The Liar's Key (The Red Queen's War #2)(62)

It lasts for what seems an age but what must be only minutes to the army around us. Alica has killed several hundred men before she needs to parry a blow. She stands scarlet head to toe, blood arcing from her blade, flying from her hair as she turns. Blood paints her trail through the camp. Even now she must seem a blur, moving with inhuman speed and leaving dead men toppling in her wake.

The army of Red March, those few hundred survivors from Ameroth Keep, start to regroup as the Builders’ magic fades. Alica and Ullamere lead them, aiming for any strong formations still holding station about the ruined castle, and slicing them apart as they make a circuit.

In the last battle my grandmother leads her four hundred survivors against an army of two thousand Zagre axemen, who have been held back in reserve. The men of Red March are still a touch faster than men should be, a handful of them twice or three times the speed of normal humans, all of them blood-soaked and gore-stained. The Zagrans break early and scatter. It’s the last resistance. The siege is broken.

Grandmother’s troops stand crimson, silent save for the patter of blood dripping from them. She paces a few yards away, ahead of the men, climbing some fallen chunk of wall stone in two steps. She stands there, panting, her breath slowly returning to her, her armour running scarlet as she surveys her warriors. The burning ruins of her castle form her background, with the defiance of Ameroth Keep tall among the collapse of the second wall.

Ullamere Contaph steps forward. He looks up at her, raises his broadsword, and although she is only a princess it is “Red Queen!” that he roars.

“Red Queen!” The army take up the shout. “Red Queen.” Weapons raised. “Red Queen.” Their voices are thick with emotion, though whether sorrow, triumph, or both and more, I cannot say.





FIFTEEN


“Wake up!”

“What?”

“Wake up!” Kara’s voice.

“No,” I told her. “It’s still dark and I’m comfortable.” Well, almost. Something I was lying on kept digging into my back.

A hand shook me. Hard.

I yawned and sat up. “I know why they call my grandmother the Red Queen.”

“Because she’s Queen of Red March.” Tuttugu, somewhere behind me.

“You’d think so. But no.” I touched the ground around me. Unyielding, damp, gritty. “Why does it smell so bad?” I rubbed my aching spine and patted the ground behind me, finding the long hard object I’d been lying on. “What the hell is this thing—”

A sudden light showed me Kara’s face, Tuttugu’s hinted at dimly, further back, and some larger shape in the deep shadow that must be Snorri. The light came from Kara’s hand—a glowing bead of silvery metal.

“Orichalcum,” I said, shaping my mouth around the word. Suddenly I remembered. “The arch!” I glanced around and saw nothing but darkness. “Where the hell are we?”

“I don’t know,” Kara said, which was disheartening, given that she was the one who is supposed to know things.

“Nowhere good,” Tuttugu offered. Spoken in the dark it sounded true. “Where did you get the spear?”

I looked down and found that the object I’d been lying on was indeed a spear. Kerwcjz’s spear. I’d taken it from the warlord in my dream . . . or in Grandmother’s memories. “How the hell did I—”

“I don’t know where we are. The works of the wrong-mages are beyond me,” Kara said. “But without guidance we should have come out as close as possible—we’ve fallen back somewhere where the world grows thin. Somewhere cracked by recent magic. Powerful magic.”

“Isn’t that going to take us closer to the Wheel?” Recent powerful magic didn’t sound good. “Why isn’t it ever ‘somewhere with cheap booze, expensive women, a race track, and good views of the river’?”

“The arch is designed to serve the will of the user. I led the way and I was trying to get us out of there . . .”

“Where’s the boy?” I remembered him as the last dregs of dreaming left me and the fear started to settle on my shoulders. “Snorri! Have you seen . . .” The name escaped me. “. . . the boy?”

“Snorri’s not here either,” Tuttugu again—closer to my ear than I’d expected. “I hope he’s with Hennan.”

“But . . .” I was sure I’d seen him. I shook my head, decided the dream must still have had its claws in me. “What is that smell?”

“Trolls,” said Tuttugu quickly.

“You smell trolls every time the wind changes—Snorri told me you’ve never even seen one.” Please don’t let it be trolls. I’d never met one either and didn’t want to. The scars Snorri had showed me from his own encounter told all the story I needed to hear.

Kara moved in closer and we huddled over the glow of the orichalcum, three pale faces illuminated in a sea of darkness. “It sounds as if we’re in a cave,” she said.

“We should get out.” I hoped somebody else would supply the how.

“Before the trolls eat us,” said Tuttugu.

“Shut up about the damn trolls!” Fear raising my voice. The darkness seethed with the bastards now, put there by my imagination—which took some doing since I didn’t know what the things looked like. “Snorri says you wouldn’t know a troll if one—”