The Poisoned Crown (11 page)

“It’s not night,” Hazel pointed out.

“Night—day—at the runt end of the year, there’s no muckle difference.”

“Could you show me the place?” Hazel asked. “Not now—it’s a bit late—but another day?”

“Aye,” the dwarf said slowly. “But I’m thinking the goodman would not be wanting ye to go there.”

“Then we won’t tell him,” Hazel said, doing her best to sound resolute. “We have to trap the gnomons. If they won’t come to me, then I have to go to them.”

“Ye’re a bold lass,” said the dwarf, but whether in approval or criticism she couldn’t tell. “I’ll be seeing ye.”

He was gone, and ahead she saw Bartlemy emerging from the gloom of the fading daylight.

“They didn’t come,” Hazel said.

“So I gather. We’ll try again tomorrow.”

But on Sunday it rained too heavily for hunting phantoms, and during the week Hazel had school.

“I could skive off one afternoon,” she offered, nobly.

“No,” said Bartlemy. “We’ll wait for the weekend.”

“The weekend,” Hazel echoed, thinking of the Darkwood and the chapel under the tree roots, and her stomach tightened in anticipation of terrors ahead.

N
ATHAN WENT
back to school on Monday, still taking the painkillers each night, less to make him sleep than to keep him in his bed. It was always awkward wandering between worlds in the dormitory, since the more solid he appeared in his dreams, the more insubstantial his sleeping form would become. It was only when he was back home for the weekend, and assuring his mother he was restored to fitness, that he stopped taking the drugs.

That night, he lay for a while unsleeping, his body rigid at the thought of the planet undersea. The Grandir was right: he knew what he had to do. Find the third relic—the relic removed from Eos countless years ago by the Grandir himself, to shield it from the greedy and the misguided. The Iron Crown. The Crown of spikes forged originally by Romandos, first of the Grandirs, to form a part of the Great Spell to save their people—a plan laid over millennia, woven into the legends of a thousand worlds, hidden in a web of folklore and lies. Nathan still had no idea what the spell itself involved, or how it could engender salvation—he knew only that it had more power than a galaxy imploding and would shake the very multiverse to its core. Even the Grandir, he suspected, had yet to fill in all the gaps in his vision of destiny. The Grandir who thought he was a true-born descendant of Romandos and his bride-sister, Imagen, though Nathan had seen in his naked face the ghost of Imagen’s lover Lugair.

Nathan lingered between sleep and waking, thoughts floating free in his mind. Lugair had betrayed Romandos—Romandos his friend— slaying him with the Traitor’s Sword, to be slain in his turn … the Sword had been held in Carboneck for generations, a curse on the kings of Wilderslee and on their people … the Grail had been guarded by Josevius and the Thorns, the so-called luck of the family, its burden and its bane … and the Iron Crown must be in Widewater, somewhere in the deeps of the sea. The masculine principle, the feminine principle, and the circle that binds. Three elements that together might change a world, or all worlds … But Osskva the mage had told him it needed a sacrifice—it needed blood. Blood had begun it, Romandos’s blood, and blood must finish it—the blood of his descendant.
It is expedient for us that one man should die for the people
… who had said that? Suddenly Nathan was sure the Grandir was ready for that, ready to make the ultimate sacrifice. Not out of love perhaps—it was hard to imagine him loving his people; he seemed above such sentiment—but from a supreme sense of duty, from pride, from his absolute commitment to his heritage and his world. And for Halmé, whom he loved indeed, Halmé the beautiful for whom he had said that world was made …

There must be another way
, Nathan thought, knowing the thought
was futile. He had no power to change things. He was caught up in this like a snowflake in a storm, a tiny component in a huge machine, and all he
could
do was whatever he
had
to do.
Only this, and nothing more.
Why did he keep thinking of that poem, and Annie’s face when he talked of the Grandir, so pale and still? He had to find the Crown.

And then he remembered Keerye, talking of the Goddess, and how she had an iron crown that never rusted, kept in a cavern of air under the Dragon’s Reef.

How could he have failed to pick up the clue? But he had been inside Ezroc’s head, sharing his thoughts and feelings, no longer a boy but an albatross riding on the wind. Oh to fly again …

His mind turned to dragons—it
would
be dragons—great fire-breathing monsters, far more deadly than Urdemons or giant lizards. But no dragon could breathe fire underwater. He visualized a vast serpentine creature, winged and clawed and fanged, rising in a storm of bubbles, the sea boiling against its flanks. Its mouth opened on a gullet of flame, its red-hot tongue crackled like a lava flow in the alien element … The ocean erupted into steam as the dragon ascended, dripping wings driving it into the sky …

Somehow, in the midst of such visions, he fell asleep.

