The Sword of Straw (32 page)

The bits that remained on the floor looked horribly like what you might get if a human body was attacked by a psychotic bacon slicer. Nathan looked and looked away, suddenly sick, too overcome to notice anything else.

“The sword.” It was Nell. “It hasn’t…it didn’t…”

“You
are
the one,” said Frimbolus.

The hilt was still in Nathan’s hand, the tip of the blade resting on the ground. The blood on it, like the venom, smoked and vanished as if scorched out of existence. Nathan could feel the spirit reaching out to him, all power and rage, yet he knew somehow it could not touch him. He was in control.

He didn’t understand any of it.

Nell tried to cling to him, but he pushed her away, afraid she would inadvertently brush against the sword. Then he went back to the bed. The king was trying to pull himself upright, a painful eagerness in his face. Nathan laid the blade the length of the wound running from ankle to groin, and up into the stomach: inch for inch, it was a perfect match. He said: “Heal,” because he felt he had to say something, and that was the best he could do. The king’s shoulders twitched—he made a small whimpering noise. Slowly, the wound began to close. As Nathan lifted the sword clear the flesh knitted, scabbed, itched, flaked into smoothness.

“I’m cured!” Wilbert said. Forgetting modesty, he hitched up his nightshirt and bed gown still farther, exposing his repaired body to all and sundry. “Nell—Frim—I’m cured!”

“Yes, Maj,” said Frimbolus. “Pull your clothes down.”

S
OME TIME
later, when the king had been left to sleep off the excitement with a dose of Bartlemy’s sedative—in another room, due to the body parts on his bedchamber floor—Nell and Nathan repaired to the kitchen. They were both starving, and it seemed like a good place to talk. The sword was back in its scabbard, but Nathan carried it with him.

“I think,” he said, “I’m supposed to take it back with me. It isn’t the responsibility of your family anymore.”

“What will you do with it?”

“Leave it with my uncle. He’ll keep it safe. He seems to be collecting these things.”

“That must be quite a collection,” Nell said.

She heated some thick soup—the kind with lots of barley and limp, unidentifiable vegetables. It had been made by Mrs. Prendergoose, which meant it both smelled and tasted uninspiring, but they were too hungry to object to either the flavor or the cook.

“Do you think the Urdemon will come back?” Nathan asked.

“Frim says not. Agnis conjured it, and she’s dead, so…It’ll go back to sleep at the bottom of a bog for another few thousand years, and the marsh will dry up around it, and people will come back to the city…”

“And the kingdom will prosper and everyone will live happily ever after,” Nathan supplied.

“Mm.”

There was a pregnant pause—a pause so pregnant it was practically giving birth.

Nell said: “Will you ever come back?”

“I—don’t know.”

“In the story”—her manner was carefully detached—“the hero marries the princess. It’s customary.”

“In my world,” Nathan said, “we’d be too young to get married.” He knew he wasn’t doing this right, but he didn’t think there was a right way to do it.

“We’re not in your world,” Nell retorted.

“That’s just it.
I
am. I mean, I’m here now, but here isn’t where I belong. I’ve done what I was meant to do, and now I’ve got to go home. I don’t know if I’ll be able to dream myself back anymore. I want to—I really want to—but even if I could, it’s not going to go anywhere, is it? You and I—it’ll always be hopeless. Maybe it’s best to say goodbye now. Get it over with.”

“Not yet,” the princess pleaded, abandoning the dregs of her soup. “You could dream yourself back just one more time. We could go for a picnic again—a real picnic, with sandwiches and lemonade—and explore the Deepwoods all the way to the mountains, and see dryads, and waterfay. We can’t say goodbye so soon. You have to come—promise me. You have to.”

“I’ll try,” Nathan said. He must come back, he knew, just once, but not for the princess.

There was a further pause, no longer pregnant, merely uncomfortable.

Nathan felt an unfamiliar sensation twisting inside him—it wasn’t physical but it
felt
physical, like the onset of an illness—a squeezing at his heart, a knotting in his stomach. Somewhere ahead he glimpsed rashes, fever, sleepless nights. He thought:
Is this love?
The L-word, Annie had called it, shying away from overuse. He could say it now, he could tell the princess
I love you,
and the word would be out there forever, a word that would bridge the gulf between worlds, a bond from soul to soul that could never be broken. With that word, Nell would hold on to his memory—the thought of him, the dream of him—and though a hundred princes came to woo her, all their wooing would be in vain. He could say the word and kiss her again—he
deeply
wanted to kiss her—and go home on a flood of happiness and unhappiness, a bittersweet magical moment never to be repeated, never forgotten.

