The Sword of Straw (14 page)

“That would not be right. It is good to look for the ripest nut on the bush, or the juiciest of the blackberries—to taste, and smell, and find the best one. If all are best, there is no fun. But…it’s kind of you to think of it.” He reached out, touching her with a timid fingertip. “You are a kind person.”

If he had been human, Hazel would have been embarrassed. But he was a werecreature, so the compliment didn’t bother her. She even forgot to pull her hair over her face. There was a silence while her thoughts wandered off along a different tack, temporarily abandoning her own affairs.

“Where do you come from?” she asked.

“The woods. Always woods. I am a woodwose.”

“
These
woods?”

“I don’t know. Maybe not. Nathan thinks he brought me here, when he was very small, so we could play together. He dreamed me, and brought me here. To be his friend.”

“Could he dream you back?”

“I don’t think so. We don’t know where I must go back
to
. But I am happy here. These woods are beautiful. There are bluebells in spring, and small flowers that creep along the ground, and birds to sing to me, and squirrels to chase, and hollow logs to hide in. I used to show Nathan…” He stopped, or ran down, his pointy face showing no expression.

“Are you the only woodwose?” Hazel said.

“Yes.”

“It must be lonely, to be the only one of something. D’you think there were others, where you came from? Can’t you remember?”

He made a strange twitching movement that might have been a shrug or a shiver, or a little of both. “Perhaps. Sometimes I dream, too. I have seen my face in water—a reflection—and there are other faces like mine, voices like mine, hands touching my hand. The trees are bigger than here, and there are more colors—autumn is more gold, and more orange, and pink and purple, too—and the birds are like flowers, and the flowers like birds, and the woods seem to go on forever. But I do not dream like Nathan—my dreams have no power—and when I wake up they are gone. The colors and the flower-birds and the woses like me—all gone. Perhaps it is just a dream, a wish. Not true at all.”

This time it was Hazel’s turn to reach out, folding two of his twiggy fingers in hers. “I heard, everything is true somewhere,” she said. “Nathan told me that. They teach that kind of stuff at his school, not just math and English and things. It might be physics, or it might be philosophy. If it’s physics, it’s real. I’m not sure about philosophy.”

“Are they very wise at this school?”

“That’s the idea,” Hazel said.

“So Nathan will grow to be wise, too?”

“S’pose so. At any rate, he’ll grow to be educated.”
Which is more than I will,
she thought,
at my present rate of progress.

There was a silence while Woody tried to figure out the meaning of
educated,
and Hazel tried not to think about her math homework. Since they were both people comfortable with silence, it extended a long time without awkwardness.

Eventually Hazel said: “Have you ever told Nathan about your dream?”

“No. I did not want him to think I was unhappy.”

“Maybe you should. It might help him to find the place. He might remember dreaming of it himself.”

“No.”
Woody sounded suddenly agitated. “It’s a secret—another secret. You have a secret with me, I have one with you. A secret for a secret. I keep yours, you keep mine. It is a pact.”

“All right,” Hazel agreed. “I won’t tell if you don’t want me to. But I still think you should consider it. Nathan may be one of those people whom everybody likes, but he isn’t selfish about it. He’d help you to go home if he could. I know it.”

“Here is home now,” Woody said, and wouldn’t change his mind.

As Hazel headed back to her own house, her thoughts reverted to Jonas and Ellen Carver.
She
had been the first to like him, the first to see mystery behind his reserve and charm in his rare smile, but now that he was going out with Ellen all the girls admired him. He himself was changing, becoming more outgoing, smiling more often in the sunshine of so much approval. No one said he had hobbit hair anymore.
But it’s all false,
Hazel thought.
One day the fashion will move on, and he’ll be out in the cold again, and then he’ll recognize
my
feelings, and he’ll know they’re different and sincere, and he’ll turn to me.

But one day seemed a very long way away.

