The Poisoned Crown (48 page)

There was a silence—an eerie silence for a garden, a silence without the hum of bees or the chatter of birds. For this was a garden that grew by magic when all other growth had ceased, an Eden at the world’s end—the memory of spring, not spring itself.

“I did not expect to love you,” the Grandir said.

It was what Nathan had been wanting to hear, what he had searched for through all his dreams. For a second his happiness was so intense, it felt like a spear inside him, twisting in his heart. He could not speak.

“I planned so carefully,” the Grandir said, “and for so many ages. But love creeps in through the chinks between plans, taking you by surprise. No ruler, no matter how powerful, can plan for everything. This has been a gift to me, and a burden, though it will cost me dear. As I sit here, in this garden, talking to my son—I would not be without it.”

Nathan tried to meet his eyes, but he could not. He thought:
In our world, we don’t say such things
—
embarrassment or inhibition gets in the way.

Which world do I belong to?

The Grandir said gently: “You have asked me very little. Have you no other questions?”

“You’ve already answered the only one that mattered,” Nathan said.

And then, out of nowhere, a question he had forgotten, or never thought to ask—Hazel’s question. Always Hazel, intruding on his thoughts like a goblin, mischievous, malignant—a goblin popping up in this Eden where the spring made no sound.

“What’s your name?”

Nathan thought for a minute the Grandir might be offended, but he only laughed. Nathan could not recall seeing him laugh before, yet it seemed he could laugh like lesser men. “My name! Ah, you would not understand. In your world, names are important—a little. I wanted you called Naithan because of its meaning, in many tongues—the gift, the God-given. It is the name that has been written into the spell since Romandos’s day. But in my world, the name of a Grandir—his true name, his birth name—can be a weapon against him. It can even be used to counteract his spells or touch his thought. Among my predecessors, many have been careless or generous with their names, but I could not afford to take that risk. Even Halmé does not know it. Only my mother, who gave it to me when I first entered the world, and she carried it unspoken to her grave. It is a name of great import in any universe, but none other has ever used it, nor ever will.” He paused. Smiled.

“You may call me Father. That, too, is a name none other has ever used … nor ever will.”

“Father,” Nathan said, trying it out.

In our world
, he thought,
we say Dad, Daddy, Pop, Papa
, but such diminutives would not do for so solemn a moment, for a Grandir, for the ruler of a cosmos.

Father…

“It will serve,” said the Grandir, “for what time we have left. I am proud to hear it on your lips.”

What time we …
Was he going to lose what he had found—so soon, so soon?

“Father—”

But the Grandir had gotten to his feet. “Halmé is coming. She helped you once, thinking I would not know it—she, who has no secrets from me! It was but a part of the pattern … Still, this is hard for her. She is the heart of my world, yet her own heart has been bruised, if not broken …”

She came toward them down one of the pathways, moving like a poem, her perfect head poised on her perfect neck. For a long while the subtle differences of proportion between earthfolk and Eosians had ceased to trouble Nathan; now it was his own people—the people he had grown up with—who looked wrong to him. Like the Grandir, Halmé wore white, a long flowing tunic over long flowing trousers. Her hair was piled up behind her head in a mass of knots and coils, bound with a strip of cloth with trailing ends that rippled as she walked. Everything about her rippled and flowed, but her face was still, frozen in hesitation—in doubt. When she saw Nathan, a light came into her eyes, though whether happy or sad he could not tell, and there was a tear on her cheek, a single tear bright as a droplet of diamond.

“I knew,” she said, placing her hands on his shoulders. He was tall, but she was taller, well over six feet in earth measurements. “When first I saw you, I knew you for his son. My soul knew, though my mind did not. His child—by another … Yet I loved you from that moment. Isn’t that strange? Almost as if… you were the son I should have had …”

“It is well,” the Grandir said. Nathan noticed it was his gesture, rather than his touch, that lifted the hands from his shoulders, breaking the contact. “And now, the time has come. The time we have waited for. The Contamination has killed all life in my universe, save here. Even as we speak, it is closing on Ind, the last continent on the last planet… The night sky darkens; whole constellations have been snuffed out. By day the sun that once warmed us scorches like fire. Arkatron, city of forty million people, now has less than two hundred thousand, the last remnants of the greatest race who ever lived. If they are to be saved, we must act. Nathan …”

“Yes?”

“Take us to your world.”

N
ATHAN STARED
at him. In all his half-formed imaginings, there had never been a moment like this. He was still struggling to take in everything the Grandir had told him—still reeling from the implications— still flattened from the emotional steamroller that had thundered over his spirit. And now, at the climax of his short life, he was being asked to do the impossible. He could not disappoint his father now, but…

“I
can’t
… I don’t know how to—how to do that. I’m not a wizard, just…”

“Just my son.” The Grandir’s voice was as gentle and inexorable as the sea—and Nathan had seen what the sea could do when it made up its mind. “You’ve done it before. You saved a man who was drowning, when we closed off Maali. It was not what I needed from you, but it taught me you have the power and the will to use it. You transported the unfortunate Kwanjira Ley from the Pits—you took a princess for a walk in the woods, hardly an essential part of your task. You used the portal, even when you stayed in the same universe, switching yourself from A to B through a point
outside
being—and you were able to carry someone with you. You didn’t know what you were doing, but you did it. Necessity was the driving force. And there is necessity here. The Great Spell must be performed in
your
world: the Three are there, the Cup, the Sword, the Crown—and the place was chosen long ago, marked
with the impress of doom. Halmé and I must be there. Set aside your doubts. I have not failed you in the past; I know you will not fail me.”

