The Poisoned Crown

By Amanda Hemingway

THE SANGREAL TRILOGY

The Greenstone Grail

The Sword of Straw

The Poisoned Crown

e was the bird, and the bird was him. He was Ezroc, son of Tilarc, fifteenth grandson in a direct line from Ezroc Stormrider, the greatest albatross who ever lived. He had flown the Four Oceans and the Ten Seas, and had seen the South Pole rising like a spire of emerald from the violet hills of the Land-Beyond-Night, and the white foam of the combers on the pink coral beaches, and had smelled the perfume of the last flowers that ever were, before the hungry waters took it all away. He had lived to 102, and died in the season his fifteenth-generation grandson was born, so the name had been passed on, but young Ezroc knew he could only dream of touching the legend.

They had set out from the Ice Cliffs more than two moons past, the albatross flying on wings still short of three spans from tip to tip— three spans would mark him for an adult—leaving the cold clean seas of the north far behind, heading south, always south. Keerye could not match his speed, for all his seal-swiftness, and from time to time the bird would descend onto the rocking waters, waiting for his friend to catch up. Some nights they would rest together, sea-cradled, half-human Keerye steadying himself on the swell with his tail flippers, while they gazed up at the unfamiliar stars.

“Do you think we’ve reached the Fourth Ocean yet?” Ezroc said once.

“There are no Four Oceans anymore,” said Keerye, who was older and wiser, or at least more knowledgeable. “No Ten Seas. When people speak of them, it’s just words. Now it’s all one big ocean, without any land in between to divide it up.”

“But we’re looking for land,” Ezroc pointed out. “We’re looking for the islands in the stories—the Jeweled Archipelago, and the Giant’s Knucklebones, and the Floating Islands of the utter south. There must be land somewhere.”

“Islands are different,” Keerye said sagely. “Islands grow, like plants. They come out of the sea sprouting fire and when they cool down there are great weeds on them with stems as thick as a monster eel, poking up into the sky all by themselves.”

“I don’t believe it,” Ezroc said. He had dismissed such tales before. “Without water to support them, they’d fall down.”

“I heard it from Shifka,” said Keerye, naming the most venerable of the selkies, “and
he
heard it from the great whales, so it must be true. Whales don’t lie.”

Ezroc duly tried to picture weeds growing on dry land, standing up by themselves, and failed. But it was something to search for.

The seas were growing warmer now, and more dangerous. They were coming to the realms of the seakings, where they worshipped the Goddess, who hated all creatures of land and air. Ezroc was anxious, since it was said the merpeople would kill a selkie if they found one in their territory, but Keerye was scornful. “They are
fish,”
he scoffed. “I can outswim any fish. Let them catch me if they can.” Ezroc wanted to know why the Goddess should hate them, but Keerye said there was no why. The Goddess was an elemental, who felt but could not reason, as strong as the currents that circled the world, in fury like the tempest, with a heart as black as the uttermost deeps where nothing could live. She was supposed to have a Crown of Iron that never rusted, but was kept in a mysterious cavern of air under the Dragon’s Reef. Had anyone seen her? Ezroc asked. What did she look like? In their rest times they speculated about it, visualizing her as a huge ray, a hundred spans
wide, whose creeping shadow brought death to the seabed, or a squid as big as an iceberg, belching poisoned ink, or a merwoman tall as a tidal wave with coiling sea snakes for hair and fins that crackled blue with electricity. Once, they met a great purple grouper that Ezroc thought might be her, but Keerye tickled it under its prognathous jaw and it mooched along with them for a while with no sign of hostility.

“Do you know any islands?” Keerye asked, but the fish didn’t answer.

“Maybe it doesn’t speak our language,” Ezroc suggested, so Keerye tried the other tongues he knew, the click-click of secret Dolphin-speech, the croaking of Penguin, the burble of Smallfish, and even a few words of Shark, but the grouper never spoke at all. Presently, it turned aside, heading west toward the shadow of sunken rocks.

This was reef country, and now they grew very wary. Above the corals the shallow water was green with sunlight and teeming with smallfish, but there were deep blue chasms in between where the merfolk might hide, and cruising sharks in search of more substantial prey than yellowstripe and fairyfin, and dark clefts that might conceal monsters they had heard of but never seen, creatures of the tropical waters who didn’t venture into the north. Giant sea scorpions, crabs whose pincers could slice a selkie in half, things part fish, part reptile, that had no name and no real species, armored with spikes and spines, their flippers halfway to feet, their mouths agape with rows of dagger teeth. Ezroc felt himself safe enough in the air, sustained on near-motionless wings, but concern for Keerye made him fly low, and the selkie was both reckless and curious, diving to peer under every rock. They met a turtle coasting the reefside who told them he was the last of his kind; his mate had been gone twenty years, searching for a place to lay her eggs.

“Do you know any islands?” Keerye said.

“If I did, my mate would have buried her eggs there, and I would have found her again,” the turtle replied. “The islands are all gone. Swim to the absolute south, and you’ll find only sea swirl around the Pole, and the sun that never sets shines on the endless waters without even a rock to break the surface.”

Keerye asked the same question of those smallfish he could persuade
to listen, a green octopus that was slithering over the coral, a frilled purple sea slug, and even a passing shark. The smallfish responded with bubbletalk, meaning little, the octopus turned red and disappeared into a crevasse, and the sea slug tied itself into a slow-motion knot and rippled away. Only the shark snapped a coherent answer.

“There are islands,” he said, “but you must move fast to catch up with them.”

“Which way?” asked Keerye. “South?”

“South—west—east.” The shark flicked his tail by way of a shrug and glided on.

