The Poisoned Crown (49 page)

“Annie …?” Bartlemy’s voice interrupted the turmoil of her mind.

“These last few months,” she said, “it’s been as if—as if Nathan’s almost forgotten me. He’ll answer me when I speak to him—he’s always polite—but he looks at me like I’m a ghost—like I’m transparent—not really there. As though he’s looking at
me
, but seeing someone else …”

“He’s had a lot to deal with,” Bartlemy said. “He’ll never desert you. You’ve been a wonderful mother under circumstances that haven’t been easy—the best mother in the world.”

“He used to say that,” Annie said, catching her breath on renewed sobs. “But I lied to him—I
lied …”

“You did what seemed right at the time.”

“No—I was selfish—selfish and cowardly—you told me so, and it’s true. And now he’s gone for good …”

“Right,” said Bartlemy with a brisk change of tone, becoming very down-to-earth. “One, I never told you anything of the kind. I simply recommended you find the right moment to talk to him, and eventually you did. Two, he hasn’t gone for good, not if the Grandir wants to finish the Great Spell. The Grail relics are still in their hiding place—I had a look before I came over—and the magic can’t be done without them. We’re assuming the Grandir is Nathan’s father, which seems to be the logical conclusion to draw. Anyway, having gone to some lengths to acquire them I’m quite sure Nathan will return for the relics, sooner or later. Meanwhile, how about some breakfast? I’ll cook while you have awash.”

Annie blew her nose, rather more decisively than before. “Sorry,” she said. “I’m being an awful fool. I hadn’t considered … about the
Grail stuff. You’re right: you must be. Only I’m afraid I’m not very hungry just yet…”

“Try,” Bartlemy said. “The brain requires food as well as the body. And I think we will need to be very intelligent before this day is over.”

N
ATHAN KNEW
he wasn’t asleep, but he didn’t think he was properly awake, either. It was dark, a slightly paler shade of darkness than the dark between worlds, and there was a curious smell, a stuffy, damp, vegetal odor like the inside of a compost heap. He couldn’t think what universe he was in, if any. And then he realized he could feel the Grandir’s hand enfolding his—the clasp of Halmé’s slender fingers— and he knew he must be
somewhere
, because during transition the senses didn’t function normally, and although the handlink was there the feel of it had been lost.

He said: “Father, I’m not quite sure … where we are.” The Grandir released his hand—perhaps there was a gesture, unseen in the gloom. A ball of werelight appeared, hovering just above them, emanating a faint greenish glow that did its best to illuminate their surroundings. A rectangular chamber, not very large, with glimpses of stonework behind a gnarly matting of what appeared to be roots or stems. Crumbly pillars … a face, peering suddenly from the apex of an arch, with stumpy horns and wicked eyes above bunched cheeks— but it was only a carving … an alcove, where something might have stood, or was intended to stand, but it wasn’t there anymore. The chapel of Josevius Grimthorn, built to house the Grail, buried for a millennium beneath the choking roots and briars of the Darkwood. Above, Nathan could make out the hole where, three years before, he had fallen through, though it seemed to be partly overgrown again and only a gray dimness leaked in from the daylight lurking somewhere up there.

The Grandir said: “This place belonged, I believe, to the man I originally entrusted with custody of the Cup. A small-time wizard, greedy and unscrupulous, but he did his job, though his descendants were less reliable. The Sword was well looked after in Wilderslee, even
if the kings there could never leave it alone, and the spirit Nefanu proved an efficient defender of the Crown despite being relatively insane, but earthfolk, as always, seem to be—wayward. I understand the Cup was actually
sold
at one point. For
money.”

“People like money,” Nathan said. “They don’t have much magic here. They use money instead.”

“We dispensed with it long ago,” the Grandir said. “But these are trivial matters. The main thing is, we have arrived. Well done, my son. I knew you had the strength, and the will to use it. Halmé?”

“I’m all right… I think,” she said, looking around her. “This … is our new world?”

