Red Queen's War: The Liar's Key Part 19

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 orichalc.u.m to Snorri so we wouldn't break our ankles, but even in his hands the light made little impression on the dark and empty s.p.a.ces 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 astonis.h.i.+ngly 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 pa.s.sing 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 s.p.a.ces 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 volva'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 pa.s.sage of years that have redesigned me root and stem.

I wipe my mouth, or rather the boy wipes his, and his hand comes away b.l.o.o.d.y. 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, pa.s.sing 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 pa.s.s. 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 n.o.ble 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 pa.s.s 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 bra.s.s, 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 a.s.s 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 a.s.sa.s.sins after. Perhaps she has seen in her crystals and mirrors something that my sister missed in her own examination."

"a.s.sa.s.sins?"

"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 peac.o.c.ks 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 a.s.sumes 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 a.r.s.e, 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 hards.h.i.+ps 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 spa.r.s.e 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 pa.s.sing 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 b.u.mp and you tumbled out." Tuttugu gestured toward what appeared to be a crude travois laid down on the trail.

"Can't see a b.u.mp myself," Snorri said. "Trolls dragged you for four days. Probably thought they could tip you out and n.o.body 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 h.e.l.l kind of spell did you put on me, volva?"

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 orichalc.u.m 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 "a.s.sa.s.sin" 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 n.o.bles 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? d.a.m.n 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.d 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."