The Poisoned Crown (23 page)

“He sat right where you are now,” Annie said. “It’s funny, you’d think I’d be used to that sort of thing, but I’m not. Even after being attacked by the water spirit, and finding Rianna’s corpse, and the things I’ve seen in the circle, and that time Nathan went missing, or when he was kidnapped, or turned up covered in slime from a giant man-eating slug … anyway, I still found it hard to take. Maybe it was because I felt he wasn’t just a demon, there was a human inside somewhere.”

“Possibly,” said Bartlemy. “That doesn’t mean it was a good human. Werespirits have their own loyalties but no moral sense, only appetites
and needs. Whatever humanity he might have had has long been distorted out of shape. Don’t be tempted to pity him. In such dealings, pity can be terminal.”

“I know,” Annie said. “Still, he told me—what were his words?— he was
growing
a soul.”

“A strange way of putting it,” Bartlemy commented. “I must take more interest in your friend Kaliban—particularly if he is taking an interest in you. What did you say he called himself?—the sword with the twisted blade. A reference to his name.
Caliburn
is what he was christened, if christening came into it: a variant of
Excalibur.
His mother wanted a weapon, not a child. The name was changed later, becoming
Kaliban
, or
Chalyban
—from
Caulborn
, I believe, one born in a caul. Shakespeare must have heard it somewhere, heard tales of the name and its owner, when he used it for Sycorax’s son in
The Tempest.
And so the legend grew. A name to live down to.”

“What does he really look like?” Annie asked. “I thought, when he was leaving, he had paws, maybe a tail…”

“What does any of us really look like?” Bartlemy said. “If there was a true mirror to show us the shape of the soul… I have never seen him—either his mortal seeming or his demon self—but I am told he is a patchwork creature like so many werespirits, a bit of this, a bit of that. The horns of a ram, the muscles of a bull, clawed feet, tufted tail. Why do you think so many of the ancient gods had scales or feathers, animal heads, eagle’s wings? Werenature could never resist the chance to experiment, to make something bigger and better, nastier and scarier than anything mere biology could achieve. Most spirits create their own forms, but I fear Kaliban was stuck with his. I didn’t know he could assume a more acceptable shape. That must be a recent development.”

“His hair hung forward,” Annie volunteered, “but his forehead was sort of scarred, as if it had been burned.”

“Scars,” Bartlemy mused. “Yes. Those cannot be altered. I don’t know the story of his.”

“Was I right,” Annie went on, “inviting him in?”

“Had I been there, I would have advised against it. But I was not there. You behaved with generosity and trust, as I would expect of you,
and you have lived to tell the tale. So perhaps my advice would have been wrong. I am more concerned with the story he told you. That is … potentially disturbing.”

“He said the boy was about sixteen,” Annie reiterated, “and his name was Nei-thun. That must be coincidence—mustn’t it?”

“I don’t know,” Bartlemy admitted. “I feel—we have a glimpse of a pattern, a pattern that must mean something, but only a few details are illuminated, and the outline is still unclear. Which is a fancy way of saying that I have no idea what’s going on, and at this stage I can only guess.”

Annie managed a smile, but it was a halfhearted effort. “Why did he sing that verse from ‘Scarborough Fair’?” she said. “Only he said
Scarbarrow
—the place where the woman … did it. D’you suppose
that
meant something, or was he just playing with rhymes like the other spirits in the circle?”

“Oh, that means something sure enough,” Bartlemy said. “‘Scarbarrow Fayr’ was the original name of the ballad. It changed over the years the way songs do, as the Scarbarrow was forgotten and the town slipped in instead. There was a story behind it, an old, old story. The Scarbarrow was a hill somewhere around here, supposedly the burial place of a primitive king. Some said he was a mortal man, others the king of Elfland, and inside the hill were the gates to Faerie. Of course, the gates to Faerie have often been equated with the Gate of Death … Anyway, legend had it that on certain nights of the year the hill would open, and the fairyfolk would come out and dance with the souls of the dead, seeking to lure them through the gates beyond the reach of church or god. People would place special herbs on the graves to shield their inmates from the charms of the fae—parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme.”

“Like the song,” Annie said, relaxing sufficiently to take a bite of coffee cake. “I see.”

“The ballad springs from one particular incident. Myth or truth, we don’t know, and it hardly matters. A beautiful girl—a young man— true love. The usual thing. But she was sought after by a local lordling— the youth challenged him—they fought—he died. The lordling was a skilled swordsman, the youth a peasant with no skills at all. The girl
mourned him, spurning her noble admirer, so he decreed in his jealousy and rage that the youth could not be buried, but must lie un-coffined till after Halloween, with neither herb nor prayer to save his soul. The girl kept vigil over him, determined to protect him at any cost. It was the night when the hill would open—the night of Scarbarrow Fayr—and she knelt in the churchyard beside his corpse, watching and waiting, while the moon sailed the cloudwrack and the fairyfolk came dancing down the hillside, carrying their little green candles and whistling, whistling for the souls of the dead.”

