The Poisoned Crown (21 page)

“His
mother?”
Annie stared at him, startled into blankness. For a minute she thought Kal was taunting her, until she saw his gaze lowered, preoccupied with memory.

“It was long after,” he said. “Three, four hundred years, maybe more. By then I had learned to live secretly; I was the hunter, not the hunted, killing in the dark. There was a witch in these parts, some descendant of Josevius—she had a lust for a demon lover, and she summoned me to the circle, and stepped within the perimeter, thinking to lie with me there. But I remembered the witch who was my mother, and I broke her neck. The spell failed, and the circle was open, and I walked away into the night. It was Halloween, or Beltane, or Lammas—one of those nights when witches are abroad and there is magic in the air. The priest hid in his chapel, the peasant in his cottage. In the churchyard, the Whistlers were out, whistling the dead from their graves. That sort of night.”

Annie started to ask
Who are the Whistlers?
but she didn’t want to slow down the story. “What happened?” she said.

“The woman was on the road through the woods. There was a road by then, though not such as you see now; this was just a track cleared of trees, so farm carts and wains could pass through. The woman had a dozen servants with her, all dressed like princes, and a boy of about sixteen. That was why I watched—because of the boy. He was deformed, his legs so twisted he could barely walk, or so I guessed— he and his mother rode in a phaeton drawn by two white llamas. The servants were on foot. I heard the woman call him Nei-thun, though what language they spoke I didn’t know. I told myself if opportunity offered I would spook both the servants and the llamas, and when the phaeton broke on the rough ground I would take the cripple, because he could not run away.”

“You don’t mean—you would have
eaten
him?” Annie demanded, horrified.

He flashed her a smile without humor, his assorted teeth gleaming in the lamplight.

“They came from the East, I knew that,” he went on. “They smelled of the spices they ate, and the hot dust of the Eastern deserts. She must have been a queen, a sorceress—either or both. You could tell by her jewels and her pride. Her skin was golden and her hair crimson and her eyes were those of a cat. Oh, she was mortal enough, but the mark of the Gift was on her. I knew I would be hard-pressed to take the boy when she was near. Still, I watched her. I’ve always hated witches. All save one.”

“Which one?” Annie queried, but he didn’t answer.

“After the woods she turned aside and made her way to the Scar-barrow. She couldn’t have known the country but she must have had directions, or maybe she’d seen her way in a spell. On Scarbarrow she stood in the circle, and the symbols flamed around her, and her servants hid their faces in terror. I might have taken any one of them, they were so unwary, but I wanted to see what she did. There was a storm on the hill, a witch’s storm, with lightning that crackled from sky to circle and the clouds sucked into a vortex of power. In the woods below, small things crept under the leaves and stayed there, trembling.”

“How do you know?” Annie said.

Kal flashed her a scorching look from narrowed eyes. “Because I’m telling the story. Had I been small enough, I would have crept under a leaf, and I do not scare easily. Are you answered?”

“Sorry.”

“It was a night like no other. The woman stood in the circle with her arms raised and her face to the lightning, and the boy sat at her feet, hugging her legs. He did not seem to be afraid, not while she was there. Not till the end. Then I heard her call on the powers of another world— the powers Grim thorn had summoned to the chapel centuries before— and the grass died on the hill, and the servants fled, and there was a stillness at the heart of the spell like the eye of a hurricane. She took a jeweled knife from her belt and brandished it, and the edge of the curved blade shone like balefire.
Then
the boy was afraid, weeping and calling
her
Mother
, but she seized him by the hair and cut his throat, and his lifeblood ran down her legs into the dead grass.”

“No,” Annie whispered. “You’re making it up. No mother could do that to her child. You’re making it up.”

“She killed him,” Kal said, “as the priest kills the prize bull, the pick of the herd, to please the gods. Thus the burden of tradition. Even the sickly Christians have such tales. My mother might have killed me, if she had valued me more highly.”

