The Sword of Straw (25 page)

“But who’s the right man,” Agnis mused, staring down at the exposed hilt, “and how will he know?”

“A hero, the legend says. Or a traitor. Depends which story you read. As for how he’ll know…”

“It might be you,” Agnis said, and her voice was very sweet, and her gaze slid sideways to meet his.

“I’m no hero. Got to be pure in heart for that—ha! No traitor, either.”

“You’re a hero to me.” Her sultry mouth curved into a wide pussycat smile.
Only cats don’t smile,
Nathan reflected,
but that’s how they’d look if they did.

She’s evil,
he tried to tell the king, forgetting this was the past, and it could not be changed, and he had no voice to speak or warn him. Even though Nell had liked her, she was evil. No one would have pushed matters this far out of mere curiosity…

“That’s enough,” the king said, with a sudden stab at regal authority. “I’m putting it back.” He tried to replace the leather guard on the hilt, but his fingers fumbled, still shaking with nerves.

There was a sound from outside—footsteps on stone, drawing nearer. The echoing footsteps of metal-shod feet. Agnis turned, pressing a hand to her breast. (Was there a flash of triumph in her eyes?) The king started, clutching the scabbard.

A man strode in—a big man, much bigger than the king, with a beard that jutted aggressively and eyebrows to match. Nathan noticed his iron-tipped boots, a glimpse of chain mail under his tabard, a longsword at his side. “Agnis!” he said sharply. “Where have you been? Slipping away like this—letting Wilbert inveigle you up here—What is this anyway? A secret room? A seduction chamber?” His face, naturally ruddy, grew still redder with outrage.

The king bristled. “My intentions toward your sister are perfectly honor—”

Sister,
Nathan noted.
Nell got it wrong. Not a rival in love—an irate brother.
He was as dark as Agnis, dressed partly in black, and Nathan couldn’t help thinking of him as the Black Knight.

“You’ll never marry her!” the intruder was saying. “The spineless ruler of a petty kingdom—a one-city state with a few acres of farmland tacked on. No warriors—only peasants, merchants,
shopkeepers
—a king who wants to eat well and sleep deep instead of fight and conquer. You’re not a king—you’re not even a man! Agnis can do better for herself—better for
me
—”

“Get out of here!” The king’s grip tightened on the scabbard; Nathan saw the whitening of his knuckles.

“I love him!” Agnis announced dramatically.

Her brother drew his sword. Nathan saw that the king was unarmed, save for the deadly contents of the sheath. Agnis had taken a step back, as if seeking protection, placing him between her and any danger of attack. “I won’t be sacrificed to your ambition!” she told her brother. “Wilbert, help me!
Please!
”

“I have no weapon—”

His assailant gave a derisive laugh, reminiscent of Damon Hackforth. “You have a sword between your hands, yet you say you are weaponless. There speaks both a fool and a coward!”

They’ve set him up,
Nathan thought.
They’re in it together—it’s obvious…

“Defend yourself, or die!” the Black Knight cried, whirling his own sword in a great arc.

It’s a bluff,
Nathan hazarded.
They wouldn’t dare kill him like this. It’s a bluff to make him draw…
His heart would have been in his mouth if either organ had been tangible. He forgot all about not interfering—if he had known how, he would have changed history. But he could only watch.

The Traitor’s Sword came out of its scabbard with a sound like tearing silk. The blade seemed to be edged with blue fire, but beneath the sheen of the metal Nathan thought he saw shadows move, and two red gleams that slid down the shaft. Then the sword leapt from the king’s hand, parried the attacking blow, and took off the Black Knight’s head with a single stroke. It shot across the room, bouncing against the stonework like a ball, jets of blood spouting from severed arteries and spraying in all directions as it rolled. Floor and walls were spattered; one side of Agnis’s skirt was drenched. She screamed with genuine emotion this time—screamed and screamed, clutching her own head as if she feared to lose that, too. Her brother’s body stood for a second as though taken by surprise and uncertain what to do, then it crashed to the ground. The sword swept around the room, hovered briefly within inches of Agnis’s neck, then sheared off her hair at the nape and moved on. She fell to the ground, sobbing and shrieking in alternate spasms. The king had shrunk back against the pedestal. “No!” he gasped. “I didn’t mean it! I couldn’t—”

The blade plunged into his thigh.

