The Liar's Key

I looked up at her, a yard above me on the dais, and met her gaze. Alica sat there—the same girl from the Castle of Ameroth, who opened the siege with what she called the mercy killing of her youngest sister and ended it bathed in blood amid the ruin of her enemy—with a little help from her eldest sister of course. True, the passage of five decades and more beneath the Red March sun had sunk her flesh about her bones, scorched her skin into tight wrinkles, but the same ruthless calculation lay behind her eyes. I would get nothing from her if she thought me weak. Nothing if she caught scent of my fear.

“Lost your tongue again, child?” Grandmother narrowed her eyes, thin lips thinning still further into a line of disapproval.

I swallowed and tried to remember every hurt I’d suffered since the night I left the city, each hardship, each unnecessary moment of terror.

“I’ve been where my great aunt sent me.” I swung round to point at the Silent Sister by the entrance. She raised her brows at that and offered me a mirthless grin, her blind eye almost glowing in the shadows of her face.

“Hmmm.” A rumble deep in the Red Queen’s throat. “Out.” She waved at the people behind me.

Lord, lady, merchant, or baron, they knew well enough not to protest or delay but shuffled out, meek beneath her stare.

The doors closed behind them, the clang like a funeral bell.

“You have good eyes, boy.” She stared into the palm of her hand, resting it on the throne’s arm.

I had spent a lifetime dreading the throne room, keen on every occasion I attended the place to be gone from it as soon as possible and with as little fuss as could be managed. But now, though every nerve clamoured for a chance to run, I had come of my own volition and provoked the Red Queen to private audience. I’d pointed out the Silent Sister and spoken her secret. Sweat poured off me, trickling down across my ribs, but I remembered how Mother had stood up to the old woman, and how she died an hour or two later, not through Grandmother’s wrath, but through her failure.

“Yes. I have good eyes.” I looked at her but she kept her gaze upon her palm as if reading something there among the lines. “Good enough to have watched you in the castle of Ameroth, with Ullamere.”

The queen raised her eyebrows as if taken aback by my boldness, then snorted. “That story is sung in taverns across the land. They even sing it in Slov!”

“I saw you in the chamber beneath the keep,” I said. “Among the best of your troops.”

She shrugged. “The keep is all that stands. Any fool could tell you the survivors gathered there.”

“I saw the machine and heard it speak. I saw the time-star burning blue.”

She closed her hand into a fist. “And who showed you these things? Skilfar perhaps? Mirrored in ice?”

“I showed them to me. They are written in my blood.” I turned to glance back at the old witch by the door. She hadn’t moved but her smile had left her. “And I saw my sister die. She had all the magic you were hunting for in me . . . but the Lady Blue stole that chance from you. Edris Dean stole it. Why haven’t you killed him for that? He works for the Dead King now . . . why don’t you reach out and . . .” I made a twisting motion with my hands. “Why doesn’t she?” I pointed to the Silent Sister, only to find her gone.

“Edris Dean still works for the Blue Lady,” the queen said. “As do many others.”

“But the Dead King—”

“The Dead King is like a forest fire—the Lady Blue encourages the flames this way or that for her own purposes. The Hundred think this war is being fought for Empire but those of us who stand behind it know there are greater things at stake.”

I tried to consider larger stakes than the whole of Empire. And failed. I wasn’t even interested in the empire, broken or unbroken. All I wanted was for the world to roll on its merry way just as it had been doing for my entire life, and to provide me with a careless middle age and comfortable dotage which I could continue to misspend just as I’d been misspending my youth. I didn’t even want to be king of Red March despite my moaning. Just give me fifty thousand in gold, a mansion of my own, and some racehorses and I wouldn’t bother anyone. I would graduate from a rich lecherous young man to a stinking-rich lecherous old man, with a pretty and accommodating young wife and perhaps a handful of blond sons to occupy some pretty and accommodating young nursemaids. And when age claimed me I’d climb into the bottle just like dear Papa. I had only one stain on the glowing imaginary horizon of my future . . .