The Poisoned Crown: The Sangreal Trilogy Three. Jan Siegel
out a shape through the panes, behind the raindrops. A face. A pale blurred face with midnight eyes and a floating mist of hair. A face he had seen somewhere before, the same and yet different, but he couldn’t quite catch hold of the memory. He got up and tried to make his way across the room, but he stumbled against the unfamiliar furniture and when he looked again the face was gone. Back in bed, he returned gratefully to the realm of sleep.
It was only in the morning that it struck Pobjoy that his room was on the first floor. He opened the window, surveying the crime scene, but there was no convenient tree nearby and the ivy on the wall would never support a climber. Downstairs, he slipped out into the garden, checking the earth for the imprint of a ladder, but there was none. Over the best breakfast he had ever eaten he called the AA for his car and the police station for a lift to work. For the moment, he wanted no further discussion with Bartlemy.
He needed some time to convince himself none of it had ever happened.
It was a long time since Hazel had walked through the woods without the comfort of the iron door-number in her pocket, and she was disturbed by how defenceless its loss made her feel. She had been in the habit of fingering the metal as she walked, fiddling with it like a worry-bead, and now her hand was stuck in her pocket with nothing to do, clenching involuntarily from time to time, relaxing again when she noticed her nails digging into her palm. She was some distance from the road, on a track that wound its way towards the valley of the Darkwood, where it petered out. All tracks failed in the Darkwood, a deep fold in the countryside with a stream running through it which would change course in a shower of rain, where the trees tangled into thickets and the undergrowth grew into overgrowth and any sunlight got lost on its way to the ground. Long ago Josevius Grimthorn, had performed bizarre rites in a chapel there – a chapel buried for centuries under the leafmould and the choking tree-roots. Nathan had stumbled into it once by accident, but there was a spell on the place which forbade him to speak of it, and it was long before he found it again. And Josevius’ house had been there too, burnt down in the Dark Ages, where Login the dwarf had been imprisoned in a hole beneath the ground.
Hazel was thinking of that as she walked, wondering if he was watching her from some hidden hollow in the leaves, or perched furtively among the branches. She glanced round every so often, watchful and wary, but there was only the great stillness of the trees, stretching in every direction. That’s the thing about woods, she thought: when you’re inside one it seems much bigger than it really is, as if it goes on forever. And they had their own special quiet, when they shut out the sounds of the free wind and the open sky, and you could hear a twig crack or an acorn drop a long way off. But that afternoon there was little to hear.
She knew this part of the wood well – she had come there as a child, when her father still lived at home and she wanted to be on her own. She would scramble up among the boughs and stay there for hours, watching mites creeping in the bark, or a caterpillar eating its way through a leaf, listening to the bird-chatter and the insect-murmur, and the great silence waiting behind it all. Later, when she was older, she had come to talk to the woodwose, Nathan’s strange friend, with his stick limbs and sideways stare, till he went back to his own place. She had always felt at ease here, on familiar territory – until now. Now, when she knew the gnomons were lurking somewhere, no longer bound to their purpose but aimless and astray, ready to turn on anything that crossed their path. Hoover was trailing her, some twenty yards back, which gave her a little security, but nonetheless she jumped when a squirrel’s tail whisked round a tree-bole, froze into alertness at the tiniest rustle in the leaf-mould.
But they did not come. There were a hundred small warnings, a hundred false alarms. And nothing. The path ran out, and the woodland floor dipped towards the valley. ‘Don’t go there,’ Bartlemy had said. ‘There’s no room to run, and you could easily get lost. If you reach the Darkwood, turn back.’
Hazel turned back. After a while, Hoover caught up with her, lolloping at her heel.
‘No luck,’ Hazel said. If luck was what she was looking for.
‘They inna there,’ said another voice close by – a voice with a brogue as old as the hills, and almost as incomprehensible.
‘Hello,’ Hazel said, politely. ‘Have you seen them?’
‘Nay,’ said the dwarf. ‘They’ll be in the auld capel, where the Magister used to consort wi’ the devil when he popped up from hell for a chat. I’ve seen them there o’ nights, a-heebying and a-jeebying, whispering thegither for hours, though I never heard they had aught to say.’
‘It’s not night,’ Hazel pointed out.
‘Night – day – at the runt end of the year, there’s no muckle difference.’
‘Could you show me the place?’ Hazel asked. ‘Not now – it’s a bit late – but another day?’
‘Aye,’ the dwarf said slowly. ‘But I’m thinking the goodman would not be wanting ye to go there.’
‘Then we won’t tell him,’ Hazel said, doing her best to sound resolute. ‘We have to trap the gnomons. If they won’t come to me, then I have to go to them.’
‘Ye’re a bold lass,’ said the dwarf, but whether in approval or criticism she couldn’t tell. ‘I’ll be seeing ye.’
He was gone, and ahead she saw Bartlemy, emerging from the gloom of the fading daylight.
‘They didn’t come,’ Hazel said.
‘So I gather. We’ll try again tomorrow.’
But on Sunday it rained too heavily for hunting phantoms, and in the week Hazel had school.
‘I could skive off one afternoon,’ she offered, nobly.
‘No,’ said Bartlemy. ‘We’ll wait for the weekend.’
‘The weekend,’ Hazel echoed, thinking of the Darkwood, and the chapel under the tree-roots, and her stomach tightened in anticipation of terrors ahead.
Nathan went back to school on Monday, still taking the painkillers each night, less to make him sleep than to keep him in his bed. It was always awkward wandering between worlds in the dormitory, since the more solid he appeared in his dreams, the more insubstantial his sleeping form would become. It was only when he was back home for the weekend, and assuring his mother he was restored to fitness, that he stopped taking the drugs.
That night, he lay for a while unsleeping, his body rigid at the thought of the planet undersea. The Grandir was right: he knew what he had to do. Find the third relic – the relic removed from Eos countless years ago by the Grandir himself, to shield it from the greedy and the misguided. The Iron Crown. The crown of spikes forged originally by Romandos, first of the Grandirs, to form a part of the Great Spell to save their people – a plan laid over millennia, woven into the legends of a thousand worlds, hidden in a web of folklore and lies. Nathan still had no idea what the spell itself involved, or how it could engender salvation – he knew only that it had more power than a galaxy imploding, and would shake the very multiverse to its core. Even the Grandir, he suspected, had yet to fill in all the gaps in his vision of destiny. The Grandir who thought he was a trueborn descendant of Romandos and his bridesister Imagen, though Nathan had seen in his naked face the ghost of Imagen’s lover Lugair.
Nathan lingered between sleep and waking, thoughts floating free in his mind. Lugair had betrayed Romandos – Romandos his friend – slaying him with the Traitor’s Sword, to be slain in his turn … the sword had been held in Carboneck for generations, a curse on the kings of Wilderslee and on their people … the Grail had been guarded by Josevius and the Thorns, the so-called luck of the family, its burden and its bane … and the Iron Crown must be in Widewater, somewhere in the deeps of the sea. The masculine principle, the feminine principle, and the circle that binds. Three elements that together might change a world, or all worlds … But Osskva the mage had told him it needed a sacrifice – it needed blood. Blood had begun it, Romandos’ blood, and blood must finish it – the blood of his descendant. It is expedient for us that one man should die for the people … who had said that? Suddenly Nathan was sure the Grandir