Nathan woke moments later, panting from the horror of it, a cold sweat on his forehead. His limbs slowly relaxed but his thoughts were racing.
They planned it together, Agnis and her brother. From what he said, they weren’t from Wilderslee. I expect he hoped the sword would kill the king so he could take over the kingdom. But the Black Knight was killed instead—they didn’t plan for that—and the king saw through Agnis and sent her away.
Or did he? He had seemed fairly besotted, and not particularly perceptive. Maybe he really
had
refused to marry her out of nobility, because of the wound. Perhaps it went right up to the groin and he was unable to have more children: that would explain it. Nell had had a close shave. She might have been saddled with the ultimate wicked stepmother.

And then:
I wonder…I wonder if Agnis could be behind the Urdemons?

He lay back, still tormented with worry about the princess, trying to sleep and failing, his mind spinning with unresolved problems. In the end he was forced to read more Walter Scott, drifting off just before dawn into a darkness without even the glimmer of a dream.

T
HAT WEEK
saw the end of the summer term at Ffylde. Hazel had to struggle through two more weeks, but Nathan finished on Wednesday, although, racked by the demands of his other life, he could barely contain himself even that long. The abbot didn’t summon him again, but went out of his way to talk to Annie, when she came to collect him, reducing her to a mush of embarrassment and pride with his praise for Nathan’s sterling qualities. Nathan’s classmates, too, wanted to give him a heroic send-off, but he managed to dissuade them, threatening Ned Gable with dire consequences if anyone so much as slapped him on the back. Damon Hackforth hadn’t been seen in school again, but Annie said she had had a letter of apology from his parents, drafted she guessed by Selena, which had moved her so much she shed a tear.

“I suppose I can’t complain about how little you tell me,” she said. “I gather from Father Crowley you didn’t say much to anyone. He said you showed commendable restraint—that was the phrase—and great magnanimity. I blushed so red I wanted the floor to swallow me up. It’s awful being a proud mother. I just hope you’ll never be restrained and magnanimous again.”

“I’ll do my best,” Nathan told her, grinning broadly. With school finally over, he felt some of the tension leaving him. From tonight, he could dream at leisure…

“He seemed very intrigued by Uncle Barty,” Annie was saying. “The abbot, I mean. He asked a lot of questions about him. They ought to meet sometime. I think they’d get on, don’t you?”

“Mm.”

Nathan’s mind was elsewhere.

There was no song in the garden that night, though he had half expected it. With all his anxiety about the princess, and the Traitor’s Sword, he hadn’t forgotten the ghostly motor launch, or the child spirit’s elusive warning.

The white ship waits by the river shore…

The memory of the words sent a faint chill over his skin, though the weather was warm.

He went to bed thinking about Agnis, and whether it could be she who was controlling the Urdemons, and what it was about her that was vaguely familiar. The long black hair reminded him of Nenufar the sea spirit, whom he had seen only briefly in the magic circle, wearing another woman’s face. But Annie had seen her in another form, with a river-fall of hair and eyes deep as the Pit…Could they be two aspects of the same spirit? But no: one was mortal, one phantom, and they were in separate worlds, separate dreams. Of course,
this
world wasn’t a dream—or was it? Increasingly, he was beginning to wonder which was the dream, which the reality. He was tossed among worlds like a storm-spun leaf, and each mirrored the one before, with parallel stories, parallel histories, myths, and magics that intertwined across the gulf of time and space. There were no two-headed aliens, only humans, moving through the same old routine of drama and tragedy, passion and destruction. Modern science had taught him that throughout the multiverse there were other Nathans, other Annies. The princess was a different edition of Hazel, livelier, more confident, with a longer tangle of hair and a sweeter smile—a Hazel to fall in love with—but still, somehow, Hazel, best of his friends. And Frimbolus—Frimbolus was Bartlemy, with his lore books and his poultices, like and unlike, a counterpart, a reverse image. If he waited long enough, he might meet George (surely not Roshan?), Ned, Damon…Familiar people behind unfamiliar faces, pattern duplicating pattern, world reflecting world. He could wander infinity living a multitude of lives, endlessly new, endlessly different, always the same. His head reeled at the thought.

