The Poisoned Crown

by Amanda Hemingway

  In our world, he thought, we say Dad, Daddy, Pop, Papa, but such diminutives would not do for so solemn a moment, for a Grandir, for the ruler of a cosmos.

  Father…

  “It will serve,” said the Grandir, “for what time we have left. I am proud to hear it on your lips.”

  What time we … Was he going to lose what he had found—so soon, so soon?

  “Father—”

  But the Grandir had gotten to his feet. “Halmé is coming. She helped you once, thinking I would not know it—she, who has no secrets from me! It was but a part of the pattern … Still, this is hard for her. She is the heart of my world, yet her own heart has been bruised, if not broken …”

  She came toward them down one of the pathways, moving like a poem, her perfect head poised on her perfect neck. For a long while the subtle differences of proportion between earthfolk and Eosians had ceased to trouble Nathan; now it was his own people—the people he had grown up with—who looked wrong to him. Like the Grandir, Halmé wore white, a long flowing tunic over long flowing trousers. Her hair was piled up behind her head in a mass of knots and coils, bound with a strip of cloth with trailing ends that rippled as she walked. Everything about her rippled and flowed, but her face was still, frozen in hesitation—in doubt. When she saw Nathan, a light came into her eyes, though whether happy or sad he could not tell, and there was a tear on her cheek, a single tear bright as a droplet of diamond.

  “I knew,” she said, placing her hands on his shoulders. He was tall, but she was taller, well over six feet in earth measurements. “When first I saw you, I knew you for his son. My soul knew, though my mind did not. His child—by another … Yet I loved you from that moment. Isn’t that strange? Almost as if… you were the son I should have had …”

  “It is well,” the Grandir said. Nathan noticed it was his gesture, rather than his touch, that lifted the hands from his shoulders, breaking the contact. “And now, the time has come. The time we have waited for. The Contamination has killed all life in my universe, save here. Even as we speak, it is closing on Ind, the last continent on the last planet… The night sky darkens; whole constellations have been snuffed out. By day the sun that once warmed us scorches like fire. Arkatron, city of forty million people, now has less than two hundred thousand, the last remnants of the greatest race who ever lived. If they are to be saved, we must act. Nathan …”

  “Yes?”

  “Take us to your world.”

  NATHAN STARED at him. In all his half-formed imaginings, there had never been a moment like this. He was still struggling to take in everything the Grandir had told him—still reeling from the implications— still flattened from the emotional steamroller that had thundered over his spirit. And now, at the climax of his short life, he was being asked to do the impossible. He could not disappoint his father now, but…

  “I can’t… I don’t know how to—how to do that. I’m not a wizard, just…”

  “Just my son.” The Grandir’s voice was as gentle and inexorable as the sea—and Nathan had seen what the sea could do when it made up its mind. “You’ve done it before. You saved a man who was drowning, when we closed off Maali. It was not what I needed from you, but it taught me you have the power and the will to use it. You transported the unfortunate Kwanjira Ley from the Pits—you took a princess for a walk in the woods, hardly an essential part of your task. You used the portal, even when you stayed in the same universe, switching yourself from A to B through a point outside being—and you were able to carry someone with you. You didn’t know what you were doing, but you did it. Necessity was the driving force. And there is necessity here. The Great Spell must be performed in your world: the Three are there, the Cup, the Sword, the Crown—and the place was chosen long ago, marked with the impress of doom. Halmé and I must be there. Set aside your doubts. I have not failed you in the past; I know you will not fail me.”

  I wish I knew it, Nathan thought. The doubts were mobbing him, storming into his head—but he couldn’t deal with them now. No time.

  The Grandir said: “Link hands.”

  They stood in a circle; the Grandir took his right hand, Halmé his left. Being rare, the touch felt special—skin on skin—almost a meeting of souls. Nathan looked into Halmé’s face and saw there the shadow of Imagen—Imagen in love, passionate and alive—stilled forever in those immortal features, time-frozen, fixed in a passionless perfection. Only when she looked at Nathan did a glimmer of that vitality return to her.

  He remembered Lugair—the alien strain in their heredity. He must tell the Grandir …

  “It makes no difference,” the Grandir said, answering his thought. “Lugair, too, was part of the spell…”

  And then Nathan looked into his father’s eyes, and saw nothing else.