“No,” said the Grandir. “Just the loophole through which we entered. There is a portal here, not suitable for people as a rule, but it was used for the Cup. I imagine Naithan was able to force it wider …”

“I don’t know what I did,” Nathan said. He couldn’t quite believe they were here—the Grandir, and Halmé. Even in the dark they seemed too large for this world, not just physically but in spirit. The Grandir’s aura, the force of his personality, filled all the available space—it was like inviting a movie star into a bedsit. “Should we … get out of here?”

At a word from the Grandir the overhead roots drew back. Then they began to grow downward, knotting themselves into a ladder. The three of them climbed up. The wood above was deep in the leafmold of many autumns; snagging stems reached out to hook clothes, twig fingers poked down from the upper branches, catching at hair or, in extreme cases, trying to take out an eye. It was a dreary, untidy, unwelcoming sort of place.

Nathan had no idea what time it was, or even what day.

“What is this?” Halmé asked. “Is it a kind of garden?”

“It’s a wood,” Nathan said.

“I remember woods. There were flowers—some of them flew around, with petals for wings—and the leaves were green, and the trees were tall as towers …”

“It’s winter,” Nathan offered in mitigation.

“I think … I would like to go home,” Halmé murmured.

“This
is
home,” said the Grandir.

And then: “Come. We have things to do before nightfall.” A snap of his fingers extinguished the werelight, which had followed them up from below. He turned to Nathan. “The place designated for the spell is not far from this spot. It was once called the
Scarbarrow
, in your tongue.”

“Where?” Nathan said.

The Grandir told him.

“We will see you there after sunset. You must fetch the Three and bring them to me. Avoid any contact with your mother or the wizard you call uncle; I do not want you distracted. A Great Spell requires a level of concentration beyond your capacity to imagine, and this will be perhaps the greatest ever performed. Your part in it is small, but significant: I need you to be totally focused.”

Even in Eosian, Nathan thought with a flicker of perfidious humor, the phrase sounded familiar. It was the kind of phrase teachers used at school when they wanted to press the right buttons—we want you
totally focused
on passing your exams, or winning this rugger match, or achieving certain academic standards.
Total focus here I come …

But the Great Spell was too serious a matter for flippancy.

“My uncle has the Three,” Nathan said. “I can’t take them without asking him. Anyway, he’s always home.”

“He will be out,” the Grandir said, with the certainty of one who
knew.
“You need have no qualms of conscience. He was only a caretaker. The Three are mine, or have you forgotten? Romandos made them, my ancestor of long ago. Bring them to me.”

“I’ll try.” What had his mother said about those words?

But when he was with the Grandir, Annie and Uncle Barty seemed small and far away, people encountered in another life, another time. Which of course they were …

“We will meet at nightfall,” the Grandir said. “I have faith in you, Naithan. Your task is almost over.”

He strode off through the Darkwood with Halmé, and the trees parted to let him pass, and the briars wriggled out of his path like snakes.

Nathan started in the other direction toward Thornyhill Manor. Even though he was in his own world, somehow it didn’t feel like it. He seemed curiously disassociated from his surroundings, as if he were in
an alien universe in one of his dreams, the dreams he’d had recently of aimless wandering, searching, going nowhere. He knew what he was doing and where he had to go, but his actions felt almost robotic, as if the Nathan who was carrying out the Grandir’s orders was divorced from the Nathan inside, a Nathan who watched from a distance, uninvolved, his brain in suspension.

He was following a plan laid down by one of his remoter ancestors in another cosmos perhaps a billennium ago, though time no longer had any real meaning for him. A lot of things no longer had any real meaning, when the man he had recently discovered to be his father—a supreme ruler on a scale unimaginable in our universe—told him he was nearly fifty thousand years old, and they jumped from world to world as casually as a subatomic particle in theoretical physics, and universes were two a penny and Doom was on the daily menu. It occurred to him he might be in shock and that was why he felt so strange—he’d felt that way ever since Annie told him the truth. People in shock, so he had heard, often went into a condition of mental and physical shutdown, to give their mind and body time to adjust to whatever had shocked them in the first place. Somewhere, he was adjusting, absorbing everything that had happened, everything that was happening. He wouldn’t try to think about it yet. He would just get on with the job.

