The Liar's Key (The Red Queen's War #2)(36)

“And where do I stand, v?lva?” Snorri kept his voice respectful, and in truth he had always respected the wisdom of the v?lvas, the rune-sisters as some called them. Witches of the north as Jal had it. Though they stood at odds with the priests of Odin and of Thor the rune-sisters always gave advice that seemed at its core more honest, darker, filled with doubt in place of hubris. Of course the v?lvas Snorri had dealt with in the past were neither so famed nor so unsettling as Skilfar. Some said she was mother to them all.

Skilfar looked to the woman beside her, “Kara?”

The woman, a northerner with maybe thirty summers on her, frowned. She fixed Snorri with a disconcerting stare and ran the iron runes at the ends of her braids through her fingers. They marked her as wise beyond her years.

“He stands in shadow,” she said. “And in light.” Her frown deepened. “Past death and loss. He sees the world . . . through a keyhole?” She shook her head, runes clattering.

Skilfar pursed her lips. “He’s a difficult one, I grant you.” She took another scroll from the pile beside her, tight-wrapped and ending in caps of carved whale tooth. “First dark-sworn and clinging to a lost hope. Now light-sworn and holding to a worse one. And carrying something.” She set a bony hand to her narrow and withered chest. “An omen. A legend. Something made of belief.”

“I’m looking for the door, v?lva.” Snorri found his own hand at his chest, resting above the key. “But I don’t know where it lies.”

“Show me what you have, warrior.” Skilfar tapped her breastbone.

Snorri watched her a moment. Hardly a kindly grandmother, but far more human than the creature he and Jal had found amid her army of plasteek warriors the previous year. Which was her true face? he wondered. Maybe neither of them. Maybe her dog was neither the monster he’d first seen nor the toy that seemed to sit now by the tunnel mouth. When a man can’t trust his eyes what does he fall back on . . . and what does the choice he makes reveal about him? Lacking answers, Snorri drew forth the key on the thong that hung about his neck. It made slow rotations in the space before his eyes, from some angles reflecting the world, from others dark and consuming. Did Loki really fashion this? Had the hands of a god touched what he had touched? And if so, what lies had the trickster left there, and what truths?

Three slow claps, sounding to the tempo of the key’s revolutions. “Extraordinary.” Skilfar shook her head. “I underestimated our Silent Sister. You actually did it. And tweaked the nose of this upstart ‘king of the dead.’”

“Do you know where the door is?” Snorri almost saw their faces in the flashes between reflection and absorption, Emy’s eye glimpsed in the moment, as if through a closing crack. The fire of Freja’s hair. “I need to know.” He could taste the wrongness. He knew the trap, and that he reached to close it around himself. But he saw them, felt them . . . his children. No man could step away. “I need to know.” His voice rough with the need.

“That is a door that should not be opened.” Skilfar watched him, neither kind nor cruel. “Nothing good will come of it.”

“It’s my choice,” he said, not sure if it was or not.

“The Silent Sister cracked the world to fill you and that foolish prince with magic. Magic enough to thwart even the unborn. Time was when you put a crack in the world it would heal quickly, like a scratch on skin. Now such wounds fester. Any crack is apt to grow. To spread. The world has become thin. Pressed on too many sides. The wise can feel it. The wise fear it.

“Given time enough, and peace, the wound you bear will heal. Time still heals all wounds, for now. And the scars left behind are our legacy of remembrance. But pick at it and it will fester and consume you. This is true both of the crack the Sister ran through your marrow, and of the hurt the Dead King gave.”

Snorri noted she didn’t speak of the assassin’s cut. He didn’t trust her enough to volunteer the information, and instead set his teeth against the growing ache of it and the southward tug that seemed to pull on him by each rib.

“Give me the key and I will set it beyond men. The spirits you have borne, both the dark and the light, are of a piece. Like fire and ice they are no friends of our kind. They exist at the extremes, where madness dwells. Man treads the centre line and when he wanders from it, he falls. You carry an avatar of light now but he lies as sweetly as the darkness.”

“Baraqel told me to destroy the key. To give it to you. To do anything but use it.” Snorri had endured the same speech dawn after dawn.

“The dark then, whatever face it took to persuade you, you must not believe it.”

“Aslaug cautioned me against the key. She said Loki bled lies, breathed them, and his tricks would lay creation in ruins given but an inch. Her father would feed all darkness to the wyrm just as soon as break the light. Anything to upset the balance and drown the world in chaos.”

“This is truly your will, warrior? Yours alone?” Skilfar leaned forward in her chair now, her gaze a shiver that travelled the length of him. “Tell me—I will know the truth of it.” The age of her wavered in her voice, a frightening weight of years that sounded little different from pain. “Tell me.”

Snorri set the key back against his chest. “I am Snorri ver Snagason, warrior of the Undoreth. I have lived a Viking’s life, raw and simple, on the shore of the Uulisk. Battle and clan. Farm and family. I was as brave as it was in me to be. As good as I knew. I have been a pawn to powers greater than myself, launched as a weapon, manipulated, lied to. I cannot say that no hand rests on my shoulder even now—but on the sea, in the wild of the evening storm and the calm of morning, I have looked inside, and if this is not true then I know no true thing. I will take this key that I won through battle and blood and loss. I will open death’s door and I will save my children. And if the Dead King or his minions come against me I will sow their ruin with the axe of my fathers.”