The Liar's Key (The Red Queen's War #2)(150)

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“Throw it higher,” Kara urged as the iron hook narrowly missed my head on its second descent.

I paused and favoured her with a narrow-eyed stare, remembering I’d not forgiven her for breaking my nose. “Throw it higher? That’s the wisdom of the v?lvas speaking is it? All those years of arcane study . . .”

I threw it higher on the third attempt and snagged the wall. Climbing a thin and unknotted rope turned out to be a lot harder than I had imagined and I spent the best part of five minutes jumping, lunging, and straining, without getting more than a yard off the ground. Finally I got the hang of it, at least partially. Driven mostly by embarrassment I managed to shin up the rope to the top of the wall as two toothless elders and a growing crowd of local urchins watched on. Kara and the boy followed with no discernible effort, Kara with the spear, Gungnir, strapped to her back. Snorri brought up the rear, his wound making his climb an awkward one, though only once, when he slipped, did he snarl out in pain. I found getting down the other side proved both easier and faster. Also it hurt more at the bottom.

Once gathered outside at the base of the walls we hurried away across the dusty and hard-baked earth toward the margins of the nearest olive grove and lost ourselves among the trees.

“Well?” Kara spoke first. We’d followed the gradient down through the dappled shade to come in sight of the Umber, the river without which the city behind us would be nothing more than badlands flecked with mesquite bushes and picked over by scrawny goats.

“Well what?” I asked, swatting at the flies, already too hot and too sweaty.

“Do you know the way?”

“Hennan knows the backpaths. I came by the Roma Road.” Before long much of the Umbertide guard would be fanning out around the northern stretch of the Roma Road. It wouldn’t matter to Snorri. He was heading south, to the sour lands where Kelem made his home in a salty gash in the earth known as the Crptipa Mine.

“Do you know the way to the mine?”

“To Kelem’s mine? Why the hell would I? I’m in Umbertide because my uncle sent me to attend to some banking affairs not to find some wizened magus and . . . and beg him to let me do something incredibly stupid.” I actually did know the way, at least roughly, but given I’d no interest in going there I kept the fact to myself.

“Snorri?” Hennan looked up from his own misery at the Norseman in his. Seeing such a sombre look on so young a face reminded me that Tuttugu lay dead—a fact I’d been trying to push to the back of my mind into the place where things get forgotten.

“I know the way.” Snorri looked up, eyes red, jaw set, scary as hell. “I’ll have the key now—you can stay or go.”

I studied the broad palm he held out toward me, and pursed my lips. “I didn’t break Hennan out of one prison and storm another single-handed just to give you a key that we earned, all three of us, me, you, and Tuttugu. I came in to save your lives. And given that I could have just walked off with the key instead some might say I’ve got a pretty good claim to owning it now. So the least you can do is ask rather than demand, and perhaps show a little f*cking gratitude.” I regretted the profanity the moment it left my mouth. Partly because a prince of the realm doesn’t want to be seen lowering himself to gutter talk with commoners but mainly because of the sunlight burning on the edge of the axe fixed across his back in a leather harness I’d recently paid for.

A dangerous silence stretched between us, slowly tightening every muscle I had in anticipation of being imminently hit. Snorri reached out and I flinched so violently that I nearly struck his hand away. He took hold of my shoulder, deep blue eyes finding mine, and sighed.

“I’m sorry, Jal. I don’t know how you got to us but it took guts, and skill. I thank you for it. Tuttugu will be telling the tale over the tables at Valhalla. The north won’t forget it. You are a true friend, and I was wrong to speak to you like that.”

We stood there a minute, him with his head bowed, looming above me, hand heavy on my shoulder, me puffing up with pride. Some men can just lift you with a few words. Snorri was one of them, and although I knew how it worked, and had seen it before, it still worked.

I put the key into the open palm of his other hand and his fist closed about it. The sense of loss was immediate, even though I knew the thing to be ten kinds of poison.

“I have to do this,” he said, sounding for all the world as if he actually did.

I tried to fathom that one. He had to take the key to the man who had sent assassins to kill him for it? He had to take the key to the man who wanted it badly enough to reach out more than a thousand miles for it? He had to enter the lair of a deadly mage and face ridiculous odds . . . and the “prize” was to open a door into death and start another suicidal quest that couldn’t possibly give him what he wanted?

“You really don’t.”

“I do. And there’s no man I’d rather have with me than you, Jalan, Prince of Red March. But this is my journey and I won’t ask anyone to share the danger. I took you north against my enemies—I’m not going to lead you into Hel.”

Dammit if I didn’t find my mouth opening to contradict him. I managed to strangle off a defiant declaration that I’d stand by him against all the hordes of the underworld.

“Look. Kelem wants you there. He’s been pulling you south with that wound in your side. He blocked you from the door in Eridruin’s Cave and would have shut any others you went to. You know he’s reeling you in. Christ, you’re only out of that tower because of the dreams!”