The Liar's Key (The Red Queen's War #2)(48)

Snorri raised a brow at that but said nothing.

“No going anywhere for me. Ever. I’m not leaving Red March again. Not if I live to be a hundred. Hell, I doubt I’ll set foot outside the walls of Vermillion again once I’m through the gates.” Righteous indignation swelled, driven past the bounds of my usual stoic good humour. I blame my fever and the fact of being sat in a grassy hollow, soaked, cold, exhausted, days from the nearest warm bed, flagon of ale, or hot meal. I kicked at the sod. “Fucking Empire. Fucking oceans. Who needs any of it? And now we’re in f*cking Osheim. That’s just great. Fuck dark-sworn or light-sworn. I want some future-sworn. Could have seen that storm coming and got out of the way.”

“The Builders watched the weather from above.” Kara tilted a finger toward the heavens. “They could tell what storms would come but they still couldn’t stop the storm that was big enough to sweep them all away.”

“Every fortune-teller I ever met was a faker. First thing you should do to a soothsayer is poke them in the eye and say, ‘Didn’t see that coming, did you?’” My mood still ran sour. I couldn’t believe we’d been delivered up on the shores of a place where all my childhood nightmares ran riot.

“What will happen when I let go?” Kara held out one of her tiny eggs between thumb and forefinger, positioning her hand above a stone breaking through the sod between us.

“You’ll mess up this fine stone,” I said.

“Now you’re seeing the future.” A grin. She looked younger when she smiled. “And if you lunged forward and tried to stop me?”

My lips echoed her smile. I quite liked that idea. “I don’t know. Should we try?”

“And that’s the curse of the future-sworn. None of us can see past our own actions—not us, not the future-sworn, not the Silent Sister, not Luntar, not the Watcher of Parn, none of them.” Kara offered me the egg.

“Raw?” The sun had broken through and I was starting to feel human enough to eat. I couldn’t remember when I’d last had a good meal. Even so, my appetite hadn’t returned to the degree where raw gull’s egg looked like something I wanted oozing over my tongue. “No?” Kara shrugged, and putting her head back she broke the egg into her mouth.

Watching her it was hard to imagine that Skilfar or the Silent Sister might have been like this once—young women overburdened with cleverness and ambition, setting foot on the path to power.

“I wonder what it is that the Silent Sister sees with that blind eye of hers. Things she can’t even speak of.”

Kara wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “And if she moves to change them . . . she can no longer see how they will end. So how terrible does the future have to look before you reach in to that clear pool to change it and have the silt rise up all around your hand so you’re as blind as everyone else—knowing it won’t settle again until the day, the hour, the moment of the thing you most fear?”

“I’d change everything bad that ever looked like happening to me.” I could think of a long list of things I would have avoided, with “leaving Red March” right at the top of it. Or maybe getting into debt with Maeres Allus should be at the top, because leaving Red March did actually save me from a horrific death at his torturer’s hands. But then getting into debt had been such fun . . . hard to imagine all those years living as a pauper . . . I suppose I could have pawned Mother’s locket . . . My head started to spin. “Well . . . I suppose . . . It’s a complicated business.”

“And if you changed those bad things how would you know that the change wouldn’t lead to worse things that would now wait for you unseen in the years to come?” Kara ate another of the eggs and handed the rest to Snorri. They looked lost in the wideness of his palm.

“Hmmm. Perhaps the evil old witch got what she deserved after all.” It sounded as though looking into the future might be as much of a pain as looking into the past. The moment was clearly the place to be. Except this moment which was wet and cold.

? ? ?

An hour later Tuttugu returned carrying a makeshift sailcloth sack into which he’d loaded his salvage. There wasn’t much of it, and nothing to eat save a tub of butter that had already been rancid when purchased in Haargfjord more than a week back.

“We should go!” Snorri slapped his thighs and stood.

“Better than starving here, I suppose.” I set off, unburdened with sword, pack, rations, or any other defence against danger and privation other than the knife at my hip. A fine knife it must be said, also purchased in Haargfjord, a brutal bit of sharp iron, intended for intimidation, and not yet used in any more deadly endeavour than peeling fruit.

Snorri and Tuttugu followed in my wake.

“Where are you going?” Kara remained where we’d left her.

“Um.” I squinted at the sun. “South . . . east-ish?”

“Why?”

“I . . .” It had seemed right. It occurred to me as I considered the question that something good waited for us in the direction I’d led off in. Something very good. We should probably hurry.

“It’s the draw of the Wheel,” she said.

Snorri frowned. Tuttugu ferreted about in his beard, hunting inspiration.

“Crap.” Nanna Willow had told us this one a dozen times. Nanna Willow had come to us from my grandmother’s personal staff, a stick of a woman, dry as bones, and not given to taking any shit from unruly princes. When the mood took her she’d tell us fairy tales—some so dark they’d even have Martus wanting a nightlight and a kiss to ward off the spirits. And practically every victim in the abattoir of Nanna Willow’s bedtime tales was led into Osheim by the draw of the Wheel.