The Liar's Key (The Red Queen's War #2)(82)

I hear a distant cry and as my head rolls to the side I see a huge guardsman tumble past Edris, his arm spurting blood where the assassin’s blade has cut him as he sidestepped. It’s Robbin, one of Mother’s favourites, a veteran of wars before I was born—perhaps before she was born. Edris moves to finish him but the man sweeps the blow aside with his longsword, bellowing, and launches his own attack. The sound is terrifying, the crash of blades, staccato footsteps thudding, harsh breaths rasped in. I can’t track the flickering swords. It’s growing dim, the sounds more faint. I meet Mother’s eyes. They’re dark and glassy. She doesn’t see me. Her hand is open, reaching for me in her last moment, the orichalcum cone sent spinning by a kick as the men fight and vanishing beneath a long couch against the far wall.

Over Mother’s head I see Edris is already carrying a wound in his side, something he earned on the way in. Now the tip of Robbin’s blade opens his cheek to the bone, painting his face scarlet. Edris repays the wild blow with a chop deep into the meat of Robbin’s thigh, just above the knee. The man staggers but doesn’t fall. Hop-stepping to stand between Edris on one side and my mother and me on the other, though we must both look dead. In fact I think we are. I hear faint shouts in the distance. Edris spits blood and shoots a disgusted look at Robbin, his glance falls quickly to the bodies on the floor. Decided, he spins on a heel and is out of the door with remarkable swiftness.

It’s dark now. Cold. Big hands lift me up but it’s all so far away.

? ? ?

It’s dark now. Cold. Big hands lifted me.

“I’ll kill him myself!” It came out as a whisper though I’d tried to shout it.

“Kara! He’s waking up!” Snorri’s voice.

I opened my eyes. They felt sore. The sky above us lay deepest purple, shading into night.

“I’ll kill the f*cker.” Someone must have given me acid to drink—each word hurt.

“Who are you and what have you done with Jalan Kendeth?” Snorri loomed across me grinning, thrusting a water flask at me.

I would have hit him but my arms had no strength, none of me did.

“H-how long?” I asked.

“More than a week.” Kara moved in looking concerned, holding the orichalcum up to inspect my face. She stared into each eye, lifting my brows with her thumb to make them wide.

“Give me that!” I managed to get my hand on hers and with a frown she let me take the metal bead.

“Odin!” Tuttugu just arriving with an armload of deadfall dropped it to shield his eyes. Hennan hid behind him. The orichalcum pulsed and guttered in my grip, lancing brilliant beams out into the night and sweeping them randomly across the nearby tree-line, sending strange bright shapes sliding across the grass. I dropped it and let my arm fall.

“It was true . . .” Something reached up along the rawness of my throat and choked me so I could say no more. Instead I rolled to the side, face to the ground, buried in my arm. Young Jally’s emotion still filled me—the little boy I didn’t know any more—he still watched Mother’s eyes, glazed and unseeing, and the sorrow of it, the red hurt, just flooded me, bursting my chest, so much misery I hadn’t anywhere to hide it. I couldn’t remember ever knowing a feeling so deep and so terrible, leaving no room for air.

Kara’s hands found my shoulders. “Get more wood, Tutt. Snorri help him. Take the boy.”

“But—” Snorri began.

“Do it!”

At last I could draw breath and hauled it in with a shuddering sob. Snorri and Tuttugu hurried away, Hennan trailing after.

“Jesus!” I hit the ground hard as my strength allowed. “Make this stop.”

Kara demonstrated a v?lva’s wisdom by not saying anything for the longest time.

Great emotion, it turns out, is a fire, and like a fire it needs fuel. Unfed it dies down to a hot and banked glow, ready to ignite again but leaving space for other matters. When Snorri and Tuttugu finally returned with half the forest piled in their arms, the night lay dark enough to hide the shame of my red eyes.

I found myself painfully thirsty and drained the water flask I’d been given. Snorri and Tuttugu set to work on the fire and preparing food. I saw Snorri anew now, understanding perhaps for the first time the kind of hurts he must have been carrying within him the whole time that we’d journeyed together. I understood in part what lay behind the man I’d looked down on in the blood-pits, what lay behind his “bring a bigger bear.”

I drew a deep breath. “Where are the trolls?” I noticed the absence of that pungent fox-stink of theirs rather than the lack of menacing giants looming on all sides.

“Renar Highlands.” Snorri broke a branch and fed it into the fire. “We said good-bye to Gorgoth two nights back.”

“Which puts us in . . . ?”

“Rhone. The province of Aperleon, ten miles south of the ruins of Compere.”

I sniffed, imagining I could smell the ashes of that city. “I’ve got to kill him.”

Snorri and Tuttugu looked up, faces painted with firelight. “Who?”

“Edris Dean,” I said, aware that a desire for revenge—a need—would prove a great inconvenience to a professional coward like myself. An inconvenience on the scale of a poker player afflicted by the compulsion to grin broadly every time he turns up an ace.