The Drowned Tomb (The Changeling Series Book 2) (17 page)

She stared at them a few seconds longer. “O … kay then,” she drawled. “I’m Penny. You guys look kind of, outsiderish?”

“Robin,” Robin spluttered, managing to make himself speak again. “Um, I’m Robin and, well, this is, my friend.”

Woad frowned at the girl with open distrust, his brows beetled. “I am W—”

“Wesley!” Robin interjected hastily. “My friend Wesley. So…” He rubbed the back of his neck. He had zero experience talking to girls. Karya didn’t count. She was part and parcel of the strangeness of Erlking, but this girl was different. He thought she was wearing a lot of makeup for the middle of a sunny day. Her ear was pierced in several place too. “Um … neat junk, eh?”

“Neato-potato,” Penny said encouragingly. “Whatcha looking for?” She pointed to Woad. “Lemme guess. Wes here wants an Enya CD and some sandalwood incense, right?” She smirked, wrinkling her nose.

“We are on an important mission to find a gift for the Henryboy,” Woad announced with great gravity. Robin cringed inwardly.

“Sorry,” he said to her by way of explanation. “He’s … an … exchange student.”

“Oh … okay.” She eyed Woad suspiciously.

“We’re actually looking for a present for my friend,” Robin said. “It’s his birthday, but I haven’t a clue so far.”

“Oh, well then.” Penny clapped her hands happily. She was wearing fingerless black lace gloves. “Awesome-sauce! Let’s go in. Morgana will have something, I just know it.”

Without waiting for a response, she pushed past them to the door and disappeared inside. Robin, a little startled, felt it would be awfully rude not to follow her, and so he dragged Woad in beside him.

Inside, the shop was a dark and dusty jumble of junk and antiques, piled haphazardly in the gloom. There were no other customers. It was deserted apart from a woman who appeared to be asleep behind the till at the back of the room.

Penny led Robin and Woad down the aisles of bric-a-brac, flicking through old action figurines and stacks of yellowing comics. “They have some good vinyl in here sometimes,” she murmured, browsing. “Depends.”

“You said you’re not local either?” Robin asked. She shook her purple head, not looking up from flipping through a stack of second hand CDs. “Nah, just visiting. Here with my bro, but he’s such a misery. Seriously, I can’t even tell you how much. So I’m off on my own. Saw you two looking lost too. Misery loves company, right?” She looked up briefly, flashing Robin a smile. He grinned back a little sheepishly.

“We looked lost?”

“Uh-huh,” she murmured. “Like little strayed lambs. So, see anything that takes your fancy?”

Robin stammered a little, looking around. “Um, I guess. There’s a lot of, well, interesting stuff in here.” He walked up to the counter at the back of the shop, where the shopkeeper was dozing on her hands, elbows propped on the desk. She startled awake when Robin coughed politely, blinking at him through round, horn-rimmed spectacles. Her face was round and smooth, with purplish lipstick that Robin thought looked a little silly. Her hair was a wild bird’s nest of towering flame-red frizz, piled haphazardly on top of her head and held in place, from what he could see, with a biro pen and a chopstick.

“You’re looking for a gift,” she said curtly, before Robin could speak. “For a friend … a boy.” Her voice was a little tremulous.

Robin nodded, frowning as she peered at him through her large glasses. This woman was even odder than his new friend with the purple hair and punk clothes. “Yeah, actually,” he said. “How did…”

“It’s that time of year, isn’t it? Present buying. Middle of summer, always lots of birthdays, aren’t there,” the woman babbled. “Nothing good on television in November is there? That’s the problem. And it had to be for a boy. Your brother perhaps, or a good friend. Wouldn’t be for a girl. Girls still smell funny and annoy boys your age.”

“Oi!” Penny called from an aisle of the shop. The woman ignored her, leaning across the counter to Robin. “Present buying for them comes in a few years, and you’ll have your hands full then, with those big blue eyes of yours.” She waved his question away with an indulgent cackle. Robin noticed her nails were very bitten down and painted purple. She looked like a faded hippy.

