The Poisoned Crown (7 page)

“Dangerous?”
Hazel brightened, doubted, dimmed. In her experience grown-ups didn’t normally ask you to do dangerous things. But then Bartlemy was unlike any other grown-up.

She said: “It’s usually Nathan who gets to do the dangerous stuff.”

“This time it’s you,” Bartlemy said.

“What is it?”

“The behavior of the gnomons is becoming … unpredictable. Something needs to be done about them.”

“I always carry iron when I walk in the woods,” Hazel said, thinking of the number in her coat pocket—a number originally made to go on the door of a house, which Nathan had provided for her protection two years ago. “But I haven’t seen—sensed—them around for ages. Anyway, I thought they only attacked when someone threatened the Grail—or Nathan.”

“So did I,” said Bartlemy. “But the rules seem to be changing. I am told they are getting out of control. Someone saw a hare pursued and sent mad. The next time it could be a dog that will turn on its owner— or a person. They have to be neutralized.”

“How?” Hazel asked bluntly.

“If we can trap them in an iron cage, perhaps sealed with silphium— the smell is inimical to them.”

“What’s silphium?”

“An herb, generally extinct, but I grow a little of it in my garden. The Romans used it extensively in cooking: they made a rather pungent sauce with it, served with fish. It has a very powerful odor that gnomons cannot tolerate. Remember, they have little substance but are equipped with hypersenses, reacting abnormally not only to the magnetic field of iron but also to certain smells and sound levels inaudible to human ears. We should be able to use these elements to hold them, if they can be lured into the trap.”

“Who does the luring?” Hazel said with misgiving, already knowing the answer.

“That would be your job. But I understand if you don’t wish to do it. Geometry is much safer.”

Hazel looked down at a diagram involving several interrelated angles, two triangles, and a rhomboid. “I’ll do it,” she said. “Whatever it is I have to do.”

“I have a plan,” said Bartlemy.

Afterward, when she had gone, he poured himself a drink from an ancient bottle—a drink as dark as a wolf’s gullet and smelling like Christmas in a wine cellar. A wood fire burned in the hearth, an un-magical fire whose yellow flames danced their twisty dances above the crumbling emberglow and bark flaking into ash. The dog lay stretched out in front of it, pricking one ear to hear his master speak.

“You will take care of her,” Bartlemy said. “I don’t want her in real danger. But she needs to feel valued—that’s the important thing. She needs to know she can make a difference, if only in a small way.”

Hoover thumped his tail in agreement or approbation, or possibly in the hope of a morsel of cake from the plate at Bartlemy’s side.

“There was a time when I thought nothing I did would change the world,” Bartlemy continued, in a reminiscent vein. “I was too busy looking at what they call nowadays
the bigger picture.
But big things are made up of small things. Move one particle and you alter the shape of the universe. Perhaps Hazel will remember that as the decades go by and disillusionment sets in. Meanwhile, you and I will alter the shape of her universe just a little—if we can.”

Hoover pricked the other ear and lifted a shaggy eyebrow.

“Cake is bad for dogs,” Bartlemy said. “Even my cake.”

N
ATHAN HAD
the accident about a week later. He called it an accident but he knew, as soon as he was capable of knowing anything, that it was his own fault. He was by the indoor pool—Ffylde Abbey had both indoor and outdoor swimming pools—with a group of boys, and Ned Gable was vaunting their prowess at diving in Italy that summer. They had visited a little bay a few times and taught themselves to dive off a
low promontory into the sea, turning a somersault in midair on the way down. One of the boys looked skeptical and made a casually snide remark that Nathan would have ignored, but Ned rose to the bait, asserting the truth of his boast.

“Okay, show us,” challenged the skeptic. His name was Richard but he liked to call himself Rix. His father owned a merchant bank.

“I can’t,” Ned responded, looking both discomforted and angry. “Not with this ankle.” He’d torn some ligaments in a rugger scrum and was banned from most sport for at least another fortnight. “You know that.”

“Convenient,” sneered Rix.

“Nathan could do it,” said a supporter with a surge of misguided loyalty.

“I’m not sure about that,” Nathan said. “The rocks in Italy were higher than this diving board, and the sea below was really deep. It would be a bit chancy here.”

