The Poisoned Crown

by Amanda Hemingway

  “We had a conversation.” Now that he was getting to the point, Pobjoy tiptoed around it. “I’ve always liked talking to the old man—not that he’s very old, when you come to think of it. He can’t be much more than sixty. He—”

  “Oh, he’s old,” Annie said. “Much older than he looks. But he’s not at all gaga, I promise you.”

  “No indeed. Of course not. A bit eccentric, perhaps … He was going on about otherworlds, and creatures—aliens—who can cross the dimensions. Like a science-fiction novel, only he seemed to believe it. Really believe it. I was a little concerned—I know you’re very close to him. He definitely seemed—well, two hard-boiled eggs short of a picnic, as they say.”

  Annie walked over to her desk, sat down on the swivel chair. Swiveled. Stopped. She said very deliberately: “Bartlemy has all his hard-boiled eggs, I can assure you. He has the full picnic. Where some people have a soggy sandwich and a can of beer, he’s got the smoked salmon canapés and the bottle of champagne. His picnic is as picnicky as it gets.”

  “I’m sure he’s very clever—”

  “Don’t you believe in otherworlds? I’m not brilliant at particle physics, but I understand scientists have proved they exist, though I don’t know how.”

  “It isn’t the kind of proof that would stand up in a court of law,” Pobjoy said dismissively. “I can accept that there are alternative universes out there in theory, but to claim there are people regularly popping across the dimensions for tea—that’s ridiculous.”

  “Not regularly,” Annie said.

  For a minute the implication of her response passed him by. Then slow light dawned.

  “You … you think …?”

  “It isn’t what I think,” Annie said, “it’s what I know. Look, I can see you’re going to make up your mind I’m—I’m several paperbacks short of a bookstore, but that can’t be helped. Supposing you tell me what got this whole conversation with Bartlemy started?”

  Pobjoy began to look uncomfortable. “It was nothing, really. I’d been walking along the road through the woods—it was dark—lonely— I got spooked, that’s all. It was nothing.”

  “What spooked you?”

  “I thought I was being followed—heard footsteps—animal, not human. Probably just a fox.”

  “You wouldn’t get spooked by a fox,” Annie said positively. “What aren’t you telling me?”

  “It’s the police who’re supposed to ask questions like that,” Pobjoy pointed out. “Anyway, there really isn’t anything else. My imagination was on overtime, that’s all.”

  “I shouldn’t have thought you had much imagination,” Annie said absentmindedly.

  “Thank you!”

  “I mean,” she fumbled, “you’re not the sort of person to scare yourself. If you were scared, there’d be a reason.”

  “Who said I was scared?”

  “You did. Well, you said you were spooked. Same thing.”

  “All right, I was scared,” Pobjoy admitted. “I was scared shitless. I don’t know why. It was almost as if the fear was something tangible, like a smell—as if it had an identity of its own. But that’s insane.”

  “Yes it is,” Annie said somberly. “That’s what they do to you. If they catch you—if they get inside your head—you go mad. They sort of suck out your mind, till you’re left an imbecile. They’re called gnomons. But I don’t see why they would come after you …”

  “Goodman said they were out of control,” Pobjoy said. “Hell, I’m doing it now. Talking as if they’re real—as if all this stuff exists. It’s all nonsense. Fairy tales and fantasy. Look, I came here to warn you about Goodman, to tell you he’s—slightly potty. Harmless, I’m sure, but—”

  “And instead you found out I’m potty, too,” Annie said. “Disappointing for you, isn’t it?”

  She knew she was being unfair to him but just then she didn’t care. She found his willful mind-closing idiotic and his warning pompous. Worst of all, he was good looking in a grim-faced, police-inspectorial way, and somehow that compounded the offense. There are few things as annoying to a woman as a good-looking man who tries to patronize her.

  Pobjoy stood in silence, at a loss for a response.

  Annie took pity on him, after a fashion. “You’re a detective, aren’t you?” she said. “You might try believing the evidence of your eyes and ears, just for once.”

  “I didn’t see anything!” Pobjoy retorted.

  “Of course not,” Annie said. “Gnomons are invisible. If you don’t see them, that’s how you know they’re there.”