Or he could go with the word unsaid, and she would see him as a hero who had come and gone in a dream, doing his heroic duty and going his heroic way, leaving her with only a tiny pang to remember him by. Her feelings would fade, withering in a late frost, ready to bloom again another day, for another boy. He didn’t want to think of her with someone else—he wanted the bittersweet magic that is stronger than any spell—but…

But…

The pause stretched out, and stretched out, until neither of them knew what to do with it.

“I’m tired,” Nathan said at last. “I’d better take the sword and lie down somewhere.”

“My room,” said the princess.

The tower bedroom with its cozy bed, and the crescent moon carved on the pelmet…He lay down on the coverlet, hands folded on the sword hilt like a crusader in effigy, resting on a marble tomb. The princess sat beside him. “Do you mind if I stay?”

“ ’Course not.”

Presently, he moved over and she curled up along the edge of the bed—there was just enough space—and he took one hand off the sword to stroke her hair, all long and thick and tangly, and they fell asleep together.

It seemed a life age later when he woke in his own bed, with the sun shining through the curtains, and the leather-bound sword digging into his ribs, and a strand of hair still wound around his fingers.

Epilogue: Autumn Leaves

A
nother time, another world. Having dozed late, exhausted by the night’s activities, Nathan was in the kitchen eating a lunch appropriate for a demon slayercornflakes with chocolate sauce. He had been talking both between and during mouthfuls, while Annie, too horrified and too riveted even to nibble a sandwich, sat propped on her elbows listening.

“Are you going to see the princess again?” she asked at last.

“I don’t think so. I need to dream myself back there, just one more timethere’s something I have to dobut it won’t be to see Nell. We’d only have to say goodbye all over again. What’s the point?”

“But you like her,” Annie said, probing gently. “You like her a lotdon’t you?”

“Mm. That’s just it. I nearly said ityou know, the L-word?” He scanned his mother’s face for signs of shock, but failed to find them. “Only I suddenly saw, if I said it, that would make the whole thing real. It would be, like, this big tragic romanceRomeo and Julietwe come from different worlds, we can’t ever be together, but our love will somehow unite usthat sort of thing. If I said it, Nell would always remember meremember me saying itmaybe it would stop her loving someone else. I never knew how powerful words are, till then. Because I didn’t say it, ourwhat we feltwas just a passing affection, something she can put behind her. She deserves to love some guy in her worldto live happily ever after. She’ll think of melike someone in a dream. No big deal. After all, it
was
just a dream, really. Best to keep it that way.”

“So youL-wordher?” Annie said.

Nathan
mm
ed an affirmative. “She’s the most wonderfulWe argued a lot, but that was wonderful, too. She made me feel I could do anything,
be
anything. I could be the hero she wantedfight demons, cure the king. Do youd’you think I just did those things to impress her? That would be awfully silly.”

“It’s natural,” Annie said. “But even if you did, you’ll learn as you get older it’s
what
you do that counts, not why you do it. We have all sorts of reasons for doing things, some good, some less so, but it’s your actions that make you who you are.”

“Was I right,” Nathan asked, “not to say it? The L-word, I mean.”

“Yes,” Annie said. “I think you were right.”

Later she drove him to Thornyhill, with the sword on the backseat of the Beetle, bundled in an old blanket.

“I thought we could hide it here,” Nathan told his uncle. “With the Grail.”

“I see,” Bartlemy said. “I’m not sure that’s a good idea, but there are no obvious alternatives, soYou’d better put it in the secret cupboard yourself; I hope it’s big enough. I would prefer not to touch it, even sealed in the scabbard and wrapped in a blanket. I can feel the aura of its inhabitant even now.”

“I still don’t understand why it let
me
touch it,” Nathan said.

“Fate,” Bartlemy suggested, flicking a glance at Annie that she pretended not to notice. “You are part of a pattern, the whole of which we cannot yet see. No doubt clarification will come, in due course.”

He took Nathan to the chimney piece in the living room, and showed him how to operate the hidden catch to open the door. There was a small package already inside, anonymous in brown paper. Nathan wedged the sword in beside itthere was only just enough space. He felt the moment should somehow be more dramatic, more ceremonial, a ritual concealment of a weapon of great significancebut it wasn’t.

“Supposing I got kidnapped again?” he said. “Now I know where it is, I might tell someone.”

Bartlemy smiled. “I’m not worried.”

“Could I stay here one night?” Nathan went on, changing the subject. “In the week. I need to do somethingdream somethingand it would be easier here.”

“Of course.”

