The Liar's Key

“Why Prince Jalan!” He fakes surprise. Garyus has never once objected to me climbing his tower, though juggling scorpions would be a safer pastime. I think perhaps a man who has never walked, never held control over his own ups and downs, doesn’t understand the danger of the fall in the same visceral way that grips any watcher seeing another hanging by fingertips.

“I’m running away,” Jally announces.

Garyus raises a brow at that. “I’m afraid you’ve come to a dead end, my prince.”

“The Red Queen is after me,” Jally says, glancing back at the doorway. He half expects to see the dead white face of blind-eye woman peering through the gap.

“Hmmm.” Garyus struggles a little further up his pillows, arms too thin and too twisted to make the job easy. “A subject shouldn’t run from his queen, Jalan.” He regards me for a moment, eyes wide and watery, each iris a deep and calming brown. He fixes me with a shrewd look, as if he’s seen past the child to the man lurking inside. “And perhaps you do too much running away? Hey now?”

“She made Mother bring me to the other tower. The one where the witch lives. Said she was going to let her touch me again.” Jally shudders and I flinch inside him—we both remember the Sister’s hand settling upon ours. Paper and bones.

A frown, upon the deformity of Garyus’s forehead, quick then gone. The smile returns to his lips. “I’m honoured that you should seek sanctuary with me, my prince, but I’m just an old man, bound to his bed in the Poor Palace. I’ve no say in the doings of the queen or of witches in towers . . .”

Jally opens his mouth and finds no suitable words. Somehow, deep down, his opinion and expectations of the man before him are totally at odds with the facts clearly on display. In the years that follow this, although I call on Garyus most months, that faith in him erodes into pity, until by the time I reach twenty I consider my visits a kindness, some secret duty that a last shred of decency binds me to. By the end it was the act of visiting that made me feel better about myself. At the start it was Garyus himself. Somewhere along the way I stopped listening to what he said and started listening to my pride. Even so, it was only ever in his presence, as now, that I saw myself unfiltered by self-deception. As I grew older the effect wore off more quickly, so that at the end any epiphany would have faded to vague discomfort before I’d made it back across the plaza to the Roma Hall. Even so, perhaps it was those moments of clarity, more than anything, that kept drawing me there.

“You should go back, Prince Jalan. The queen may be a scary old lady but she won’t allow harm to come to her grandson, will she now? And the Silent Sister . . . well, neither of us please the eye, so don’t judge our hearts by our hide. She sees too much and perhaps it twists her way of understanding what you and I see, but there’s a purpose to her, and—”

“Is she good?” Jally asks. I’ve felt the question building behind his lips. He knows she isn’t and wants to hear if Garyus will lie.

“Well, don’t children ask the most complicated questions?” Lips wetted with a thick tongue. “She’s better than the alternative. Does that make sense? The word ‘good’ is like the word ‘big.’ Is a rock big? Who knows. Is this particular rock big? Ask the ant, ask the whale, both have different answers, both are right.”

“Is Grandmother good?” A whisper. Jally is too young for these answers. He listens to the tone of Garyus’s voice, watches his eyes.

“Your grandmother is fighting a war, Jalan. She’s been fighting it all her life.”

“Who against?” Jally’s noticed no war. He watches the soldiers drill and march, parade on high days and holy days. He knows Scorron is the enemy but we don’t fight them any more . . .

“A thousand years ago the Builders put a slope under us all, Jalan.” A woman’s voice behind me, old but strong. “The world’s sliding toward a fall. Some of us have been enjoying the ride too much to worry about that drop, or they think there will be something for them at the bottom of it. Others want to undo the deed that set us sliding in the first place. That’s the war.”

For a moment I think of that hot roof slipping beneath me, the desperate scrabbling at the tiles as the edge rushed toward me, the relief when I managed to steer into the east spire. Had she seen all that? I don’t want to ask if she plans for us all to fall.

I make a slow turn. The Red Queen fills the doorway, her gown a deep crimson, bone spars rising above her shoulders to spread a fan of the material behind her. A necklace of jet sets stark black shapes across her chest, diamonds and rectangles. She looks old, but tough, like a rock that has weathered countless storms. There’s no kindness in her eyes. I can see Mother behind her, winded by the stairs, tiny in comparison, and Nanna Willow with her.