The Liar's Key

“I can’t wait.” The boat had become a prison, the sea an endless wall. I sat trapped there, with neither space nor answers. Too young she was for the assassin’s blade. I remembered, on the journey north, wiping the soup from my locket and at Snorri’s insistence really seeing it for the first time in years. The scales had fallen from my eyes and I had discovered a treasure. Now I feared what I might see if I looked again at my past—but not looking had ceased to be an option. The key had unlocked the door to memories long buried. Now I had to throw that door wide. “Help me to remember.”

“I have little skill, Prince Jalan.” Kara looked down at her hands, folded in her lap, nails bitten short, fingers callused by ropework. “Find another way . . . Perhaps the key—”

“It’s Loki’s key,” I snapped, filling the words with more harshness than intended. “It’s black with lies. I need to know if what I saw, what I remember, are true memories, or the trickery of some pagan spirit.”

Evening thickened, spreading across the face of the sea, the glow of the swallowed sun faded among the clouded western skies. A fat raindrop struck my hand, another grazed my cheek. Snorri watched us from the prow, huddled in his cloak. Tuttugu sat closer, whittling some piece of driftwood he’d snagged from the water.

“All I know of memory is in the blood,” Kara said. “A man’s blood can tell the secrets of his line. The story of his life lies there, the story of his father too, and his father’s father. But—”

“Let’s do that then. I like a good story, and if it’s about me—all the better!”

“But,” she kept to her thread with the tone that always means the speaker is heading toward “no.” “I am a novice. It takes a lifetime to learn the blood-tongue. Skilfar might show you a day of your choosing, or hunt out some secret held too deep for speaking. My art is less . . . precise.”

“Try?” I used that vulnerable look that makes women melt.

Kara pressed her lips together in a thin line and studied my face. Her eyes, very blue, moved as if I were a book she could read. I saw her pupils dilate. Somehow she was falling for my puppy dog routine. I felt slightly disappointed. I had wanted her to be more . . . magic. Stronger. I’ve found over the years that women want to save me. No matter how bad I am. No matter how bad they see me being—perhaps I’ve cast aside their friends when I’ve had my fun, or cheated with a handful of court wives, a new one each day—if I but show them some small hope that I might be redeemed, many, even some of the cleverest of them, the most moral, the most wise, step into my trap. It seems that the prospect of taming a dangerous reprobate who is unlikely to truly care for them is sweeter honey to some than, say, a strong and moral man like Snorri. Don’t ask me why. It makes no sense to me—I just thank God for making the world this way.

There in the boat though, wanting the truth, wanting for perhaps the first time in my life to know myself, I would rather have been sat beside a woman who could see right through me.

“Please,” I said, widening my eyes. “I know this will help me to be a better man.”

And like that she fell for it. “If you’re sure, Jalan.” She started to rummage in the covered space beneath the bench.

“I am.” I wasn’t sure of much except that the experience was damned unlikely to make me a better man. I was sure though that it was what I wanted, and getting what I want has always been my main priority. Aslaug says it shows strength of character. I forget what Baraqel called it.

“Here!” She pulled out a long case of polished bone from the locker and sat up. A single rune had been burned into the front of the box. It looked familiar.

“Thorns.” Kara set a finger to the rune in answer to the query in my raised eyebrow. “The first thing we’ll be needing is some blood. And for that—a thorn.” She clicked the case open to reveal the longest needle I’d ever seen.

“Ah,” I said, making to get up. “Perhaps we could do this later.” But Snorri and Tuttugu had crowded around now, both snorting as though I were play-acting for their amusement.

The weight of their expectation pressed me back into my seat. “Ha. As if I were scared of a little needle.” I managed a dry laugh. “Have at me, madam witch.”

“I have to say the incantations first.” She offered a small smile and all of a sudden despite the foot-long needle that sat between us, and the fact she’d promised to meet my next advance with a knife to the balls, I found myself wanting her. She hadn’t Astrid’s voluptuousness or Edda’s slender form, or the prettiness of either . . . maybe it was just being forbidden that sparked my lust, but more than that it was the strength in her. Old witches aside, like Skilfar and my grandmother, I’d never met a woman more capable. Like Snorri she had something about her that made it impossible to believe she would ever let you down, ever be afraid, ever run.