The Poisoned Crown

by Amanda Hemingway

  It wasn’t.

  One of the notebooks lay open at a page headed: a charm to reveal the true nature of things. It sounded profound and philosophical, but when she glanced through it Hazel saw it was simply a way of learning if a gold coin was real or fake, that sort of thing. She thought for a minute, then fetched a basin from the kitchen, half filled it with water, added a few drops from a bottle, a sprinkling of powder from a jar. Then she said the words and slid the yellow paper into the liquid. Probably only get soggy paper, she told herself. But the paper shriveled away into floating stringy stuff, and when she picked it out of the basin she saw it was weed.

  River weed …

  Reed in the river pool

  Weed in the stream …

  She thought of the vial that Nathan was supposed to carry at all times, the gray pearl with its petroleum sheen.

  Oh shit.

  It was past one o’clock now, but she rang Nathan’s cell phone. No answer. Then she tried the landline.

  It rang a long time before Annie took the call.

  “Sorry to wake you,” Hazel said, “but I have to speak to Nathan. It’s urgent.”

  Picking up on the undercurrents, Annie didn’t protest. There was a pause while she left the phone to fetch him. Hazel waited, hanging on to her phone like the proverbial drowning man with the straw.

  She mustn’t think about drowning …

  Annie came back.

  “He’s not there,” she said.

  HE WAS staring straight into her eyes—eyes ocean-deep, ocean-dark, like and unlike those of Nenufar. There was a purplish cast to their blackness like the aftermath of lightning in a midnight storm. And then the lightning came, leaping out of her eyes, crackling from floor to roof and back again. Nathan felt himself clutching the Crown and wondered fleetingly if that was wise.

  “Let it go!” said the Goddess. “Or I’ll fry you in the ashes of your own skin. It is not yours—let it go!”

  Her voice, too, was Nenufar’s, but harder, grainy with the breath of the wind and the surge of the sea. She had never needed to sweeten it for her worshippers, nor play the lorelei to bespell the unwary. She ruled; she did not have to seduce.

  “Let it go!”

  It’s iron, Nathan assured himself. She can’t touch iron. Lightning is drawn to metal—but werespirits can’t touch iron.

  “It’s not yours,” he said. “It was made by the ruler of another world—”

  “It’s in my world now. Everything in my world is mine!”

  He was backing away from her, backing away sideways, trying to move clear of Denaero—so far, Nefanu seemed uninterested in her— and back-sidle to one of the rock tables with a weapon. The trident, the knife. He didn’t know if it would do any good but he would feel much better with a weapon at hand …

  “If it’s yours”—he threw at her, recklessly—“then take it!”

  Her form seemed to expand, growing another foot or so; more lightning forked from her eyes. He wondered how she got in—she was a goddess, presumably she could go anywhere, but she was a goddess of the sea, and this was a dry place, dust-dry and bone-dry and sealed tight against the incursion of a single drop of water. The rules of physics apply, even to the gods. She must have come through the stone chamber, as they had; there was no other way. Which meant her substance was finite—she couldn’t draw on the sea to grow.

  Her phantom figure looked awesome but transparent, as though stretched too thin. The lightning didn’t touch him.

  “You can’t take it, can you?” he said. “You can’t kill me. Your power here is limited—unless you call on the sea …”

  Maybe he could provoke her into letting the water in.

  She shrank again, growing denser. It wasn’t reassuring.

  “Very clever, little mortal,” she said. “But I heard your plan—your futile little plan—your plan that won’t work. I hear everything. The echoes tell me. Do you know what would happen, if these caverns filled? Do you know how vast they are, how deep they go, caves below caves, pits, chasms, an entire labyrinth burrowing down into the roots of the planet? If the sea came in, all the oceans of the world would fall. There would be land at the South Pole, continents to the north and west. The twelve reefs would emerge, driving the merpeople into the depths, only the depths would become shallows and the coral would die and bleach like bones in the sun, and a billion tiny creatures would lose their habitat, their home. There would be death, death everywhere, and what life would come to take its place? The humans are gone—the land creatures are gone. Even the weeds that grew there have vanished, leaving not a seed behind. Did your mermaid friend know that when she agreed to help you? Does she know the cataclysm that would follow, if the sea sank? You would make an eighth—a quarter—of my world into a desert, dry and lifeless forever.”

