Snorri nodded, his eyes sympathetic. “Oh.”
Without warning the boat, the sea, Snorri, all of it vanished, just for the beat of a heart. A blinding light took its place, dazzling, dying away as I blinked to reveal a familiar chamber with star-shaped roundels studding the ceiling. A drawing room in the Roma Hall where my brothers and I would play on winter nights. Mother stood there, half bent toward me, a smile on her face—the face in my locket, but smiling, eyes bright. All replaced a moment later with the boat, the sky, the waves. “What?” I dropped the key as though it had bitten me. It swung from Snorri’s hand on the thong. “What!”
“I’m sorry.” Snorri tucked the key away. “I warned you.”
“No.” I shook my head. Too young she was for the assassin’s blade. Taproot’s words, as if he spoke them in my ear. “No.” I stood up, staggered by the swell. I closed my eyes and saw it again. Mother bending toward me, smiling. The man’s face looming over her shoulder. No smile there. Half-familiar but not a friend. Features shadowed, offered only in rumour, hair so black as to be almost the blue beneath a magpie’s wing, with grey spreading up from the temples.
The world returned. Two steps brought me to the mast and I clung for support, the sail flapping inches from my nose.
“Jal!” Snorri called, motioning for me to come back and sit before the sweep of the boom took me into the water.
“There was a blade, Snorri.” Each blink revealed it, light splintering from the edge of a sword held low and casual, the fist at his side clenched about its hilt. “He had a sword!” I saw it again, some secret hidden in the dazzle of its steel, putting an ache in my chest and a pain behind my eyes.
? ? ?
“I want the truth.” I stared at Kara. Aslaug hadn’t arrived with the setting sun. To me, that was proof enough of the v?lva’s power. “You can help me,” I told her.
Kara sighed and bound the tiller. The wind had fallen to a breeze. The sails would soon be furled. She sat beside me on the bench and looked up to study my face. “Truth is rarely what people want, Prince Jalan.”
“I need to know.”
“Knowledge and truth are different things,” Kara said. She brushed stray hair from her mouth. “I want to know, myself. I want to know many things. I braved the voyage to Beerentoppen, sought out Skilfar, all in search of knowing. But knowledge is a dangerous thing. You touched the key—against Snorri’s strongest advice—and it brought you no peace. Now I advise you to wait. We’re aimed at your homeland. Ask your questions there, the traditional way. The answers are likely not secrets, just facts you’ve avoided or misplaced whilst growing up.”
“I can’t wait.” The boat had become a prison, the sea an endless wall. I sat trapped there, with neither space nor answers. Too young she was for the assassin’s blade. I remembered, on the journey north, wiping the soup from my locket and at Snorri’s insistence really seeing it for the first time in years. The scales had fallen from my eyes and I had discovered a treasure. Now I feared what I might see if I looked again at my past—but not looking had ceased to be an option. The key had unlocked the door to memories long buried. Now I had to throw that door wide. “Help me to remember.”
“I have little skill, Prince Jalan.” Kara looked down at her hands, folded in her lap, nails bitten short, fingers callused by ropework. “Find another way . . . Perhaps the key—”
“It’s Loki’s key,” I snapped, filling the words with more harshness than intended. “It’s black with lies. I need to know if what I saw, what I remember, are true memories, or the trickery of some pagan spirit.”
Evening thickened, spreading across the face of the sea, the glow of the swallowed sun faded among the clouded western skies. A fat raindrop struck my hand, another grazed my cheek. Snorri watched us from the prow, huddled in his cloak. Tuttugu sat closer, whittling some piece of driftwood he’d snagged from the water.
“All I know of memory is in the blood,” Kara said. “A man’s blood can tell the secrets of his line. The story of his life lies there, the story of his father too, and his father’s father. But—”
“Let’s do that then. I like a good story, and if it’s about me—all the better!”
“But,” she kept to her thread with the tone that always means the speaker is heading toward “no.” “I am a novice. It takes a lifetime to learn the blood-tongue. Skilfar might show you a day of your choosing, or hunt out some secret held too deep for speaking. My art is less . . . precise.”