“My little buddy here needs something special, Morgana,” Penny said, appearing at Robin’s side and bumping him with her hip. The shopkeeper blinked at the girl several times, looking unfocussed and confused. “Do we … know each other?” she asked.

The girl leaned forward on the glass counter, looking over the pewter jewellery displayed beneath. “Dunno, don’t think so,” she said. “I’ve been in here a couple of times. Buying stuff, selling stuff, but there’s so much sandalwood in the air, who can remember, eh? Faces and places.”

The shopkeeper huffed, reaching behind the counter and rummaging around. While they waited, Woad sniffed cautiously at a jar of coconut incense sticks. Robin noticed the distant sound of a pan-pipes CD wafting rather depressingly through the gloom.

“Here!” the woman said decisively, re-emerging from beneath the counter and slapping down a large black box, long and thin. “This is what you get him.”

“Erm … what is it?” Robin asked. The strange girl leant in next to him, craning her neck to see. She was close enough that he could smell her hair. She smelled faintly of liquorice. Robin swallowed.

Morgana opened the box on its hinges. Within, resting on black padded velvet, was a bow and a quiver of arrows made from intricately carved white wood. The feathers on the arrows were pure black. It was beautifully detailed. Exquisitely made.

“Wow,” Robin was impressed, his eyes wide.

“A bow,” Penny said. “Well, I guess that’s kind of cool. Very ‘Lord of the Rings’. Your friend like bows, Roland? Is he a ‘Hunger Games’ fan?”

“Robin,” Robin corrected her absently. It really was a thing of beauty. Woad had appeared at his other shoulder and cooed appreciatively, standing on tiptoe to see over the counter. “That’s really … I mean, I bet he’d love that, but it looks…”

“Expensive?” the shopkeeper said, snapping the box closed with a loud snap. She shrugged, as though this was neither here nor there. “Well, I suppose it is old, and from far away, China or Mongolia or Wales, I forget…” She was already wrapping the box up with string. “But it’s been a slow day, I only get tourist trade mainly, and there are none of them in Barrowood at the moment. Not with that big music festival on up the road.” She glanced at the gothic Penny. “Are you from the festival? You look like the sort.”

Penny shook her head.

Morgana blew air down her nose. “Well, it’s only tourists really I make anything from. It’s not like the locals around here have a weekly need for channelling crystals or books on Zen meditation. Philistines.”

“How much is it?” Robin asked. “The bow.”

“Henryboy will love it,” Woad whispered with glee. “Everyone likes weaponry! It’s the gift that keeps on giving!”

Morgana peered at him through her thick glasses. Robin thought she would actually be quite pretty, in an oddball way, if she got better glasses and didn’t wear quite so much caked-on make-up.

“What you reckon it’s worth?” she asked sharply.

Robin rummaged in his pockets. “Well I’ve only got…” He pulled out some crumpled notes and a flurry of change. “Ten pounds … and um … forty pee left.”

She made a clucking noise with her tongue, then held out her hand. “Go on then, eh. Cross me palm with silver and all that.” She smirked at him lopsidedly. “Not buying anything for your girlfriend here too then?”

Penny laughed and Robin turned beetroot crimson. “She’s, she’s not my girlfriend,” he stammered. “She’s well, I … I mean we … Woah—I mean, Wesley and I … we just met her outside and—”

“I adopted them, Morgana,” Penny said sniggering. She tucked her silky hair behind her ear, turning her attention back to the junk in the shop. Robin watched her, still burning with embarrassment. “You crazy old flowerchild, you. Honestly. Don’t tease them. I should charge you commission for bringing in trade to this place.” She held up a keyring she had plucked from a barrel filled with bric-a-brac. “How much for this hello-kitty keychain? It’s good. In a so-bad-it’s-good kind of way.”

The shopkeeper frowned at the girl. “Are you sure I don’t know you, girl?” she asked again.