  “I didn’t think,” Nathan heard Denaero mumble. “I didn’t…”

  “There will be seeds,” Nathan said, hoping he was right. “Seeds survive. There are still lungbreathers and legwalkers who will use the land. Others will come. Evolution—”

  “Evolution takes a long time,” said the Goddess. “I know: I’ve seen it. You want to slaughter my people—in the name of evolution?”

  How the hell had he gotten into an argument about ethics?

  “You slaughtered whole kingdoms! Look at all this stuff. There must have been a huge civilization—”

  “You cannot bring it back. I am a goddess; I am supposed to kill. Why would I have the power, if not to use it? I kill those who will not worship me, who follow my rivals. You are a mortal—your life is a little thing—you value little lives. Will you really wipe out half my world?”

  Her math is going haywire, he thought, automatically—but this wasn’t about math.

  He said: “I want to—to restore the balance—”

  “You want revenge!”

  He knew she was right. He wanted revenge for the realms that had drowned, leaving their treasures here like bones in a charnel house. The realization horrified him. He faltered, finding no more answers, his arguments all run out.

  But he would not give up the Crown.

  “Leave it here,” she said, and her voice changed, falling to a giant whisper, like the rasp of the wind in a canyon of ice. “I will let you go, back whence you came, such is the magnanimity of Nefanu. Return to your own gods—never come here again! The mermaid is mine—she must be punished. She will die here, slowly, withering, knowing, as the thirst devours her, what it means to be without the sea. One day I will bring her father here to see her skeleton. Such is the justice of Nefanu!”

  “No …” He was backed against a rock—he felt the edge digging into his thigh. He reached out—his hand closed over the trident. The trident of Nepteron. He half lunged with it, half threw it. At that range, skill was unnecessary; he couldn’t miss. It passed through her body with a crackle of sparks, clattered to the ground.

  Nefanu laughed.

  “Do you think such weapons can hurt me? I am the Sea—the Sea—”

  Nathan wondered about hurling the Crown at her, but he knew it was his only protection—if he misjudged, or she was unharmed, she would kill him. He was fishing for inspiration when he felt the dream trembling around him. The portal was opening in his head, sucking him in. Words screamed across his brain—Not now! Not now! I can’t leave Denaero!—and he struggled to resist, to focus, turning inward, seeing the portal, like a blur of interference on the blank screen of his mind, withdrawing from it, forcing all his thought, all his being, to pull back. Closing off his way of escape …

  The effort left him reeling, faint, and sick. He had never managed it before—never wrested the dream into his control—but somehow he hung on to consciousness, to thereness, to the fabric of an unfamiliar world …

  Denaero was peering around a rock, her breathing short and strained. The dehydration was aging her, pinching her cheek against the bone; her frightened eyes met his for a brief moment.

  Nefanu had moved toward t
he rock where the Crown had lain. Seeing Nathan begin to fade—imagining she had driven him out—she let herself be distracted, staring at the vial he had discarded there. Picking it up—“What’s this?”—uncorking it, letting the pearl roll into her palm …

  “This came from beyond the Gate,” she said. “Why? I have seen better pearls in an undersized mussel shell. There is power here, but…”

  The rainbow sheen detached itself from the surface, swirling up into the air in a shimmer of dim colors. The pearl evaporated into a shadowy smoke that mingled with them, thickening, darkening. The shadow-shimmer became substance, a rippling, changing substance that shaped itself into a figure. Suddenly Nathan remembered why he didn’t believe in magic. There were no shortcuts, no miracle solutions, no storybook spells. Only the small print you always forgot to read.

