The Liar's Key

I glanced up at the sky—still velvet and dusted with stars. “Couldn’t have been more than an hour?” Kara’s spell could have had me on my back for a week. Had she planned it that way? Perhaps I was growing less susceptible. “Two hours?”

Hennan shrugged.

“Come on.” And I snatched the lantern before leading off. The voices of Garyus and the Red Queen followed me, sounding somewhere deep behind my imagination.

I hurried along, taking turnings at random, unhooding the lantern only when some or other obstacle presented itself—the damaged hood leaked enough illumination the rest of the time to stop me running into walls. I kept my eyes on the patch of light before me—whenever I glanced at the dark I saw the lines of Garyus’s room written across it. He seemed less damaged back then but surely he knew no king so crooked as he ever sat upon a throne. Still, children hope in ways adults find hard to imagine. They carry their dreams before them, fragile, in both arms, waiting for the world to trip them.

I ran, trailing other people’s lives and dreams, and each time I slowed they caught up, surging around me to fill the night so that I had to wade through the images, through scents, memories of a touch, struggling all the while not to be dragged down beneath them and cast into one of those endless sleeps that had plagued my journey south.

In time the visions lessened and we came to broader streets where the occasional person still came and went despite the hour. The morning couldn’t be very far away and I felt I could ward off the memories that my blood had sparked, at least until I had to sleep—what dreams might come then I couldn’t say. Sageous would have to fight Kara’s magic if he wanted a place on stage. I pulled Hennan to the side of the road and sat with my back against the wall, slumped.

“We’ll wait for dawn.” I didn’t say what we’d do at dawn. Run away probably, but at least it sounded like a plan.

•   •   •

I could have taken Hennan’s twenty doubles off him. The fact that it was my gold in the first place only made it an easier thing to justify. I could have taken the boy’s money, left Kara senseless in the alley, bought a horse and ridden for the hills. I should have done that. I should have taken him by the ankles and shaken my florins out of him. Instead dawn found me staring across the width of Patrician Street at the high bronze doors of the Frauds’ Tower, and the silvered steel bulk of the clockwork soldier standing guard before it.

Morning made its slow advance down the street. I’m sure a tutor once told me that day breaks at a thousand miles an hour, but it always seems to creep when I’m watching. The high points on the soldier’s armour caught the first light and seemed to burn with it.

“There. I told you. Nothing we can do.” I took Hennan’s shoulder and pulled him back into the shadows of the side street. He shot me a sour look. He still hadn’t forgiven me for taking him by the ankles and trying to shake my florins out of him. I’d failed on two counts. Firstly, he’d proved heavier than I’d imagined and I got very little shaking done, and most of that with his head on the ground. Secondly, he’d had the foresight to hide all the gold. He’d probably stashed it when I fell into the vision-sleep. I explained to him how terribly mistrustful this was and how it wasn’t only an insult to my royal person but by extension to the whole of Red March. The little bastard just clamped his mouth shut and ignored all reason. Some people might say I only had myself to blame, what with teaching him to cheat at cards, advising him to always take the money, and sharing with him my policy on disposable friends. It’s not the kind of education that builds trust in the tutor. Of course I’d say to those people, “shut the hell up,” and also that it was Snorri’s fault for filling the boy’s head with nonsense about never abandoning a comrade and for making that ridiculous last stand with Hennan’s grandfather back in Osheim. In any event the boy’d hidden the money and I was hardly going to twist his arm until he told me where he’d put it. Well . . . I did twist his arm, but not far enough to get him to tell me where my gold was. Hennan had turned out to be tougher than I’d expected and whilst I might twist his arm, I didn’t want to break it. Or at least not unless I was sure it’d get me my answer. And of that I wasn’t sure.

In the end we’d come to a compromise. I agreed to take him to Frauds’ Tower and show him just how impossible what he was asking would be. In exchange he would, when convinced, recover the money and we’d buy a horse then ride it to death getting to Vermillion in the hope of getting the Red Queen’s aid in freeing Snorri and Tuttugu.