  Pobjoy gave up and left, succumbing to the onset of a huff.

  There are few things more annoying to a man than a woman who attracts and intrigues him against his will, particularly when she doesn’t appear to be attracted—or intrigued—in return.

  AT SCHOOL, with GCSEs due the following summer, Nathan knew he should be concentrating on work rather than distracted by his dreams. But the dreams still came, invading his sleep and snatching him away into the multiple universes of his mind. Fortunately, in most of them he seemed—so far—to remain incorporeal, thus avoiding the embarrassment of his dormitory companions wondering where he had gone during the night. His ability to dematerialize in sleep was always potentially awkward. With luck, he thought, it would be Christmas vacation before things progressed that far—and then he would have to deal with the problem of being solid on a planet entirely covered in water, spending all his time in the sea when he couldn’t even bring himself to get back in the pool.

  Worrying about it brought no solutions but he still worried, often far into the night. His injuries were mending but they gave him an excuse to keep out of the pool; on Widewater, he would need more than an excuse to keep out of the sea. He found himself speculating, idiotically, on whether he could go to bed with an Aqua-Lung, and if he would ever be able to cope with the terror of total immersion. When the worrying wore him out he slept, and then he was on Eos or some other planet of that cosmos, whirled through different fragments of time, watching once more as Romandos forged the Crown of spikes, as the Grandir ascended his solitary tower to gaze across the worlds, as Halmé the beautiful walked the empty chambers with her face unmasked, though no one dared come to gaze on her. Once, he saw Romandos in some palace of long ago, with a woman whom Nathan guessed to be Imagen, a woman both like and unlike Halmé, serene, aloof, yet far more alive, far more passionate. She wore a long green mantle embroidered with flowers that seemed to open and close, and bees that flew from blossom to blossom, and butterflies fanning themselves with jeweled wings. She and Romandos were talking, though Nathan couldn’t hear what they said. Then another man entered the room—Lugair the traitor—Lugair the handsome with a hint of cruelty about his mouth—only here he was still young and his mouth was not yet cruel. Imagen looked up at him, and it was as if a light came on behind her face. She loved him, Nathan thought, but she had to marry Romandos. It was custom—it was tradition—it was greed, keeping the genes of power in one family, one bloodline, so that family might rule forever. She wasn’t allowed to choose for herself. And somehow he felt that the seeds of destruction were sown, for the bloodline and for the world, when Imagen was forced to marry according to custom, and against her heart.

  Time spun around him, and he was in another somewhere, another somewhen. He saw the Grandir—the last Grandir—placing the Iron Crown on a plinth in a darkened room, possibly a cave; Nathan could distinguish few details. The only light came from the object itself, or the plinth, a cone of faint radiance that showed the many spikes of the Crown, coiled and twisted and warped into a shape like a thorny wreath, and the Grandir’s hands, encased in gloves of what looked like silver mesh. Little of his face was visible beyond the light, but Nathan knew him now, knew him so well that he thought he would have been able to identify that presence, that aura, even in complete darkness. Something about the Crown itself struck him disagreeably: it appeared deformed, inexplicably sinister, the metal gray and luster
less, the spiked points dagger-sharp. Many of them curved inward as if they would impale anyone attempting to wear it. Nathan recalled seeing Romandos, long ago, place it on his head, and the blood running down his face …

  The Grandir was speaking, or chanting, an incantation of some kind. Even as Nathan watched it reach a climax on a single word, plainly a Command, and the world changed. It was as if the darkness turned inside out; for a timeless instant—a millisecond, a millennium— there was no plinth, no cave, no universe, only the Crown, suspended in light. Insubstantial as he was, merely a thought floating in the ether, Nathan felt squashed, as if his awareness were being compressed to the size of a single molecule and forced through the eye of a needle only wide enough to admit an atom. Then the world opened up again—a different world, all blue—and there was water rushing past him, and an explosion of bubbles. For a terrible moment he thought he was solid, and he tried to breathe, to hold his breath—thought he was struggling, drowning—then he realized the bubbles came from the Crown, and he was still bodiless, and thankfully breathing was unnecessary. In front of him the Crown reeled down through the water, gases streaming from its plunge like a comet’s tail. Light had been transmuted into heat, boiling the sea, enfolding the falling object in a vortex of spinning currents. Gradually, it came to rest hooked on a point of rock, and the sea cooled until only a few slow bubbles spiraled around it before drifting lazily upward toward the air.