  He said in English: “Oh bugger.”

  “What’s happening?” Denaero asked.

  “I know it sounds impossible,” Nathan said, “but things just got worse.”

  “HE WANTED to be able to swim underwater,” Hazel explained. “Like the merpeople. No need to breathe, no problems with pressure. He asked me—at least, he didn’t exactly ask me, it was just a joke, but I thought… I found the spell on a piece of paper in one of Great-Grandma’s books.”

  Bartlemy had driven over, and they were sitting in Annie’s living room. Hazel was shaking.

  “Effie Carlow would never have known a spell like that,” Bartlemy said quietly. “Properly speaking, there are no spells of that kind. Such things are beyond ordinary magic. You must have realized that.”

  “I wanted to help,” Hazel said, at her gruffest.

  “You should have talked to me. If the potion works, it will be because Nenufar has put something of her self into it, her essence. When Nathan drinks, she will become a part of him. It’s a form of possession.”

  Annie said in a voice that was almost inaudible: “No …”

  “I doubt she intends anything permanent,” Bartlemy said. “At a guess, she’s using Nathan as a way into the otherworld—the world of sea. When the right moment comes—whenever that moment may be—she will leave him, and then—”

  “What about the pearl?” Hazel said.

  “The pearl is probably the nucleus. With it, she maintains her separateness while at the same time securing her bond with Nathan. If he loses it, or even puts the vial down for an instant, Nenufar will abandon him. The core of her self will be in the pearl: she could not risk being parted from it.”

  “I told him to hang on to it,” Hazel gruffed.

  “She might try to crack the vial,” Bartlemy said. “If he’s underwater at the time …”

  “He’s a good swimmer,” Hazel said. “He was afraid of the water, after the accident, but he’ll get over it. He’s Nathan. He’ll get over it.”

  Bartlemy forgot to offer comfort.

  “Let’s hope he has the chance.”

  THE TWO goddesses stood face-to-face, eye-to-eye. Nenufar Nefanu. They looked solid now, twin facsimiles of humanity. They were not exactly alike but in that confrontation their minor differences began to vanish, dissolving into similarities, as if they were trying to synchronize themselves, to achieve perfect duplication. Perhaps the process was involuntary, a kind of chemical reaction between near-identical opposites seeking an absolute equilibrium. Nenufar’s hair curled into billows—Nefanu’s smoothed into a waterfall of darkness—tiny variations in their features shifted and changed like worms wriggling beneath the skin. There was a brief, confused interlude when other shapes seemed to flow through them, peering out through face or breast or belly, becoming absorbed back into the core—shapes with tentacles and spines and scales, pincers, fins, fangs. Then gradually the two forms settled, until each was a mirror image of the other.

  They said: “Nenufar. Nefanu,” and name melded with name, voice with voice.

  They reached out…

  Their fingers entwined, entangled, melting into each other—the arms flowed together up to the shoulder. There was an instant when the two profiles were nose-to-nose, then they seemed to pour themselves into one, becoming a single body that, just for a few seconds, had two backs and no face—a blind thing horrible in its deformity that stood there, shuddering, as if wrestling with its own physical confusion. Nathan, still slightly faint from the effort of wrenching himself away from the portal, had dropped to the ground beside Denaero—he heard her sharp intake of breath at the sight.

  “What’s happening to them?” she demanded weakly.

  “Not sure,” Nathan said. “Maybe they’ll implode …”

  But they didn’t. Once the entity had achieved what it felt to be its correct mass, its outward form appeared to melt—it became an amorphous column of not-quite-flesh, rippling and bulging with potential features like the water that was its main constituent, an elbow sticking out here, a knee joint there, a hand, a hip. Eyes swiveled around the head in separate orbits, finally coming to rest close by, more or less on a level. Then the whole column heaved—writhed—twisted itself into the shape it knew it ought to be, and the Goddess stood there again, the same but somehow grown, grown from within, two deities in a single being. Her strength, her aura, her very self was doubled—she was in truth Nenufar Nefanu, Goddess, demoness, witch …

  She expanded upward into her own power, soaring toward the cavern roof, head thrown back in a terrible glee. The force that emanated from her was so potent the walls shook—the rock cracked as if in an earthquake.