“No mother
could…”

“She stood in the circle with the body at her feet, and drank the blood from a cup of obsidian, and the storm hung over Scarbarrow like a black crown spiked with lightnings. But the Other Powers made no answer, and the fabric of the world did not stir. The woman screamed in the language of the Stone, as though mere fury would open the forbidden Gate—screamed until her voice failed, and she sank to the ground, weeping for her son, or herself, or the end of her hopes. I had no hunger anymore; I left her to her wretchedness. In the dawn I saw the servants creeping back, and later in the day there was nothing left but the blood, already grown cold. And that was the end of it.”

“Is that all true?” Annie demanded. “I still think no mother could … Is it really true?”

“I’ve drunk your drink, and warmed myself at your hearth,” the demon said. “I could lie to you, but for what purpose?”

“Why did you come to me—not Bartlemy?”

“I like wizards no more than witches. And you were the one who wanted to know. I did not hear the name of either mother or father, but the boy was Nei-thun, and he is dead. Does that answer your questions?”

“No,” Annie said frankly. “It just makes things more complicated.” She found she was shaking, perhaps from the proximity of the demon, more likely from the impact of the story. She believed him, whether she wanted to or not, and the horror of it seemed to taint her life, like a bloodstain in a familiar room.

She glanced at the clock and saw it was midnight precisely; it would be. “N—my son will be coming home soon,” she said. “I don’t want to
be unfriendly, but please would you go now? I don’t think he should meet you.”

The ruby eyes darkened. “You love your son,” Kal said. “Still, mortal love is a fragile thing, the emotion of the moment. Only werefolk know what it is to love forever.”

“You’re wrong,” Annie said. “Our lives may be short, but they are not empty. Werefolk endure; they do not know what it is to truly live, or truly love.”

The demon rose, and looked down at her, his alien features enigmatic. “I am werefolk,” he reminded her. “Do you think I cannot feel? If I bit your throat out and drank your blood, do you think I would not taste your pain?”

Annie made herself breathe slow and deep.

“You have a mortal soul,” she said with sudden certainty, “though I don’t know where you keep it.”

Kal drew back a little, and the corner of a smile came and went. “I am growing one,” he said. “In a pot of basil.”

He stepped into the kitchen, heading for the garden door, though she hadn’t told him where it was. “Thank you for your hospitality. I will not forget it.” For a second, watching him go, she thought she saw lion’s paws below the hem of his jeans, and the twitch of a tail that protruded somehow, flickering across the floor. As he went into the garden she heard him singing a ballad she knew well, though one word sounded wrong. His voice was deep and unexpectedly musical.

And then the shop door clanged, and she knew Nathan was back.

T
HAT NIGHT
, the little house was full of dreams. Annie saw the Eastern witch standing in a circle far larger than the one Bartlemy had made.
Flames played along the perimeter. Her hennaed hair hung down to her knees, and at her feet sat the boy, his arms clasped around her legs, his head bent. She raised the knife; the curve of the blade gleamed with wicked light. Then the boy looked up with Nathan’s face, Nathan’s eyes, and Annie was the witch, and the knife was in her hand, and she couldn’t help it, she couldn’t stop, though the tears ran down her cheek she was pulling back his head and drawing the blade across his neck …

She woke up screaming.

She got up and trod lightly into Nathan’s room to tell him it was all right, she had had a nightmare, that was all, nothing to fear. But he still slept, and when she laid a hand on his shoulder he didn’t stir, and she knew he wasn’t there.

N
ATHAN WAS
in Widewater, no longer solid, a thought drifting in a submarine world. Through the blue dimness he saw tall chimneys of rock bubbling with noxious gases; the surrounding water was cloudy with nutrients and flickered with tiny creatures that had come there to feed, ghost-shrimps and spiny stars and gulping mouths that swam without tentacle or fin. Nathan could make out little through the mist of plankton, but gradually he realized it was growing darker, the darkness not of night but of depth. He knew he was descending farther than ever before, and panic set in at the idea of it—the weight of water above him, the terrible pressure that would crush his lungs if he should materialize. He didn’t know how the merfolk survived it, magic perhaps, but he remembered that even in our world there are many fish and other marine animals that can endure such pressures, though scientists still do not fully understand how. He had left the stone chimneys behind now; ahead of him there was a wall of utter blackness. As he drew nearer he realized it was a vast cliff, the roots of the reef. Things wriggled past him in the dark; he was aware of their passage as a trembling in the water and was glad he could not really feel or see them.

