The Poisoned Crown

by Amanda Hemingway

  “Remember,” she had told him, “you’re not to hold it against Mr. Toad that he’s a criminal on the run. Go into the story with an open mind.”

  “I’ll try,” he had said.

  Trying isn’t enough, Annie thought unhappily after she left Bartlemy. He’s right. Sometimes trying just means I’ll make an effort to show I’m willing, but it doesn’t matter if I fail. I’ve put this off too long …

  At home, Nathan was finishing an essay with one eye, so to speak, and watching television with the other.

  “We have to talk,” his mother said.

  Ominous words at any age. Nathan assumed the expression of someone who was bracing himself for bad news.

  “You mean, about—about James,” he said. “Are you going to marry him?”

  “Good God, no! I haven’t even …”

  “Only I saw you kissing last night, and—”

  “Nowadays,” Annie said, “people do quite a bit of kissing without getting married. Society has gone downhill since the Victorians. If I saw you kissing a girl, I wouldn’t expect immediate news of your engagement. I know you don’t like James, but—if you just look at him as a temporary fixture, couldn’t you give him a chance?”

  “I’ll try,” Nathan said.

  Those words again.

  “Oh bugger,” Annie said—she hardly ever used strong language.

  “Funny how we always say that when we mean we won’t really try at all.”

  “I will try, honestly, but—”

  “Not you. Me. There’s something I suppose I should have done a long, long time ago, but I kept putting it off, saying to myself: Not yet, not yet. And earlier today I told Barty I’ll try, but I don’t know that I meant it. And James said it last night, about Mr. Toad, but I’m not sure he meant it, either.”

  “Mum,” Nathan said, “you’re rambling.”

  “No, I’m not. It just sounds like it.” She stood up. “I have to get something. I won’t be a sec.”

  When she came back, he was making tea.

  “I thought we needed it,” he said, “if we’ve got heavy stuff to discuss.”

  “Yes,” Annie said. “It’s heavy.”

  She sat down again, waiting for the tea. When it came she said: “Have you ever … felt the need … for a father?”

  Nathan looked startled. Whatever he had expected, it wasn’t this. A lecture on drugs, contraception, safe sex, the meaning of life—but not this.

  Were they heading back to Pobjoy again?

  “Not really,” he said. “Even though Dad’s dead, I’ve always felt I had someone. You talk about him sometimes, and you loved him so much. And I have Uncle Barty.” He added with a glint of humor: “I’m not short of male role models.”

  “This isn’t about role models,” Annie said with a sigh. “Daniel was kind, and good, and I loved him, yes, so very much. I told you we weren’t married—we just didn’t get around to it. My parents were old-fashioned: they disapproved—but they kind of tolerated the situation. And then he died, and you came, and they weren’t so tolerant after all.”

  “That was because he was Asian, right?” Nathan said. “They didn’t like you having a mixed-race child. You didn’t exactly say so, but—I always thought that was why we didn’t have anything to do with them.”

  “It’s more complicated than that,” Annie said. “I suppose I should contact them at some point—they’re getting older now. I call my cousin every year, just to check they’re all right, but being out of touch gets to be a habit, one it’s hard to break. And going back would be … difficult. Painful. They never understood.” She paused. “But then, I didn’t understand, either.”

  “Understand … what?”

  “About you. Daniel was in the car crash—the police said he fell asleep at the wheel, but I didn’t believe it. He was always so careful. He wouldn’t have driven if he was that tired … Anyway, they took him to the hospital, and I sat by his bed, watching him die.”

  “Mum …”

  “No. Don’t interrupt—please. I have to tell you. I have to tell you now.” Her eyes were like dots in her face—gray dots in the blankness of her pallor—staring and staring into the past. “When he died, I knew. I felt him go. I went after him—through the Gate—I didn’t know about such things in those days, but I do now. I loved him so, the Gate opened for me, and I followed him … I went through, between the worlds … and when I came back, I was pregnant.”

