The Liar's Key

It’s dark now. Cold. Big hands lifted me.

“I’ll kill him myself!” It came out as a whisper though I’d tried to shout it.

“Kara! He’s waking up!” Snorri’s voice.

I opened my eyes. They felt sore. The sky above us lay deepest purple, shading into night.

“I’ll kill the fucker.” Someone must have given me acid to drink—each word hurt.

“Who are you and what have you done with Jalan Kendeth?” Snorri loomed across me grinning, thrusting a water flask at me.

I would have hit him but my arms had no strength, none of me did.

“H-how long?” I asked.

“More than a week.” Kara moved in looking concerned, holding the orichalcum up to inspect my face. She stared into each eye, lifting my brows with her thumb to make them wide.

“Give me that!” I managed to get my hand on hers and with a frown she let me take the metal bead.

“Odin!” Tuttugu just arriving with an armload of deadfall dropped it to shield his eyes. Hennan hid behind him. The orichalcum pulsed and guttered in my grip, lancing brilliant beams out into the night and sweeping them randomly across the nearby tree-line, sending strange bright shapes sliding across the grass. I dropped it and let my arm fall.

“It was true . . .” Something reached up along the rawness of my throat and choked me so I could say no more. Instead I rolled to the side, face to the ground, buried in my arm. Young Jally’s emotion still filled me—the little boy I didn’t know any more—he still watched Mother’s eyes, glazed and unseeing, and the sorrow of it, the red hurt, just flooded me, bursting my chest, so much misery I hadn’t anywhere to hide it. I couldn’t remember ever knowing a feeling so deep and so terrible, leaving no room for air.

Kara’s hands found my shoulders. “Get more wood, Tutt. Snorri help him. Take the boy.”

“But—” Snorri began.

“Do it!”

At last I could draw breath and hauled it in with a shuddering sob. Snorri and Tuttugu hurried away, Hennan trailing after.

“Jesus!” I hit the ground hard as my strength allowed. “Make this stop.”

Kara demonstrated a völva’s wisdom by not saying anything for the longest time.

Great emotion, it turns out, is a fire, and like a fire it needs fuel. Unfed it dies down to a hot and banked glow, ready to ignite again but leaving space for other matters. When Snorri and Tuttugu finally returned with half the forest piled in their arms, the night lay dark enough to hide the shame of my red eyes.

I found myself painfully thirsty and drained the water flask I’d been given. Snorri and Tuttugu set to work on the fire and preparing food. I saw Snorri anew now, understanding perhaps for the first time the kind of hurts he must have been carrying within him the whole time that we’d journeyed together. I understood in part what lay behind the man I’d looked down on in the blood-pits, what lay behind his “bring a bigger bear.”

I drew a deep breath. “Where are the trolls?” I noticed the absence of that pungent fox-stink of theirs rather than the lack of menacing giants looming on all sides.

“Renar Highlands.” Snorri broke a branch and fed it into the fire. “We said good-bye to Gorgoth two nights back.”

“Which puts us in . . . ?”

“Rhone. The province of Aperleon, ten miles south of the ruins of Compere.”

I sniffed, imagining I could smell the ashes of that city. “I’ve got to kill him.”

Snorri and Tuttugu looked up, faces painted with firelight. “Who?”

“Edris Dean,” I said, aware that a desire for revenge—a need—would prove a great inconvenience to a professional coward like myself. An inconvenience on the scale of a poker player afflicted by the compulsion to grin broadly every time he turns up an ace.

“Edris Dean needs killing right enough. I’m with you there.” Snorri turned to face me, hidden in shadow now with his back to the fire. “But did it take two weeks of sleeping on the matter to reach that conclusion? He’s tried to kill you twice already. And me.”

Snorri knew I’d learned something in my dreaming—this was him asking how much I’d tell him. I rubbed my nose on my sleeve and sniffed again. The aroma of Tuttugu’s stew reached me along with the realization of just how ravenous I was. They must have fed me something while I was dragged along all those days, but whatever it was it wasn’t enough. Even so, I pushed the hunger aside, met Snorri’s gaze.

Tuttugu spoke first. “Dean’s only tried to kill me the once and I’d be happy to push him off a cliff.” He stirred the stew. “Why does Jal need a new reason to be angry? The man’s already attacked him two times.”