The Poisoned Crown (24 page)

The doors opened again, and three more people came out, one of them a woman. Imagen. She wore a long violet gown and her hair was piled on her head in a complex arrangement of loops and whorls and wound with a strip of silk. She carried a cup in both hands—
the
Cup, the Grimthorn Grail. It looked dull and lusterless in the roseate light. Beside her was Lugair, Lugair the traitor, holding the Sword. Nathan knew it at once. And in front of both walked Romandos, dressed in what looked like cloth of gold, wearing the Crown. Some of the spikes turned inward, pressing his brow, but he did not seem to bleed.

At the very edge of the platform he stopped, facing the sky, and commenced a slow incantation. Nathan knew this was the beginning of the spell, the Great Spell whose long binding was still unfinished. The purple-robed figures echoed the chant in a chorus like the wailing of distant winds. He was reminded of the shaman-priestesses of Nefanu, or the sisterhood of seeresses whom he had once seen in Bartlemy’s magic circle, speaking with many voices though a single mouth. Perhaps there was a special potency in numbers, in the synchronicity of mind and word. As the incantation progressed he lost track of time; he thought hours or even days might have passed, and the blossom-clouds gathered together and mushroomed into a storm, and the towering vapors formed into shapes like great wings sweeping across the sky, and galloping horses with tossing manes blended into billows like waves on the sea. Then the billows dissolved into faces, a thousand faces shifting and changing, men and women, heroes and demons, until at last they all flowed together into one huge face filling half the sky. Romandos. And the chorus called out his name, and the sound of it seemed to be carried across all the worlds, and the pink daylight darkened into night, and lamps flared along the parapet, and meteors streamed past the tower like silver rain. Romandos turned to Lugair and held out his bare arm, and the other man drew his Sword across the bare skin, and Imagen knelt holding the Cup to catch the blood. Nathan felt the emotion seizing on his heart like a clamp, though his heart was in bed at home, and with it came knowledge, and horror.

This is it
, he thought.
This is where it all goes wrong …

And then it happened. The rhythm of the ritual broke. Lugair
raised the Sword and plunged it into Romandos’s breast, and the blood ran down into the Cup and overflowed, splashing Imagen’s arms, her dress, her face. “So be it,” said the first of the Grandirs, and his dying whisper was the loudest thing in all that world. “Not just my blood but my lifeblood. Heart’s blood. The Sword takes what it must… the Cup drinks what it needs. The power has spoken. The spell is sealed. So … be … it.” From the spikes of the Crown, more blood ran down his face in red streams. He gasped a little, coughed, and died. The chorus gave a great wail, no longer like the wind. The clouds opened and rain poured down, extinguishing the lamps. In the dark Lugair let fall the Sword— Nathan heard the clatter as it struck the marble—and one of the purple-robed figures picked it up and thrust it toward him, but somehow Imagen got in the way, and she collapsed into his arms, and the robed attacker was slipping in the wet, and everything was blood and rain.

Nathan’s mind spun away into the dark, thinking:
It was the spell. The spell needed Romandos
—
it needed his life
—
so it used Lugair. Maybe he was chosen long before the magic was made …

Later, the darkness cleared. How much later he didn’t know; sleep distorts time. This was another terrace, another palace. Beyond stretched a garden where carved dragons wrestled in a dazzle of fountain spray and the sky was eggshell blue. Nearby in a curtained pavilion a woman was admiring the view. Not the view of the garden but the view of her own face, the most beautiful face in the world, shining out of an oval mirror like a vision of Helen. Halmé, Nathan realized, but not the Halmé he had known. This was a girl, young and fresh and radiant with vitality and hope.

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” she said. “Am I the truth? Am I the one and only truth for you?”

“The one and only,” said the man on the couch beside her. He was naked under the embroidered coverlet, and the interplay of his muscles might have belonged to the statue of an athlete or a god.

The Grandir—the last Grandir—the one with no name.

He looked unnervingly like Lugair, save that there was neither cruelty nor treachery in his face, only passion and the intensity of his secret will.

