The Poisoned Crown

by Amanda Hemingway

  At Thornyhill he went in through the kitchen door. Hoover was there to greet him, tail wagging, but there was no sign of Bartlemy. The Grandir had been right, but then he always was. He had the Sight, or some high-tech, high-magic equivalent: he could see across the worlds, through windows in space and time. He had read his son’s thoughts, admitted Nathan into his own. It had been the ultimate intimacy, an act of total self-revelation—but with a mind like the Grandir’s there must still have been depths unplumbed, thoughts unexplored, veils past which he could not see. All he had been permitted, Nathan guessed, was a brief glimpse just beneath the surface.

  He had started thinking again, even though his brain wasn’t ready for it—thinking his mother must be worried, he should call her, leave a message, write a note. The drawing room clock said it was nearly five. Maybe Bartlemy was with her now. He felt as if he had been gone a century but worked out, with an effort, it was just a night and a day. No contact, the Grandir had said. Bartlemy would look after Annie. He could explain … afterward. When it was all over. The Great Spell— the end of a world—whatever it was …

  He opened the secret compartment in the chimney and took out the three objects hidden there, wrapped in brown paper and bits of old sheet. There was a sports bag tucked in the cupboard under the stairs, one of his—he must have left it behind awhile ago—and he put the things inside. A section of the Sword protruded, but it was encased in its sheath and bundled in torn linen, so he didn’t think it mattered. No one would be able to tell what it was.

  Hoover watched him, head on one side, tail no longer wagging. He looked disconcertingly intelligent.

  “It’s all right,” Nathan said. “I have to take these things—for the Great Spell. Uncle Barty knows … Anyway, I’ll tell him later.”

  When the hour has struck, when the world has halted, when the knell of Doom is all tolled out…

  Hoover clearly wanted to come with him, trotting after him out of the door, but Nathan said “No” in his sternest voice, tinged with a quaver of anxiety, and the dog, rather reluctantly, did not attempt to follow farther. At the idea of how the Grandir might react if he arrived at the location for the spell with his uncle’s shaggy mongrel in tow, all the thoughts in Nathan’s head began to tumble over, like a row of dominoes when someone flicks the one at the end. But he couldn’t go there, not now, and his mind closed down again, and he was back in robot mode, walking through the woods with the bag over his shoulder, on his way to Scarbarrow Fayr.

  Dark crept through the trees behind him, and as he reached the road there was a whistling call, somewhere nearby, a sort of eldritch piping, but he assumed it was only a bird.

  POBJOY ARRIVED to see Annie about half an hour after Bartlemy had left. They didn’t have a date, but he was back from Lancashire for a week and felt a sudden, overpowering need to talk to her—the sort of need that wouldn’t waste time with preliminary phone calls but drove him straight to Eade, parked the car for him, and propelled him into the bookshop before he had had time to find an adequate excuse for the impromptu intrusion. On a subliminal level, he was thinking that Nathan would be at school and they could have some quality time together, discuss whatever it was needed discussing, maybe repeat their last kiss …

  But one look at Annie’s face changed all that. A pale winter face— wintry with the frozen top layer of her thoughts, with the deeps of inner chill.

  She said: “I’m sorry, I can’t… I can’t see you right now. Sorry …”

  “What’s happened?” In Eade—quiet, sleepy little Eade—something bizarre was always happening. Robbery, kidnapping, murder. And certain individuals were invariably mixed up in it… “What’s happened to Nathan?”

  “He’s gone,” Annie said.

  Pobjoy became a policeman—if he had ever stopped being one. His interrogation technique clicked in automatically. “How long? Have you reported it? Why wasn’t he at school?”

  Annie answered the questions, indicating her recognition of the auto-policeman phenomenon with a shadowy smile. “I don’t want it reported,” she said. “There’s no point.”

  “He’s only been missing a little while,” Pobjoy said, hearing the standard reassurances coming out of his mouth and despising himself for them, knowing—knowing—that this time they didn’t apply. “He’s fifteen—almost an adult—and tall and strong for his age. I’m sure he’ll be all right.”

  He was pathetic. There was a crime going on in Eade—a crime so large he couldn’t see it, only the bits that stuck out around the edge— and the boy was involved somehow, up to his neck, perpetrator or victim. If he was missing, it was because he was in trouble, real trouble, and all he, Pobjoy, could do about it was bleat clichés to his mother like a bloody policeman’s manual …

  “We’ll find him,” he said, meaning it, and was shocked when Annie laughed.

  The kind of laugh that cracks into a sob, only this one didn’t.

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “Not where he’s gone.”

  “Annie—”

  The shop door clanged. Hazel walked straight through into the house, barely acknowledging Pobjoy.

  “Nathan isn’t answering his cell phone,” she said. “And it’s the Solstice. And—” She took in Annie’s expression. “—he’s gone, hasn’t he? He’s gone.”

  “Yes.”

  What does the Solstice have to do with it? Pobjoy wondered. But he didn’t manage to ask the question.

  The phone rang. In that taut atmosphere it sounded dramatic, portentous, the way only a phone ring crashing into a sudden silence can.

  Annie picked up the handset, said yes a couple of times, and I’m coming. Put it down.