In the bedroom she barricaded the door and lit a candle in front of the mirror. Then she spoke the words, words she knew by heart now from long reading and thinking on them. Though she didn’t realize it her voice had grown, in hunger and in power; the accent she had never learned came naturally this time. In the mirror her face altered, paling into beauty, her features melting into the slanting silvery lineaments of Lilliat, Spirit of Flowers.

“You have called me,” she said, “at last. Are you ready to pay the price?”

“I am ready,” Hazel said.

A
nnie noticed the cut on his mouth, and some of the more obvious bruises, when Nathan came home the next weekend. She demanded an explanation; he refused to provide one. “You’ve been bullied,” she said. Nathan, to her knowledge, had never been bullied, though he had stood up to bullies before now, but such bruises meant fights, and fights meant bullying. “I won’t allow it! I’ll go to the school—I’ll speak to the abbot—”

“Mum,
please.
I haven’t been bullied—someone sort of tried, but it was a one-off, he won’t do it again. And Father Crowley knows about it.”

“If you told Father Crowley, then you can tell me.” Idiotic to feel a pang of jealousy, to fear that his headmaster might feel a closer bond with her son than she did.

“I didn’t tell him—I didn’t tell anyone—he just knows. It’s nothing to worry about, honestly. I can deal with it. I’m old enough to deal with things myself; I don’t need you coming the protective mother all the time.” That was a mistake: he knew it as he spoke. Annie was rarely angry but her face flamed with embarrassment and indignation.

“
Coming the protective mother
? When I let you wander off into other worlds, and—and chase thieves, and outface monsters…I can’t stop you doing those things, but what happens to you at school is still in my remit. You’re fourteen, you’re a child, and I’m your only parent.
I’ll
decide what you deal with and don’t deal with. Just tell me who did this to you…”

“I can’t.” His face had stiffened with obstinacy.

“You mean you won’t! In that case, you’re—you’re grounded. For the weekend. In fact, until I say otherwise.”

“
Grounded
? Mum—you’ve never grounded me. I didn’t know you even knew the word. Have you been watching some teen TV soap?”

Annie wouldn’t dignify that with a response. She was hanging on to her spur-of-the-moment act of discipline with the doggedness of someone who wasn’t sure she was right. Nathan was forbidden to play football with George or meet up with Hazel, and when Annie went to Thornyhill Manor for dinner he stayed at home. The atmosphere in the house was taut and twangy, like an overstretched rubber band, both mother and son unhappy, but too proud, too pigheaded, or simply too confused to make a move toward reconciliation.

“I don’t know what’s come over her,” Nathan told Hazel, by phone. “I mean,
grounded.
As if I were a silly kid.”

“She’s never done that before.” Hazel’s tone was oddly distant. “Why did she—”

“Oh, there was some trouble at school. Nothing I couldn’t handle—well, nothing for Mum to handle. I’ll tell you about it some other time. The thing is, I can’t see you. Not this weekend, maybe not next. It’s like I’m in solitary, no visitors allowed.”

“You could sneak out,” Hazel said. She had been grounded, and had sneaked out, at regular intervals throughout her childhood. “I always did.”

“I don’t want to do that. My mum’s not like—”

“Like mine?”

“Your mum’s great—really great—but she’s different. She’s sort of tried to be strict, and failed, and made rules for you to break—that’s how your relationship works. But my mum didn’t make any rules, except about good manners and things. Generally she let me do what I wanted—she trusted me. Now it’s like she doesn’t trust me anymore. I don’t know why—but she won’t get that trust back if I slip out the instant she leaves.”

“You could slip back in again a bit later,” Hazel said. “Then she wouldn’t know.”

“I can’t lie to her. We don’t do that. I’ll have to talk her around. It may take a little while, that’s all. Sorry I can’t see you.”

“Doesn’t matter.” The distant note had never quite left Hazel’s voice.

“Are you all right? You sound a bit—aloof. You’re upset with me, aren’t you?”

“I’m fine. Everything’s fine. You don’t have to see me if you don’t want to.”

“That isn’t it, and you know it. I’d come if I could. Is there something you want to talk about?”

