Mark Lawrence - The Liar's key

“Well I did go, and I damn near burned!” I lowered my hands a touch. “And someone’s to blame!”

“Someone is. Just not me.” He wiped at his mouth with a red hand. “Quite a punch there, little brother.” He grinned. “It’s good to see you!” And somehow he still managed to look as if he meant it.

“You-” I remembered Lisa and bit off the accusation. “Were the DeVeers there that night?”

Darin wiped away his smile. “Alain DeVeer was. The shock of it killed his father, Lord Quentin-died abed later that week. Fortunately there was some kind of scandal at the house the day of the performance and the sisters were kept in. Very fortunate in fact as I’ve married Micha, the youngest of them. Just off to our country house now as it happens.”

I kept my face blank. Too blank in fact.

“Micha! You know her, surely? You must have met her?” Darin said.

“Ah, yes. . Micha.” A good half-dozen times. Most of them in her bedroom after a difficult scramble up an ivy-clad colonnade. Little Micha, a beauty whose face shone with the innocence of an angel and whose tricks I’d had to teach the ladies down at the Silken Glove and at Madam LaPenda’s. “I remember the girl. Congratulations, brother. I wish you joy of each other.”

“Thank you. Micha will be glad to learn you survived. She was always anxious to hear the rumours about you. Perhaps you’ll come to visit when you’re settled? Especially if you’ve any words of comfort to offer about poor Alain’s last night. .”

“Of course. I’ll make a point of it,” I lied. Micha was probably checking I was dead to set her mind at ease regarding any tales I might tell her new husband. And I doubted she wanted to hear that her brother died in a toilet after I kicked him in the face while he hauled my trousers down. “I’ll visit first chance I get.”

“Do!” Darin grinned again. “Oh! I forgot, you won’t know. You’re going to be an uncle.”

“What? How?” The words made sense individually but didn’t add up into anything comprehensible.

Darin threw an arm over my shoulder and put on a mock-serious voice. “Well. . when a daddy and a mummy love each other very much-”

“She’s pregnant?”

“Either that or she swallowed something very big and round.”

“Christ!”

“Congratulations is what most people say.”

“Well. . that too.” Me an uncle? My Micha? I felt a sudden need to sit down. “I’ve always thought I’d make a great uncle. Terrible. But great.”

“You should come with me, Jalan. Recover from your ordeal and all that.”

“Maybe.” Watching Darin and Micha play happy families was not how I anticipated spending my first few days back in civilization. “But right now I need to see Father.”

“Back on your travels so soon, Jal?” Darin cocked his head, puzzled.

“No. . why?” He wasn’t making sense.

“Father’s in Roma. The pope summoned him for an audience and Grandmother said he had to go.”

“Hell and fire.” I had questions that wanted answers and I might have squeezed them out of Father more easily than elsewhere. “Well. . look, I’m going to get cleaned up and-wait, you didn’t throw out my clothes, did you?”

“Me?” Darin laughed. “Why would I go touching your peacock feathers? It’s all there as far as I know. Unless Ballessa took it upon herself to clear your rooms out. Father certainly won’t have got around to giving any instructions. Anyhow, I’d best go. I’m late as it is.” He motioned for his man to start hauling the chest again. “Visit us when you get the chance-and don’t rile Martus, he’s in a foul mood. Grandmother appointed Micha and Alain’s elder brother, the new Lord DeVeer, to captain the infantry army that’s been put together these past few months. And Martus had already decided the post was his. Then a few days ago some other calamity or indignity. I wasn’t really paying attention. . something about a huge bill from a merchant. Ollus I think the name was.”

“Maeres Allus?”

“Could be.” Darin turned at the doorway. “Good to see you alive, little brother.” A wave of his hand and he was off and gone. I stood, watching, until the carriage took them from sight. He hadn’t even asked where I’d been. .

Alphons kept his gaze front and centre at the door. The less ancient guard, Double, a dark fellow with bags beneath his eyes, watched me with undisguised curiosity. I let the insolence slip. It was good to see that at least one person found the returned adventurer fascinating.

With Father gone to Roma, Darin shacked up in his country retreat with my sweet little Micha, and Martus on the warpath over being presented with my posthumous gambling debts, I had no immediate family to regale with the saga of my accidental exile.

In the hope that Martus might actually pay Maeres what I owed before he discovered I wasn’t dead I kept a low profile in the house. I reinstalled myself in my rooms and called a couple of the housemaids to scrub my back and incidentals while I had a much needed bath. The water soon turned black, so I had Mary go heat up some more while Jayne helped me select an outfit for court. All in all it had proved a disappointing homecoming so far and even the maids didn’t seem as pleased to see me as they should be. I gave Jayne a little squeeze and you’d think she was a princess for all the offence she took! And that set me thinking about the last princess I met, the striking Katherine ap Scorron, owner of a particularly tempting behind and a vicious left knee. Memory of how she’d deployed that left knee put me right off my game and I sent Jayne off back to her duties, telling her I’d manage to dress myself.

Nothing felt quite right, as if the palace were another man’s boots I’d pulled on by mistake. I went to the Glass Chamber, a room where some previous cardinal had gathered a collection of glassware from the sunken cities of Venice and Atlantis, all displayed in tall cabinets. I’d avoided the room for years since the incident with the egg fight where somehow Martus and Darin escaped scot free and conspired to have me take the blame. Now, though, I paced among the old cabinets and their forgotten contents gleaming in all the colours between red and violet, led on by some old memory and the taste of blood.

Crouching in a corner, I pulled away a piece of loose skirting board, and there, glowing in a small hole in the plaster sat the rune-set cone of orichalcum that had fallen from Mother’s hand as Edris Dean killed her. When they released me from the care of the surgeon and his nurses, and when at last I had my first opportunity to be alone, I went to the Star Room, retrieved the cone from beneath the couch where it had been kicked, and came here to hide it. The thought that Garyus might want it back never troubled me, and he never asked after it-perhaps because to do so would mean accusing me or my mother of theft. I had hidden it away, and pushed all thought of the murder from my mind: the cone, its hiding place, the whole terrible business. Until Kara’s blood magic woke those memories.

“Mine.” I snatched the thing up, cold in my fist. The light pulsed through my hand, making the flesh rosy and the bones of my fingers into dark bars. I wrapped it in a handkerchief and thrust it deep into a pocket.

I stood, but kept my place, staring sightless into the corner. I say Kara’s magic, because it was her spell that brought those dead recollections back to life, her work that disturbed their peace and set them playing over and over upon the inside of my skull like some monstrous shadow play. . but the key had started it. Truly it had been Loki’s key that unlocked all this-against advice I’d used the key and opened a door onto the past that I couldn’t close. I wondered then just how hard it might be to close the door Snorri had it in mind to open.