I wish I knew it
, Nathan thought. The doubts were mobbing him, storming into his head—but he couldn’t deal with them now. No time.

The Grandir said: “Link hands.”

They stood in a circle; the Grandir took his right hand, Halmé his left. Being rare, the touch felt special—skin on skin—almost a meeting of souls. Nathan looked into Halmé’s face and saw there the shadow of Imagen—Imagen in love, passionate and alive—stilled forever in those immortal features, time-frozen, fixed in a passionless perfection. Only when she looked at Nathan did a glimmer of that vitality return to her.

He remembered Lugair—the alien strain in their heredity. He must tell the Grandir …

“It makes no difference,” the Grandir said, answering his thought. “Lugair, too, was part of the spell…”

And then Nathan looked into his father’s eyes, and saw nothing else.

Emotion poured into him like a black tide—an urgency on the edge of despair. In his mind he glimpsed the lifeless wastes of the Contamination—empty lands, brown and sterile—gray deserts—great trees crumbling away, their dust blown on the wind until both wind and dust were gone—the red glare of dying suns—planets gripped in a starless cold, their orbits decaying around the heart of the universe—a heart that beat slower, slower, till it subsided into the stasis of the utter End … The visions opened his thought, unfolding it into the thought of someone who has lived almost fifty millennia, who has seen everything and done everything, and knows that everything is yet to see and do … Fear touched him, the penumbra of an endless night—the hope of a dawn beyond—and love, great love—for Halmé, the most beautiful woman in all the worlds—and for his son, valiant beyond the measure of his kind, who could not fail him now …

The world became a spinning dark, a tunnel that swallowed them at lightspeed—shrank—and vanished—

Nathan thought he passed out.

nnie knew, the second she woke up, that there was something wrong. It was a cold pale gray morning like many of the mornings that had preceded it, a winter sort of morning even though it was the first day of spring—winter seemed to be going on more or less forever that year—but her sense of wrongness was only heightened by the fact that nothing was obviously different, nothing out of place. Something must have happened, she thought, while she still slept, something she had been aware of on a subconscious level—a scream, a snarl, a minor earth tremor. A change in the tempo of the house. She could not see it but she
felt
it, her intuition sharpened by more than a decade of contact with the shady side of existence. She got out of bed, remembered that it was Tuesday. The twenty-first. And then she knew.

She ran to Nathan’s room, entered without a knock. He was gone. She stood there, stupid with the onset of fear, trying not to lose her head. It had happened before, he had a tendency to go missing, in one world or another, but he had always turned up in the end. Only somehow this didn’t look like
missing
, it looked like departure. The duvet was indented, as if he had been lying on top of it, like someone snatching
a nap in a house not his own. The clothes he had worn the previous day were gone, including his sneakers—he must have slept in them. And the room was
tidy
, books stacked, oddments tucked in cupboard and drawer, unthinkable for a teenager. Unless they were going away. That was when you tidied up, wasn’t it?
When you were leaving…
Nathan had been absent, inside his head, ever since she told him the truth. Now he was gone indeed, and she was filled with the terrible cold certainty that he was never coming back.

She rang Bartlemy, stuttering in her distress, fighting to stay calm. “It’s the S-Solstice. You said—this was the day. I should’ve watched him—I didn’t think, I expected it to be t-tonight—”

“You can’t watch a fifteen-year-old boy all the time, you would drive him insane,” Bartlemy said with quiet common sense. “Don’t panic: we’ve been through this before. He’ll be back. I, too, thought it would be tonight… Are you sure he hasn’t gone for an early-morning walk?”

“No—yes. Of course I’m sure. He—”

“How can you be so positive?”

“The impression in the duvet. He never got up.”

“All right. I’ll come over as soon as I can. I have to check a few things first. Hang in there.”

“Hanging,” Annie said.

When he arrived, he found her in tears. For all her gentleness, he had rarely seen her cry, except over a sad film, or a novel, or a piece of music. She glanced up at him as he came in, pink-nosed and puffy-eyed, sniffling into toilet paper since Nathan had used up all the tissues the previous week.

“I’ve been thinking,” she said. “I’ve only ever had him on loan, haven’t I? His father always intended to take him back, when the moment came. Did he imagine I was going to—to sacrifice him or something, like that madwoman Kal spoke of? Does he think I’m some crazed medieval witch, trying to open the Gate of Death with my son’s blood? He may not know me at all, but—but he should still know me better than that.”

“Nathan’s father must know something of you,” Bartlemy said. “He knows you were able to open the Gate out of love, not as part of his spell.”

“Love …” Annie’s tears ceased; the back of her hand went to her mouth.

She bit it.

She thought:
I’ve hated him for so long. Supposing this is my punishment
—
to lose Nathan to him? And how can I harm him
—
should I ever get the chance
—
if Nathan loves him and wants to be with him?