The Poisoned Crown (19 page)

“What’s this funny loose skin ’round your legs?” Denaero asked, tugging at his tracksuit trousers. Annie, who felt the cold, always kept the heating on high in the winter months, and Nathan had gone to bed without a top on.

“It isn’t skin,” he said. “It’s clothes.”

“What are
clothes?”

Neither merfolk nor selkies went in much for clothing. Rhadamu’s warriors wore battle armor made from the carapace of giant crab, horned lobster, or sea scorpion, and both males and females favored elaborate jewelry, with necklaces at throat and waist, bracelets, rings, hair ornaments. Disney mermaids, Nathan reflected, invariably sported C-cup scallop shells, but Denaero was completely topless. When her tail had split into legs, he had noticed she was bottomless as well. Her breasts were small, shallow mounds that barely broke the eel-smoothness of her body, but they were still breasts, and as a normal fifteen-year-old boy he couldn’t help being aware of them. He decided the one advantage of the underwater situation was that, since she was more or less covered to the throat, it did minimize the embarrassment factor. If they had both been seated on the albatross, with him behind her—the idea made his brain spin …

“I need to keep warm,” he said briefly.

“But it’s not cold!” Denaero protested. “How can
this
keep you warm?”

“Well, it would if it wasn’t wet—if I was out of the water.” He definitely wasn’t going to go into issues of modesty.

Denaero seemed unconvinced. She was obviously intrigued by his strangeness, but it was plain she was not much impressed by Nathan himself. In Wilderslee, he had found it easy to impress Nellwyn after
saving her three times from an Urdemon, even if a large amount of luck had been involved. Here, he had knocked Denaero off her perch on Ezroc, fallen into the sea after her, nearly drowned in panic, shown himself awkward and cowardly in water, and generally failed in the hero stakes. Although Nathan didn’t expect girls—princess, mermaid, or otherwise—to be automatically impressed with him, he wasn’t used to looking a complete fool, and in view of what he had to accomplish it wasn’t an ideal starting point.

“If you come from another world, how did you get here?” Ezroc asked. “And what are you here
for?”

“I dream myself here,” Nathan said. This was never an easy thing to explain. “It’s like there’s a portal in my mind that opens when I’m asleep, and I go through into otherworlds. And I’m always—sort of—
integrated.
I can speak the language and everything. Only I never found myself in someone’s head before. I’m sorry: I don’t do it deliberately. It just… happens. I think … it’s part of something. A quest. There are things I have to do …”

“You mean—you’ve been to
lots
of worlds?” Denaero said, uninterested in quests.

“A few.”

Her eyes widened; she turned to Ezroc.

“Is he telling the truth? The shaman-priestesses can leave their bodies in dreams, but they can’t move between worlds. How could that happen? It must take big magic.”

“Not magic,” Nathan said. “Physics. We’re all made up of these tiny particles, too small to see, and they can move in and out of reality. With me, it’s like—the same thing, only scaled up.” He had no idea if this was correct, but that was how he rationalized things to himself.

“Particles of what?” said Ezroc.

“Stuff,” Nathan said helplessly.

“I’m not made of particles!” Denaero declared. “The First Gods made us when the God-King killed his wicked father with the Sickle of the Moon, and the blood dripped into the sea, mixing with the moonlight on the foam, and so the merfolk were born. Everyone knows that.”

“But you and the sea and all things are made up of these particles,” Nathan said. “Particles of… of energy.”

“Magic particles?” Denaero asked.

“In a way.” He left it at that.

“What about this quest?” Ezroc persisted.

“I was coming to that.” Nathan began to explain about the Iron Crown, and how it was part of a spell to save another universe, and he had to get it back, but suddenly he felt dizzy, and the sundazzle on the water was blinding him, and the sea started to revolve like a huge flat disk—and then he was falling, falling into deep water, out of the dream into the dark.

N
ATHAN AWOKE
almost immediately feeling very uncomfortable and realized it was because he was still wet. He got up, toweled himself down, and swapped his dripping trousers for a dry pair. The bed where he had lain was sodden, and after a minute’s thought he crept into the bathroom to borrow Annie’s hair dryer. It was around three a.m. and he didn’t want to disturb her but he supposed, by the morning, her sensitive maternal antennae would have detected the problem and she would be requiring an explanation. That was the thing about mothers, he reflected. They always knew when you were in some kind of trouble even if they couldn’t tell precisely
what
kind. He thought of saying his hot-water bottle had leaked but that might be worse; Annie was well aware he only went to bed with a hot-water bottle when he was ill. No, he would have to tell her the truth. She had always been pretty good about such things in the past, but he knew she worried, and he would have done almost anything to prevent that.