“The Whistlers!” Annie exclaimed with a flash of revelation. “He talked about the Whistlers.
That
was what he meant.”

“Folk thought it bad luck to name the people of Faerie,” Bartlemy said, “so they gave them other names. The Little People, the Good People, will-o’-the-wisps, starsprites, the Whistlers. They would call up the spirits of the dead with a whistling noise like the piping of some unearthly bird. It was an eerie sound to hear on a wild night, a sound to chill the blood.”

“But you can’t have heard it,” Annie protested. “It’s just a story. It isn’t
true.”

“Stories change,” Bartlemy said. “Truths change. The gates to the hill are shut, and the hill itself is forgotten, and even the location of the Scarbarrow is lost forever. I heard the Whistlers once, on a night such as I described, but maybe it was only a bird.”

Annie felt a shiver like a cold draft on her nape. She said: “What happened to the girl?”

“She knelt in the graveyard, and she heard the Whistlers, and her hand clutched the cross about her neck. Presently, she saw the souls rising like smoke from those graves where no herbs were laid, and the dancing lights came to her lover’s corpse, though she could see no shapes carrying them, and the spirit rose from his body and reached for her with glimmering arms. But the werelights spun around them, and invisible hands drew him into the dance, and shadow fingers plucked at her dress and pulled her hair, tugging her, turning her, harrying her into their mad fandango, over grave mound and tombstone, out of the cemetery and up the hill, to where the gates of Faerie stood open
wide—the gates to eternal damnation. She could not resist, for her cross was torn off in the hedgerow, and the magic had gotten into her feet, and the face of her lover was ever before her, though she could not make him hear her nor catch his hand. But even as they reached the gates his voice came to her, urgent and low: ‘Go back! Go back! It is too late for me, but not for you. I will give my soul for yours. Go back!’ Then he called on Jesus, and immediately the whistling ceased, and all the lights went out, and the hillside was dark and empty. She walked slowly homeward and told no one what had chanced, and the next day they buried him, and she prayed beside his coffin for the soul that was gone. And on afternights when there was magic in the air she would linger on the hill singing her song, but the gates never opened, and the Whistlers did not return, and she knew she would not find him again on earth or in heaven.”

“That’s so sad,” Annie said. “Beautiful and sad. But I don’t believe in damnation.”

“It happens,” Bartlemy said. “But people make their own hell, usually this side of the Gate. They need no gods for that. As for the story, it’s one of those pagan folktales that Christianity adopted when they set themselves up as the good guys. A little truth, a little fantasy, a moral at the end. Who knows what really happened—if anything?”

“Then what does the story have to do with us?” Annie said. “And the woman whom Kal saw—who sacrificed her own child—did she think that would open the gates to Faerie? Did she think the Whistlers would come for him and let her through?”

“That is the question,” said Bartlemy. “And as ever, we are short of answers. But I wouldn’t trouble yourself too much. I don’t see you as the sacrificial type.” He smiled his gentle smile, and she found herself responding, comforted by his mere presence, his quiet common sense. “Have some more cake.”

“S
O NOW
Hazel and I aren’t speaking,” Nathan said. “It’s idiotic. Just because I made a stupid joke … She’s being completely unreasonable.”

“You didn’t tell her so, did you?” Annie said with foreboding.

“I—I might have. I mean, she was
so
overreacting—”

“Did you tell her
that?”

“Yes.”

“What else did you tell her?” Bartlemy inquired with an air of clinical interest. “You didn’t suggest she should calm down, I suppose?”

“Actually …”

“Actually?” Bartlemy prompted.

“Yes, I did.”

“Good God,” his uncle said faintly.

“What did I do wrong?” Nathan demanded, slightly aggrieved.

“Telling an angry woman she’s overreacting and ought to calm down,” Annie explained, “is on a par with stuffing a lighted firework into a bottle and waiting for it to blow up in your face.”

“But Hazel and I aren’t, like, a man and a woman,” Nathan protested. “Not in
that way.
We’re best mates. We always have been. After all, we’ve known each other since we were kids.”

“You aren’t kids anymore,” Annie said patiently. “You’re not kids and you’re not adults. You’re stuck in the in-between zone of teenagerdom. Basically you’re just two giant hormones. It changes things—you have to start learning to
think
before you speak on occasion.”

