The Poisoned Crown (33 page)

They ought to have a beer, and bond
, Nathan thought wryly. But Widewater was a beer-free zone.

“The king ordered me to kill her,” Uraki went on, with a jerk of his head at Denaero.

“My father ordered you—? He
can’t
have—”

“He asked me to make it quick and painless. He didn’t want you to suffer.”

“I’m not suffering!” raged Denaero. “I just want to get out of
this
—” She tugged at the manacle. “Why didn’t he order you to set me free? Why do people have to be so
tragic
about everything?”

“What will you tell him?” Nokosha had moved between Uraki and the mermaid, as if prepared to protect her. Nathan wondered if the gesture was instinctive.

“I will tell him … she didn’t suffer. Take her north with you. See to it she eats fireflowers to warm her blood or the cold will kill her.”

“Is that what you did on the raid?”

How Uraki might have responded Nathan never knew. That was the point when the knot unraveled, and he and Denaero headed for the surface. And now at last he could breathe again—breathe at leisure in the bliss of his own element—gulping the air like wine, hanging on to the albatross for support. Ezroc had seen most of the battle, but the action had taken place too far down for him to help. Denaero hugged him, then hugged Nathan, her small naked breasts squeezed against his chest. Nathan felt a flicker of relief—slightly tinged with regret—that he had worn his T-shirt: at least they weren’t skin to skin.

Then Nokosha emerged, without Uraki.

“Where did he go?” Denaero asked.

“He went,” the selkie said curtly. “Back to his people. His war. I’m stuck with you. A spoiled child who’s betrayed her kin and her kind— oh, and the legwalker, who’s no use to anyone.”

“He freed Denaero,” Ezroc snapped. “His fingers are nimbler than yours.”

“Very well,” Nokosha said with what might have been a shrug if it had been above the water. “But now they’re both just baggage. This
whole expedition has been a waste of time. I need to get home. I, too, have a war to fight.”

“Wrong,” said Nathan.

“What?”

“You’re not going to fight the war, you’re going to stop it.”

“How?” asked Denaero.

“I’m not exactly sure—”

“That’s a surprise,” said Nokosha. “If you want to stop the war, don’t talk to me. It’s the merfolk who are attacking us. You’re the one who brought news of it—and I’ve no intention of calling off the defense.”

“Why did you bring
him?”
Denaero asked Ezroc. “He’s not as nice as Keerye. Or as handsome.”

Nathan gave her hair a yank in the hope she would take the hint and shut up.

“Nefanu is the one starting the war,” he reminded them. “Without her shamans to stir things up, the king would never have made a move. So it’s Nefanu we have to target.”

“You want to challenge the Queen of the Sea?” For once, Nokosha was taken aback. “You can’t even swim properly.”

“He’s doing fine,” Ezroc said. “Go on, Nathan. What’s your plan?”

“I haven’t got one yet,” Nathan conceded. “But I need to get the Iron Crown—the Crown of Death—from the caverns of air. Suppose we could unblock the entrance somehow? Then the air would rush out, and the sea would sink, and the islands would return.”

“How would that stop the war?” Nokosha said.

“It would create one hell of a diversion. Nefanu would have a lot more to worry about than destroying the northfolk, and the upheaval would throw everyone off their stride. I know it’s a long shot, but have you got a better idea?”

“Fight!” the selkie snarled.

“Only if we have to,” Ezroc said. “If there’s another way—”

“You’re psychotic,” Nathan told Nokosha. “You and Uraki both. Two of a bloodthirsty kind. You could have been friends back there—
you nearly were—but you’ll grab any excuse to butcher each other, because that’s the way you are. It’s the human in you—seals and fish manage to exist side by side. Only people kill.”

“We’re going north,” the selkie said, as if concluding the debate. “You can come, or vanish back to your own world—I really don’t care. With any luck you’ll drown here and we’ll be rid of you.”

“I can’t carry three,” Ezroc pointed out.

“I’m not going,” said Denaero. “It’s too cold up on the Great Ice. There are places here I can hide. Anyway, Nathan will need me to find the caverns of air.”

“Do you know how to get in?” Nathan asked her.

“Of course. It’s meant to be a secret, but it’s the sort of secret that everyone knows. Only it’ll be far too deep for you.”