He found himself wondering if fathers were the same. Did they have twitchy paternal antennae and lie awake agonizing over the behavior of their sons? He didn’t know, and it seemed to him odd that he had never thought about it before. And why should such thoughts occur to him now, when he was nearly sixteen, long past the age—in his opinion—of needing fatherly care? It wasn’t as if his childhood had been lacking in male guardianship. There had been Bartlemy, less than
a father but more than an uncle, a large, reassuring figure in spite of— or because of—his wizardly skills, cooking wonderful food, listening to his problems, helping and guiding him,
being there.
And the Grandir, a remote but inexplicably caring presence, gazing down from the star that wasn’t a star, clearly exercising some influence over his otherworld adventures, watching over him, for all his other concerns, from beyond the world. What father could have done more?

He snuggled down into his blow-dried bed and slid back into sleep feeling curiously comforted, as if there were a mantle of protection wrapped around him thicker and warmer than any duvet.

In the morning Annie scooped up the damp trousers and said philosophically: “At least it isn’t demonspit. I thought I would
never get
that out. And it didn’t do the washing machine any good, either. I had to have the man ’round a month later: he said it had gummed up the filter.”

She kept her tone light and turned her head away so Nathan wouldn’t see the anxiety in her eyes.

Later that day Nathan caught the bus to Chizzledown to visit the Thorns. Rowena was the last surviving member of the ancient family who had owned Thornyhill Manor since time out of mind, the only legitimate descendant of Josevius Grimthorn. Despite two marriages locals still called her Rowena Thorn, and since her second husband seemed to have no particular surname, or none of distinction, he had become Mr. Thorn willy-nilly, though he didn’t appear to object. His real name was Errek Moy Rhindon, an exile from Eos whom Nathan had yanked into this world largely by mistake, dumping him on the beach at Pevensey Bay as an illegal immigrant with no papers and nowhere to return to. It had taken Nathan some while to catch up with him again, by which time he had begun to learn the language and assimilate an alien and—to him—backward culture. Unfortunately, he had seen the original
Star Wars
trilogy at the house of a charity worker not long after his arrival, giving him a view of our universe that he had never lost. In the Grandir’s world, fiction was banned, since it was said to be founded on corruption and lies, and accordingly Eric had believed the films constituted an account of our history, detailing a high
point of civilization from which we had subsequently declined. Even now that he was married to Rowena and had learned rather more about the world that had adopted him, he was still prone to greet people with
May the Force be with you!
and to bracket the fall of the Republic and the Emperor’s seizure of power with later events in Rome or revolutionary France.

Rowena ran an antiques shop, with a two-story apartment above where she and Eric lived. She was on the phone when Nathan arrived, what sounded like a business call about something whose provenance she clearly doubted, so Eric took him into the small kitchen at the back and made coffee. Since he came to this world, he had developed a passion for it. Nathan accepted a cup with plenty of milk and sugar and sat down on a rickety chair.

“So,” Eric said, “you have been on Eos again, in a dream?”

“Mm.”

“The Contamination has not yet reached Arkatron?”

“Not yet,” Nathan said. The Contamination was a form of magical pollution, probably the fallout from a war that had gotten out of hand, which had poisoned the entire cosmos, destroying all living things. Eos was the last surviving planet, and even there only a few regions were still free.

“Do you miss your home?” Nathan asked diffidently.

“Only a little. It seems so far away—so long ago. Another world! This is my home now.”
Integration
, Nathan thought.
Like in my dreams. You find yourself in a different universe, you start to belong to it. It must be some form of survival trait.

He said: “But on Eos, you lived for ages. Thousands of years.” The Eosians used their magic to prolong life, resulting in a population so sterile, no children had been born there for centuries. “Here—you’ll grow older.” He didn’t say,
You’ll die
, but Eric knew what he meant.