“The Floating Islands,” Keerye said. “That’s what he means.”

“I don’t trust him,” Ezroc said. “My father says, a shark is a stomach with fins. He doesn’t talk, he just opens his mouth.”

But Keerye was too eager on their quest to take warning.

T
HEY MET
the mermaid on a night of shooting stars, at the full of the fourth moon since they’d left the Ice Cliffs of home. On an unknown signal the corals released their spores, uncurling like smoke into the sea surge, glittering with reflected light, until both sky and sea seemed to be heaving with the dust of stars, and leaping fish, come to feast on the coral’s beneficence, left phosphorescent tracks like meteor trails through the black water. Keerye lay on his back in the sway of gentle billows, made careless by the beauty, luxuriating in the night magic. “The sky fires of the north are lovelier,” he insisted, but the star glitter was mirrored in his dark eyes as he turned his head this way and that. Ezroc sat on the wave beside him, sculling with webbed feet, dazzled by the wonder of it. Neither of them saw the watcher until she was very close.

Her hand brushed Keerye’s tail, feeling the strangeness of his fur, flinching away and returning to touch again. The selkie, whose reflexes were lightning, somersaulted and caught her arm, holding her though she wriggled, fish-like, trying to escape. Her skin felt cold and slippery, like bladderwrack. He forced her head out of the water and saw the gill slits in her neck widen as she gasped in the alien element. Her wet hair looked black in the starlight but he guessed it was darkly purple, and
the sheen on her arms was like pearl. Her eyes were unlike his, narrow and slanting, with no whites; he could not tell their color.

She was small, barely half his size. He guessed she was still a child.

“You’re merfolk,” he said. “Are you alone?” And when she didn’t answer: “What is your name?”

Her mouth opened and shut, but no noise emerged.

“What is your name?”

“Maybe she can’t talk out of water,” Ezroc suggested.

Keerye had never met merfolk before, but he knew enough of them from rumor and hearsay. “She can talk,” he insisted.

And again: “What is your name?”

“Denaero,” she said at last. Her voice sounded thin and strange in the air, more accustomed to carrying underwater. “I am Rhadamu’s daughter. If you hurt me, he will kill you.”

“We won’t hurt you,” Ezroc said. “We wouldn’t hurt anyone.”

“If
you answer my question,” Keerye amended.

“I answer or not, as I please,” said the girl, trying to toss her head, but Keerye held her by the hair. “I am not afraid of you, even if you eat me.”

“Why should I eat you?” Keerye demanded, startled.

“Selkies eat merpeople,” Denaero said. “We are fish. Lungbreathers eat fish. That is the way of things.”

“I won’t eat you,” Keerye said. “You are too small. When we catch fish that are too small, we throw them back.”

“My father is the High King,” Denaero declared. “When the Festival of Spawning is over, he will come looking for me and hunt you with spears. You will be stuck full of spears till you bristle like a sea urchin. You won’t be so scornful then.”

Keerye laughed out loud at her defiance and her pride, and the girl sulked, then laughed, too, ducking her head underwater when he let go of her hair to inhale her native element.

“Why must we talk like this?” Denaero asked, meaning above water. “Can’t you talk undersea?”

“I can, but Ezroc can’t. He’s a bird,” Keerye explained.

“I heard there are birds that fly through the water,” Denaero said,
not wanting to appear ignorant, “called pinwings. If you can fly underwater, why can’t you talk there, too?”

“I’m not a penguin,” Ezroc said. “I’m an albatross.”

The girl shivered and shrank away. “A windbringer,” she said. “I thought they were only in stories. Is it true, you can fly around the whole world in a day, and you bring ice storms from the north to destroy us? Did you bring the ice now?” She glanced from side to side as if expecting ice floes to emerge from nowhere.

“I don’t bring ice,” said Ezroc. “I don’t want to harm you.”

“The stories say you are much bigger,” said Denaero, recovering her courage.

“He’s only young,” said Keerye. “Like you. When he’s fully grown, his wings will be as wide as—as the entire reef.”

“Could I ride on you, then?” Denaero begged suddenly. “Could I fly—really fly—up in the sky among the stars?”

“Well…,” Ezroc temporized.

“One day,” said Keerye. “But now we are on a quest. We are looking for islands. Do you know of any?”

“Only in stories,” Denaero said. “The Goddess ate the islands. She is always hungry. Once, there were whole kingdoms above the sea, full of creatures that didn’t swim, and strange people, neither merfolk nor selkie. I wish I could have seen them. But the Goddess swallowed them all up. Then she devoured the islands, one by one, crunching up the rocks that were their bones. There are no islands anymore.”

“We heard there were Floating Islands,” Keerye persisted, “south of here, or east, or west. Have you seen them?”

The girl’s face changed; her hair lifted of its own accord, rippling with sparks.

“Those are not
islands,”
she said. “Don’t go near them … Listen!” She dipped below the waves, the better to pick up vibrations, reappearing a moment later.

“The festival is over,” she continued. “My father is coming to look for me. If he finds you, you will be stuck full of spears like a sea urchin. I do not want that. You must swim fast, fast, till you come to the Great Reef Wall where the sea boils and the steam goes up a hundred spans
into the air. If you can cross that, you will be safe. But you must go
fast.
Your swimming makes an echo pattern that we can detect from far away; that was how I found you. If my father senses it, he will hunt you down.”

“How far to the Great Reef Wall?” asked Ezroc.

“Can’t you stop the king?” Keerye said.

“I will leap and dance in the water and make a great splashing that will overlay the echo pattern, but you must go
now. Phase!”