Penny shrugged. “Maybe in another life, eh?” She tossed the hello-kitty keychain to Robin, who caught it, surprised. “Here Robin-bobbin, you have that one, there’s a glow in the dark one here I want more, I’ll treat us both. How about you Wes-ster? Want a bauble?”

Woad was glaring at the girl from behind Robin’s elbow. “Pinky needs the bow, not tiny kittens,” he glowered.

They paid and took the package, thanking the odd woman. Morgana watched them leave, staring at all three children curiously through her sharp horn-rimmed glasses. Robin felt perhaps she had been inhaling a little too much incense stuck in her dingy shop.

As they left, she called out to them. “And be careful with that thing,” she said. “Don’t have anyone’s eye out. Unless they deserve it of course.” She cackled.

“Weird,” Robin said outside in the street, shaking his head as the door closed behind them with a tinkling bell.

“All humans are weird,” Woad muttered, giving Penny a very pointed look. “My tail is aching stuck in these ridiculous trousers,” he complained to Robin in a whisper.

Robin thought they had seen most of the village now anyway. They were laden down with many packages and had probably been over an hour. “We’d better be heading back,” he said to the odd, friendly girl. “It was nice meeting you though.”

She smiled and shook both their hands firmly. “Where are you guys staying? In the village? My bro and I have rooms at the Star and Child, that little pub off the main street. Dunno how long were here for though.”

“Oh, we’re up at Erlking,” Robin said. “On the hill, just outside the village.”

Penny’s eyebrows rode up her face. “That big old pile?” she whistled. “Wow, that’s kind of awesome. I thought that was one of those National Trust places, you know, with tours and things.”

“No, it’s my aunt’s house. Well, my great-aunt. I’m staying with her.” He shrugged. “It is kind of awesome. Wesley lives there too, most of the time.”

“Well now I’m completely, ridiculously jealous,” the girl said, thrusting her hands into the pocket of her black jeans. “I want to live in Castle Dracula too. I suppose at least the Star and Child has a pool table, though the jukebox is rubbish.”

“You should … I mean, if you wanted, if you were bored or whatever…” Robin said hesitantly. “You could come up, maybe, one day. If you like.” He shrugged casually.

“Sounds fun. If I can slip away from the family for five mins’ peace,” she said. “I’ll come a-knockin’.”

She punched Robin amiably on the shoulder. He admirably didn’t drop the parcels.

“Smell you later then,” she said to Woad and Robin, turning and waving over her shoulder as she ambled off, leaving them laden with gifts. Robin watched her go for a few seconds, until Woad huffed and tugged sharply at his shoulder.

They headed back, passing the tiny train station where he had first arrived in Barrowood. Robin didn’t like to admit it, but all day he had been looking out of the corner of his eye for a glimpse of trouble, half expecting to see Mr Strife or Mr Moros. His heart had skipped a little once when he thought he had seen a mop of green hair across the street, but it had turned out to be nothing more than a tall woman in a colourful hat.

The two boys spent much of the walk back arguing amiably over who was carrying more presents. Robin was feeling quite content, wondering vaguely how on earth he was going to sneak all these parcels up to his room. His stomach gave an insistent grumble, making him wonder vaguely about what Hestia was making for dinner. He hoped it would be something hot. Roast beef in steaming gravy, with crispy roast potatoes and Yorkshire pudding would be just the ticket. He was pleased with the bow; Henry was going to love it. And although she had been a little odd, he was impressed that he’d met a normal human and even managed to hold a conversation. It was nice to know he didn’t always have to be the Scion of the Arcania, and could still occasionally be just Robin.

As they passed out of the village and up the lane to Erlking’s great iron gates, Woad complained that every human they had met, from the knitted hearts lady to the frazzled shopkeeper, had all being weird. “All humans are weird, Pinky,” he muttered, as they walked through the tree tunnel and his glamour began to fade, his skin darkening once more to the ever-familiar blue. “They’re just not normal like you and me.”

