-he still watched Mother’s eyes, glazed and unseeing, and the sorrow of it, the red hurt, just flooded me, bursting my chest, so much misery I hadn’t anywhere to hide it. I couldn’t remember ever knowing a feeling so deep and so terrible, leaving no room for air.

Kara’s hands found my shoulders. “Get more wood, Tutt. Snorri help him. Take the boy.”

“But-” Snorri began.

“Do it!”

At last I could draw breath and hauled it in with a shuddering sob. Snorri and Tuttugu hurried away, Hennan trailing after.

“Jesus!” I hit the ground hard as my strength allowed. “Make this stop.”

Kara demonstrated a völva’s wisdom by not saying anything for the longest time.

Great emotion, it turns out, is a fire, and like a fire it needs fuel. Unfed it dies down to a hot and banked glow, ready to ignite again but leaving space for other matters. When Snorri and Tuttugu finally returned with half the forest piled in their arms, the night lay dark enough to hide the shame of my red eyes.

I found myself painfully thirsty and drained the water flask I’d been given. Snorri and Tuttugu set to work on the fire and preparing food. I saw Snorri anew now, understanding perhaps for the first time the kind of hurts he must have been carrying within him the whole time that we’d journeyed together. I understood in part what lay behind the man I’d looked down on in the blood-pits, what lay behind his “bring a bigger bear.”

I drew a deep breath. “Where are the trolls?” I noticed the absence of that pungent fox-stink of theirs rather than the lack of menacing giants looming on all sides.

“Renar Highlands.” Snorri broke a branch and fed it into the fire. “We said good-bye to Gorgoth two nights back.”

“Which puts us in. .?”

“Rhone. The province of Aperleon, ten miles south of the ruins of Compere.”

I sniffed, imagining I could smell the ashes of that city. “I’ve got to kill him.”

Snorri and Tuttugu looked up, faces painted with firelight. “Who?”

“Edris Dean,” I said, aware that a desire for revenge-a need-would prove a great inconvenience to a professional coward like myself. An inconvenience on the scale of a poker player afflicted by the compulsion to grin broadly every time he turns up an ace.

“Edris Dean needs killing right enough. I’m with you there.” Snorri turned to face me, hidden in shadow now with his back to the fire. “But did it take two weeks of sleeping on the matter to reach that conclusion? He’s tried to kill you twice already. And me.”

Snorri knew I’d learned something in my dreaming-this was him asking how much I’d tell him. I rubbed my nose on my sleeve and sniffed again. The aroma of Tuttugu’s stew reached me along with the realization of just how ravenous I was. They must have fed me something while I was dragged along all those days, but whatever it was it wasn’t enough. Even so, I pushed the hunger aside, met Snorri’s gaze.

Tuttugu spoke first. “Dean’s only tried to kill me the once and I’d be happy to push him off a cliff.” He stirred the stew. “Why does Jal need a new reason to be angry? The man’s already attacked him two times.”

“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.”