Mark Lawrence - The Liar's key

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.

“I was born to peasant stock, thralls to the Thorgil, the Ice Vikings. I could tell you that I had a hunger to know things, to understand what lies behind what we see, to unlock the secrets that hold one thing to the next. A lot of the young völva apprentices will tell you that kind of thing, and a lot of them mean it. Curiosity. It’s killed more cats than dogs have. But the real reason? For me at least-I’ll tell you honestly, because you should never lie on a mountain. Power, Prince Jalan of Red March. I want to take my own share of what you had given to you with your mother’s milk. There are bad times coming. For all of us. Times when it would be better to be a völva, even if it means being a scary witch in a cave. Better that than a peasant working to scrape a life from the ground, head down, as ignorant of what’s coming as a spring kid is of the farmer’s knife.”

“Ah.” I hadn’t an answer for that. Every royal understands the value of ambitious men, and the danger inherent in them. The courts of the Broken Empire are packed with such. I had half-imagined that different forces drove those who toyed with the fabric of the world and dreamed of strange and frightening futures. . but perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised to find ambition, the simple greed for power, at the bottom of that too.

• • •

By day three I got so bored that I let Snorri talk me into trekking up to the crater a thousand feet above us. He brought the spear, using it as a staff to lean on, and limped along favouring his good hip, setting a pace that I could match for once. The boy came with us, scampering ahead over the rocks.

“A good kid.” Snorri jerked his head toward Hennan, waiting for us up the trail.

“Don’t let the trolls hear you call him a kid. They’ll gobble him up in two bites without even wanting to know who’s trip-trapping over the bridge.” I looked at the boy, hunched and windblown. I supposed he was a good kid. I’d never really had occasion to think of children as good or otherwise, just small and in the way, and remarking loudly about where I was touching their big sister.

We came up through gullies, deep-scored in the black rock. Up between the serrated teeth of the crater rim, and gazed down at a wide and unexpected lake.

“Where’s the fire?” I asked. The lack of smoke rising overhead during our climb had already made me suspicious. I’d missed out on looking down into Beerentoppen’s crater when Edris Dean force-marched me up the damn thing, and frankly I’d been grateful not to have to climb the last hundred yards to the rim. I remembered though that smoke had escaped Beerentoppen, to be scraped away by the wind, trailing south like a bald man’s last wisps of hair. Labouring up Halradra I expected to be rewarded with some fire and brimstone at the very least.

“Long gone.” Snorri found a seat out of the wind. “This old man has slept for centuries, perhaps a thousand years or more.”

“The water’s not deep.” Hennan from further down the inner slope-the first thing he’d had to say all day. Odd when I considered that the defining characteristic of children for me had been how seldom they shut up. He was right though, it looked to be little more than an inch or two of water spread across a huge ice sheet.

“There’s a hole out near the middle.” Snorri pointed.

The reflected light had disguised it but once seen it was hard to know how I’d missed it. A carriage and four horses could have fallen through it.

I remembered Gorgoth’s words. Two fire-sworn disagreed. “Perhaps that’s how the trolls ended the fire-sworns’ argument.” A bucket of cold water to separate two fighting dogs-an entire lakeful to end a battle that cracked the world deeply enough to let us spill out into it from wherever the wrong-mages’ arch had sent us.

The boy started to throw stones out into the water, as boys do. I half wanted to join him, and would have if it had involved less effort. There’s a simple joy in casting a rock into still waters and watching the ripples spread. It’s the thrill of destruction combined with the surety that all will be well again-everything as it was. A stone had fallen into my comfortable existence at court, so large that the waves washed me to the ends of the earth, but perhaps on my return I would find it as before, unchanged and waiting to receive me. Much of what men do in later life is just throwing stones, albeit bigger stones into different ponds.

Snorri sat silent, the blue of his eyes a shade lighter with the reflection of the sky in the lake. He watched the waters, watched the boy, arms folded. The wind reached around the rock he’d set his back to and threw his hair across his face, hiding his expression. I’d seen him step away from Hennan, more than once, leaving his care and safety to Kara or to Tuttugu. But he watched him, every time he thought himself unobserved, he watched him. Perhaps a family man like Snorri couldn’t help but be concerned for an orphan child. Perhaps he thought his care a betrayal of his own lost children. I’d never really seen how family works-not out in the world, without nannies and nurses paid to do the job in place of parents, so I couldn’t say. If I was right it seemed damned inconvenient though and an expensive vulnerability. All those years spent training, all that skill at arms, just to let a little boy get under your guard and weigh you down with his wants.