Presently, he made out a kind of glow somewhere in front, and as his vision improved he saw there were phosphorescent growths adhering to the rock like deep-sea fungus, quivering in the current. Beyond
was something that looked like a garden, a garden on the ocean floor in the endless midnight of the deep, with sea shrubs whose every stem was tipped with a lidless eye, and writhing clumps of spaghetti-grass, and flowers like a frill of lip sucking at the water. He floated above it, invisible and intangible, but a bush of glittering eyes swayed toward him as though half aware of his presence, and tentacles of spaghetti groped at his nothingness, and flower-mouths gaped as he passed. He remembered Denaero saying something about the gardens of the shaman-priestesses, and assumed that was where he must be. Then in front there was a break in the wall, and the cliff opened to engulf him.

Nathan’s dream carried him along the tunnel—he tried not to think of being trapped there, solid, with air and sunlight hundreds, perhaps thousands, of yards above—until it widened out into a huge cavern. It was roughly circular, ribbed and vaulted like a natural cathedral, lit with the pale mauve radiance of sea stars and the reflected glimmer of quartz and crystal veining the rock. In the center around a species of altar a group of merwomen were chanting. Their tails and bodies undulated with fluorescent stripes; their fins were barbed and their faces skull-thin, shrunken-cheeked, and lipless like beings halfway to starvation or decay. Their closed eyes bulged in hollow sockets as though straining to split their lids.

The chant climaxed; the eyes opened. They were not whiteless like those of most werefolk but all white save for the elongated pupils, glowing with a luminescence of their own. They spoke in voices blended and distorted by the water, lilting without music, moaning without the wind.

“The Goddess calls to her people. The time has come.”

Come … come …
Watery echoes rippled around the cave.

For the first time Nathan noticed the listeners—they must have been waiting in a shallow chamber in the cavern wall, and now they moved forward, approaching the altar. The foremost was a merman whose massive torso was laden with chains of coral chips and pearl shells; he wore a coronet of uncut quartz on his head, surely too heavy to sustain without the support of water. Mermen are beardless, smooth-skinned, and virtually unwrinkled unless they live to extreme old age,
their bodies kept moist by the element in which they live, their faces slightly androgynous, but this one looked unmistakably masculine, older by his build and a certain authority in his carriage. His mouth was a stern line, his rather flattened nose—typical of his kind—very broad, his sharp-cut nostrils flaring and shrinking visibly as he drew in the water that was filtered out through the gill slits in his neck. In the glow of the sea stars, his long hair looked more purple than Denaero’s, and his skin had a sullen tinge that might in another light have been subtly green. Nathan guessed this must be Rhadamu.

Two others flanked him, both with the sea dragon tattoo on their chests, one clearly a warrior, with spiked shoulder plates and armbands, and an assortment of knives on a belt at his hip. Possibly Uraki, the sharkrider Denaero had spoken of. The other had the slender muscles of youth and wore a small circlet of red coral that suggested he might be the king’s eldest son.

“We are the chosen of Nefanu, the children of the Sea.”

Sea … Sea …
, murmured the echoes.

“The time has come. You must destroy the lungbreathers, the monsters who live on the northern ice. They are traitors who dream of the land and live half their lives in the air, eating our fish to stoke the heat of their blood—the fish that Nefanu gave us to protect and to feed on. If they are not stopped, they will eat all the fish in the sea to perpetuate their unnatural warmth. They despise us, calling us coldkin, wormkind, mackerel to be hunted and slain. They have dreadful weapons hidden on the ice: swordfish lances that can travel for miles, and poisons to befoul our water. You must attack first and destroy them ere they destroy us. Unite the merkings! Summon an army! Purify the ocean for the true children of the Sea!”

Sea … Sea … Sea …
The cavern threw back the word in a wash of mingled reverberations.

Why does this sound familiar?
Nathan wondered. Was the call to war always the same?