“No.” Hazel was feeding her own resentment, telling herself he was doing it on purpose, staying away from her because he couldn’t be bothered to come. Opting out of their friendship. Which meant she didn’t owe him anything anymore—neither affection nor loyalty.

She hung up.

Nathan was left to brood on the fact that one argument sparks off another—one ruptured relationship leads to another rupture. Like a row of dominoes, falling each against the next until the whole line lies flat. For a minute he was frightened, wondering if his powers of persuasion were equal to mending matters, and whether any other friendships would hit the floor, now the dominoes were falling. He felt himself losing hold of his life, sensed it slipping away from him, unraveling in the wrong direction while he stood by helpless, unable to call a halt. He wasn’t someone who needed to be in control of family and friends, but he’d never felt so
out
of control before, never seen his home world spinning away from him while an irresistible current swept him somewhere else—somewhere he didn’t want to be. It was almost as if reality had become the dream, and as in his dreams he was subject to the whim of chance or fate, and must go where he was led.

Uncle Barty will fix things,
he thought with a sudden rush of thankfulness.
He’ll make Mum come around.

But when Annie got back it was late, and nothing was fixed.

L
EFT TO
make his own entertainment for the weekend, Nathan did his homework, read several vintage novels from the bookshop, watched some largely mindless television, and thought a great deal about the princess. He went early to bed, but without physical exercise he wasn’t tired, and he lay sleepless a long while, rerunning his conversation with Nell in his mind, trying to prepare what he would say next time—if only next time would come. He even attempted to turn his thought inward and find the portal himself, but he couldn’t seem to concentrate. Little sounds from outside distracted him: the distant rumble of truck or Land Rover, a sudden shout from someone on a path nearby, the cry of a barn owl flying past on its way to the river meadows. He heard the pipes gurgling as his mother used the bathroom before going to bed, and waited for the night silence to settle in, the silence of a sleeping house in a quiet village where, even on a Saturday, nothing much happened when the pub had closed. (Of course, last year there had been three murders and a robbery, but that, as everyone had told the police, was exceptional, and resulted solely from a recent influx of Londoners. Londoners, as the whole village knew, were immoral types capable of anything.)

It was midnight now, the witching hour—he could see the luminous dial of his bedside clock—but the silence felt wrong, the night felt wrong, tense and stuffy. Or maybe the wrongness was in him. Nathan got up, as quietly as he could, and made his way to the Den where he and Hazel and George had had their headquarters for so many years. They didn’t go there very much now. It was a sort of secret room under the slope of the roof, fine for three children but constricting for growing teenagers. Nathan bent down to climb in, using a flashlight to see his way. There were still three mugs there, dusty from lack of use; he ought to remove them. He lifted the skylight and scrambled up to sit on the sill, looking down over rectangular slices of garden, and the path beyond, which local people called a twitten, then more gardens, more houses, a single lamp in the lane, and after that the darkness of the fields and the remote gleam of the moon on the river. The River Glyde, which flowed down the valley to the sea.

Cloud on the sunset

wave on the tide;

death from the deep sea

swims up the Glyde.

That was what a spirit had said, summoned to the magic circle by his uncle the preceding summer. The Glyde might only flow into the Channel, narrow and far from deep, but all seas interconnect, and Nenufar the water phantom, the shapeshifter, the forgotten goddess, had come from the caverns far beneath the ocean, hungry for the Grail and its power. So three had died—old Effie Carlow, drowned in the river (or possibly Hazel’s attic); stranger still, the German visitor, drowned in the wood in a shower of rain. And the woman whose corpse Annie had found, laid out in a white bed, with her face shriveled to the bone and her hair spread across the pillow. And on that thought, Nathan abandoned resentment, resolving to talk to Annie, to make things right, somehow, anyhow. She was just having a brief attack of standard parenthood, but she wasn’t a standard parent; she’d always been different. She’d resisted a psychopath, and defied the water succubus, not to mention knocking Dave Bagot unconscious with a saucepan.
She’s the best mother in the world,
he thought with a sudden warm rush of feeling,
the best in all the worlds.
And on that realization the tension went out of the night, and he knew that now he would sleep.

