The Sword of Straw

by Amanda Hemingway

Nathan straightened, and approached the bed. He could feel the spirit stirring now—a dark, seething essence straining at both scabbard and sword. It felt a little like holding a bottle of champagne that has just been violently shaken and will explode at the slightest nudge. He looked down at the deadly wound, flesh torn from flesh, still red and raw inside but rucked along the edge with the scabs of unsuccessful healing. Here and there, daubs of Bartlemy’s lotion had gathered like milky tears. It went deep into the groin, vanishing under the king’s nightshirt.

  “What do I do?” he whispered. It was one of those moments when you have to whisper—a loud word might split the air. “Just…lay the hilt on the wound? Is there a spell—something I should say?”

  “I haven’t a clue,” said Frimbolus brightly. “This was your idea.”

  Nathan glanced up at him, seeking inspiration—saw the king’s haunted stare, fear and hope in his eyes—saw Nell’s anxious face—Mrs. Prendergoose, flabby with terror, her cheeks white as her linen, her mouth a hole without a scream. He wondered fleetingly why, out of all of them, she was the one whose reaction was most extreme. And then—maybe it was the proximity of the sword, infecting him with its alien power—suddenly everything was very clear. He stepped back, not touching the king—not yet—and when he spoke, his voice was sharp and commanding.

  “Nell, pull off that wimple.”

  “What?”

  “Your nurse—pull off her wimple.”

  Mrs. Prendergoose was clutching the headdress without which, presumably, she had never been seen. Nell ran to her, plucked her dress. “Nathan…”

  “Pull it off.”

  Nell reached up, doubtfully, even as Mrs. Prendergoose flinched back. The linen unraveled—her hair came loose—hair once black, now streaked with gray—sheared off at the neck in a sword-straight line. “Agnis,” said Nathan.

  “Prendergoose!” Frimbolus’s shout was loud with fury, more than half at himself. “Why didn’t I see? You must have be-charmed us all—reshaped your very features—but I should have seen, I should have known. When Agnis Embernet first came to the court there was gossip—rumors of occult ceremonies—black magic—cantrips to bewitch the king. I distrusted Agnis—I detested Thyrma—I should have known—”

  The king had turned his gaze from Nathan to the woman who had been his daughter’s nurse. “Agnis…It can’t be…Agnis?”

  The face of Mrs. Prendergoose began to change, muscles tightening, cheeks lifting, eyes and mouth slipping back into place—tiny changes that reassembled her features into those of Agnis Embernet. An older Agnis, the sullen pout become vicious, the earthiness toughened into grit.

  “When I first saw Agnis I thought she looked like someone,” Nathan said. “I just couldn’t remember who. But—”

  “You took everything from me.” The woman ignored Nathan, Quayne, the princess, staring only at the king. “My brother’s life—all our plans—all our dreams. The sword was supposed to go for you—then I would have married you, nursed you out of this world, and Wilderslee would have been ours. We could have ruled twenty kingdoms like this, been the greatest king and queen in the history of this age…Instead, my brother was slain—you sent me away—I had nothing left. Nothing. I swore then I would destroy you—you and your petty realm—wipe you off the face of the earth—and I have. I have! Look at you—a helpless invalid in a moldering palace above a city deserted by everyone—”

  “Deserted?” The king latched on to the word, his expression fuddled with bewilderment and pain.

  “Oh yes! They wouldn’t tell you—they wanted to protect you—but your subjects have gone. There’s only a handful left—grass grows in the streets—the houses are full of ghosts. You’re king of a graveyard—a graveyard where even the corpses have moved out. A king without subjects, a deluded fool ruling in a void. May you rot!”

  “It was you calling the Urdemons,” Nell said, the hurt clear in her face. “It was, wasn’t it? All the time I thought it was me—and it was you. I believed you cared for me, I thought…” She was fighting the tears, unable to go on.

  Agnis looked at her as if there were a kink in her hatred, a knot that couldn’t be unraveled. “I told you to leave, didn’t I? Didn’t I? You were a sweet little girl—I never wanted to harm you. If you hadn’t been so stubborn, if you’d gone to your cousins…but it’s too late now. You stayed—I have no choice—you’ll die with the rest of them.”