  “I’m going to Thornyhill,” she said, speaking to Hazel. Only to Hazel, Pobjoy noted. As if he didn’t matter anymore. “The relics have disappeared—Nathan’s taken them.”

  And to Pobjoy, as an afterthought: “Sorry …”

  He followed the two of them outside to where the yellow Beetle was parked at the curb—Eade was the sort of place where you could still park in front of your own house without getting a ticket. Annie slid into the driver’s seat; Hazel went to the passenger door.

  Pobjoy said brusquely: “I’m coming with you.”

  “We don’t need a policeman,” Hazel said. “Especially not one who doesn’t believe in the evidence.”

  She got in, slammed the door in his face. Annie had already switched on the ignition.

  Thirty seconds later he went after them in his own car. Not because he was a policeman, not this time. This time, it was because of Annie— and because he wanted to know the answers, whatever the questions were—no matter how improbable those answers might be …

  IT WAS dark when Nathan reached the hill, and he was having trouble seeing where he was going. There was a church at the bottom tucked into a fold in the hillside, a very old church, long neglected and unused—local historians claimed the original building was Saxon, and various conservation groups were interested in it, but none of them had any money. In the dim light it appeared to be hunkered down against the cold, its stubby tower barely protruding above the pitch of the roof, darkness gathering behind the glassless windows. The churchyard beyond the low wall was overgrown—when spring finally arrived, it would be deep in wildflowers—and the gravestones leaned this way and that, as if their owners had dislodged them while tossing and turning in their eternal slumber. A cypress tree grew there, unclipped for a decade, stretching over the sleepers like a huge clot of shadow. On a summer’s day it was a peaceful place where bumblebees and brown meadow butterflies came to browse, but that evening it looked different—Creepy, Nathan said to himself—with a thin mist oozing out of the ground and drifting among the tombstones. He almost thought he saw a light there, a tiny green flicker, but when he looked again it was gone. He hurried past and up the track to the hilltop.

  There was a cluster of trees just off the summit, and the Grandir and Halmé were waiting there, shining faintly in their white
clothing like tall ghosts. The Grandir took the bag from Nathan, unfolded the wrappings to check the contents. He did not conjure another werelight; evidently he could see clearly even in the gloam.

  “It is well,” he said. “Everything is ready. We have no need to mark the circle: it is already there.”

  The chalk lines showed pale against the turf, an arc bisected by a straight line, set within a circle. Scarbarrow, Nathan thought: that must be an old name. Perhaps there was a barrow once, before time and weathering had eroded the soil and it had sunken into the hilltop. He had always called it the Chizzledown, above the village of the same name. He remembered Eric telling him once that the chalk outline was a symbol of great power in his world, but he had paid little attention, since Eric didn’t know what it meant, and anything could be a symbol if you stared at it long enough. Now he understood.

  “The circle is the Crown,” the Grandir explained. “The arc is the Cup, and the line the Sword. There should be a cross to represent the hilt, but it seems to have worn away. I had Grimthorn put the mark on the hill, more than fourteen hundred years ago in earth time. There is a weakness here in the fabric of the world—not an actual portal, such things are very rare, but the possibility of one. What we would call a magnopoint. It attracts magical energy … Are you cold?”

  The previous night Nathan had gone to bed in a sweater but not a jacket, and he’d had no chance to pick up any more clothes. Now that he was standing still he had started to shiver.

  “Take my hand,” said his father.

  Warmth flowed from his grasp, pouring through Nathan’s body at pulse-speed.

  “We have awhile to wait,” the Grandir said. “I will say when it is time to begin. Meanwhile, let us sit.”

  They sat on the ground, cross-legged, in a triangle facing inward. With that unnatural heat in his blood, Nathan found himself impervious to the damp grass and the growing chill.

  Presently, he asked: “Will the Great Spell… open a portal here?”

  Against his will, he was picturing two hundred thousand Eosians arriving in the south of England, exiles who could never be sent home, asylum seekers as Eric had been, all needing to be housed and fed— proud people, intelligent and civilized far beyond the range of their hosts, some with what could be seen as superpowers … It was a picture that hadn’t occurred to him before, and the sudden rush of panic galvanized his brain into action, unraveling scenarios in his head. The government in crisis—demonstrations by far-right groups—media coverage—the Grandir on TV …

  It couldn’t happen. He knew it couldn’t. The Grandir, of all people, would plan ahead. He would never think short-term …

  “No,” the Grandir said. “That would hardly fulfill our needs. We would be mere refugees in your world, doubtless unwelcome as refugees always are, trapped in a primitive society, trammeled by the limitations of our environment. We would age as your people do, dying out in less than a century—freaks who might intrigue and even dominate for a few years but who would then be forgotten, swallowed up in the petty histories of your age, all our knowledge and potential gone to waste. No—a portal, for us, would only be a shortcut to death. We need a universe with the magical levels of our own, and time—time to reestablish ourselves, time to start living forever. There is only one way forward— we must bring our own world with us.”

  Nathan’s first flash of guilty relief faded. Human eyes didn’t glow in the dark, but the Grandir’s eyes shone in the deepening night as if lit from within.

