The Slanted Worlds

by Catherine Fisher

  Maybe he guessed. He said, “You did what you thought was right. But Venn won’t forgive you.”

  “I’m not asking him to.”

  “We have to be able to trust you.”

  Sidelong, she glanced at him, her blue eyes as cool as Venn’s. “Do you know who the enemy is here, Jake? Not me, not Summer. Not even Janus. The mirror is the enemy. The mirror, and what it offers. It has us all in its power; we already all but worship it.”

  He was silent. Then, to her surprise he said, “We need to work together, you and me. Promise me we will. No more secrets.”

  She laughed. Then she nodded.

  Deep in the house a gong rang. Piers’s yell came up the stairs. “Supper!”

  Jake rolled off the bed.

  “I’m surprised you can eat,” she said.

  “I’m not giving up.” He grimaced, feeling the strapping Wharton had put on the knife slash. “Not on my father. I know him. He’ll be back. Anytime.”

  He went out and ran down the stairs. She wondered if the glint in his eyes had been tears, or sheer determination; either way, she envied him. Instead of following, she crossed to the window and opened it, leaning her elbows on the sill.

  The night was calm. Over the dark branches of the Wood the moon was a thin crescent.

  Below her the kitchen light spilled out across the lawns; she could see the shadow of Piers and then maybe Wharton cross the window.

  She stood still, listening, as if the evening called her.

  It was the last night of April.

  And it was strangely warm.

  Small yellow flowers were opening in the aisles of the wood. Cow-parsley stood ghostly, its white umbels wide. She could smell the may, and even as she watched, the undergrowth seemed to ripple into the soft greenery of spring, as if Summer had forgotten her anger, lost interest in her revenge.

  Smoke from the Abbey chimneys rose straight in the calm evening air.

  A bird chirruped, high above.

  Sarah breathed in the sweetness, and despised herself. Jake had failed. She had failed too.

  Whatever he said, it was over. Unless . . .

  A cheep called her, a last lonely whistle in the twilight.

  She looked up, alert.

  It fell from high in the blue-and-purple sky. It dropped like a small crystal raindrop, a solitary snowflake, so small she could barely see it at first. And then it was a tiny blue-and-gold bird of wood and feathers, giddying down to land on the windowsill with a broken gold coin in its beak.

  Sarah stared in disbelief.

  The bird put the coin down carefully on the stone sill. “There.”

  It had lost all its tail feathers. One eye had been pecked away. But the other, beady and black, fixed on her. “Of course, there’s no going back now. I’ll have to live in the Dwelling. You’ll have to swear to protect me till she forgets.”

  Sarah reached out for the coin, her fingers trembling. She touched the face of Zeus and turned it around, the ancient god with his hooked nose and bold eye, gazing at her through the night.

  The bird fluttered past her into the room. “I can stay anywhere. A cuckoo clock. Jewelry box. Anything like that, as long as They don’t find me. And if I were you, I’d hide the coin under a stream of running water, because Summer won’t be able to get it there.” It perched on Jake’s wardrobe.

  Sarah held the gold piece tight.

  “How did you get away?” she breathed.

  The bird gave a puzzled whistle, and tilted its head on one side. “Not quite sure, really. She was on me, caught me, had me gripped in her talons, all ready to tear my head off. Then she just dropped me. As if something else caught her eye.”

  Wharton gulped a spoonful of the hot garlic and tomato soup with relish. “Totally fabulous, Piers. One of your best. Home-baked bread?”

  “Of course.” Piers wore a chef’s hat at a jaunty angle and new checkered trousers. Happy, he surveyed Horatio chewing a banana, the seven cats licking from identical named bowls, Rebecca and Wharton eating, Jake picking at his bread. “Lovely old food,” he said. “Nothing like it for cheering everyone up.”

  Jake flashed a look at Gideon. The changeling sat in the inglenook bench, hugging his knees, brooding into the fire, his patchwork clothes steaming dry.

  “What will you do?” Jake asked.

  Gideon shrugged. “Stay here. Refugee from the Wood.” He was pale, as if the thought of Summer’s fury chilled him. “At least until she gets back in here.”

  “Have some soup.” Wharton pushed a bowl across the table.

  “I don’t need to eat.”

  “Then maybe you should start. This is not the Summerland, after all. Maybe if you eat, you’ll feel more like a mortal and less like one of those unpleasant creatures.”

