The Traitor’s Sword: The Sangreal Trilogy Two. Jan Siegel
so. He brings her flowers, and that’s always a sign, isn’t it? She says he’s dependable, which is what she wants, after dad. He’d never knock her about, or get drunk, or anything. He’s sort of boring, but that’s okay for her. She likes boring.’
‘Have you talked to him much?’ Nathan queried.
‘Not really. He asked me about my homework once, but when I showed it to him he couldn’t do it.’
‘If you haven’t talked to him,’ Nathan said, ‘you don’t really know if he’s boring or not.’
‘You’re being reasonable,’ Hazel said sharply. ‘You know I can’t stand it when you do that. He – he gives off boring, like a smell. B.O. Boring Odour. He walks round in a little cloud of boringness. Please, please don’t start being open-minded and tolerant about things. It’s revolting.’
‘When you shut your mind,’ Nathan retorted, ‘you shut yourself inside it. That’s silly. Besides, I just said, give him a chance. You think he’s nice, don’t you? So he might surprise you. He might be fun after all.’
‘Mum doesn’t need fun,’ Hazel said obstinately. ‘She’s my mum, for God’s sake. I like him, okay? He’ll do. I don’t have to be thrilled by him.’
‘Okay.’ Nathan grinned, a little mischievously. Sometimes, he enjoyed provoking her. She was always too quick and too careless in judging people, and slow to alter her opinions, and he liked being the only person who could ruffle her certainties.
When he had gone she took out the picture she never showed anyone, cut off from the end of a group shot taken at the school disco. It was a picture of a boy with a fair childish face, wavy hair worn rather long (hobbit hair, said his detractors), blue eyes crinkled against the flashlight. He smiled less than his classmates and Hazel believed he nursed a secret sorrow, though she could only speculate what it might be. (Of course, he could have been merely sullen.) He rarely spoke to her, hardly seemed to notice her, but somehow that only made him more fascinating. He didn’t have Boring Odour, she reflected – beneath their lack of communication she sensed the wells of his soul were fathoms deep. She stared at the photo for what felt like an age, racked with the pain of impossible longing, with anger at the hopelessness of it all, with shame because she would never be pretty enough to fascinate him in return. Her girlfriends all expected her to be in love with Nathan – Nathan with his dark alien beauty, his lithe athletic body, his indefinable uniqueness, charms she had known all her life and regarded with the indifference of familiarity – but she would only shrug at the suggestion, and smile, and hug the secret of her true affection to herself. She liked to be contrary, to keep Nathan as a friend – only a friend – and give her heart to someone nobody would suspect. Until the moment she dreamed of – the distant, elusive moment when they came together at last. The moment that would never happen …
Presently, she dived underneath the bed, groping behind the schoolbooks and sweaters and CD cases, and pulled out a carrier bag that chinked as it moved. The bag of things which had belonged to her great-grandmother, Effie Carlow, who was supposed to be a witch – the bag she had always meant to throw away, only somehow she hadn’t got around to it. Hazel hadn’t wanted to believe in witchcraft but she had seen too much of Effie not to know what she could do – at least, until she drowned. ‘You too have the power,’ the old woman had told her. ‘It’s in your blood.’ The Carlows were offshoots of the Thorn family on the wrong side of the blanket: there was said to be a strain of the Gift in their genes, dating back to Josevius Grimling-Thorn, a magister of the Dark Ages who had reputedly sold his soul to the Devil. When Effie spoke of such things Hazel was frightened – frightened and sceptical both at once. (Scepticism was her protection from the fear, though it didn’t work.) She had no intention of taking up her great-grandmother’s legacy, of dabbling in spells and charms and other stupidities. But now there was Jonas Tyler, who wouldn’t look at her, and the moment that would never happen, and maybe … maybe … among the sealed bottles with their handwritten labels was a love-philtre, or in Effie’s notebook there was an incantation, something to make her irresistible, just to him.
One by one she took the bottles out of the bag and peered at the faded writing, trying to make it out.
Back at the bookshop, Nathan sat down to supper with his mother. In the summer months she tended to favour salads, but the weather was still vacillating and he noted with satisfaction that it was cauliflower cheese. ‘You should have brought Hazel back,’ Annie said. ‘There’s plenty.’
‘I wasn’t sure,’ he explained. ‘Have you met her mum’s new boyfriend?’
‘Yes.’
‘She says he’s nice, but boring.’
‘He seems very nice, certainly,’ Annie said. ‘I don’t know about boring. I haven’t had much of a chance to talk to him.’
There was a brief interlude of cauliflower cheese, then Nathan resumed: ‘Has Uncle Barty said any more about the burglary?’
‘Apparently he called the inspector. You remember: the one from last year.’
‘The one with the funny name?’ Nathan said, with his mouth full.
‘Pobjoy.’ There was a shade of constraint in her manner. She hadn’t completely forgiven the absent policeman for his suspicions.
But Nathan had forgotten them. ‘He was clever,’ he said judiciously, ‘even if he did get lots of things wrong. I bet he guessed those burglars were after the Grail.’
‘We don’t know that. Anyway, Rowena Thorn has it, not your uncle.’
‘She gave it to Uncle Barty to look after. The traditional hiding place is at Thornyhill: they once discussed it in front of me.’
‘How do you know she –’
‘I just know.’
Annie didn’t argue any more. Even after fourteen years there were times when she found her son’s alert intelligence disconcerting.
‘The thing is,’ he went on, ‘they were just ordinary burglars, right? Not like the dwarf last time.’
‘Mm.’
‘So they wouldn’t know about the Grail unless someone told them. It couldn’t have been any of us, so they must have found out by magic.’
‘They’re just kids,’ Annie said. ‘I don’t think they’re the sort to use magic.’
‘Of course not. It was somebody else, somebody who paid them to try and steal the cup. That’s logical.’ He added, with a creditable French accent: ‘A kind of eminence grise.’
Annie smiled. ‘You’re a bit young to be turning into a conspiracy theorist.’
‘Uncle Barty thinks so too,’ Nathan pointed out. ‘Otherwise he wouldn’t have called the inspector.’
Annie’s smile faded into a sigh. ‘You wanted something to happen,’ she said, ‘and now it has. Can we just try not to let it grow into something worse? No more conspiracies, and spectres, and horrors. Not this time.’
‘You talk as if it was my fault,’ Nathan protested, referring to their adventures the previous year.
‘Just don’t wish for trouble,’ his mother said without much hope. And: ‘You will tell us, won’t you, if you start having dreams again? Those dreams, I mean.’
He looked at her very steadily, and she was disturbed to find his expression completely unreadable. ‘Yes, I will,’ he said at last, adding, to himself, fingers crossed: When I’m ready.
In her room that night Annie, too, took out a picture she never showed anyone. Daniel Ward, the man who was assumed to be Nathan’s father. She had assumed it herself, until the baby was born. The face in the photograph was pleasant rather than handsome, fair-skinned, brown-haired, unremarkable.