“Drown him,” Nokosha repeated grimly, swinging himself onto the albatross’s back. Insofar as a bird can assume a facial expression, Ezroc looked annoyed. “We’re going home. I have a battle to plan.”

“Any fool can start a war,” Nathan said with contempt. “It takes brains to stop one.”

“I’m not starting it.
Drown him!” He kicked Ezroc, who twisted his head and clipped his beak within an inch of the selkie’s face.

“I’ll be back,” said the albatross, beating his wings against the water. “This one’s no help to us. Keerye would’ve tried …”

“Don’t talk about Keerye!”

They took off in mid-argument, describing a wide circle around Nathan and the mermaid. “I’ll—be back!” Ezroc called.

“Be careful!” cried Denaero, who was evidently learning caution from recent disaster. “I’ll send you a message by smallfish!”

“Don’t thank me for saving your skin!” said Nokosha.

“I won’t!” Denaero retorted.

Then the bird swung northward, racing away on a single wingbeat, darkening to a silhouette that dwindled and vanished into the huge blue of the sky. Nathan was left treading water beside the mermaid, wondering what to do next.

“I’m getting awfully tired,” he said.

“I’ll hold you up,” Denaero promised, swimming closer.

Nathan experienced a brief panic at the proximity of her nakedness, but the twinge was lost in his general exhaustion. All the diving down, and holding his breath, and fighting his fear of being underwater—a fear now gone forever—had worn him out. He felt sleep washing over him, drawing him down into the sea. He tried to say,
I’ll be back
as Ezroc had, but he never knew if he managed it. The dark took him, bearing him back to his own world, leaving Denaero alone on the borders of the reef.

I
T TOOK
some time for Hazel to be satisfied with the potion; she knew she could not afford to get it wrong. According to her phantom instructor, the final result should be clear, with a slight greenish tinge, and her first two attempts were both cloudy and murky, one of them a sinister tint of purple. She tipped them down the loo, hoping there was nothing living in the sewers that would be affected by drinking them, murmuring a deactivating spell as she tugged the handle to flush. Then, back in her room, she started again. It would have been simpler to work in the attic, as Effie Carlow had—there was more space—but she was slightly superstitious about it. Effie had told her she had inherited the Gift, the witchcraft gene, her words malevolent as a curse, as if she were ill-wishing her own great-grandchild, condemning her to a future of solitude and madness. Working in what had been Effie’s spellroom would, Hazel felt, somehow compound the curse, turning her into everything she feared to become. In her bedroom, whatever magic she did was hers, and hers alone.

Besides, it was in the attic she had once seen Nenufar’s head emerge from a basin of river water, and the horror of that moment had stayed with her, so she could not even enter there without a chill in her heart.

She mixed the ingredients of the potion in a glass bowl she had borrowed from the kitchen, murmuring the spellwords, thinking it would have been better, or at least more dramatic, if she’d had a cauldron. Fortunately, the mixture didn’t require heating, though she knew when she
got it right the bowl would grow warm toward the end. She had raided Bartlemy’s garden for a couple of the less well-known herbs, waiting till he was busy elsewhere, not wanting to tell him what she was up to. When the charm was completed—when she knew it had worked—
then
she would tell him. If she was going to fail, she preferred to keep it to herself.

This time she concentrated harder, making sure she spoke the incantation at the appropriate moment, watching for color changes as each new ingredient was added. At one point the contents of the bowl turned black and smelled like a whole harbor full of dead fish; then it went bright green, and there was a far-off ripple of music, very fluid in tone, as if the instrument was playing underwater. And then at the last the liquid changed to a sparkling clarity, and she knew this was it.

As the spell climaxed, Hazel did not see the pipe-cleaner doll charring and crumbling into a few flakes of ash—did not notice, while she turned to retrieve the crystal vial, how those flakes drifted into the bowl, swirling around in the potion, congealing at the bottom. But when she looked again, there was the pearl. She poured the liquid through a funnel into the bottle and it rolled out, caught in her palm, a tiny, perfect sphere of rainbow gray, its sheen like oil pollution on a puddle. Hazel had never really liked pearls. She associated them with middle-aged dowdiness, with women in cashmere twinsets and country accents, running fetes for charity and talking about hunting. But this pearl was different. Not just because it was gray—the color of smoke and shadows—but because it looked, somehow, magical.
Never trust anything that looks magical
, Bartlemy had told her,
because it probably is.
But finding a magical object in a magic potion was to be expected, even if it hadn’t featured in the original specification. Finding an unmagical object there—that would have been weird.