“We will have children,” Halmé said. “We will have children now, before it’s too late. A daughter and a son. Beauty and strength.” She stroked his arm, admiring their joined reflections, his arm laced around the slenderness of her waist, the shadow of his face behind hers.

“Maybe,” he said.

“We will,” she insisted. “I feel the fruit swelling inside me, the ripeness and the readiness. Don’t fear for my fertility—there will be children!” She laughed and stood up, wrapping herself in a silken garment that trailed along the ground behind her. Then she stepped out between the curtains and walked along the terrace, lifting her face to the sunset.

Now they have the sundeath
, Nathan thought.
She cannot look at the light except through a mask.

In the pavilion, the Grandir withdrew his other hand from beneath the coverlet. He was holding a vial so bright it might have been cut from diamond, full of a milky liquid. The air glittered faintly around it, the afterglow of magical transition.

“Alas, my love,” he said, “there will be no children. My seed is precious; I cannot spare it. I need it for other things. One day, when this world is old and dying, I will give you another, but the price is high. Your price. You are paying now, though you know it not. Our son will never be. Your sorrow will outlast Time, and there will be no remedy. But the choice is mine, and I have chosen. So be it.”

The same words Romandos used, when his dying sealed the Great Spell.
So be it.
Nathan knew that this time the Grandir was unaware of him; this dream journey formed no part of any plan. Yet he sensed a pattern that grew clearer, though he still couldn’t see what it was. He tried to concentrate, to bring the blur of his thoughts into focus, but before he could grasp detail or meaning the dream drifted away, and he was sinking back into sleep.

T
HE TERM
was over, and Nathan still couldn’t get back to Widewater. Hazel came around to the bookshop, asking Annie to ask Nathan something, and Nathan told Annie to tell Hazel something else, and in the
end Annie lost her temper and ordered them both to start speaking to each other or she would not be answerable for the consequences. The flare-up made her feel marginally better, as though her pent-up anxieties had found a brief outlet, and afterward, when normal service had been resumed, she gave them some of Bartlemy’s almond ice cream and reflected, a little sadly, that soon the day would come when they were too old for ice cream to melt their differences. Although with Bartlemy’s ice cream, anything was possible.

It was the tenth of December, the day of the Rayburns’ party. Annie went around early with her contribution to the festivities: cocktail sausages from the local butcher cooked in honey and mustard—“You just need to heat them up a bit at the last minute and stick the toothpicks in”—and what she called all-vegetable soup, made with a pint of the liquid from Bartlemy’s mysterious stockpot, which had been simmering quietly for the past several centuries and might contain almost anything.

“It’s probably not for vegetarians,” Annie told Ursula. “Barty says he last remembers putting meat into it in 1973, but he might have added something since and forgotten about it.”

Ursula laughed, on the assumption that it was a joke. “That’s so long ago it doesn’t count,” she declared largely. “After all, when you bury people they turn into grass eventually, don’t they? So whatever it was would have died naturally by now and been transformed into vegetation anyway.”

Annie didn’t attempt to follow her reasoning. The house was in a state of chaos, with assorted children running up-and downstairs in the persistent way children do, Donny and a friend trying to set up a beer barrel in the drawing room, some enterprising teenagers mulling wine on the Aga, and Sharia from London changing diapers in what Ursula had christened the Room of Death. “I decided it would be really good for the vibes to put her in here. New life, you know, sort of
burgeoning
, which should completely override the negative impact of having a corpse hanging around all that time. Sharia! This is Annie. She
found
it, only she’s incredibly cool and just takes dead bodies in her stride. They
have lots of murders here: it’s exactly like Miss Marple’s village in Agatha Christie.”

“So you didn’t do a skeleton in the bed after all?” Annie said.

“No: isn’t it a shame? It was such a great idea, but the only one we could get is a plastic model three feet high, so it’s hanging in the kitchen instead with a piece of tinsel ’round its neck. Which reminds me, I must go and see to the mince pies. I’m never sure how long they’re meant to bake.”

“Nor me,” Annie said, thinking how the house was cheered up by all the people and the noise and the mess. “I’m going home to get changed. See you later.”