“Not with
Hazel!”

“You said she was behaving stupidly at the party,” Bartlemy remarked. “What exactly did you mean by that?”

“Nothing really. It’s just… she was talking to Damian Wicks. You know. For ages. Damian as in brother-of-Jason-Wicks. He’s a complete prat. All that family are. And she said he was
sweet,”
Nathan made a face. “I sort of worry about her. She really does have awful taste in boys.”

Annie and Bartlemy exchanged glances.

“I think,” Annie said with resignation, “I need to teach you some of the dos and don’ts about dealing with the opposite sex. Before you get yourself horribly murdered and some poor girl pleads justifiable homicide.”

“I’m not
that
bad with girls,” Nathan objected. “Nell thought I was all right.”

“You kept saving her life,” Bartlemy pointed out. “That tends to create a good impression.”

“Besides,” Annie added, “you didn’t spend that much time with her, did you? Your dream probably whisked you away before you had a chance to put your foot in it.”

“You seem to think I’m a dead loss,” Nathan said a shade sulkily. “Thanks very much.”

“You’re fifteen,” Annie said gently. “The fifteen-year-old boy who is good with girls doesn’t exist. In fact, nor does the sixteen-, seventeen-, or eighteen-year-old, and so on ad infinitum. The thing is, as girls grow older they suss out how to deal with boys. That’s kept relations between the sexes going so far.”

Nathan managed a grin.

Bartlemy said: “Fortunately for you, you have a wise and sympathetic mother who will undoubtedly offer you a few tips. Pay attention. That will give you a head start. Probably ahead of me—I’ve been around fifteen hundred years, and I still haven’t worked women out.”

Nathan eyed his uncle dubiously, unsure how to react. He found the thought of Bartlemy having any interest in women, or vice versa, deeply unnatural, but he was too polite to say so.

His family read his mind without difficulty.

“We’ll talk about it some more over vacation,” Annie said. Nathan, being at private school, was due to start a break shortly. “You’d better go to bed now. School tomorrow.”

In bed Nathan brooded on his argument with Hazel for a while, puzzling over the general incomprehensibility of female behavior, then his thoughts switched to Denaero and his need to get back to Widewater. He wondered if the same rules applied to mermaids, even though they were part fish, and had a grim suspicion they did. For all he knew, they applied to fish, too. But he still felt somehow cheated by Hazel’s attitude. After all, this was
Hazel.
His best friend. She wasn’t supposed to be like the other girls.

She wasn’t supposed to be so easily impressed by a prat like Damian Wicks …

He fell asleep without realizing it and slid into a muddle of ordinary
dreams. He was marrying Denaero, only she still had her tail, and Bartlemy was pushing her into the church in a wheelchair. She had a veil on but kept refusing to wear the scallop shells he’d provided. Then Hazel swept past in a white wedding dress with her hair up in a butterfly clip the way she’d taken to wearing it lately. “It’s all right, Nathan,” she said. “It doesn’t matter about the scallops. I’m going to marry Damian.” She went inside with the prospective groom, and all the church bells were ringing, and Nathan was left alone among the tombstones. Suddenly it was dark, and nearby someone was whistling, or maybe it was a bird, and there was fear all around him …

Dream faded into oblivion. Much, much later, when he opened his eyes, he was Elsewhere.

Not Widewater—the lack of sea was a dead giveaway—nor Eos, nor Wilderslee. In fact, it was nowhere he recognized. He seemed to be on a broad curving platform encircling a cylindrical tower, with different-sized tiers set one on top of another like a stack of irregular plates. It continued upward for many stories, alternately widening and tapering, until it terminated in a conical roof tipped with a spire of gold. The whole edifice was constructed from some pale yellow stone, polished and gleaming like marble. Nathan allowed his thought to float toward the edge of the terrace; beyond the balustrade, he could see only a rose-pink sky dimpled with cloud like a drift of apple blossom. He peered over the stone rail, and although he was weightless and bodiless he felt his mind reel. There was no ground below that he could see, only more sky, and the tower, broadening toward what he hoped was its base. Perhaps a thousand feet down the cloud thickened and pressed against the building, obliterating the view. Nathan pulled himself away, his dream turning back to the tower, where two lines of people had emerged from a double doorway and were ranging themselves across the terrace. They wore deep-purple-black robes, perhaps denoting religion, or rank, or any combination, and under the hoods they had the lean, curved, long-boned faces of Eosians. Nathan was evidently somewhere in the same cosmos, if not on the same planet. He remembered the Grandir’s purple-cowled henchman, and wondered if these men fulfilled a similar role—whatever that was.