  Eyes watched from a crevice below. Fish finned past indifferently. Darkness slid over the reef, the storm shadow of Nefanu’s hair. Long webby fingers with nails like talons of pearl reached toward it and drew back, repelled by the magnetic force of the iron. She was a werespirit; she could tolerate the proximity of iron, but for all her strength she could not touch it. Still, she sensed the power emanating from it, not just the power of iron but the spellpower of the Crown itself, and she knew this was something she could use.

  Presently, a huge octopus came slithering over the rocks, its mottled colors shifting and changing as it moved. It probed the Crown with its tentacles, turning blood scarlet at the contact. Somewhere Nathan heard Nefanu’s voice, like the sound of the wind far off, echoing strangely through the water. Bring it! Bring it to me! Tentacles wrapped the lethal spikes; ink belched out in a cloud, enclosing everything in blackness …

  When the vapor cleared the dream had changed, and Nathan was somewhere else. Out of the water, low in the air, skimming the wave crests as the breakers heaved and tumbled over the spine of a reef. The rocks were so near, their highest points almost broke the surface— almost, but not quite. Beyond, the water was still and green, translucent as a lagoon. Something dark thrust upward, a small oval silhouette with a shadow puddled behind it like more octopus ink. Then Nathan saw a pale arm extended, the wave of a hand, and the shape acquired meaning. Denaero. Her head emerging from the sea, with the long purple hair fanning out around her.

  “Ezroc!” she called.

  The albatross came to rest on the water beside her.

  Nathan thought: She’s older. Not a child anymore.

  Ezroc, confused by the intruder in his head, said: “You’ve grown.”

  “It’s been six moons since you came by,” she said, “but I don’t think so. My cousin Semeele says I’m stunted—she’s two handspans longer head-to-tail—but if I grew any more you might not be able to carry me, and I couldn’t bear that. You don’t think I’m too big now, do you?”

  “Of course not,” Ezroc said. “I don’t know why I— There’s something odd happening to me lately. Almost as if… as if I have someone else’s thoughts inside my head.”

  “Don’t say that!” The mermaid looked alarmed, glancing quickly from side to side. “The shamans can do that. They put a hex on you, and mutter spells, and wherever you are you hear them, like voices in your mind, and you have to do what they say. If the shamans are after you it’s because they know about us—our friendship and the flying and everything. And if they know, then Father knows, and—”

  “Don’t panic,” said Ezroc. “It isn’t shamans, I’m sure it isn’t. It’s a thought, not a voice.” In his head Nathan was trying to convey reassurance. “It may be nothing. Anyway, I don’t think it’s dangerous, just… strange. Sometimes I remember things—only they’re things I didn’t know.”

  “Like what?”

  “About Keerye …” He didn’t want to explore the horror of his friend’s death.

  “Keerye was fun,” the mermaid said. “I’m sure I would’ve liked him a lot, if I’d had the chance to know him better. Are all selkies like him?”

  “No,” said Ezroc. “He was special. There are selkies who hate your people as much as you hate ours. Northfolk, southfolk—lungbreathers, coldkin—we’re supposed to hate each other. Stupid, but true.”

  “Why do you call us coldkin?” Denaero asked. “You’re the ones who live on the Great Ice. We live here, where it’s warm.”

  “Yes, but your blood is cold, like that of a fish,” the albatross explained. “Lungbreathers are warm-blooded.”

  “It’s not a reason to hate each other,” Denaero said. “Sometimes I think people like to hate. It gives them somewhere to put all their anger, all their cruelty. They say, Northfolk are our enemies, we must hunt and kill them, or they will hunt and kill us, and that makes it all right to be angry and cruel. My father talks like that when he gets worked up, and some of his captains are worse. One of them came back from the north recently with the skin of an ice monster. It was hairy all over, like a sealskin I saw once, and huge, and it had four legs with claws, and big teeth. Uraki said it was the selkies’ creature, trained to kill merfolk, and it did look terrifying, but all the same I wished I could have seen it alive. Uraki said it walks on its four legs, walks across the solid ice—it must have been amazing. I couldn’t help wondering … if it really had to be killed.”