THE SAD PASSING OF MRS CLEMENTINE

Henry returned from his holiday in Dorset to a superb birthday party. Aunt Irene and Mr Drover had laid out a feast in the dining room with bunting, balloons and lots of other decorations, which made the boy both grin with delight and cringe with embarrassment at the same time. He was fourteen now after all, a gangly age of awkward elbows and frequent eyeballing rolling in some other teens. Luckily for all involved, Henry was, in many ways an old soul. Calypso had provided further decorations in the form of swirling frost patterns on all of the long windows of the dining room, a huge ice chandelier which hung from the ceiling, catching the sunlight and reflecting it around the room in fractured rainbows, and Henry’s personal favourite, a life-size ice sculpture of the boy himself standing heroically atop a slain dragon. Henry, who had never slain anything outside of a computer game, was suitably impressed, even when it began to melt in the heat and look a bit macabre.

“You have Icarus-face, Henryboy,” Woad observed with interest as he handed over his present, wrapped with admirable enthusiasm but little order in an entire newspaper and a whole roll of cellotape. He inspected Henry’s face from several angles. “Is the sun closer to the ground at the door set?”

Henry grinned sheepishly. “It was roasting down south,” he said. “Hotter than the Algarve, according to the telly, although I’m not really sure where the Algarve is. Somewhere bloomin’ hot though!” Under his mop of brown hair, Henry’s face was sunburned and peppered with new freckles. “What’s this then Woad, mate?” he asked, tearing the wrapping off the present eagerly, to reveal what appeared to be seven or eight large pine cones, carefully tied together into a rough ball shape with rushes for thread.

The faun beamed his white teeth proudly. “It’s a sculpture!” he cried with glee as the others gathered round to see. “It’s you!”

Karya eyed the haphazard mass of cones with interest. “A dirty ball of nonsense,” she smirked. “Wonderful. You’ve really captured his essence, Woad.”

Henry and Robin looked bemused.

“It’s abstract,” the blue boy declared, as though this cleared everything up, and gave Henry a cheery thumbs up. Henry clapped him on the back, making the glass jar holding Inky the kraken slosh around Woad’s neck on its lace.

“I love it,” he grinned.

Karya reached into the folds of her robe and brought out a small package too, which she thrust at Henry with a very serious and business-like frown. He eyed it suspiciously.

“Don’t get excited,” she said. “I don’t have any money, and I don’t really understand why we’re celebrating your existence specifically today, but here, take it anyway.”

Henry hadn’t been expecting anything from the girl at all, and peeled off the brown paper wrapping dubiously, half expecting a book borrowed from the library, ‘how to be less of an annoying prat, volume one’ or something similar. It was in fact a jewellery box, and when he flipped the lid, Henry found it contained a small flat stone, with a hole in the middle, like a smooth donut. It was deep, midnight blue. He looked up at her questioningly.

“Well,” she said, abruptly. “You’re the only one of us who doesn’t have a mana stone, being just a useless human boy, of course.” She sniffed. “It’s not a mana stone. There’s nothing special about it. I found it in a trunk upstairs ages ago in the hatbox room and Irene said I could keep it. It’s just a necklace. I thought you might want to feel less left out, it would be easier if you had an equivalent.”

Henry lifted the stone out of the box and weighed it in his palm appraisingly. “Wow,” he said, genuinely astonished and for once lost for words. “I don’t know what to say.”

“That’s a first,” Robin observed wryly.

Karya shrugged. “It’s just a token,” she insisted. “It’s completely useless really.” She gave him an awkward smile, unused as she was to social niceties. “So I thought it would suit you.”

Aunt Irene and Mr Drover had presented Henry with a host of much more usual birthday presents between them. From incredibly boring gifts such as new socks and a coat, to far more fun things like computer games and movie box sets, both of which Henry would have to save until he got home to the village, as technology was not friendly at Erlking.

But the prize present of the day was without a doubt Robin’s bow.

