The Liar's Key

I stood, looking around stupidly, not knowing what to do. The chamber was otherwise empty, a water jug on its side on the floor, broken, a bucket in the corner. And, seeming at odds with its surroundings, a mirror in a wooden frame hung from a chain-hook above the table, a cheap thing and tarnished, but out of place.

Blood from Tuttugu’s cut throat pooled about his head. It had soaked into the red curls of his hair and dripped between the planks to the flagstones beneath. He must have been alive when we entered the Tower . . .

“Hennan!” I spun around.

Edris already had the boy, his sword at his neck, the other hand knotted in his hair. They stood opposite the doorway, against the corridor wall.

“You hid in one of the other cells . . .” I should have been terrified for myself, or angry for Tuttugu, or worried for the child, but somehow none of those emotions would come, as if the part of me that dealt with such things had had enough and gone home for the night.

“So I did.” Edris nodded.

I hadn’t seen a friend dead before. I’d seen dead men aplenty, and some of them I’d liked well enough. Arne Deadeye and the quins I’d liked. But Tuttugu, lowborn and foreign as he was, had become a friend. I could admit that now he was gone.

“Let the boy go.” I lifted my short sword. The steel Edris held to Hennan’s neck was rune-marked and stained with necromancy, its blade considerably longer than mine, but whether that would still prove an advantage in the confines of the corridor I couldn’t say. “Let him go.”

“I will,” Edris nodded, that crooked smile of his on narrow lips, “to be sure. Only first give me this key everyone’s talking about, hey?”

I watched his face, shadows twitching across it. The half-light caught his age, seamed with old scars, grey, but toughened by the years rather than diminished. I set the lantern down, keeping back out of his reach, and fished for the key in my pocket. In the moment my fingers made contact a younger face pulsed across Edris’s, the one he’d worn when he killed my mother, killed my sister inside her, and driven the same blade he held now into my chest. Just for a beat of my heart. Only his eyes remaining unchanged.

I drew the key out, a piece of blackness like the shape of a key, cut through the world into night. The Norse called it Loki’s key, in Christendom they’d name it the Devil’s key, neither title offered anything but tricks, lies, and damnation. The Liar’s key.

Edris’s smile broadened to show teeth. “Give it to the boy. When we’re safely past whatever’s making that racket downstairs I’ll take it from him and let him go.”

To some men the desire for revenge can be a craving that will lead them on through one danger into another—it can consume them, a burning light outshining all others making them blind to danger, deaf to caution. Some call those men brave. I call them fools. I knew myself for a prince of fools to have let my anger lead me into the Tower in the first place, in defiance of all reason. Now, even with Tuttugu dead behind me and his murderer before me, all the anger in me blew out like a flame. The sharp edge at Hennan’s throat captured the light, and my attention. Shadows outlined the tendons stretched taut beneath the skin, the veins, the swell of his neck. I knew what a ruin one quick draw of that steel would make of it. Edris had opened Mother’s throat with the same economy a butcher uses when slaughtering pigs. With the same indifference. With the same edge.

“What’s it to be, Prince Jalan?” Edris pressed the blade closer, hand to the back of the boy’s head to help press him into the cut.

All I wanted was to be out of there, miles away on the back of a good horse, riding for home.

“Here.” I walked toward them with the key held out. “Take it.”

Hennan looked at me with furious eyes, giving me that same mad look Snorri was wont to offer up at the worst possible times.

“Take it!” I made a snarl of the order and stepped out through the doorway. Even so, and with Edris twisting his hand still tighter into the boy’s hair, I didn’t think Hennan was going to accept it. And then he did.

Hennan snatched the key from me and I slumped, relief washing over me. I saw that look come over the boy, eyes widening as the thing fed its poisons into him, opening doors in his mind, filling him with whatever visions and lies it had stored up for Hennan Vale.

“No!” And in one sharp motion Hennan tossed the key past me, into Tuttugu’s cell.

I found myself lunging at Edris, the point of my blade driving at the place his smile had fallen from. He proved quick—damn quick—managing to raise his sword and deflect my thrust. I may have nicked the lobe of his ear as the blow slipped past. Hennan spun away, leaving plenty of hair in Edris’s grip, but the boy slipped, struck his head against the wall and tumbled on to collapse boneless somewhere in the dark length of the corridor.