  Gideon uncurled and came over. Curious, he looked down at the hot liquid, smelled the savory aroma cautiously. “It won’t bite you,” Wharton said. “Actually, you bite it.”

  Gideon glared. He took the spoon, dipped it in, and tasted a tiny mouthful. His eyes widened. His whole body seemed to jerk.

  Wharton grinned. “Well?”

  “It tastes!”

  “Tastes?”

  “Of . . . things.” Gideon shook his head. How could he explain to them that he hadn’t known until now that everything in the Summerland was tasteless. That their food was like leaves and ashes. He sat and filled another spoonful, hastily, intent. Over his head Wharton raised both eyebrows at Piers.

  Jake got up and wandered over to the fire. The cradle had been set up at a safe distance; the baby, changed and washed and full of warm milk, lay gurgling there in comfort, one chubby fist clutching the soft pink blanket.

  Jake crouched. Quietly, so Wharton and the others couldn’t hear, he whispered, “Don’t worry. He’ll be back. Your dad. Mine. We’ll get him back, I swear.”

  He touched the baby’s warm fingers.

  His brother clutched him, tight.

  In the lab, Maskelyne said, “You were right to rebuke me.”

  “What did Janus mean? About you teaching him things? That you worked with him?”

  He touched the green webbing. “One day I’ll tell you everything, Becky, I promise. About how I came to . . . find the mirror . . . and . . .”

  “Find?” She came closer, a tall red-haired girl in jeans, so familiar to him, though sometimes it seemed only seconds since she had been a tiny child crying in the night. “I don’t think you found it. I think you created it.”

  “Becky . . .”

  She held his eye. “I think you were Mortimer Dee, and maybe many other people too, down the centuries. I think you and the mirror have been together a very long time.”

  He put his finger lightly to her lips.

  “Then keep my secret, Becky.”

  They were silent a long moment. Until she said, “For now.”

  Alone in his high tower room, Venn heard the spring arrive.

  He heard the flowers open on the hawthorn bushes, the bees wake, the small furled buds of oak and ash and rowan rustle and uncurl. He felt the wind change and the breeze shiver, hedgehogs crisp through banks of leaves, tadpoles in the lake open their eyes and grow tails and swarm in the deep green water. Folding his arms, he watched the moon rise and the moths flutter.

  He felt light and strange. As if the long dig out of the avalanche on Katra Simba had only ended now, and it was here that he burst out into the fierce blue air and breathed again.

  He knew he had taken some step away from being human.

  He waited until the hawk flew out of the night and landed on the head of a gargoyle on the sill.

  Her bright yellow eye, black-slitted, unblinking, fixed on him.

  Her talons gripped the stone.

  Venn nodded. “Even you can only delay the spring
. What is it you want from me, Summer? What’s your price for our survival?”

  But he knew her answer, even as she turned and flew off, high into the purple twilight, and as he watched her, he allowed his eyes to widen to the hard blue of sapphire, let his glance shift, let his face become beaked, alert, fierce as a predator, let his whole body cast off the weight of the earth and the pain of loss.

  And fly.

  So when Piers slammed the door open moments later with the tea tray and said “Thought you might like some soup,” the room was empty, the window open, only a scatter of dark feathers drifting down on the sill.

  Piers put the tray on the bed, came over, and leaned out into the twilight.

  Two hawks were soaring high up over the trees. Far off, in the Wood, the strange rhythmic music of the Shee came to him, and he remembered that this night was Beltane, the eve of May Day, one of the magical cusps of the year, and that bonfires would be burning on the moor.

  He closed the window and turned, looking up at the portrait of Leah.

  Her face, pale in the moonlight, laughed down at him.

  “He needs you,” he whispered. “He needs you now or he’s lost forever.”

  But she was silent and he knew she could not hear him.

  End of Book 2

  About the Author

  CATHERINE FISHER is a critically acclaimed author and poet and was named the first Young People’s Laureate for Wales. She graduated from the University of Wales with a degree in English and a fascination for myth and history, and has worked in education and archaeology and as a lecturer in creative writing. Her genre-busting novels, like the New York Times bestselling Incarceron and Sapphique, have given her the reputation of being “one of today’s best fantasy writers,” as noted by the London Independent. Ms. Fisher lives in Wales in the United Kingdom.