He found he was falling asleep and—for once—forced himself back to wakefulness, fearful that the morass of philosophy might infect his dreams. With such thoughts in his head, who knew where he might end up.
Focus,
Bartlemy had said.
Focus on the moment to which you wish to return.

It wasn’t difficult to concentrate on the princess, and that day in the woods…

He slept.

When he opened his eyes, the sun was rising. The light came streaming through the lacework of twig and leaf, foundering in a thicket, slipping though chinks in the scanty spring canopy, casting a muddle of tiny shadows that danced across the woodland floor and were lost in the debris of last year’s autumn. He saw the princess beside him, still sleeping—he knew a sudden hope that she had never realized he had gone. He waited for the dawn to wake her, watching as the whole sky lightened, listening to the morning song of the birds. A small golden squirrel played peekaboo around a tree trunk, then scurried down to the ground and vanished into the wood with a whisk of its tail. It occurred to Nathan that Nell wasn’t where he had left her: the cover was deeper here, and the tree that shaded them was different, with twigs splayed into fans and crumpled leaves only half unwrapped from their buds. He wondered how long it had been till his return, and whether Nell was angry, or hungry, or both; but at least she was safe. That was all that mattered.

Her eyelids stirred and lifted; she stared up at him, blinking.

“You came back! You
did
come back! Nathan—Nathan—” There was a moment when she was hugging him and hugging him, half crying with relief—then the hug became the grip of fury, fingers clenching on his arms, and she was shaking him, or trying to, sobbing accusations. “You left me—you
left
me—how could you? It’s been a whole day—a day and a night—I looked for you—I waited and waited—I was all on my own—”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I couldn’t help it. I fell asleep, and when I woke up I was in my own world. I’d never deliberately abandon you—you must believe that. It’s been worse for me—no, I don’t mean that, but longer—four days. I kept trying to get back to you, but whenever I dreamed, I was in the wrong place, or the wrong time. Nell—”

“I didn’t say you could call me Nell!”

He smiled—a mistake. She tried to shake him again, snarling with rage and frustration. He caught hold of her arms to restrain her, hoping to calm her down.

“You brought me here—you managed that—so
why
didn’t you get back? Don’t tell me you can’t control it—I’m sick of that one. You can when you want to. You dodge in and out of universes, spirit people off somewhere, then disappear when it suits you—”

“It didn’t suit me,” he said, being rational, sensing too late that rationality wasn’t what she wanted. “If I could choose, I’d never leave you. You know that.”

“Do I?” She subsided into a sulk—just a small one, since she wasn’t good at sulking. “How can I trust you, when you come and go like this—with no warning, no word? How can I ever trust you?”

There was no answer to that, but he knew he had to find one, even if it was the wrong answer. “You can’t,” he said. “I can’t trust myself. Sometimes I’ll leave—no warning, no word—that’s how it is. But you can trust your heart, and mine. My heart will never leave you.”

She gazed at him with eyes scrunched up against the sun. “That’s a beautiful line,” she said, trying to be cynical. “Frim would probably say you were silver-tongued. Do they teach you to talk like that, in your world?”

“No,” he said. “It comes naturally.”

She gave a shaky laugh—and everything was all right again, or as all right as it could be.

“You’re quite clever,” he remarked, “for a princess.”

“Princesses are supposed to be clever.”

“Not in my world. They just have to look pretty, and wave at the crowd, and do things for charity.”

“Even in my world most princesses do that,” she said. “Only not me. At Carboneck, I haven’t much of a crowd to wave at. And according to Roshan, I’m only
quite
pretty.”

“He was wrong,” Nathan said airily. “You’re not pretty at all.”

Her gaze slitted.

“But you
are
beautiful.”

“You’re doing it again,” she said. “Saying the right thing.”

“I know. I’ve been practicing.”

“On whom?”

After a while, they began to talk about practical matters—how to get back to Carboneck, and what the princess had done the previous day, and whether they could find anything to eat. Left on her own, Nell had been befriended by a woodwose, who had shown her another stream where she could drink and found her some more wild strawberries and a few nuts from a squirrel’s hoard. “But I ate them all,” she said. “There weren’t many, and I was starving. I still am.” Nathan knew he wasn’t hungry, but he found his stomach yearned in sympathy. “The wose said it was
this
way, toward the road to the city. I was sort of heading in that direction before I stopped to go to sleep.”