And
now
he was flying again, not the dragon but the bird. Soaring on the high air into a deep blue night. Southward and eastward there was a faint pallor along the horizon; light leaked into the sky. The sun’s disk lifted above the rim of the globe and the light washed over the ocean, turning the waves to glitter. Ahead, Nathan saw a broken shoreline of crags and peaks and towers, rough-faceted, glimmering here and there with a glimpse of crystal. The Ice Cliffs. As he drew nearer he made out a vast colony of seabirds stretching along the escarpment: gannets, puffins, auks, gulls, terns—the squawking of their competing chatter was like the din of a whole city. On the highest part of the ridge there was a group of albatrosses, twenty or thirty pairs, far bigger than the other birds—bigger than the albatrosses Nathan had seen in nature shows—some, at a guess, nearly as tall as he was, or would have been if he had been solid. Ezroc, he realized, had grown, too: his wingspan seemed to reach halfway across the world. He gazed down at the mating
pairs—Nathan remembered that albatrosses mate for life—and felt the sorrow in Ezroc’s heart because he was alone, he had chosen loneliness to pursue his long voyages in search of Keerye who was dead and the islands that were no more.

In Ezroc’s mind he heard a memory replaying, the voice of an older bird, a relative or mentor:
The islands are lost, young Stormrider, if they ever existed. You have journeyed many miles farther than your namesake
—
you have followed the great currents to the south
—
merfolk have hunted you, boiling spouts have singed your feathers, sea monsters have chased your shadow across the waves. You know the truth. The seas are empty. Stay here; settle down withy our own kind. Until the Ice Cliffs melt, the northfolk will have a place to be.

And Ezroc’s reply:
It is not enough.
The words of a maverick, stubborn beyond reason, holding on to a vision no one else could see.

He passed over the colony, ignoring the birds that raised their heads to watch him, speeding along the floating shoreline. Below, Nathan glimpsed other creatures, refugees from the lost lands of long ago, surviving on the Great Ice. A troop of penguins waddling along a promontory, plopping into the sea—clumsy and comic on the ice, arrow-smooth in the water. A huddle of sea lions and trueseals, nursing their newborn pups. A great snowbear waiting at a borehole till its dinner came up for air. And an enormous walrus, tusked and bristled, heaving himself up onto a floe, who raised a flipper in greeting.

Ezroc wheeled and swooped down to land on the ice beside him.

“Greetings, Burgoss. May your mustache never grow less! I’ve been away awhile—what is the word along the Ice Cliffs?”

“Greetings, young’un,” the walrus grunted. “What makes you think I have time for the jabber of chicks and pups? I don’t listen to children’s gossip, and when they’re grown their talk is all of food and sex. Enough to deafen you with boredom. If that’s the word you seek, ask elsewhere.”

“You are the oldest and wisest creature in all the seas,” Ezroc said, flattering shamelessly. “Except for the whales. If there is any news worth knowing, you will know it.”

“Not so much the
oldest.”
The walrus shook himself, feigning displeasure.
“You have a beak on you, young Ezroc, you always did. I’d say you were getting too big for your wings if they weren’t grown so wide I can barely see from tip to tip. What’ve you been eating down in the south? Hammerhead?”

“Too small,” Ezroc said airily. “I feast only on sea monsters.”

“All boast and no bulwarks,” the walrus retorted. “Hrrmph! Well, I can guess the kind of news you need to hear, and it ain’t good. A piece broke off the Great Ice away westward, maybe five longspans across. Perhaps Nefanu is bringing the sun north to melt us, though the days don’t seem any longer to me. But I’m not as young as I was, and could be I’m out of my reckoning.”

“She won’t bring the sun,” Ezroc said. “I don’t think she has that power. Anyway, she doesn’t need to. All she has to do is divert one of the warmer currents. If she hasn’t tried that yet, it’s only because she hasn’t thought of it.”

“Those old gods are as dumb as dugongs,” Burgoss remarked. “How else did her queenship manage to wipe out the rest of them? Anyhow, ice breaks in the spring. It may not mean much. You’ve got other things to worry about. The Spotted One says he saw merfolk scouting below the cliffs last moondark. Says they took a snowbear, though there’s no proof. The bears don’t lair together; they wouldn’t know if one’s gone missing.”