  “Nonsense!” said Frimbolus with rare coherence. “No one’s going to die. The demons are mere illusion—”

  “There’s only one,” Nathan said, “but it isn’t an illusion.”

  “Clever of you.” Agnis’s mouth made the shape of a smile, but there was no joy in it, only a kind of gloating. “It had slept in the depths of a bog for five thousand years, but I woke it up. I spread the marsh for it to dwell in and its Urulation sounded over the city, driving the people away. It took those forms it could remember—I tried to teach it new ones, but it hasn’t much imagination. Like all elementals it’s drawn to acts of magic—and the aura of the sword. I haven’t let it feed often; it doesn’t need to, save for pleasure. But I’ve learned how to make it stronger, hungrier, more solid—to meld my substance with its spirit—to make one being, one Urdemon with the mind and power of a witch, sharing its appetite, filling its belly. I don’t know how you got away last time, but it won’t happen again. I wanted the suffering to go on a little longer, I was enjoying it so much, but now—now I shall feed on you all, and swell and swell to the size of a behemoth, and doze in the marshes to keep Wilderslee a desert forever.”

  There was a short, stunned silence. In a minute, Nathan thought, she’ll give an evil cackle. But she isn’t funny; she’s real. And the demon’s real. And I can wake up, but the others can’t…

  “Mad,” Frimbolus said abruptly. “Barking. Absolutely barking.”

  He grabbed her by the arm, but she shook him off, backing toward the open window. “You can’t stop me!” Contempt seethed in her voice. “You’re a scientist, not a magician. And Nell—all she can do is make mud pies and untangle her hair. The boy can’t draw the sword—no one can draw the sword.” For an instant, as her gaze flickered toward it, the specter of an old terror blanched her cheek. But only for an instant. “This is my revenge—and it’s almost complete! Venya urdaiman—venya daiman-glaure! Fiassé! Fiassé! Enfirmi! ”

  The daylight darkened behind her. The sound of the Urulation was the howling of winds and wolves, the screeching of ravening harpies. The king reached for his daughter, clasping her hand—Frimbolus drew closer—Nathan moved around the bed, gripping the scabbard, with some vague notion of protecting them, though he didn’t know how. Outside the window, something like a cloud was thickening rapidly, growing blacker, growing denser, pouring into the room like smoke. In the smoke shapes formed and dissolved…baleful eyes, jagged fangs, an ogre’s face, a scaly paw, things with claws and horns and tusks. The shadow shapes swirled around Agnis as she stood in the attitude of a voodoo priestess, arms outstretched, head thrown back, her throat bulging with effort as the words hissed from between her lips. “Uvalmi! Invardé! Enfirmi!”

  The darkness condensed into a ribbon of vapor that streamed into her mouth. Her neck arched to an impossible extent, bending her into a bow—her muscles billowed to improbable size—limbs writhed—her whole body seemed to flow together into one amorphous lump. Nathan was briefly grateful they couldn’t see what was happening to her face. The room was filled with the rotting odors of the swamp—slime oozed across the floor. Then the quivering mass of unformed flesh erupted upward into the familiar slug-creature, smaller than the one in the marsh but far too big for the room. This time it had remembered to provide itself with teeth—a jagged collection that appeared to be all incisors, some almost the length of Nathan’s arm. The green saliva not only frothed, it steamed, huge drops burning holes in what was left of the carpet.

  Frimbolus said: “Definitely…not…an illusion.”

  The princess
said, “Papa,” but she looked at Nathan.

  Nathan looked at the sword.

  The Traitor’s Sword. The Sword of Straw. It was all he had. He felt the spirit waking in the blade, wrestling against the spells that bound it there. The monster that faced him was nothing to the power trapped under his hand…

  Now was the time to make a choice—the choice—the only choice.

  He thought at lightspeed: I’m not the one. I’m not a knight or a hero, I’m not pure in heart, I don’t do miracle cures. The blood of the Grandir doesn’t flow in my veins.

  He thought: It’ll kill me but maybe Nell will be spared…

  The slug-monster lunged toward them, squelching across the floor, its blind head eclipsed by a gape full of teeth.

  Nathan’s hand closed on the hilt.