“This … is … ace!” Henry exclaimed, lifting the pale bow from its hastily torn wrapping and turning it over and over. “Seriously! Where did you even find something like this Rob? It’s awesome.”

“A little junk shop down in Barrowood,” Robin shrugged happily.

“A girl helped us,” Woad piped up. “She was pretty, but strange. She made Pinky’s tongue go all floppy in his mouth, it was funny.”

Robin shot the faun a harsh look. “She did not.”

“You been making friends in the village, eh?” Henry gave the bowstring a satisfying twang. “Nice one. She probably goes to my school.”

Robin shook his head. “Nah, said she was just passing through. Something about a music festival up the road. The lady in the shop was a bit odd though, is everyone in your village strange?”

Henry glanced around at the current company. Calypso was making the ice-cubes floating in the punch dance for Mr Drover’s amusement, Hestia was standing silently in a corner, dustpan and brush in hand, ready to leap into action should anyone have the temerity to loose a party-popper. “Not as strange as here,” he said, tactfully. “But I like here better, come on, let’s take this baby outside and give it a test run.”

“After we eat,” Aunt Irene called from the other end of the table, where she was standing in conversation with the other adults, holding a tiny glass of sweet sherry. Mr Drover was wearing a party hat quite merrily. Calypso had been offered one too, but had merely eyed it with vague disinterest.

“Not that I disapprove of gifting an excitable boy with weaponry,” Irene said. “But there is a time for firing arrow bolts into one’s own foot, and a time for eating. Please all come and take your places at the table.”

The feast was impressive, comprised as it was of all of Henry’s favourite foods, which largely consisted of pastry. Irene observed that it was a constant astonishment to her how a boy could consume so much food and still be as thin as a whippet. Hestia milled around the room, clearing plates and bringing out course after course until they were all stuffed. She complained and muttered moodily to herself the entire time, but Robin noticed that despite her protestations, she had still gone to the trouble of making a huge trifle, which was Henry’s favourite dessert. She unceremoniously slammed this down on the table, issuing stern and foreboding warnings to the four children of the serious and potentially fatal ramifications should any of them spill cream on the dining room parquet floor. She fixed her beetle-black eyes on Woad in particular. “Or … on … the … ceiling,” she said pointedly, before shuffling off to make a start on the washing up.

After the party, when the food was crumbs and the sculptures were puddles, the adults returned to adult business and Irene shooed Robin and his companions out into the gardens, suggesting that it may be safer for all involved if everyone kept well out of Hestia’s way while she cleared up.

Henry and Robin took turns with Henry’s new bow, using a collection of cans they had stolen from the party as targets, lined up neatly atop the rose garden wall. Here they remained, untouched, due to the chronically terrible aim of both boys. Karya watched their efforts with critical glee, the occasional world-weary shake of her tangled head doing nothing to soothe the macho hunter bravado of her companions. Woad had no interest in playing with the bow, but he did have tremendous fun bounding off excitedly on all fours and fetching the arrows back from various bushes, trees, and on one occasion from between the broken horns of the fountain-statue satyr where it had become lodged rather comically.

The sun was relentless, and they were soon happily exhausted. Henry told them all about surfing in the sea, how he had been banned from no less than two amusement arcades, and the disgusting truth about what you were required to do when stung by a jellyfish. Robin in turn filled him in on his progress with the Tower of Water, and Karya’s progress with the translation and her discovery that the Grimms were stalking the human world looking for the hidden Janus station.

“Well, if any Grimms come near me or my friends…” Henry said with mock seriousness, twanging his bow. “I’ll put an arrow through their leg!”

Later that evening, after Henry and Mr Drover had left, Woad disappeared into the woods to hunt. Karya announced she was quite possibly going to expire after eating so many pies, and had disappeared to bed, and so, happy and full, Robin lay on his bed reading.

One of his favourite times at Erlking were these quiet nights, lying alone in his circular tower room, with the windows open to the cooling night air, surrounded by books.

