The Liar's Key (The Red Queen's War #2)(67)

“Long gone.” Snorri found a seat out of the wind. “This old man has slept for centuries, perhaps a thousand years or more.”

“The water’s not deep.” Hennan from further down the inner slope—the first thing he’d had to say all day. Odd when I considered that the defining characteristic of children for me had been how seldom they shut up. He was right though, it looked to be little more than an inch or two of water spread across a huge ice sheet.

“There’s a hole out near the middle.” Snorri pointed.

The reflected light had disguised it but once seen it was hard to know how I’d missed it. A carriage and four horses could have fallen through it.

I remembered Gorgoth’s words. Two fire-sworn disagreed. “Perhaps that’s how the trolls ended the fire-sworns’ argument.” A bucket of cold water to separate two fighting dogs—an entire lakeful to end a battle that cracked the world deeply enough to let us spill out into it from wherever the wrong-mages’ arch had sent us.

The boy started to throw stones out into the water, as boys do. I half wanted to join him, and would have if it had involved less effort. There’s a simple joy in casting a rock into still waters and watching the ripples spread. It’s the thrill of destruction combined with the surety that all will be well again—everything as it was. A stone had fallen into my comfortable existence at court, so large that the waves washed me to the ends of the earth, but perhaps on my return I would find it as before, unchanged and waiting to receive me. Much of what men do in later life is just throwing stones, albeit bigger stones into different ponds.

Snorri sat silent, the blue of his eyes a shade lighter with the reflection of the sky in the lake. He watched the waters, watched the boy, arms folded. The wind reached around the rock he’d set his back to and threw his hair across his face, hiding his expression. I’d seen him step away from Hennan, more than once, leaving his care and safety to Kara or to Tuttugu. But he watched him, every time he thought himself unobserved, he watched him. Perhaps a family man like Snorri couldn’t help but be concerned for an orphan child. Perhaps he thought his care a betrayal of his own lost children. I’d never really seen how family works—not out in the world, without nannies and nurses paid to do the job in place of parents, so I couldn’t say. If I was right it seemed damned inconvenient though and an expensive vulnerability. All those years spent training, all that skill at arms, just to let a little boy get under your guard and weigh you down with his wants.

A few moments later I picked up a loose stone and lobbed it over Hannan’s head, out across the lake. The question was never if I would throw a stone, just when.

? ? ?

We stayed up on the crater rim until the sun began to fall and the wind grew chill. I had to call the boy back from whatever silly games were occupying him at the lakeshore. He’d found a twig somewhere and set it to sail where new melt water had gathered on the ice.

He came running up between us, Snorri staring into the distance across the valleys choked with forest, and me huddled in the blanket that was serving me as a cloak.

“We’re going down already?” He looked disappointed. “I want to stay.”

“We don’t always get what we want,” I said, remembering as the words left my mouth that he didn’t need advice on hardship from me. He’d watched the man who raised him die within moments of our acquaintance. “Here.” I held out a silver crown between two fingers to take his mind off it. “You can have this coin, or you can have the most valuable piece of advice I own, something a wise man once told me and I’ve never shared.”

Snorri looked around at that, taking in the two of us with a raised eyebrow.

“Well?” I asked.

Hennan furrowed his brow, staring at the coin, then at me, then at the coin. “I’ll . . .” He reached out, then pulled his hand back. “I’ll . . . the advice.” He blurted it out as if the words pained him.

I nodded sagely. “Always take the money.”

Hennan looked at me uncomprehending as I stood, pocketing the coin and pulling my blanket tight. Snorri snorted.

“Wait . . . what?” Hennan’s confusion giving way to anger.

Snorri led the way and I followed.

“Always take the money, kid. Bankable advice, that.”

? ? ?

By the time Gorgoth finally reported that the Danes had been spotted entering the forest we were all eager to be on the road again.

We left on a dreary late afternoon with a north wind raking rain across the slopes. The plan was to travel by night on our long journey but the earliest part of the route, down from the Heimrift, lay through lands so sparsely populated that the Danes said that there was no need for concealment. My bet was that our escort just didn’t want their first meeting with a horde of trolls to be in the dark.

Still wearing what we’d escaped the wreck of the Errensa in we wound our way down the black flanks of Halradra toward the pine forests in the valleys below. Snorri kept us at the rear of the column and we counted one hundred and forty of the beasts as they left the caves, hissing at the light. An eerie thing to follow a hundred and more trolls, creatures few men have ever glimpsed even in ones or twos, and fewer men have lived to speak of. We five made more noise than they did, with barely a sound passing between the lot of them. And yet the exodus proved orderly and swift. Kara maintained the creatures must speak together in some manner beyond our hearing, without the need for words. I offered that sheep will form an orderly queue to leave their pen and they’re just dumb animals. A troll at the rear turned his head at that and fixed those wholly black eyes of his upon me. I shut up then.