“Are you
sure
your reclusive uncle won’t come? I’m longing to meet him. That tonic he made for Romany was so good, we all drank it.”

“’Fraid not.”

Back at home she put on a skirt with an uneven hemline that owed less to fashion than erratic shrinkage after washing, a glittery top from one of the posher charity shops, and the leaf pendant Daniel had given her, set with a smoky green stone that Bartlemy said was an emerald cabochon. She tried to recall when she had last been to a party, and couldn’t. Once you got past twenty, parties were not a big feature of life in Eade. Nathan emerged from his room wearing a newish sweater as a concession to the occasion and said: “Hazel’s coming with us. She says it would be too embarrassing arriving with Lily and Franco.”

Annie grinned.

While they were waiting, they had a glass of wine in the kitchen. Nathan felt suddenly very grown-up, taking his mum to a party, having a drink together first like sophisticated adults, and Annie felt grown-up, looking at her tall, handsome son, who had somehow turned into a man she could rely on—when he was in the right universe. She remembered coming to Eade all those years ago, a very young girl clutching a baby, running from phantoms, and thought, not for the first time, how lucky she was, and tried not to be afraid, because luck is a fragile thing. This was a moment to savor, a memory to hold on to, both of them being grown-up, sharing a drink, sharing their lives, before he went his own
way for good.
They always go their own way
, she thought.
That’s how it’s meant to be
—but a sudden cold fear came to her, out of the future, and she closed her mind on the moment, holding it tight, tight, to keep it safe in her heart forever.

Then Hazel arrived, and they went to the party.

At Riverside chaos had evolved along haphazard lines, following one of those creation theories that say everything happens by accident, and order is achieved by a series of fortuitous mutations. Different kinds of music were playing at either end of the house and colliding in the middle. People whose normal idea of fun was the local darts tournament stood around drinking steadily and looking slightly baffled. Other people—like Annie—said how long it was since they’d been to a party, and what a good thing it was to have one, and how they must do it themselves sometime soon. Annie foresaw a wave of parties hitting Eade the following year, causing a boom in the sales of cocktail sausages and cheap glassware. Children hurtled through the crowd at a subterranean level while higher up food floated on platters and trays, which teetered from group to group before returning to the kitchen empty of everything but the toothpicks. Adolescents clustered in knots to deplore the behavior of their elders—“Oh God, Dad’s dancing! It’s
sooo
cringe making”—and plotting an ambush to change the music to something, like,
bearable.
Several aging hippies were smoking pot. The mulled wine had evolved into a hellbrew potent enough to send rockets to Mars, but fortunately it tasted so vile even the hardiest underaged drinker could manage very little of it. Locals swapped gossip and bemoaned the advent of too many city types; city types admired the Room of Death and said, really, country life was so exciting. Lily Bagot shocked older residents by turning up in a strapless dress and crimson lipstick and wrapping herself around Franco at regular intervals.

The Wickses hadn’t been invited so Hazel was unable to spend half the evening talking to Damian, which Nathan considered an extremely good thing. Jason gate-crashed later with a couple of henchmates, presumably with the intention of causing trouble, but by then the party was booming and nobody noticed.

Ursula introduced Annie as if she were a minor celebrity, and various Islingtonians expressed sympathy for the trauma she must have suffered after finding the body, and understood that she couldn’t bear to talk about it, but was it true she’d known the murderer really well, and what was he—you know—
like
, and was he different from other sociopaths she might have known? Annie said he was just a perfectly normal murderer, as far as she could tell.

“Anyhow,” she concluded, “the police think that the actual killing was probably done by his female partner, the woman who pretended to be Rianna Sardou.” In fact, she wasn’t sure what the police thought, but was prepared to give them credit for inside information they didn’t possess. The recollection of Nenufar sent a brief chill through her thoughts, but at a party it is difficult to believe in demons, even when you know they exist, and ghosts and terrors do not thrive in an atmosphere of celebration. She even allowed herself to be persuaded into a dance, and then tried to recall how long it was since she had last danced with someone, and realized it was entirely possible she hadn’t had a dance with a man since Daniel died …