“What do I do with it?” Hazel wondered aloud, glaring at the sheet of paper from which her latest instructions had already faded.

After a moment’s thought, she repeated the question in Atlantean.

Place the pearl in the bottle
, the writing told her, rippling its way across the page.
Without the pearl, the potion will not be viable. The bottle with the pearl must be carried at all times. It is a talisman.

And then, when the page had cleared, two more words wrote themselves emphatically across it.

Tell Nathan.

The words stayed there for a long time before they began to dissipate.

Something about that final edict made Hazel uncomfortable. She put the pearl in the bottle, corked it, sealed the cork with a magical Command. Then she sent Nathan a text telling him to come and see her as soon as possible, it was important, she had a surprise for him—but all the while there was a niggle at the back of her mind, a dim consciousness that something was not quite right. She went over what she had done from her own notes—
Check
, Bartlemy always said.
Check, double-check, triple-check. The precise wording of a spell may vary, but the elements never do. A tiny error can be catastrophic
—but she didn’t think she’d made any mistakes this time. She failed to register the absence of the Nenufar doll from the clutter in her room. After all, it was leftovers from a charm long worn out; she had no more use for it.

Some spell-debris is like radioactive waste
, Bartlemy had said, tipping the contents of his brass basin down the sink.
Be very careful how you dispose of it.

The next morning Hazel had school, and the niggle was pushed even farther back in her thoughts.

In the evening Nathan came around.

He asked Lily for another cappuccino, earning himself a glare from Hazel.

“You’re being charming to my mother,” she accused. “You know I hate it when you’re charming. Anyway, you don’t need to. She’s known you all your life.”

“I like cappuccino,” Nathan said. “Especially the froth on the top. Your mum remembers the chocolate powder, too. She’s better than Café Nero.” Eade didn’t have one, but there was a Café Nero in Chizzledown, which he and Eric frequented from time to time.

“Charm!” Hazel reiterated. “You do it much too often. Like chocolate powder on top of everything.”

“I have to compensate for you,” Nathan said.

“You should be yourself. Nothing more.”

“What if my self is charming?” Nathan suggested provocatively. “Sometimes, anyhow.”

“Nobody’s self is charming,” Hazel declared. “Charm is … is … an acquired virtue. It doesn’t grow by itself.”

“You can’t know that.”

At least it was a friendly dispute, Nathan reflected, accepting his cappuccino from a gratified Lily. Franco wasn’t around that night, and she had already appalled her daughter by painting her toenails, an activity only allowable in the summer months to go with sandals. In winter it hinted at decadence, and private orgies.

“Next she’ll be buying her underwear from Agent Provocator,” Hazel grumbled.

Nathan thought about correcting her pronunciation but decided she was doing it deliberately.

“Why not?” he asked.

“How would you feel if Annie bought Provocator underwear?”

“Why’re we always talking about underwear these days? You’ve got a fixation.” As a retort, Nathan knew it was probably a mistake, but he couldn’t be bothered to be diplomatic with
Hazel.

“Actually,” she said in an arctic voice,
“actually
, I got you ’round here about something
far
more important. But if you’re only interested in conversations about knickers—”

“You started the subject,” he said. “Not me.”

“You went on with it,” she said unfairly. She had learned long ago that Nathan could always out-argue her, and being unreasonable was her best policy. Especially since—like Nathan’s charm—it came naturally.

“No, I—never mind. Just tell me what’s so important.”

“I’ve solved your problem for you, that’s all.”

“Which problem?” Nathan queried. He could think of a dozen for starters.

“The Widewater one. I’ve found a spell that will mean you can swim underwater like your mermaid friend, even right down deep where the pressure gets bad. You told me to make myself useful, so I did.” She
produced the vial, holding it out to him. “The bottle’s crystal: you should be able to take it with you. You drink the potion when you get there, but keep the bottle on you because of the pearl. I’m not quite sure how it works but it’s a kind of talisman. You could hang it ’round your neck on a piece of string—something like that.” She waited expectantly, enjoying the look on Nathan’s face.