  “It didn’t,” Ezroc said. “It was a snowbear. They kill trueseals, not merfolk, and they don’t serve the selkies any more than sea scorpions and giant crabs and crested serpents serve your people. The raiders waited for it at a borehole in the ice and took it with spears.”

  “I am sorry,” Denaero whispered. “It’s true what I said, isn’t it? Hate makes people cruel, and then they think they’ve been brave, and they boast of it, as if it were a great deed. But… how did you know? About the bear, I mean.”

  “The raiders were seen,” Ezroc explained. “There was a selkie—”

  “One like Keerye?” Denaero looked hopeful.

  “No. There are none like Keerye. One of the others, as full of hate as your friend Uraki, though he doesn’t boast of it.”

  “Uraki isn’t my friend!” Denaero said indignantly. “He talks to me sometimes, because I’m the princess, but that doesn’t mean I have to like him. Who is this selkie?”

  “They call him the Spotted One,” Ezroc said. “He’s not popular— even his own people avoid him—but he’s clever. He thinks the raid was a scouting party—that one day the merfolk will come north in force to make war on us. I fear he may be right. Do you know anything about your father’s plans?”

  Denaero shook her head, looking bewildered. “I can’t believe it. It’s one thing to hate, but—war? It would be pointless. The ocean is a big place; there’s room for all of us. And it’s not as if merfolk could live in the north: it’s far too cold.”

  “But the Goddess,” Ezroc said, “hates lungbreathers more than any of your people. It could be her hatred driving the merkings. If there’s a war, many will die on both sides, but she won’t care.”

  Denaero’s little face scrunched into a scowl. “She may be my goddess,” she said, “but I hate her. She ate the islands and the creatures who walk on legs. I could have learned to walk—I could have climbed up onto the land and seen the legwalkers and the weeds that grew there. My father said the islands were all dry and empty, because nothing grows out of water, but my grandmother told me the weeds there were different—as tall as the sky, waving and
bending in the wind, and there were birds like you, but smaller and many-colored, and all kinds of landfish, and people who couldn’t change, who had legs all the time. Now we aren’t even supposed to change, except to mate; my father says legs are no good in the sea. If he found out I changed when I sit on your back he would be even angrier than about the flying.”

  “He mustn’t find out,” Ezroc said anxiously. “I don’t want to get you into trouble.”

  But Denaero was still smoldering away to herself. “It’s all her fault,” she went on. “It’s all Nefanu. She hates lungbreathers, and leg-walkers, and anything to do with land and air. She doesn’t even love us, although we’re meant to be her own people. Her shaman-priestesses made my brother have the tattoo, even though he didn’t really want to. He screamed for a week, the pain was so bad, and then he was ill for two moons with tryphid poisoning. The shamans said he wasn’t brave enough—he had to be brave to please her. How could a god be happy because people are in pain? She’s evil… evil… I don’t care what anyone says. When I have to go to the rituals I shut my mouth tight, I won’t say the liturgies anymore.”

  “Be careful,” Ezroc warned her. “If your father notices—”

  “I pull my hair over my face,” Denaero said. “Anyway, I don’t see why gods need praise so much. They must be incredibly vain, wanting people to tell them all the time how wonderful they are. Why should I praise a goddess who doesn’t even care if her people die, as long as she gets more power, and more prayer, and wider realms to rule?”

  Ezroc didn’t even try to answer. “Denaero,” he said, “if she’s going to get the merkings to start a war, I have to know. Can you find out for me?”

  “You mean,” she said, “so the selkies can be warned, so they can fight back, wait in ambush—kill my people?”

  Ezroc’s beak dropped; he made a confused squawking noise, more like a chicken than an albatross.

  “It’s all right,” she said quietly. “I’ll find out. Otherwise … it’s playing her game, isn’t it? I won’t play her game. I don’t want the merfolk to be massacred. I don’t want anyone to be killed at all.”