  The sword came out of its sheath with a sound like a silken scream. The blade was edged with blue fire, but under the sheen shadows moved, and two red gleams slid down the shaft. Nathan swung the sword or the sword swung him—he wasn’t sure which—slashing across the Urdemon’s mouth, shaving the points off a row of teeth with less effort than cutting grass. The poisonous saliva bubbled along the blade and evaporated instantly into nothing, as if it could not endure the metal’s temper. Nathan slashed and slashed again, half terrified, half exultant, slicing great chunks out of the vast wormy body, until what was left collapsed in a shuddering heap of blood and gluten and pus. Then the whole mess gave a great heave—shrank inward—and a wisp of darkness trailed through the window, its lonely Urulation dying away in the direction of the marsh.

  The bits that remained on the floor looked horribly like what you might get if a human body was attacked by a psychotic bacon slicer. Nathan looked and looked away, suddenly sick, too overcome to notice anything else.

  “The sword.” It was Nell. “It hasn’t…it didn’t…”

  “You are the one,” said Frimbolus.

  The hilt was still in Nathan’s hand, the tip of the blade resting on the ground. The blood on it, like the venom, smoked and vanished as if scorched out of existence. Nathan could feel the spirit reaching out to him, all power and rage, yet he knew somehow it could not touch him. He was in control.

  He didn’t understand any of it.

  Nell tried to cling to him, but he pushed her away, afraid she would inadvertently brush against the sword. Then he went back to the bed. The king was trying to pull himself upright, a painful eagerness in his face. Nathan laid the blade the length of the wound running from ankle to groin, and up into the stomach: inch for inch, it was a perfect match. He said: “Heal,” because he felt he had to say something, and that was the best he could do. The king’s shoulders twitched—he made a small whimpering noise. Slowly, the wound began to close. As Nathan lifted the sword clear the flesh knitted, scabbed, itched, flaked into smoothness.

  “I’m cured!” Wilbert said. Forgetting modesty, he hitched up his nightshirt and bed gown still farther, exposing his repaired body to all and sundry. “Nell—Frim—I’m cured!”

  “Yes, Maj,” said Frimbolus. “Pull your clothes down.”

  SOME TIME later, when the king had been left to sleep off the excitement with a dose of Bartlemy’s sedative—in another room, due to the body parts on his bedchamber floor—Nell and Nathan repaired to the kitchen. They were both starving, and it seemed like a good place to talk. The sword was back in its scabbard, but Nathan carried it with him.

  “I think,” he said, “I’m supposed to take it back with me. It isn’t the responsibility of your family anymore.”

  “What will you do with it?”

  “Leave it with my uncle. He’ll keep it safe. He seems to be collecting these things.”

  “That must be quite a collection,” Nell said.

  She heated some thick soup—the kind with lots of barley and limp, unidentifiable vegetables. It had been made by Mrs. Prendergoose, which meant it both smelled and tasted uninspiring, but they were too hungry to object to either the flavor or the cook.

  “Do you think the Urdemon will come back?” Nathan asked.

  “Frim says not. Agnis conjured it, and she’s dead, so…It’ll go back to sleep at the bottom of a bog for another few thousand years, and the marsh will dry up around it, and people will come back to the city…”

  “And the kingdom will prosper and everyone will live happily ever after,” Nathan supplied.

  “Mm.”

  There was a pregnant pause—a pause so pregnant it was practically giving birth.

  Nell said: “Will you ever come back?”

  “I—don’t know.”

  “In the story”—her manner was carefully detached—“the hero marries the princess. It’s customary.”

  “In my world,” Nathan said, “we’d be too young to get married.” He knew he wasn’t doing this right, but he didn’t think there was a right way to do it.

  “We’re not in your world,” Nell retorted.

  “That’s just it. I am. I mean, I’m here now, but here isn’t where I belong. I’ve done what I was meant to do, and now I’ve got to go home. I don’t know if I’ll be able to dream myself back anymore. I want to—I really want to—but even if I could, it’s not going to go anywhere, is it? You and I—it’ll always be hopeless. Maybe it’s best to say goodbye now. Get it over with.”