  “Are you … sure?” Nathan asked tentatively. “I mean, you could have been pregnant before …”

  “Oh yes,” she said. “I’m sure. I was so glad when I realized—so glad. And when you were born, even though I knew at once things weren’t right, it was the happiest day of my life.”

  “What wasn’t right?” It was his turn to stare, baffled by her tone. She talked as if he were a mutant, someone with six fingers on one hand, or thirteen toes, but he was normal—as normal as anything.

  Except for the dreams …

  “Here,” she said, passing him the item she had fetched from her room. A photograph. A photograph he had never seen before. “That’s Daniel.”

  “He looks … nice.” An inadequate word. It was a gentle face but not weak, as honest and true as Annie’s own. But…

  “He’s white.”

  “Yes,” Annie said. “That was the problem.”

  “He’s white …”

  “When they saw you, my parents thought I’d been with someone else. But I hadn’t. There was only that moment when Daniel died … My mind shut it off, sort of sealed it up, for years and years. And after the birth I started to see Them—the gnomons—I thought I was going mad. So we went away, and somehow we came here—it was an accident, or so I thought at the time—and Bartlemy took us in, and … you know the rest.”

  “He’s not my father.” Nathan was still gazing at the photograph. “Daniel Ward isn’t my father …”

  “When you were older,” Annie said, “I tried to remember what had happened when the Gate opened. Love is so strong, stronger than death”—oh Daniel, Daniel—“I reached out for him, and Someone was there, waiting for me, in another place, another time. You were conceived—between worlds. Your father …”

  “My father comes from another universe,” Nathan said. “That’s why I dream.”

  There was a silence that seemed to go on a long time. Nathan had left the television on mute and Annie watched the actors going to and fro, their faces moving in shock, horror, drama—all silent. And in this little room there was Nathan’s face. No shock, no horror, no drama. Only the silence.

  “Why didn’t you tell me before?” The inevitable question. “Why did you—lie?”

  Annie never lied. She saw herself in his eyes, diminished, degraded, touched with cowardice and deceit. It hurt her more than anything she had ever known.

  “I wanted you to be normal.” She was almost pleading. Pleading for him to understand. “I wanted you to have a normal life. Not to be saddled with all this doom-and-destiny stuff…”

  “It’s all right.” His voice was curiously empty. “I can deal with it.”

  At least, she thought, snatching at crumbs, he’s only seeing this from his angle. Not mine. He sees what was done to him—not what was done to me. And she was grateful—so grateful—for the blind self-absorption of youth.

  He said: “It’s the Grandir. It must be. He’s my father …”

  He wasn’t looking at her, or he would have recognized the expression on her face. That look of Nevermore.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s possible.” She didn’t tell him about the witch from the East who had sacrificed her own child. Right now, Annie felt as if she were standing there with the knife in her hand …

  “I need to go and think,” he said.

  It wasn’t late, but it had been dark for hours. She knew where he would go. Up on the roof, to look at the star.

  “You can miss school tomorrow,” she said. “We can talk about things …” />
  “No,” he responded. “Normal boys go to school. You wanted me to be normal, remember?”

  He said it without malice, but it stabbed.

  He climbed up to the skylight, and Annie sat in the chair, waiting for him to come down, until at last she fell asleep.

  UP ON the roof, straddling the skylight, Nathan didn’t think. He just sat, his mind as blank as if it had been wiped. The sky was overcast, furred with gloom from horizon to horizon. All other stars were obscured, but his star was still visible, below the cloud, a fixed, unwinking light. The casual observer might have assumed it was shining through a gap, or, more accurately, might have labeled it a UFO, but Nathan surmised it was simply lower down. A spy-globe from another universe, watching him like a solitary eye. His father’s eye….