“The pool’s six feet at this end,” Rix said. “Tom Holland, who left last year, he did all sorts of fancy dives off that board. I saw him.”

“Tom Holland was the Interschools Champion,” someone else pointed out.
“And
he was dead short—about five foot nothing. He could’ve dived into a puddle.”

“Of course,” Rix said, a little smile tweaking at his mouth. A smile at once patronizing and faintly
knowing.
“Don’t worry, Nat. I understand.”

Nathan didn’t like anyone calling him Nat.

“
What
do you understand?” Ned growled, picking up his cue while Nathan was still trying to let it pass.

“Oh, it’s easy to be chicken when you’re so tall people are too scared to tell you the truth.”

There was a brief pause, then suddenly Nathan laughed. “Yeah,” he said. “I’m the class bully. Everyone’s
really
scared of me.” Since he was notoriously tolerant and had never bullied anybody, most of the group laughed with him, and the tension of the preceding moment was defused.

Rix took the laughter personally. He was the sort of boy who
would take it personally if it rained on his birthday or his favorite soccer team lost a match. “So what you’re
saying,”
he resumed, “is that Ned here is a bigmouthed liar.”

Ned balled his fist. Nathan, who had thought the whole stupid exchange was over, said: “What?”

“He
says you did the dive when you were in Italy.
You
say you can’t do it now—the pool’s too shallow and all that crap. Excuses. That means you’re calling him a liar. Your best mate, right? Some friend you are.”

One or two of the others laughed at this piece of sophistry—not a relaxed sort of laugh, the way they had laughed with Nathan, but the uncertain kind that tightens up the atmosphere. If the teacher had been around he might have noticed something amiss and put a stop to it, but he had gone to the infirmary when one of his pupils started a nosebleed. Nathan had no fallback position; he knew he should call a halt himself, but Ned was looking at him with absolute confidence that his friend wouldn’t let him down, and Nathan couldn’t fail him. The dive wasn’t safe, but he had done many far more dangerous things, in the other-worlds of his dreams, and somehow he had always come through, protected by chance, by fate, by whoever watched over him—the Grandir, or the sinister forces that shielded the Grimthorn Grail. He had been plucked from the jaws of desert monster and marsh demon, from the spelltraps of Nenufar—he had lifted the forbidden Sword, defeated the unknown enemy. Perhaps, on some subconscious level, survival had made him complacent. He shrugged, not looking at Rix, only at Ned.

“I’ll do it.”

Then he climbed up the steps to the diving board, stood poised on the edge.

Dived.

He knew, immediately, that he’d miscalculated. Everything happened at once very fast and very slow—the world arced as he completed the somersault—he tried to straighten out, to cut the water cleanly—hit the surface at the wrong angle—felt the sting of the impact, the rush of bubbles as the pool engulfed him. He needed to tilt his arms, curve the dive upward, but there was no depth beneath him, no
time to maneuver. He’d opened his eyes underwater and for a long slow millisecond he saw the bottom of the pool coming for him like a moving wall. Then it struck, knocking the air out of him, and he was breathing water—his lungs clenched—the world spun away into darkness and pain …

It was Ned who got him out, jumping in fully dressed in spite of his sprained ankle, heaving him out of the water while the other boys reached down to haul him over the edge. They’d done lifesaving techniques earlier that term, and someone managed to pump at his chest while someone else tried mouth-to-mouth. Ned said: “Get Mr. Niall,” meaning the games master, but no one did and it seemed an incredibly long time before any adults appeared on the scene to take over. There was blood on Nathan’s head, on his arm, blood fanning out across the wet floor tiles. Rix stood back from the rest of the group, looking pale and uncomfortable.

“This is your fault,” Ned said, struggling to evade his own guilt, knowing Nathan would never have reacted to Rix’s taunting if it hadn’t been for him.

“He was sh-showing off,” Rix stammered, determined to convince himself.

Later, in the headmaster’s study, he said the same thing.