  Emotion poured into him like a black tide—an urgency on the edge of despair. In his mind he glimpsed the lifeless wastes of the Contamination—empty lands, brown and sterile—gray deserts—great trees crumbling away, their dust blown on the wind until both wind and dust were gone—the red glare of dying suns—planets gripped in a starless cold, their orbits decaying around the heart of the universe—a heart that beat slower, slower, till it subsided into the stasis of the utter End … The visions opened his thought, unfolding it into the thought of someone who has lived almost fifty millennia, who has seen everything and done everything, and knows that everything is yet to see and do … Fear touched him, the penumbra of an endless night—the hope of a dawn beyond—and love, great love—for Halmé, the most beautiful woman in all the worlds—and for his son, valiant beyond the measure of his kind, who could not fail him now …

  The world became a spinning dark, a tunnel that swallowed them at lightspeed—shrank—and vanished—

  Nathan thought he passed out.

  nnie knew, the second she woke up, that there was something wrong. It was a cold pale gray morning like many of the mornings that had preceded it, a winter sort of morning even though it was the first day of spring—winter seemed to be going on more or less forever that year—but her sense of wrongness was only heightened by the fact that nothing was obviously different, nothing out of place. Something must have happened, she thought, while she still slept, something she had been aware of on a subconscious level—a scream, a snarl, a minor earth tremor. A change in the tempo of the house. She could not see it but she felt it, her intuition sharpened by more than a decade of contact with the shady side of existence. She got out of bed, remembered that it was Tuesday. The twenty-first. And then she knew.

  She ran to Nathan’s room, entered without a knock. He was gone. She stood there, stupid with the onset of fear, trying not to lose her head. It had happened before, he had a tendency to go missing, in one world or another, but he had always turned up in the end. Only somehow this didn’t look like missing, it looked like departure. The duvet was indented, as if he had been lying on top of it, like someone snatching a nap in a house not his own. The clothes he had worn the previous day were gone, including his sneakers—he must have slept in them. And the room was tidy, books stacked, oddments tucked in cupboard and drawer, unthinkable for a teenager. Unless they were going away. That was when you tidied up, wasn’t it? When you were leaving… Nathan had been absent, inside his head, ever since she told him the truth. Now he was gone indeed, and she was filled with the terrible cold certainty that he was never coming back.

  She rang Bartlemy, stuttering in her distress, fighting to stay calm. “It’s the S-Solstice. You said—this was the day. I should’ve watched him—I didn’t think, I expected it to be t-tonight—”

  “You can’t watch a fifteen-year-old boy all the time, you would drive him insane,” Bartlemy said with quiet common sense. “Don’t panic: we’ve been through this before. He’ll be back. I, too, thought it would be tonight… Are you sure he hasn’t gone for an early-morning walk?”

  “No—yes. Of course I’m sure. He—”

  “How can you be so positive?”

&nbs
p; “The impression in the duvet. He never got up.”

  “All right. I’ll come over as soon as I can. I have to check a few things first. Hang in there.”

  “Hanging,” Annie said.

  When he arrived, he found her in tears. For all her gentleness, he had rarely seen her cry, except over a sad film, or a novel, or a piece of music. She glanced up at him as he came in, pink-nosed and puffy-eyed, sniffling into toilet paper since Nathan had used up all the tissues the previous week.

  “I’ve been thinking,” she said. “I’ve only ever had him on loan, haven’t I? His father always intended to take him back, when the moment came. Did he imagine I was going to—to sacrifice him or something, like that madwoman Kal spoke of? Does he think I’m some crazed medieval witch, trying to open the Gate of Death with my son’s blood? He may not know me at all, but—but he should still know me better than that.”

  “Nathan’s father must know something of you,” Bartlemy said. “He knows you were able to open the Gate out of love, not as part of his spell.”

  “Love …” Annie’s tears ceased; the back of her hand went to her mouth.

  She bit it.

  She thought: I’ve hated him for so long. Supposing this is my punishment—to lose Nathan to him? And how can I harm him—should I ever get the chance—if Nathan loves him and wants to be with him?

  “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.”

  NATHAN 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 pres
s 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.