“Get away from me!” Those were my words, and yet my reflection’s mouth stayed closed. It watched me with eyes that were not my own. I tried to turn away but that stare held me.
“I’m not your enemy, Jalan. You want to escape. I want to help you escape. You’re a piece on the Red Queen’s board and she keeps pushing you into danger whatever you do. I can help you play your own game.”
“You’re my enemy,” I said, though she was right about the escaping part. “Your hands are red with the blood of my family and my friends. Too much of it to be forgiven.”
She smiled, her mouth more hers than mine now, curved as I remembered it from Grandmother’s youth. “We show our weakness most when we look upon ourselves, Jalan. I’ve watched you watch yourself. I’ve heard the secrets spoken to your reflection—the doubts—the truths, each confession. We all knew you would be special. You or your sister. And we watched you, but while the Silent Sister studied the paths that might lead you through all your tomorrows, I made a study of the man, took his measure. A coward can forgive himself anything given the right excuse, Jalan. Believe me when I say that the sting of any treachery, whether to the living or to your dead, will last only a moment compared to the joys waiting for you. The freedom to do as you want, unconstrained by troublesome morality, unbound by that nagging voice of conscience which others have imposed upon you, infected you with.”
“Lies,” I said.
“The Wheel is turning, Jalan. It can’t be stopped. The change can’t be stopped. Everything we know will end. The decision is not how to fight it but how to survive it. I’ve watched you and you, Jalan Kendeth, are, above all else, a survivor.”
“Lies,” I repeated, but the worst of it was not that she was almost certainly right about the Wheel being unstoppable. The worst of it was that she was right about me. I could walk away. I could betray any trust to save my own skin. Oh it would hurt, and yes I would curse myself and mope . . . but after? I didn’t think it would break me—not as it would break Snorri if he could ever do such a thing. I didn’t run that deep. I wasn’t made of the same stuff. Snorri was the truth. No give in him. Inflexible. Hold or break, nothing in between. And me? Prince Jalan was a lie I told myself, mutable, adaptable, lasting . . . a survivor. “How can anyone survive the end of everything?”
And there it was. As good as a betrayal. I’d asked the Lady Blue to plant a seed of hope in me. My reflection looked like both of us now—a mixture—her age on my bones, her words on my lips.
“There are ways known to those with power. True power that rests in the mind rather than in titles or lands or the command of great armies. I will bring those who serve me through the conjunction of the spheres and into a new world. But they have to be close at the last moment. Close enough to touch.”
“All I have to do is come through your wall and join you in that tower, eh?” It had been a faint hope at best, but I hadn’t expected it to sour so quickly.
“There is another way. For a man with Loki’s key.”
“I’m listening.” My hand found the key.
“The heart of the Wheel is the centre of the storm. When the worlds shatter like mirrors and all the pieces come sliding down, anyone standing at the heart of the Wheel will pass through without harm.” My reflection held little of me now, just my eyes staring from an old woman’s face.
“I’m told it’s not a place anyone would choose to wait.”
“The engines of the Wheel continue to change the world. The Wheel continues to turn but that was never the Builders” intention. The engines were built to turn it so far and no more, to hold it in place, to give a little magic to each Builder and change their world from one set thing into another. The fact the Wheel kept turning, ever so slowly, was a mistake, an unforeseen event. It’s us that turn the Wheel when we use the power it gives us, and the engines at Osheim help us to turn it considerably faster than we could on our own.
“Their war ended their interest in the matter, and a thousand years turned a little mistake that might have been corrected into a big one that cannot.” The Lady Blue watched me from the mirror, no hint of my face there now. She looked old, though not as ancient as Grandmother and her sister. Her face however, held far less vitality—the skin stretched tight across her bones, paper thin, her eyes clouded. “Some think the key might be used to disable the Wheel’s engines and that doing so might slow the inevitable conjunction. It’s possible, though unlikely, and such a waste . . . the key destroyed to buy a handful of months, a few years at best. Better by far to turn it the other way—put those engines into overdrive, spin the Wheel as the Builders once did and bring about the end in moments. The man who did it would be assured a place in the new order of things and a clean, sharp transition would make it easier for those skilled among us to survive the change and bring through with them not just a few followers but dozens, scores, maybe hundreds.”
“You sent Edris Dean to kill my mother.” I held to the anger—at least that felt clean and uncomplicated.
“It wasn’t an act of malice, Jalan. It was about survival. You know in your heart that when it comes down to burn or don’t burn, you would choose to save yourself over others. That’s honesty. That’s the truth at the core of what we are. You need to—”
Something whizzed past my ear and the world exploded.
I opened my eyes an indeterminate amount of time later and discovered the world less exploded than I had imagined it would be, albeit decidedly odd-looking, as if the entire house had fallen on its side. It took a moment to work out that I was the one who had fallen over.
Some tugging and grunting indicated that someone was attempting to get me back into a sitting position, although they were doing a piss-poor job of it.
“I’m all right.”
I sat up and drew a hand over my face, turning to find Hennan frowning at me. A glance down at my palm revealed it scarlet. “Shit! I’m not all right! I’m bleeding to death!” I staggered to my feet. Glittering shards of mirror lay all around, crunching under my boots.
“You’ve got a cut below your eye,” Hennan said. “A piece of it must have caught you when I threw the rock.”
“Threw?”
“The mirror was doing something to you. It was all blue—like the sky gone wrong. I threw a rock at it.”
“Ah,” I said. “Well.” I glanced about. Just me and Hennan in the blackened shell of a merchant’s house. “Good. Let’s go.”
TWENTY-SIX
I let Snorri and Kara navigate us out of Blujen’s garden lands and on into northern Slov. Snorri’s instinct for the outdoors seemed as keen among the woods and fields of the central kingdoms as it had amid the icy rocks of Norseheim. Kara also proved her worth, casting her runestones wherever the road offered us choices and selecting the path of least resistance.
Slov was of course in a state of high anxiety with rumours running rife through the countryside and any town with a wall, girding its loins for war. Suspicion ran deep that any stranger might be a Red March spy, but even the fevered imagination of the Slovs was hard-pressed to picture the Red Queen recruiting giant Vikings, blonde v?lvas or red-haired northern lads as covert agents. I did my best to hide behind Snorri and say as little as possible during encounters. The approach worked well, becoming easier by the mile as we left the war zone behind us, and within a few days we had returned to the steady progress and comfortable tavern nights that we had enjoyed on the way.