  Images came and went in the emptiness of his head. The first time he had seen the Grandir, in his semicircular office—his face, unmasked, touched with concern—the feel of his hand, skin on skin—a bottle of cloudy liquid, glittering with leftover magic—Osskva’s words as he lay dying: You must save all your seed …

  And Osskva’s words at the end, the very end: We have no youth anymore but he is there … youth our savior, last of our children …

  I’ve always known, Nathan told himself, dully. It was part of the pattern, something so big and obvious he hadn’t been able to see it—he had been too busy looking to actually see. Too busy jumping from world to world, caught up in action and danger, in questions and plans. If he had only stopped for long enough he would have seen, he would have known …

  If Annie had spoken sooner …

  But he didn’t blame her. He couldn’t feel, or wonder, or allocate blame. His mind—his whole being—was filled up with the hugeness of the truth, squeezing out all other functions. He just sat there, trying to absorb it, gazing numbly into the dark. The murmur of evening traffic on the Crowford road gradually died away. He was so still, a barn owl passed close by without a sideways glance, on its way to hunt in the river meadows.

  The night went on forever.

  When his brain woke up enough to nudge him toward bed he realized the window frame was cutting into his thigh and his leg had gone to sleep. He had to massage the feeling back before he could climb down and go to his room. He never thought to check on Annie, still curled up in the armchair downstairs. He never thought about her at all.

  In bed, he groped for the portal—he could touch it now, he could manage the transition, he was in control. But when he arrived on Eos he found himself roaming the corridors of some vast empty building, peering into rooms and around corners, searching and searching, on a fruitless quest for someone who wasn’t there. Around half-drawn screens he saw the cityscape of Arkatron, the curving walls like cliffs a thousand feet high, the poisonous sunlight reflected in the dazzle of a million windows. The occasional skimmer or winged xaurian soared the canyons in between. Inside, it was warm and soft underfoot, with soft lighting coming from no particular source and soft noises as automatic doors opened and closed for him. It was like a dream, he thought, only this dream was real. This was Arkatron, capital of Ind, the last city on the last planet in a world that was almost gone. There were few people left now. Only the empty corridors, the softness of the endless rooms. He walked and walked but there was nobody, nobody in the whole building. Beyond the windows the skimmers and xaurians were few, and too far away to be clearly seen.

  He thought, I ought to go home, but he had to find the way, and he was so very tired, and the final effort drained him of all consciousness, leaving him, at last, in the blackness of welcome oblivion.

  AT HOME and at school, normal service was resumed. Nathan attended lessons, played rugger, held conversations with his classmates; on weekends he did his homework, watched television, functioned. But his friends thought him indefinably aloof, his teachers felt he was learning on autopilot, and Annie noticed he spoke only when spoken to, as if, somewhere inside, he had switched himself to another channel, or gone into isolation, and the main part of him was no longer there. She talked to Bartlemy, who said, “Give him time,” and guessed Nathan talked to Hazel, though what was said or how he said it, she didn’t know. It was as if he had pulled down a blind between him and his mother, and she could find no way through, and the burden of her guilt seemed to grow heavier every day. Guilt because she had left it too late to tell him, because she had been selfish, wanting to preserve his ignorance and affection intact, wanting to keep him innocent, in a world where no one can afford innocence anymore—and guilt because she had allowed it to happen in the first place, the rapine and betrayal, she had opened the Gate and let in the stranger and made Nathan what he was. All rape victims feel guilt, she knew that; her emotions were commonplace. But it didn’t occur to anyone, even Bartlemy, that she would react that way; he was caught up with otherworldly visions, with the Big Picture of fate and fatality. I see only the small picture, Annie thought. My picture. She had tried to follow Daniel, reaching out beyond life, beyond death—and her body, her very womb had been invaded and abused. She had been happy in the child who had come to fill her emptiness, spending long years on the borders of denial, seeking to keep that happiness inviolate—and now Nathan was in danger, weighted down with responsibility and doom, and it was her fault. All her fault. How could she ask him to understand when all she herself understood was her own culpability?

