We stood there, me frozen in fear, him spitting out blood and soup through the gaps left by missing teeth. I clung onto his wrist for dear life before realizing that he wasn’t making any effort to stab me. At that point I noticed that my dinner knife was still clenched in the fist I had wedged under his chin. A fact that he had already registered. I stared expectantly at his knife hand and he obliged by opening it to let his blade fall. I released his wrist and snagged the chain of my locket from the edge of his bowl, bringing the trinket dripping from the soup.

“If you have a problem, peasant, bring it up with the man who threw it.” My voice and hand shook with what I hoped would be considered suppressed manly rage but was in fact cold terror. I nodded towards Snorri.

Having kicked the man’s knife under the table, I withdrew my own from beneath his chin and returned to sit by the Norseman, making sure my back was to the wall.

“You bastard,” I said.

Snorri tilted his head. “Seems that a man who would come back with my sword against an unborn wasn’t going to be scared of a mill worker with an eating knife. Even so, if it were worthless you might have paused for thought before going to reclaim it.”

I wiped at the casing with what had left the city of Vermillion as a handkerchief and was now little more than a grey rag. “It’s my mother’s picture, you ignorant—” The soup smeared away to reveal the jewel-set platinum beneath. “Oh.” I’ll admit that seen through a coating of muck and the misting in my eyes it was hard to judge the thing’s value, but Snorri had not been far off. I remembered now the day that Great-Uncle Garyus set the locket in my hand. It had glittered then, catching the light within cut diamonds and returning it in sparkles. The platinum had glowed with that silver fire that makes men treasure it above gold. I remembered it now as I hadn’t for many years. I’m a good liar. A great one. And to be a great liar you have to live your lies, to believe them, to the point that when you tell them to yourself enough times, even what’s right before your eyes will bend itself to the falsehood. Every day, year on year, I took that locket and turned it in my hand and saw only cheap silver and paste. Each time my debts grew, I told myself the locket was worth a little less. I told myself it wasn’t worth selling, and I offered myself that lie because I had promised old Garyus, up there on his bed in that lonely tower, crippled and twisted as he was, that I would keep it safe. And because it held my mother’s picture and I didn’t want a reason to sell it. Day by day, by imperceptible degrees, the lie became real, the truth so forgotten, so walled away, that I sat there and denied Maeres Allus—the lie became so real that not even when the bastard had his man break my finger did any whisper of the truth reach me and allow me to betray that trust to save my hide.