“The Spotted One …” The albatross might have frowned, if birds could frown. Nathan could sense his unease.

“The others don’t listen to him,” the walrus said. “Since old Shifka died they’ve grown complacent—complacent and careless. Apathy! Huh! The biggest killer of all time. Once that sets in, you’re halfway to extinction. I’m old—though not as old as you seem to think—but I can still smell trouble coming. If the Great Ice were to break up—if the merfolk mounted a serious attack—”

“Do
you
believe him?” Ezroc interjected.

“Possibly. He’s surly and solitary, but that don’t make him a liar. Been an outcast since he was a pup, when they taunted him for his spots. Seal-brats can be cruel—cruel and stupid—just like any other
young’uns. He wasn’t quick with words so as he got older he fought— fought tough and fought dirty—teeth, flippers, fists, he didn’t care what shape he used as long as he won, and the odds were always against him. Can’t blame him for that.”

“He killed someone,” Ezroc said.

The walrus shrugged, a great rippling shrug that flowed right down his massive body. “It happens. Don’t think he set out to kill—he always wanted the others to feel their bruises, or so I guess—but the brat got his head smashed on the ice, and that did it for him. Skull too thin or something.”

“Brat?” Ezroc was appalled. “He killed
a pup?”

“Nah. Just some half-grown flipperkin shooting his mouth off. They’re all brats to me. Point is, after that they avoided him, and he— well, he’d have made himself an outcast even if they didn’t. It suited his mood. I thought you’d know the story.”

“I was only a chick,” Ezroc said. “Keerye never went into details. He used to talk to Nokosha sometimes—he wasn’t like the rest of them.”

“Young Spots was the only one he couldn’t best in a fight,” Burgoss said. “Strongest selkie on the cliffs. I daresay Keerye respected that.”

“Nokosha still blames me for his death, I think,” Ezroc said. “I’ve never had anything from him but foul looks.”

“When you’ve only got one friend, you’d want someone to blame for losing him,” the walrus said philosophically. “If you want to ask Nokosha about the merfolk, you’ll have to get past that.”

“How?” Ezroc asked.

“Up to you.”

“Where do I find him?”

“No idea. Wherever the others aren’t. Those big wings of yours must be good for something. Use ’em.”

The albatross made a sound that Nathan knew for laughter—bird’s laughter, harsh as a cry. “Thanks, Burgoss,” he said. “I owe you. You are the wisest—and the fattest—creature in the sea, except for the whales—”

“Hrrmph! Be off with you, or you’ll find I’m not the slowest, whatever you may have heard.”

The albatross veered away, taking off in a few strong wingbeats, launching himself into a long glide out over the water. As he circled higher Nathan felt his doubts, the growing weight of fears still only half formed and founded on uncertainty. If he had learned one thing in all his travels it was that the hatred of the Goddess was unrelenting and her hunger insatiable. Once, she had hated the islands and all those who lived there, man, beast, or bird, drowning them in her tempests, driving out rival gods. Now she had turned her enmity on the last vestiges of the People of the Air—the lungbreathers whom she saw as aliens, dwelling in her kingdom but not of it, corrupting the purity of the great ocean.
And when we are gone
, Ezroc thought,
whom will she have left to hate? The rocks that hold up her reefs? The whales and dolphins who are not true fish
—
the crabs and sea scorpions because they have legs
—
any creature who ever tried to crawl or wriggle into the sun, when there was still something to crawl on?

But as long as the Great Ice endured, the northfolk could withstand her. If they were careful—if they were watchful—if the merfolk stayed in the warm seas of the south …

He flew over a blue-green inlet, walled with ice, where a group of selkies were leaping and diving; Nathan could see them changing shape as they plunged beneath the surface, shedding their half-human form for the seal-fell native to the element. He knew from his bond with Ezroc that the selkies could transform themselves at will, though they rarely used their legs. A couple of them waved to the albatross, but although he dipped his head in acknowledgment he did not stop. A little farther on he came to a place where a great berg had broken away from the cliffs and was rocking gently on the swell. There was a figure on the lowest part of the berg, lying on its stomach, gazing into the depths below. Fishing, maybe. As Ezroc drew nearer Nathan saw it was a selkie, but unlike the others, his tail fur dappled with curious markings, black spots within gray, his thick hair, also somehow dappled, bristling like the mane on a bull seal. The bird lost height, and Nathan made out the ridged vertebrae along the selkie’s back, and the bunched muscles in arm and shoulder. There was even a faint mottling under his skin, the ghost-markings of his dual self.