  To make it worse, it was January. The days were gray and short, the nights dark and long. February followed, as a matter of routine, and the world grew if anything colder, and it snowed even in the south of England, not just a light dusting on the hilltops but a real whiteout, and the electricity went off, and they huddled around the fire by candlelight, toasting bread over the flames. It might have been fun, an adventure of the small-scale, manageable kind, but Nathan declined the toast and went to bed wearing two sweaters and burying himself under extra blankets, searching for his father through a dozen different worlds. He was desperate to see him, talk to him, but the summons did not come, and when he was on Eos the buildings were always empty and the people distant, so he could not get close enough to question them, and he roamed other universes though he knew there was little point, not knowing where he was going or why, trapped on a mission to nowhere. Once, he was in the Eosian desert, under Astrond, the Red Moon of Madness, looking at the skeleton of a wild xaurian. Somehow he knew it had once been white. Another time he was in the Deep-woods of Wilderslee—he hoped to see Woody the woodwose, his childhood friend and playmate, but what creatures were there hid from him, and the slopes grew steep and the trees wild, and by a twilit pool among moss-grown rocks he saw a waterfay, watching him slyly from beneath her shadowy hair. And there were other worlds, worlds he had only glimpsed through the spy-crystals in the Grandir’s tower, landscapes of ice and stone and sand, towering temples, jungles that sweated and steamed. There was a forest of giant purple mushrooms, and a house with a roof that curled up at the corners, and a lake of green water with a man sitting beside it who looked as if he had sat there for a hundred years. “What is this place?” Nathan asked, but not a muscle moved in the man’s face, and his stillness and silence were as impenetrable as a wall. In all the worlds—in all the dreams—if there were people they were far away, or did not speak, though he knew he was visible, until he almost thought he was dreaming indeed, a recurring nightmare of an endless search for something that could not be found.

  “Maybe the Grandir’s doing it deliberately,” Hazel said. “Building up the suspense—manipulating you.”

  He had confided in her because he required a confidante, but he barely listened to what she said.

  “He wouldn’t be so petty,” Nathan replied.

  When she heard the truth Hazel had been shocked but not, somehow, very surprised. It explained so many things that had needed explaining: Nathan’s differentness, his specialness, his ability to cross the barrier between worlds—the Grandir’s obsession with him. It was plain he had been conceived to fulfill a spec
ific destiny—like the royal family, Hazel thought, whose role in life was mapped out long before any of them popped into existence. Sometimes, when Nathan talked about Nell or Denaero, she had experienced a sneaking envy of those born to princessdom, with kingly fathers and adoring subjects and a life that, whatever their tribulations, earmarked them as heroines from scratch. Hazel had an absentee father who had hit her mother when he was drunk, a little talent for witchcraft and none for anything else, and she knew she would never be a heroine—but she resented her own envy, and pushed it away, telling herself princesses were stuck with a life of duties and restrictions, and anyway she was a republican, and the French Revolution had been a good thing. However, Nathan wasn’t a prince—she didn’t know what the Grandir’s son would be—and he seemed to have the duties and the dangers without the perks. In the past, though he had appeared increasingly mesmerized by the Grandir, it was the job at hand that had dominated his thoughts. Now Hazel feared he, too, was becoming obsessed—knowing the truth, it engrossed him to the exclusion of all else.

  “Mum should have told me sooner,” Nathan said broodingly more than once.

  “Maybe he should have told you,” Hazel suggested, but she made no impression.

  “I suppose I’ll have to stop thinking of him as a power-crazed supervillain,” she remarked later. “Although supervillains do have sons who turn out to be good guys. Think of Darth Vader.”

  “Stop talking like Eric,” Nathan said, taking her too seriously. “All that Good-’n’-Evil, turn-to-the-dark-side stuff—life isn’t like that. Most people come in between. The Grandir may be a supreme ruler, but he’s not a saint, he’s not a monster, he’s not a god. He’s—he’s human. Human writ large, but human. He cares about me, I know he does. I’ve seen it in his face.”

  “He uses you,” Hazel said. “You were born for him to use.”