At Thornyhill he went in through the kitchen door. Hoover was there to greet him, tail wagging, but there was no sign of Bartlemy. The Grandir had been right, but then he always was. He had the Sight, or some high-tech, high-magic equivalent: he could see across the worlds, through windows in space and time. He had read his son’s thoughts, admitted Nathan into his own. It had been the ultimate intimacy, an act of total self-revelation—but with a mind like the Grandir’s there must still have been depths unplumbed, thoughts unexplored, veils past which he could not see. All he had been permitted, Nathan guessed, was a brief glimpse just beneath the surface.

He had started thinking again, even though his brain wasn’t ready for it—thinking his mother must be worried, he should call her, leave a message, write a note. The drawing room clock said it was nearly five. Maybe Bartlemy was with her now. He felt as if he had been gone a century
but worked out, with an effort, it was just a night and a day. No contact, the Grandir had said. Bartlemy would look after Annie. He could explain … afterward. When it was all over. The Great Spell— the end of a world—whatever
it
was …

He opened the secret compartment in the chimney and took out the three objects hidden there, wrapped in brown paper and bits of old sheet. There was a sports bag tucked in the cupboard under the stairs, one of his—he must have left it behind awhile ago—and he put the things inside. A section of the Sword protruded, but it was encased in its sheath and bundled in torn linen, so he didn’t think it mattered. No one would be able to tell what it was.

Hoover watched him, head on one side, tail no longer wagging. He looked disconcertingly intelligent.

“It’s all right,” Nathan said. “I have to take these things—for the Great Spell. Uncle Barty knows … Anyway, I’ll tell him later.”

When the hour has struck, when the world has halted, when the knell of Doom is all tolled out…

Hoover clearly wanted to come with him, trotting after him out of the door, but Nathan said
“No
” in his sternest voice, tinged with a quaver of anxiety, and the dog, rather reluctantly, did not attempt to follow farther. At the idea of how the Grandir might react if he arrived at the location for the spell with his uncle’s shaggy mongrel in tow, all the thoughts in Nathan’s head began to tumble over, like a row of dominoes when someone flicks the one at the end. But he couldn’t go there, not now, and his mind closed down again, and he was back in robot mode, walking through the woods with the bag over his shoulder, on his way to Scarbarrow Fayr.

Dark crept through the trees behind him, and as he reached the road there was a whistling call, somewhere nearby, a sort of eldritch piping, but he assumed it was only a bird.

P
OBJOY ARRIVED
to see Annie about half an hour after Bartlemy had left. They didn’t have a date, but he was back from Lancashire for a week and felt a sudden, overpowering need to talk to her—the sort of
need that wouldn’t waste time with preliminary phone calls but drove him straight to Eade, parked the car for him, and propelled him into the bookshop before he had had time to find an adequate excuse for the impromptu intrusion. On a subliminal level, he was thinking that Nathan would be at school and they could have some quality time together, discuss whatever it was needed discussing, maybe repeat their last kiss …

But one look at Annie’s face changed all that. A pale winter face— wintry with the frozen top layer of her thoughts, with the deeps of inner chill.

She said: “I’m sorry, I can’t… I can’t see you right now. Sorry …”

“What’s happened?” In Eade—quiet, sleepy little Eade—something bizarre was always happening. Robbery, kidnapping, murder. And certain individuals were invariably mixed up in it… “What’s happened to Nathan?”

“He’s gone,” Annie said.

Pobjoy became a policeman—if he had ever stopped being one. His interrogation technique clicked in automatically. “How long? Have you reported it? Why wasn’t he at school?”

Annie answered the questions, indicating her recognition of the auto-policeman phenomenon with a shadowy smile. “I don’t want it reported,” she said. “There’s no point.”

“He’s only been missing a little while,” Pobjoy said, hearing the standard reassurances coming out of his mouth and despising himself for them, knowing—
knowing
—that this time they didn’t apply. “He’s fifteen—almost an adult—and tall and strong for his age. I’m sure he’ll be all right.”

He was pathetic. There was a
crime
going on in Eade—a crime so large he couldn’t see it, only the bits that stuck out around the edge— and the boy was involved somehow, up to his neck, perpetrator or victim. If he was missing, it was because he was in trouble, real trouble, and all he, Pobjoy, could do about it was bleat clichés to his mother like a bloody policeman’s manual …