  “Not yet,” the princess pleaded, abandoning the dregs of her soup. “You could dream yourself back just one more time. We could go for a picnic again—a real picnic, with sandwiches and lemonade—and explore the Deepwoods all the way to the mountains, and see dryads, and waterfay. We can’t say goodbye so soon. You have to come—promise me. You have to.”

  “I’ll try,” Nathan said. He must come back, he knew, just once, but not for the princess.

  There was a further pause, no longer pregnant, merely uncomfortable.

  Nathan felt an unfamiliar sensation twisting inside him—it wasn’t physical but it felt physical, like the onset of an illness—a squeezing at his heart, a knotting in his stomach. Somewhere ahead he glimpsed rashes, fever, sleepless nights. He thought: Is this love? The L-word, Annie had called it, shying away from overuse. He could say it now, he could tell the princess I love you, and the word would be out there forever, a word that would bridge the gulf between worlds, a bond from soul to soul that could never be broken. With that word, Nell would hold on to his memory—the thought of him, the dream of him—and though a hundred princes came to woo her, all their wooing would be in vain. He could say the word and kiss her again—he deeply wanted to kiss her—and go home on a flood of happiness and unhappiness, a bittersweet magical moment never to be repeated, never forgotten.

  Or he could go with the word unsaid, and she would see him as a hero who had come and gone in a dream, doing his heroic duty and going his heroic way, leaving her with only a tiny pang to remember him by. Her feelings would fade, withering in a late frost, ready to bloom again another day, for another boy. He didn’t want to think of her with someone else—he wanted the bittersweet magic that is stronger than any spell—but…

  But…

  The pause stretched out, and stretched out, until neither of them knew what to do with it.

  “I’m tired,” Nathan said at last. “I’d better take the sword and lie down somewhere.”

  “My room,” said the princess.

  The tower bedroom with its cozy bed, and the crescent moon carved on the pelmet…He lay down on the coverlet, hands folded on the sword hilt like a crusader in effigy, resting on a marble tomb. The princess sat beside him. “Do you mind if I stay?”

  “ ’Course not.”

  Presently, he moved over and she curled up along the edge of the bed—there was just enough space—and he took one hand off the sword to stroke her hair, all long and thick and tangly, and they fell asleep together.

  It seemed a life age later when he woke in his own bed, with the sun shining through the curtains, and the leather-bound sword digging into his ribs, and a strand of hair still wound
around his fingers.

  Epilogue: Autumn Leaves

  Another time, another world. Having dozed late, exhausted by the night’s activities, Nathan was in the kitchen eating a lunch appropriate for a demon slayercornflakes with chocolate sauce. He had been talking both between and during mouthfuls, while Annie, too horrified and too riveted even to nibble a sandwich, sat propped on her elbows listening.

  “Are you going to see the princess again?” she asked at last.

  “I don’t think so. I need to dream myself back there, just one more timethere’s something I have to dobut it won’t be to see Nell. We’d only have to say goodbye all over again. What’s the point?”

  “But you like her,” Annie said, probing gently. “You like her a lotdon’t you?”

  “Mm. That’s just it. I nearly said ityou know, the L-word?” He scanned his mother’s face for signs of shock, but failed to find them. “Only I suddenly saw, if I said it, that would make the whole thing real. It would be, like, this big tragic romanceRomeo and Julietwe come from different worlds, we can’t ever be together, but our love will somehow unite usthat sort of thing. If I said it, Nell would always remember meremember me saying itmaybe it would stop her loving someone else. I never knew how powerful words are, till then. Because I didn’t say it, ourwhat we feltwas just a passing affection, something she can put behind her. She deserves to love some guy in her worldto live happily ever after. She’ll think of melike someone in a dream. No big deal. After all, it was just a dream, really. Best to keep it that way.”

  “So youL-wordher?” Annie said.

  Nathan mmed an affirmative. “She’s the most wonderfulWe argued a lot, but that was wonderful, too. She made me feel I could do anything, be anything. I could be the hero she wantedfight demons, cure the king. Do youd’you think I just did those things to impress her? That would be awfully silly.”

  “It’s natural,” Annie said. “But even if you did, you’ll learn as you get older it’s what you do that counts, not why you do it. We have all sorts of reasons for doing things, some good, some less so, but it’s your actions that make you who you are.”