  “How?” Nathan said.

  “The Great Spell.” His father’s voice was quiet with a sort of huge quietness, like the hush of a vast forest or the star murmur of an endless sky. “It is not for trivial things like opening doors. It can destroy a galaxy—or a cosmos—and it can regenerate, re-create, unite. I have read your memory: you saw what happened when the ancient goddess from your world met Nefanu on Widewater. The two beings fused, becoming a single entity. Given their parallel natures, it was an inevitable reaction. Your universe is, in all fundamentals, parallel to mine—save for the level of natural magic, which is far lower here, as I have explained. Your cosmos is expanding, ours is shrinking. Tonight, there will be an instant of perfect balance. The Great Spell will cause the two worlds to fuse, flowing into each other, melding into one universe that will incorporate the principal elements of both. My world will become yours, yours mine—and all that we have achieved will not be lost.”

  There was a pause that must have continued for a long time. Nathan struggled to think coherently, realizing too late that he was out of practice with both thinking and coherence.

  You believed you were in shock? mocked an imp of thought at the back of his mind. Try this for shock …

  “Will there,” he managed, “will there … be any … damage?”

  Stupid question.

  The Grandir smiled. Nathan couldn’t see his face anymore, except for the eyes, but he felt the smile, like a change in the texture of the dark. “Of course. I would expect about fifty percent destruction in both worlds. In mine that will make no difference, since it is barren from the Contamination, but here countless planets and civilizations will vanish—it is unavoidable. However, that need not concern you. Earth will be at the epicenter, the eye of the spell: it will remain untouched. Those who die will be billions of light-years away, what your people call, I believe, little green men. I will feel their death, as I feel the death of all things, but for earthfolk it will be but the repositioning of a few stars. You need not worry about it. Such troubles are on my shoulders, as they have always been.”

  Little green men … Nathan tried to imagine it—the annihilation of billions of worlds, of lives beyond count, peoples he had never known, would never know. But it was too big to take in, too big to think about. He was only an ordinary mortal, despite his paternity. He was earthfolk—when had he started saying that?—he could only think small thoughts.

  Thoughts of Hazel… his mother … his little life in the village, with school, and friends, and an ordinary future lying ahead of him. Such a happy life, in all its comfortable smallness …

  “What will happen,” he said, “to the people here … on earth?”

  “Your people, too, will become mine. I will care for them. I may even be able to teach a select few how to use their Gift without psychological harm. But they need guidance—their technology is crude but dangerous, they are prone to futile wars, and the planetary environment is already so badly affected it will take centuries to repair. However, these are small matters.” I like small, Nathan thought. “Your cosmos is young, still growing. Once the union is complete it will continue to grow, and my power will grow with it, reaching out across the stars. I will have the space and time to achieve anything—ultimate order, a universal pattern not spun at random by a careless fate but developed from one Design, one Thought, one Man. In my world this was impossible—I was burdened by the errors of my predecessors, born too late into a cosmos already drawing to its end. But here …”

  “What about the Contamination?” Nathan said. “Won’t that be part of your new universe? Won’t it take hold—here?”

  “The impact of the Great Spell should eliminate it,” the Grandir said; but Nathan noted the use of the subjunctive. “I have spent a thousand years on the calculations. The force generated by cosmic fusion should be enough—more than enough—to wipe it out. It was, after all, the affliction of an older world, battening onto a Time that was already running down. Just as a normal human is subject to the diseases of age, so it is with a universe. But your world is still young—young …”

  And Nathan recognized the light of his eyes for what it was. Not aspiration, passion, vision—

  Greed.

  This is my father, he thought.

  This is my father.

  THIS IS MY FATHER …

  What had Hazel called him? A power-crazed supervillain …

  There is nothing like a cliché for getting it right.

  Halmé had no
t spoken in a long, long while. Nathan wondered what she was thinking, if anything. She was the Most Beautiful Woman in All the Worlds … but that was it. It wasn’t much to show for nearly fifty millennia. To move like a poem, and carry your perfect head like a queen—to be exquisite beyond all other exquisiteness—to exceed the standards of the past and set the standard for all women yet to come. And to be dead at heart, frozen in the shell of your beauty forever and ever…

  Together, they would make a Brave New World. The three of them.

  O brave new world that has such people in it…

  Nathan struggled to his feet. “I can’t—”

  “Yes,” said the Grandir, standing up in a single, flowing movement, so swift his body blurred. “It is time.”

  AT THORNYHILL, Bartlemy was trying to calm everyone down. It wasn’t working.

  “I can’t think if you keep yelling at each other,” he said, rather more sharply than was his wont. “Hazel, do you want to help Nathan or don’t you? Because screaming about police harassment isn’t getting us anywhere. James, I know you think we are all suffering from some sort of collective delusion, but if you want to stay and be useful, don’t say so. Shut your mouth and open your mind. Annie—no, don’t cry. Don’t cry …”

  “I’m not crying,” she said. “It’s just—I feel so ineffectual, hanging about like this, not knowing what to do …”

  Pobjoy put a cautious arm around her, but she brushed it off, wiping her tears with her fingers, like a child.