A
NNIE WAS
informed and drove to the school in her yellow Volkswagen Beetle, exercising all the self-control she possessed in order not to go too fast. By the time she got there they were able to tell her Nathan would be all right: he had a concussion, a dislocated shoulder, severe bruising, and what the doctor called “extensive physical trauma,” but no broken bones or internal damage. His first words to her were: “Sorry, Mum.” She sat by his bed in the infirmary, holding his hand until it occurred to her that might embarrass him, torn between standard maternal anxiety, pointless anger—
why is he always doing dangerous things, even when it isn’t necessary?
—and the sneaking paranoia of other, deeper doubts. Romany Macaire, tumbling into the river …
Nathan, diving into a pool too shallow for him …
Water, water, everywhere …
Was it mere coincidence, or some dark supernatural plot?

“Don’t overreact,” Bartlemy said when she confided in him. “We’re surrounded by water all the time. It’s essential to life. Don’t start seeing demons in every raindrop. Teenage boys do rash and often stupid things. Children fall into rivers. Accidents happen. It’s a very human weakness, needing someone to blame.”

Ned blamed Rix, at least to his classmates. To Nathan, he blamed himself, saying awkwardly: “It was me. I made you do it. I shouldn’t have—”

“Forget it,” Nathan said. “It was my own stupid fault. I knew the dive wasn’t possible there but I didn’t want to admit I couldn’t do it.”

He, too, was blaming himself, not just for his recklessness but for the seed of unthinking arrogance that had made him believe that whatever he did, no matter how foolhardy, he would somehow get away with. His guardian angel—or devil—would take care of him.

But the devil had let him down, and now he knew he was vulnerable, and a tiny germ of fear grew at the back of his thought, not the fear of danger but the fear of fear itself. He could be hurt—he might be killed. Knowing that, would he be able to explore the otherworlds as boldly as before, doing whatever he needed to do, or would his newfound fear hold him back?

He couldn’t talk to Ned about it, or any of his other classmates, because they knew nothing of the voyages he made in his dreams and would only think him nuts if they did. He couldn’t talk to Annie, because she was his mother and worried about him too much already. He couldn’t talk to Bartlemy, because although his uncle came to see him once he was back home, they had no privacy for confidences.

In the end, he talked to Hazel. Just as he always had.

“You think too much,” Hazel said. “Like what’s-his-name in Shakespeare who wanted to avenge his father’s murder and kept messing it up and killing the wrong people.” She’d been on a school trip to see
Hamlet
the previous term. “He got rid of nearly everyone in the play before he killed the right person, didn’t he? The point is, he spent too much time agonizing and making long speeches to himself instead
of just getting on with the job. You’re starting to do that. Picking your feelings to bits and worrying about them. It’s a waste of time.”

“I don’t make long speeches,” Nathan objected.

“You’d better not,” Hazel said grimly. “The play was quite good but the speeches were boring.”

“They’re famous,” Nathan said, quoting:
“To be or not to be, that is the question
— and something about
to die, to sleep
—
to sleep perchance to dream … For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
…”

“Boring,” Hazel said. “You’re going all thoughtful on me. That’s your problem. Thinking.”

“Thinking is a sign of intelligence,” Nathan said.

“No it isn’t,” Hazel argued. “Stupid people think, too. It’s the thinking that
makes
them stupid. Like that guy in the play. He stuck his sword in a curtain and killed a harmless old man because he
thought
he was someone else. Hamfist, Prince of Denmark. Stupid.”

“I don’t go around sticking swords into people,” Nathan said. “At least, only once.” He had picked up the Traitor’s Sword—the Sword of Straw—and slashed at the Urdemon of Carboneck, but killing a demon, he felt, wasn’t the same as killing a person. “Anyhow, that was self-defense. I didn’t have much of a choice. The point is, maybe I found it easy to be brave, because—subconsciously—I thought I was sort of
looked after.
And now I know I’m not… well…”

“You were brave from the start,” Hazel responded. “You couldn’t have felt looked after then. If you’re more scared now, you’ll just have to be braver. You’ll manage it. You’re a brave kind of person. As long as you don’t start
thinking
about it.”

She hadn’t told him about the gnomons. Bartlemy had said he would set the trap that weekend. Hazel had already decided that if she didn’t think about what she had to do she wouldn’t worry, and if she didn’t worry she wouldn’t panic, but the effort of not thinking was taking its toll. She knew she wasn’t as brave as Nathan, but that only meant she had to try harder. Nathan’s self-doubts she regarded as trivial—yet it was strangely reassuring to find that he, too, was having to cope with the possibility of failure and fear. Somehow it made her feel better about her own secret terrors.