The Poisoned Crown (45 page)

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.

A
T 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 specific 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.”

“Yes. But he’s got a universe to save. And he’s also tried to protect me. We disagreed—he told me not to get involved when I was in otherworlds—he didn’t want me running into danger. Just like a real father … Only I
did
get involved—I broke the—the
link
between our minds—I sort of took control of the portal—and now I can’t find him. He must be waiting for me, trying to contact me … There are so many things I want to ask him.”

“He’ll be in touch,” Hazel said in a strangely flat voice.

She was sure of it.

A
NNIE AND
Pobjoy continued to date, but infrequently. He was sent away to Lancashire over a case of people-smuggling that had ramifications in both areas, and when they
did
meet he found her preoccupied and unwilling to discuss her troubles. How could she tell him what she had told Nathan, when he was still so reluctant to believe in magic, and otherworlds, and their possible incursion on everyday existence? They kissed, and in kissing the barriers almost came down, and their doubts and differences started to melt away—but Annie always drew back, thinking of Nathan, though he was not thinking of her, feeling that now was not the time to risk widening the gulf between mother and son. And in consequence Pobjoy began to wonder if she truly liked him, and whether it was worth persisting, and—as usual—what was
really
going on in Eade. He read
The Wind in the Willows
, which he found unexpectedly gripping, though he was torn between his approval of Badger as a character and his disapproval of vigilante action by civilians, as advocated in the retaking of Toad Hall. Annie then gave him John Masefield’s
The Midnight Folk
, because it had highwaymen and stolen treasure and many other ingredients guaranteed to appeal to the small boy in every grown man, and
Guards! Guards!
, because it was about policemen.

Pobjoy found himself thinking that surely dating never used to require quite so much intellectual effort. When he was in his teens and twenties, preparation had generally consisted of brushing his teeth, changing his shirt, and checking he’d remembered to pack the condoms. Reading hadn’t gotten a look-in. But then his marriage had been short-lived, and he realized, looking back, that he didn’t actually know if his wife liked to read, since he had never found the time to ask. Maybe, in the New Age, with its New Men, and its New Women—an age when you filled out a form on the Internet to assess compatibility, and chatting up a colleague could land you with a lawsuit for harassment—maybe this was how things were done.

He consulted the inspector with whom he was liaising in Lancashire, a man some fifteen years his senior.

“I dunno, lad,” the man said. “Been married nearly thirty years. Easiest way. I’d be lost if I had to start again. My daughter’s got a boyfriend in Tibet whom she met online—they’ve never seen each other but she says they bond spiritually. My son has a girlfriend with pink hair who’s studying psychology and claims he’s an interesting case. In my day a couple of pints and a grope in the cinema always did the trick. But you know what the French say: Ortra temps, ortra mouse. They do it with computers nowadays.”

Which didn’t help much.

Meanwhile, his sense of humor, carefully cultivated, grew like a bulb that thrives in the dark, ready to reach out into the daylight at some future stage.

M
ARCH ARRIVED
, and the winter still hung on, like an unwanted guest who stays and stays, ignoring all hints that it’s time to depart. It dug itself in with icy claws, turning the ground to permafrost, splitting the pipes, sharpening the wind till it seemed to cut to the bone. Puddles cracked underfoot, noses reddened, lips chapped, everyone got colds. Hazel decided she was warmer at Thornyhill, with Bartlemy’s broth inside her and Hoover snuggled against her leg and a fire burning merrily
on the hearth. Redoing her schoolwork was a small price to pay, and it meant she could talk to Bartlemy about her worries over Nathan, though careful not to cross the line into generation disloyalty. But Bartlemy had been around so long he didn’t belong to
any
generation, so perhaps he didn’t count.

“It’s time to try and help,” Bartlemy said, “though there’s little we can do. Other universes are outside the province of regular magic. Still, we can ask a few questions and see if the answers have changed. You never know what we may learn.”

“Do we light the spellfire?” Hazel said, happily abandoning her math.

“Not tonight. It is customary to burn fire crystals when you draw the circle, but in this weather I think warmth wins over atmosphere.” He closed the curtains, rolled back the rug. Hazel, obedient to instructions, drizzled spellpowder around the perimeter, where the blackened scar of other circles showed clearly on the bare floorboards.

“Have you done this before?” Bartlemy said, with an absentmindedness unusual for him.

“N-no, but—”

“Very well. Just do as I say. I will initiate the magic, but you may summon the spirits and question them, as and when I tell you. However, this is a hazardous proceeding, so don’t deviate from my orders, no matter what may occur. This is not the time for getting—as they say nowadays—creative. Do you understand?”