He was currently reading over Hammerhand’s ‘Netherworlde Compendium’, wondering if there might be something in here about the secret valley of the Undine.

There were indeed several entries regarding both Undine and nymphs, with some interesting trivia. He learned for instance that nymphs were pulled by emotion as tides were pulled by the gravity of the moon. He wondered if this was why Calypso seemed so utterly disinterested at the party when everyone was relaxed and amiable, but had been so nice to him when he had been upset about Gran previously. Perhaps this explained why so many nymphs were drawn over to Eris’ cause in the war, he considered. Nothing says strong emotion like power-hungry genocidal hatred.

There was less information on Undine. They were purer spirits, it seemed, powerful and primal water Panthea, and as for their home, although alluded to several times here and there in the book, there were no solid leads on where in the Netherworlde it might be. Vague allusions to a frozen valley, or a snowy plateau, that was all.

Sighing and stretching, Robin clapped the heavy book shut and rolled over onto his back. As he did so, he let out a yelp. It felt as though he’d just been bitten on the hip by an insect. Sitting up, he lifted his t-shirt, wincing.

The tiny hello-kitty keyring from the village had spent the last couple of days clipped to the belt loop of his jeans, like a lucky charm. He didn’t have any keys to clip it to after all. There was only one room in Erlking that locked, and that led to another world. He must have rolled onto it, and he saw that the sharp metal clip which threaded through the denim had somehow come loose and pricked him like a needle. A small drop of bright red blood was already welling against it.

Getting up and muttering some curse words which he was very sure his aunt and Hestia were too far from earshot to hear, he unclipped the little plastic cat, crossing to his dresser, where he dropped it into the small silver dish where he kept his mana stone and the silver horseshoe charm at night.

It was a silly little thing anyway, he told himself. He didn’t really know why he’d kept it.

Soon, he was asleep, remembering vaguely as he drifted off something about an old fairy tale where someone pricked their finger and fell asleep for a hundred years. He didn’t have any lessons tomorrow with his tutor. It was a ‘study day’ which was code at Erlking for ‘no studying whatsoever’. He could quite happily sleep through the day, if not for a hundred years.

The Scion fell asleep happy, watching dark moths flutter in and out of the window, pattering softly against the rafters above in the warm summer air, and flitting around the silver bowl, drawn by the light, or perhaps the smell of blood.

***

“Mrs Clementine is dead,” Mr Drover muttered around a slice of toast. It was Monday morning, the last week of August, and he had just arrived after dropping Henry off at his extra-tuition summer school (or Maths-Hell, as Henry called it) in time to join Irene and Robin for breakfast.

Robin’s aunt stopped spreading marmalade with her silver knife and set it down on her side plate. “And what, pray tell, is a Mrs Clementine?” she enquired.

“Lived in the village long as I can say,” Drover shook his head, winking up in a friendly way at Hestia, who poured tea at his elbow. She didn’t return the wink, but sniffed haughtily and moved around the table to Irene, pot in hand.

“Terrible shame,” Drover continued, “But she was no spring chicken, I’ll say that. Made me look like a babe in arms, she did. She had a good innings. Shame to go out on your own like that though, no family there.”

“Someone died in Barrowood?” Robin asked, looking up from his juice between the gardener and his aunt. Drover nodded. “Aye. Batty old bird really. Little old dear, bit of a village fixture. Used to say hello and how do you do in the butchers, you know, just in passing. Our Henry used to steal apples out of her garden when he was younger, and she was young enough to chase him off with her stick.” He picked up his teacup and slurped noisily. “Lived on her own, right out near the bypass. They only found her ‘cause the milkman noticed this morning that she hadn’t taken her milk in for days. Terrible shame really. Dead in her bed.”

“Is this really appropriate conversation for the breakfast table, Mr Drover?” Hestia fluttered. “All of this talk of death and these grim deliveries of news. It is most unpleasant when my lady is attempting to break her morning fast, honestly!” She put the teapot on the table with a thud.