The Liar's Key

“Ah.” I backed off into the doorway. All around me the sounds of movement in the cells, the occupants roused by the clash of steel, a muffled bellowing close at hand. “Sorr—”

Edris made to cut off my apology with his sword so I saved my breath for defending. Swordplay on the training ground is one thing, but when an evil bastard is trying to cut bits off you most of that goes out the window. Your mind, at least my mind, remembers almost nothing when soaked in the raw terror of someone doing their level best to kill you. Any memory is done by your muscles which, if they’ve been trained year in year out, with or without much enthusiasm on your part, will make the best they can of what they learned in order to keep you alive.

The sound of sword hammering into sword in close confines is deafening, terrifying. I turned one thrust after the next, backing slowly, yelping when they came too close.

“Take the damn key.” I inserted the gasp into the melee.

Fifteen more years didn’t weigh heavy on Edris. He showed the same quickness and skill that had got the better of my mother’s guard, Robbin, back in the Star Room. It proved all I could do to fend him off. The reach of his long sword meant I’d no chance of getting to him even if I’d had a heartbeat to make any sort of attack.

“I don’t want the damn thing!” I backed through the cell’s doorway and Edris stepped up to it in pursuit, the lantern in the corridor silhouetting him. Mad thoughts yammered at me, rising amid the terror seething through my mind, an insane desire to throw myself on him and rip out his guts—the sorts of notions that get you killed.

There’s a problem with continually stamping down on the least sensible instincts that drive men to recklessly endanger themselves. Even the most reasonable and level-headed of us have only limited space to store such unwanted emotion. You keep putting the stuff away, shoving it to the back of your mind but like an over-full cupboard there comes a point where you try to cram one more thing into it and all of a sudden something snaps, the catch gives, the door bursts open and everything inside spills out on top of you.

“Just let me live!” But even as I said it the red veil I’d been trying to hold back descended. A liquid and fiery joy rose through me and while a tiny voice deep inside me wailed “no” I launched myself at the man who killed my mother.

With the entrance between us Edris’s long sword became a liability, confined between the door jambs. I swept his next thrust aside, pinning his blade to the side of the doorway with my own and smashing my forearm into his face. I felt his nose break. Spinning inside Edris’s reach, keeping his sword pinned until the last moment, I set my back to him and brought the elbow of my sword arm around into the side of his head with all the force I could muster. Without turning, I took my blade in both hands, reversed the point, and stabbed it under my armpit into his chest, grating between his ribs.

I pulled away at Edris’s roar of pain, stumbling into the cell, my sword caught on bone and torn from my grasp. His blade hit the flagstones behind me with a clatter. I stopped myself just short of sprawling over Tuttugu’s remains on the table and turned, hopping on my lead foot, on the edge of balance. Edris Dean stood in the doorway, leaning against one side for support, both hands on the short sword I’d driven into him, low on his chest. Blood ran scarlet over the steel.

“Die, you bastard.” It came out as a whisper. The battle madness had left me as quickly as it came. I coughed and found my voice, putting some royal authority into it. “You killed a princess of the March—you deserve worse than Tuttugu got.” It seemed too easy for him to just die there and slip away. “Be thankful I’m a civilized man . . .” Unkind words might not amount to much after the driving in of a sword but they were all the salt I had to rub in his wound.

Edris watched his blood patter on the floor, in shock at his reversal of fortune. He raised his hands, dripping, and looked up at me, dark crimson welling from his mouth. The fact that he then smiled, showing bloody teeth, rather took the wind from my sails, but I carried on, trying not to let the uncertainty colour my voice. I knew enough about wounds to know the one I’d given him was fatal. “The necromancer who gives you your orders . . . she won’t be pleased. I can’t see your corpse getting a decent burial.” I tried to smile back.

“That.” Edris drew a rattling breath, some of it sucked in around my steel, bubbling blackly. “Was a mistake.”

“Damned right! And the first mistake you made was going up against m—” A horrible thought interrupted me. I realized Edris had me trapped weaponless in the cell . . . “You’re hoping when you die the necromancer is going to stand you up again to finish the job!”