It took Nathan two days to find Woodyor rather, to let Woody find him, sitting on a log with a packet of Smarties for a lure. He’d forgotten about the wose’s penchant for Smarties, but Hazel reminded him. Woody perched on the log at his side, picking out the green ones, while Nathan told him about Wilderslee, and the Deepwoods. That night the wose came to Thornyhill Manor, avoiding Hooverhe was nervous of dogsby climbing through the bedroom window. He settled down to sleep beside Nathan, evidently ill at ease in the strange surroundings (Nathan knew he would never have come to the bookshop), his twiglet body scrunched up on top of the quilt, his knotty fingers twined with Nathan’s.

Nathan didn’t say:
I’ve never done this before.
He wasn’t even sure he could, but he hoped, if Woody believed in him, something in his spirit wouldn’t allow him to let the woodwose down.

When Woody appeared to be sleeping, he fumbled for the portal, trying to focus on his destination without losing contact with his companion. It was horribly complicatedafterward, he thought it was like trying to do exams in three different subjects at once. He was concentrating so hard that as the channel opened it felt as if the world turned inside out, or he turned inside out, and there was a rush of nausea even though he had lost touch with his stomach, and the reeling vertigo of an endless fall. But somehow, though his hand was somewhere else, or nowhere at all, it was still entwined with Woody’s. He landed in his own body, on the ground, with an impact so hard he was winded. But there were treesautumn trees, orange and gold and crimson and pinkand sun sparkling through the leaves, making leopard patterns on the woodland floor. And Woody was beside him.

They walked for a while, when Nathan got his breath back, through the many-colored forest, with the leaves falling slowly around them, and winged seedpods whirring by like tiny shuttlecocks, and spiders spinning their shimmery webs, and the whisk of squirrel tails vanishing in a flurry of foliage. After a while they halted in a clearing with a moss-grown tree-stump surrounded by toadstoolssmall brown ones like miniature umbrellas, and big red ones with white spots, and green ones with purple frills, and three tiers of yellow bracket fungus sprouting from the bole. Beyond in a net of interlocking branches a dark strange eye was watching, wary and curious.

Nathan said: “You’d better go.”

Woody didn’t hug him, because woses don’t hug. He said: “Goodbye,” and “Say goodbye to Hazel,” and “I’ll miss the Smarties.”

Then he was gone.

Nathan went on walking by himself. It had been early spring when he was there with Nell, and he wondered how much time had passed since. One summer, or two, or a hundred years. Nell could be dead and gone now, another princess sleeping in the carved bed. The thought made his heart shiver. Then he heard voiceslaughing, chatting, callingsomewhere not far away. He went toward them, cautiously, halting at the crest of a rise, dropping to his stomach to see but not be seen. The ground fell steeply in front of him, and in the dell below a group of people were having a picnic. It was a very sumptuous picnic, with two big hampers and a low table littered with plates and bottles and glasses, bowls of nuts and berries, platters of cured meat and sandwiches cut into assorted shapes. There were perhaps half a dozen picnickers with a couple of servants to look after them, but Nathan only noticed one person. Nell.

She looked, he thought, a littlea very littleolder, maybe sixteen. Her hair was woven into braids and twisted up in a complicated mass on the crown of her head. She wore earrings that dangled and glittered, and a dress of some silky material with no darns or patches, kilted up to show another dress underneath.
The Nell I knew,
he thought,
only wore one dress at a time
but layers were evidently still in fashion in Wilderslee. She wasn’t as chatty or as noisy as some of her companions, but from the way they turned to her every so often it was clear she was the important one, the center of attention. No longer the ragged princess of a forgotten city but a princess with a court and courtiers, with jewels and clothes and admirersa princess who might sleep (badly) on a pea but would certainly never shell one. She talked a great deal to the young man beside her, a young man with hair the color of copper beech leaves and cinnamon freckles on his arms, though Nathan couldn’t see his face. Nell was smiling often, the lovely smile he remembered so well. He was glad she wasn’t old, or dead, but somehow it stabbed him.
She looks happyreally happy

He watched for a few minutes then slithered back down the slope, trying to make as little noise as possible. He went on through the woods until the picnic was out of earshot, wondering why it should hurt so much, that Nell was happy, and wore two dresses at once, and would never shell peas again.

The dream ended without his noticing it, fading into darkness in the way of dreams, and when he woke a bit of the darkness was still there, like a bruise on his spirit.

Downstairs the kitchen was full of breakfast smells, but he wasn’t hungry.

“A broken heart,” said Bartlemy. “I see. There is no food for that, not even chocolate, though many would disagree. First lovefirst painisn’t the worst, but the trouble is, you don’t know it at the time.”

