The Liar's Key (The Red Queen's War #2)(124)

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When Racso returned he carried a reed basket containing three crusty loaves, a wedge of blue cheese, and half a dozen apples of a good size, bursting with the summer. He also brought with him a barrel on wheels from which he doled out ladles of water to those who could pay. Water exchanged hands for the clippings of a copper, for a left shoe, for one of the tin mugs into which he was pouring—that man took his ration in his cupped hands—and for promises of company from several of the younger women. I had to pay over a penny for two cups and their contents, my earlier order not having made mention of water.

“Give me two apples first,” I said. And Racso rolled them over to the bars.

I tossed them to the two largest and least dead of our inmates, Artemis and Antonio, men I’d selected and negotiated with before. They cleared a space and kept the others back while I took the remaining food.

“Behave yourselves and there’ll be crusts to share out. Give me any shit and jaws will get broken.” It’s easy enough to be the hard man when you’re fit, fed, and hale and the foe are skin and bones.

Backs to the wall, bread between us, cups on the floor and the candle burning at our feet, Hennan and I began to eat. The boy dipped his bread in the water to ease it past his sore gums. I still couldn’t pin an age on him and he’d never had a clear idea of it himself. Today I settled on twelve. He looked older starved. All of them did. Ancients with young men’s fears. Old women with children like tiny old men. A mother with breasts as withered as any crone, the baby in her arms black with dirt and unmoving. I choked down what food I could and threw the rest at them, cursing the lot for beggars and thieves. Fear stole my appetite.

Hennan recovered faster than I thought possible, wrinkling his face at the cheese as he wolfed it down.

“Steady—you’ll be sick.” I say “recovered” . . . he remained a skeleton dressed in skin, but the light returned to his eyes, the words to his tongue.

“Why did you come?” he asked.

I’d been asking myself the same thing. “I’m an idiot.”

“How come they locked you in? You’ve got money.”

“I owe more than I’ve got.” That had been the story of my adult life. A short enough tale but one that had never got me locked up in hell before. “In debtors’ prisons you own what you carry in. They call it bankruptcy.”

“How are we getting out?” He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and reached for his water. Across the cell fights were breaking out over the loaf I’d thrown.

“I don’t know.” Honesty always pains me. Telling it to a child who considers you a hero puts any number of barbs on those words, making them harder than you’d expect to spit out. “You shouldn’t have run.” Recriminations are useless but it takes a better man than me not to kick someone close when they’re down. “You were in the palace of Vermillion for God’s sake! And now . . .”

“I wanted to be with the others . . .” He kept his eyes on the apple in his hand, red with his blood where he’d bitten it.

“Yes, but you didn’t find them did you?” Snorri and the others were back in Vermillion enjoying my grandmother’s hospitality—the second time for Snorri. There was no way they could have beaten the Red March riders to the border and I’d seen the riders returning, so they must have been captured.

“I did find them.” So quiet I almost missed it.

“What? Where? I’ve been here weeks and not a whisper of them.”

“Kara’s here. In this prison.”

“She is not!” I couldn’t believe that. How could this place hold a v?lva? I imagined her watching from the bars of the cell opposite, one more grey face among the rest, and found I didn’t want to pursue the thought. “Where?”

“She’s serving at the front.” Hennan put the bread down, a hand clutching the distended ache of his belly. “She doesn’t know I’m here.”

“But you know she’s here?” I raised a sceptical brow.

“News travels front to back, not the other way. They say Lady Connagio has a heathen maid with white hair and white skin who can do charms that cure warts. Came in the same time as me.”

“God’s sake!” A thousand questions fought to exit my mouth at once, but the biggest one won. “Where’s the key?”

Hennan shuffled closer and spoke lower, the bread wars were coming to an end with the victors pitting wobbly teeth against the crusts and the losers licking wounds.

“Can’t talk about it. That’s what we’re in for.”





TWENTY-EIGHT


True to his word Hennan wouldn’t tell me about the key. Every question I hissed at him about it met with silence. I exhausted myself quizzing him but the child kept his lips clamped tight and in the end I fell into a doze, unsure whether the sun was still shining outside or not.

? ? ?

I dreamed of a book, surely for the first time ever. I’ve long maintained that nothing of interest ever took place between the covers of a book, excepting the cardinal’s whisky and pornography of course, but here I was turning page after page in my dream. Even in my dream I didn’t want to read the thing, but some compulsion kept me going as if hunting for a particular page. I tried focusing on the writing but the letters carried no meaning, sliding this way and that like spiders who’ve forgotten how to master so many legs.