But before climbing back through the skylight he glanced up, involuntarily, and there was the star that didn’t belong, watching him. The Grandir’s star, hanging both in the sky above his house and in a tower room in Arkatron, a pale, unwinking point of light, like a sentinel keeping guard. But guarding what? The Grail perhaps—that made sense—but why watch over him? Why him? It was one of many questions he had yet to answer, a fragment of the puzzle that still didn’t fit, whichever way he twisted it.

He closed the skylight and came down from the Den, the momentary warmth gone from his heart, leaving him tired and empty.

He slept.

He was falling…falling…His ears popped and his head felt squeezed and his stomach was left far behind. It was not a pleasant sensation. He fell and the world fell with him…Then it stopped, allowing his insides to thump back into place, leaving him breathless and slightly sick. He didn’t know if he was visible or not, it was too dark to tell, but a little way ahead there was a light, and he moved unsteadily toward it. Glancing back, his sight adapting to the gloom, he saw he had emerged from an elevator shaft (
the elevator needs some work,
he thought) into a passageway that looked vaguely familiar. He had seen it before, with more illumination, though not much. Now there was only a single light above the laboratory door, its angled ray striking the warning sign.
PRIVATE—NO UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY.
Cautiously he pushed the door open and slipped through.

The laboratory was poorly lit by a gray glimmer that seemed to come from the ceiling; its sole occupant, far away down the other end of the room, appeared unaware of Nathan’s entrance. Whatever he was doing absorbed him to the exclusion of all else. Nathan found it odd the door wasn’t locked, but perhaps there was some scanning device that had failed to register his shadowy, semi-spectral figure. He crept nearer, screened by a workbench, moving softly on bare, insubstantial feet. It was the Grandir, of course; not Romandos but
the
Grandir, the last Grandir—he who had set the star above Nathan’s house, who controlled the gnomons that guarded the Grail, who was striving to complete the Great Spell his predecessor had begun uncounted millennia ago. Nathan wondered if the cave of the green stalactites was still there, then realized it wouldn’t have been on Eos—Eos was simply the one uncontaminated planet remaining in a universe that was poisoned, the final retreat of a people who had once ruled an entire cosmos.

He risked a quick look above the bench, and saw with a kind of shock that the Grandir was not masked. It was the first time he had seen the man’s face, and he found it strangely disturbing, like seeing your headmaster naked. He received a fleeting impression of dark alien features, a sweep of black hair falling over the brow, the echo of a resemblance to someone. Halmé perhaps, his sister and lover, wedded to him by family tradition—Halmé who was so beautiful that few were permitted to look on her. But no, it was someone else, someone seen more recently. Romandos…no. No, it was Lugair—Lugair with his slanting glance and the trace element of cruelty about his mouth. Nathan ventured another look. In the Grandir’s face, slyness had become calculation, cruelty the coldness of detachment, but the resemblance was there, like a distant ghost infesting his features. Nathan wondered what his name was. Even Halmé had never used it, calling him only by his title. In the dimensions of magic a name could give you power over a person, or so Nathan had heard; if you were Grandir of a whole world that power might be deadly. Evidently this ruler was more prudent—or more distrustful—than Romandos long ago.

He was doing something with the sword—the Sword of Straw—which he had placed on a circular plinth in the space beyond the workbenches. The wicked-looking blade appeared as sharp and bright as it had when Romandos first tempered it so many ages before. As Nathan watched, a white spotlight shone down on it, perhaps from a source on the ceiling, fixing it in a pool of radiance. Beyond, the laboratory seemed to grow darker. Nathan was suddenly aware of the cage nearby, a cage he had seen in another dream—seen and feared. The front was glass, or some similar material, and there was a blur of darkness pressed against it, a darkness that seemed to pulse somehow, emitting a sense of tormented life. And at the core of the darkness there were two ragged ovals, like holes cut in a blanket, only red.