The Liar's Key (The Red Queen's War #2)(145)

I drew the key out, a piece of blackness like the shape of a key, cut through the world into night. The Norse called it Loki’s key, in Christendom they’d name it the Devil’s key, neither title offered anything but tricks, lies, and damnation. The Liar’s key.

Edris’s smile broadened to show teeth. “Give it to the boy. When we’re safely past whatever’s making that racket downstairs I’ll take it from him and let him go.”

To some men the desire for revenge can be a craving that will lead them on through one danger into another—it can consume them, a burning light outshining all others making them blind to danger, deaf to caution. Some call those men brave. I call them fools. I knew myself for a prince of fools to have let my anger lead me into the Tower in the first place, in defiance of all reason. Now, even with Tuttugu dead behind me and his murderer before me, all the anger in me blew out like a flame. The sharp edge at Hennan’s throat captured the light, and my attention. Shadows outlined the tendons stretched taut beneath the skin, the veins, the swell of his neck. I knew what a ruin one quick draw of that steel would make of it. Edris had opened Mother’s throat with the same economy a butcher uses when slaughtering pigs. With the same indifference. With the same edge.

“What’s it to be, Prince Jalan?” Edris pressed the blade closer, hand to the back of the boy’s head to help press him into the cut.

All I wanted was to be out of there, miles away on the back of a good horse, riding for home.

“Here.” I walked toward them with the key held out. “Take it.”

Hennan looked at me with furious eyes, giving me that same mad look Snorri was wont to offer up at the worst possible times.

“Take it!” I made a snarl of the order and stepped out through the doorway. Even so, and with Edris twisting his hand still tighter into the boy’s hair, I didn’t think Hennan was going to accept it. And then he did.

Hennan snatched the key from me and I slumped, relief washing over me. I saw that look come over the boy, eyes widening as the thing fed its poisons into him, opening doors in his mind, filling him with whatever visions and lies it had stored up for Hennan Vale.

“No!” And in one sharp motion Hennan tossed the key past me, into Tuttugu’s cell.

I found myself lunging at Edris, the point of my blade driving at the place his smile had fallen from. He proved quick—damn quick—managing to raise his sword and deflect my thrust. I may have nicked the lobe of his ear as the blow slipped past. Hennan spun away, leaving plenty of hair in Edris’s grip, but the boy slipped, struck his head against the wall and tumbled on to collapse boneless somewhere in the dark length of the corridor.

“Ah.” I backed off into the doorway. All around me the sounds of movement in the cells, the occupants roused by the clash of steel, a muffled bellowing close at hand. “Sorr—”

Edris made to cut off my apology with his sword so I saved my breath for defending. Swordplay on the training ground is one thing, but when an evil bastard is trying to cut bits off you most of that goes out the window. Your mind, at least my mind, remembers almost nothing when soaked in the raw terror of someone doing their level best to kill you. Any memory is done by your muscles which, if they’ve been trained year in year out, with or without much enthusiasm on your part, will make the best they can of what they learned in order to keep you alive.

The sound of sword hammering into sword in close confines is deafening, terrifying. I turned one thrust after the next, backing slowly, yelping when they came too close.

“Take the damn key.” I inserted the gasp into the melee.

Fifteen more years didn’t weigh heavy on Edris. He showed the same quickness and skill that had got the better of my mother’s guard, Robbin, back in the Star Room. It proved all I could do to fend him off. The reach of his long sword meant I’d no chance of getting to him even if I’d had a heartbeat to make any sort of attack.

“I don’t want the damn thing!” I backed through the cell’s doorway and Edris stepped up to it in pursuit, the lantern in the corridor silhouetting him. Mad thoughts yammered at me, rising amid the terror seething through my mind, an insane desire to throw myself on him and rip out his guts—the sorts of notions that get you killed.

There’s a problem with continually stamping down on the least sensible instincts that drive men to recklessly endanger themselves. Even the most reasonable and level-headed of us have only limited space to store such unwanted emotion. You keep putting the stuff away, shoving it to the back of your mind but like an over-full cupboard there comes a point where you try to cram one more thing into it and all of a sudden something snaps, the catch gives, the door bursts open and everything inside spills out on top of you.

“Just let me live!” But even as I said it the red veil I’d been trying to hold back descended. A liquid and fiery joy rose through me and while a tiny voice deep inside me wailed “no” I launched myself at the man who killed my mother.

With the entrance between us Edris’s long sword became a liability, confined between the door jambs. I swept his next thrust aside, pinning his blade to the side of the doorway with my own and smashing my forearm into his face. I felt his nose break. Spinning inside Edris’s reach, keeping his sword pinned until the last moment, I set my back to him and brought the elbow of my sword arm around into the side of his head with all the force I could muster. Without turning, I took my blade in both hands, reversed the point, and stabbed it under my armpit into his chest, grating between his ribs.