“Everyone grow old, in the end,” Eric said largely. “Is nature. Here, maybe it happen faster, but life better. Also, I not wish to outlive Rowena. Is good we pass the Gate together. Who know what lies beyond? Perhaps we are reborn in new universe, have another life, another youth. In winter leaves wither, fall from tree, but in spring they grow again.
Perhaps the same with people. Death part of a cycle, then there is room to regrow.”

Eric had a decidedly philosophical streak, Nathan reflected, but that was a possible side effect of intercosmic travel. He himself showed a tendency to philosophize from time to time, and he was a teenager.

He said, “I suppose so,” and took a chocolate cookie from a package Eric had thoughtfully placed by his elbow.

“You find the Crown yet?” Eric inquired.

“Sort of. I know where it is, but it’s going to be difficult to get. You know so much about the Grail relics—they’re a major legend in your world. What kind of protection does the Crown have? Is there a spirit trapped inside, like there was in the Sword?”

“I don’t know. Maybe … but I never hear of one. Power of iron protect the Crown. Iron very strong in my world, stronger than here. Makes magical field to keep all evil away. Where is Crown now?”

“In a place called Widewater. It’s a world—a planet—entirely covered by sea. The Crown’s in a cavern under a reef—this sea goddess has it, Nefanu, only she’s a werespirit and I think she can’t actually touch it.”

“Crown cannot be undersea,” Eric said positively. “Iron and water make rust. Rust not good for sacred relic.”

“It’s supposed to be a cavern of air,” Nathan said, “even though it’s underwater. I’m not quite sure how that works, but that’s what I’ve been told. Could the power of the Crown somehow expel the water?”

Eric shrugged one of his flamboyant shrugs. “Maybe. I not know.”

“Perhaps it was Nefanu,” Nathan said, thinking aloud. “Perhaps
she’s
the guardian of the Crown, like the gnomons for the Grail and the elemental in the Sword. Only the Grandir didn’t have to conjure her, he just made use of her. He knew she would want the Crown—she would recognize its power—it’s like a kind of trophy for her. I can’t see how she could use it, if she can’t touch it or wear it, but—”

“Crown is not Sword,” Eric said. “Sword is for use. Crown just
is.”

Nathan thought about that for a minute.

“Until the Great Spell,” he said. “Then someone—the Grandir— will use it.”

“Crown is … circle that binds.” Eric was trying to explain something, but Nathan wasn’t sure he knew himself what it was. “We have old saying: hand on the Sword, blood in the Cup, Crown on the head. Three rules of king making from ancient days. Great Spell bring together many things. But king is also sacrifice. So … blood in the Cup, Crown on the head. But whose head? To save a world, whose head?”

“The Grandir’s,” Nathan said.

“Maybe. But none wear crown since Romandos’s day. Too heavy. Weight of iron, weight of power, weight of doom.” And he repeated: “Crown just
is.
To wear it, death. So they say.”

“If it’s part of the spell,” Nathan said, “then the Grandir will wear it. Whatever the cost.”

T
HAT EVENING
Nathan, Hazel, and George went to the sixteenth-birthday party of an old friend from primary school. Annie stayed at home watching Saturday-night TV and wondering if she was becoming middle-aged, lapsing into completely irrelevant thoughts about what DCI Pobjoy might be doing now and how he spent his Saturdays. Investigating crime, probably. She was just picturing him leaning over a corpse in some exotic location, like Crowford or Crawley, when she heard a noise from the bookshop. She couldn’t be sure against the sound of the television but she thought it was a door closing. As if someone had come in very stealthily, taking care not to let the handle rattle. Access to the house was through the back door from the garden or through the entrance to the shop; she had left the latter unlocked for Nathan, only putting up a closed sign, in case anybody wanted to buy a secondhand book in the middle of a Saturday night. Eade was the kind of place where people still left doors unlocked, a sleepy little village where apart from the odd robbery and serial murder nothing untoward ever happened. Nathan had a key, but he had left it in his gym bag at school.

And now there was someone in the shop. Annie switched off the television and waited for a knock on the adjoining door, a familiar voice—
any
familiar voice—demanding her attention. Lily Bagot, or
Ursula Rayburn, or … Silence. The hairs rose on the nape of her neck. Long ago, Bartlemy had told her that werefolk and wizards could not enter a house uninvited, but a bookshop, she knew, was different. Anyone could enter a shop; that was what it was about. She walked to the door, laid a hand on the knob. Telling herself fear was idiotic, irrational, she pushed it open.