  “We are the Two in One!” she cried. “We are the Duality! We are the Sea—the Sea—”

  Nathan recalled his words on the riverside and thought: Dear heaven, this is my fault… all my fault…

  “What do we do now?” Denaero whispered.

  “Die?” Nathan suggested. “She’s out of control—the power’s gone to her head. If the walls crack any farther the water really will come in … Save yourself: you must. Warn the others—the selkies, your own people …”

  “Is this the hour of Doom?” Denaero evidently wanted to check.

  “It looks like it.”

  “Then blow the horn!”

  Nathan lurched to his feet, grabbed the shell trumpet. The ground vibrated; standing was difficult even for someone who was used to it. The Goddess’s words boomed around the cavern like the thunder of great waves—“I will kill them all—the lungbreathers, the humans, the creatures that walk and crawl—I will drown the cities, sink the ships— the ocean will reclaim the earth—” She obviously no longer knew who she was or what world she was in. Nathan found the hole to blow through—it was in the side of the shell, not at the very top—and set it to his lips. His mind—as the human mind can—thought a dozen thoughts in a fraction of a second. What was he really doing?—blowing for the end of the world? Didn’t the Archangel Gabriel have a bugle to blow for the last trumpet—or was it Heimdall on Bifröst Bridge, announcing Ragnarök? And there was Queen Susan’s horn in the Chronicles of Narnia, that would summon help if you were in danger—the horn of another Susan, in Alan Garner’s books, the horn you blew when all else was lost. The horn of last resort. Which horn was this? No more time to speculate. Just blow it and see …

  The mouthpiece tasted stale and unpleasant, with a far-off tang of seafood several years past its sell-by date. He thought: If I get through this, I’ll probably die of botulism.

  He blew.

  Nathan had never blown a horn in his life. There was a noise like air whistling in a tube, barely audible against the reverberation of Ne-fanu’s curses.

  “Blow!” Denaero urged.

  He tried again, putting all his strength into it—the shell emitted a sort of squeak, but that was all.

  “Give it to me! I’ve done it before—hunting with barracuda—but not—not in air—”

  He saw there was blood on her lip where it had desiccated and split—her face was drawn—her hands unsteady. He knew she was an amphibean, but she had been too long out of water; she would neve
r find breath enough for the horn.

  “You can’t—”

  But she squirmed and crawled toward him, bruising her legs on the rock floor, snatching the shell trumpet from his grasp. She put it to her bleeding mouth, closed her eyes.

  Nefanu looked down.

  “Nooooo—”

  The horn call wasn’t loud, but somehow it overpowered all other sound, a low soft note that swelled and swelled until the air, the walls, the ground beneath them all thrummed with it. It was like the sea surge against the Rock of Ages, like the wind blowing down the long, long tunnel to eternity. Like the song of the whales echoing through the endless halls of the deep. Long after Denaero had run out of breath and dropped the horn the note went on, carrying into the caves beneath and the seas above, till that whole world throbbed. It was the sound not of endings but beginnings, a bugle call to wake the dead and summon souls from hell… Nefanu covered her ears; her lips gaped in a scream that no one heard. And then, when the horn music finally died away, there was another sound.

  Water.

  It came through the widening cracks, a drip, a seep, a trickle, a gurgle. It spread across the cave floor in wavelets, shallow but very swift, covering the ground faster than a rising tide. Denaero dipped her hands in it—her face—rolled in it, trying to moisten every inch of her. The Goddess, grown as high as the roof, cursed in every language of the sea, pressing her palms against the cracks, seeking to close them with power or brute force, but nature was stronger than magic, and the water streamed in. Trickles became cascades, cascades became torrents.