The Liar's Key
Our beds were heaps of bracken, heather, and the occasional spiky sprig of gorse, all looking to have been yanked up, roots and all, still with the earth fresh upon them. Dinner predictably was goat, presented raw, and still eyeing us with that faintly surprised expression it wore when the troll ripped its head off. Breakfast was goat too. Also lunch.
I woke before daybreak on the second day and lay unmoving as the predawn began to reach in, blunt-fingered and finding only edges. Time passed and I saw, or thought I saw, amid the greyness, a deeper shadow, sliding toward the lump I took to be Snorri. The gloom seemed to knot about . . . something, concealing it, but leaving enough of a hint to draw my eye. Perhaps if I weren’t dark-sworn I’d have seen nothing. The something, or the nothing, gathered itself as it drew close to Snorri and rose above him, and still I lay, paralysed, not with fear but with the moment, held by it in the way that a waking dream can sometimes trap a man.
Dawn broke, no rays of sun reaching into our cave, only a different quality to the light.
“Knocking.” Snorri sat up, muttering. “I hear knocking.”
And just like that the strangeness left me and I could see nothing more sinister than Snorri, rubbing the sleep from his face, and Kara leaning over him.
“I don’t hear anything.” She shrugged, perhaps a flicker of irritation on her brow. “I need to check those wounds. Today I’ll make a poultice.”
• • •
The morning of that second day Kara trekked down the ashy shoulder of the mountain to a level where plants dared to grow and returned hours later carrying a linen pouch stuffed with various herbs, barks, flowers, and what looked suspiciously like mud. With these she proceeded to treat the wounds our Vikings had sustained, the slice above Snorri’s hip proving the most serious. All I could plead was skinned knees of the sort little boys endure. I probably sustained the injury falling to my knees to plead for mercy or praying to an uncaring God, but to be honest I had no recollection of it. Either way I got no sympathy from Kara who fussed around Snorri’s over-muscled side instead.
Aslaug didn’t return to me that second night either. The first night I’d fallen asleep before sunset and lain so dead to the world it would have taken a full-blown necromancer to have roused me. The second sunset though, when Aslaug didn’t appear, I wondered if Loki’s daughter were still angry about me diving through the wrong-mages’ arch. Since the alternatives had all appeared to end in gruesome death it seemed unreasonable of her to object, but she had been set against it at the time. Temper or no temper it struck me as odd. Aslaug had been so eager to return that first day ashore after being denied my ear for so long by the magics set around Kara’s boat. I chalked it up to “women” and told myself she’d come round in the end. They always do.
In the gloom and boredom of our cave I replayed those memories of my grandmother at Ameroth Castle more than once. In truth, when my mind turned toward the events of the siege’s last day I couldn’t stop the carnage playing out behind my eyes. I wondered once more how I could have managed to avoid the story for so long. But then again I have been accused in the past of being a little self-centred and my only interest in the family’s glorious history was to know where they’d buried the loot. Come to think of it, there was a song about the Red Queen of Ameroth but I’d never paid any real attention to the words . . .
I thought of Grandmother with her long-laid plans, her strange and creeping sister who ran her spell through me and Snorri, and of Skilfar, ice cold and old beyond the lives of men.
“Kara?”
“Yes?”
I tried to find the right words for my question and, failing, settled for using the wrong ones. “Why did you decide to become a witch? You know they all end up weird, yes? Living in caves and talking gibberish while they gut toads . . . scaring honest folk. When did you decide, yes, toad-gutting, that’s the life for me!”
“What would you have done if you hadn’t been born a prince?” She looked up at me, eyes catching the light.
“Well . . . I was . . . destined to be—”
“Forget divine right or whatever excuse your people use—what if you weren’t?”
“I . . . I don’t know. Maybe run a tavern, or raise horses. Something to do with horses.” It seemed a silly question. I was a prince. If I wasn’t then I wouldn’t be me.
“You wouldn’t pick up your sword and carve yourself a throne then? Regardless of your birth?”
“Well, yes of course. That. Obviously. Like I said, I was destined to be a prince.” I’d rather be destined to be a king though. But she had me right—I wouldn’t cut myself out a kingdom, I’d work with horses. Hopefully riding the beasts rather than shovelling their dung. But better wielding a shovel than a sword.