“I didn’t say I was in love,” Nathan responded. Certain confidences had gone no farther than his mother.

“In that case,” Bartlemy said, unperturbed, “what would you like for breakfast?”

Nathan stiffened his sinews, or possibly his upper lip.

“Scrambled eggs, please.”

H
AZEL WAS
there, a few days later, when Bartlemy had the unexpected visitor. A tall manor such was the impression he gavewith silver hair receding from the double arch of his brow and very piercing eyes. He wore a black flapping raincoat and a high collar that proclaimed his calling. “You’d better go,” Bartlemy said to Hazel. “We’ll talk tomorrow.”

She went, conscious of that sharp glance, like a laser boring into her back.

Bartlemy turned to his uninvited guest. “Zakharion.”

“Bartoliman.”

“Do come in.”

As they entered the living room Hoover rose, hackles bristling, his normally buoyant tail very still. “Sit,” Bartlemy said quietly, presumably to the dog.

The men sat, too, in a careful fashion, their attitude neither tense nor relaxed, but somewhere in between.

“No doubt you were expecting me,” said the visitor, whom Hazel had thought unexpected.

Bartlemy made a noncommittal response. He was stroking Hoover’s head, pulling one floppy ear between his fingers. The dog, taking his cue from his master, looked calm but alert.

“I thought it was time we met,” the stranger continued.

“We have met many times.”

“My dear Bartoliman, let’s not be pedantic. You and I have beenshall we say, in competition?for a long, long while. However, we have not had a
rapprochement
sincewas it Damascus, or Samarkand?”

“I wouldn’t have called that a
rapprochement,
” Bartlemy said. “But my French is a little rusty.”

The visitor chose to ignore that. “I had no idea you had buried yourself down here. A beautiful part of the countryvery quiet after all your travels. The kind of place where nothing ever happens. I imagine that was what attracted you. Quite a coincidence that I, too, should have found myself in the area.”

“Coincidence?” Bartlemy queried.

“Perhaps. Of course, I have a position of importanceI am a man of some stature on a national level. Whereas you”

“You were always interested in importance and stature,” Bartlemy said.

“What is it you’re calling yourself these days? Goodman, isn’t it? A modest title.”

“Aspirational.”

“Hmm. Let’s not waste time fencing with each other. I infer the same thing drew us both to these parts. I don’t suppose you would considerjoining forces? Together, we might be able to put the objector objectsin question to good use. Our combined skills”

“I wouldn’t presume,” Bartlemy said, picking his words, “to combine my skills with yours.”

There was a silencea significant sort of silence, the kind that says more than speech.

“I expect you’ll be moving on now,” Bartlemy said.

“Moving on?”

“Leaving the school. You must have done all you can there. A man of your talents will always be in quest of pastures new, I’m sure.”

“Indeed.” The visitor arranged his hands very deliberately on the arms of the chair. He had beautiful hands; Velzquez might have wanted to paint them. According to some sources, he had. “However, I have no immediate plans for departure.”

“It would be wise. Consider your reputation. There is Giles Hackforth, a man in need of a crusade. If he were to make inquiries”

“My dear fellow, there is nothing into which he could inquire. Still, you may have a point. If theerbattle is lost, a prudent man will leave the field while he is still in one piece. Is that what you are trying to tell me?”

“The battle is neither lost nor won,” said Bartlemy. “In fact, it has barely gotten started. But there are too many forces in the field, none of them on the same side. It’s already untidy. Were you tobow out of the lists, it would thin the crowd a little.”

“I will bear that in mind. It is true that my present situation has begun to pall. A school is a very limited bailiwick for a man of ambition. Nonethelesswhat of the boy?”

“Which boy? Your school is full of them.”

“The boy who dreams,” the visitor said. “Nathan Ward.”

“I’ll look after himas far as possible.”

“Your ideals, Bartoliman! Always getting in the way. Such an unusual boy. He fell asleep in my study once and disappeared completely. I could have done something with a boy like that. Once in control of his mindWell, we’ll let it go. You’ve never been enthusiastic about mind control, I know that. Cookerysuch a waste of your talents. Yet you don’t even offer me a cookiean unexpected discourtesy.”

“Not really,” Bartlemy said.

“Ah. We don’t break bread together. How traditional you are. Since no refreshment is forthcoming, I had better leave. One small thing.”

“No.”

“Bartoliman, don’t jump down my throat! The boy Damon had a bracelethe stole it from me, I’m afraid. Distressing to find such lax morals in the child of caring parents from a privileged environment. I wondered if he left it here?”