The Poisoned Crown

by Amanda Hemingway

  Nathan found he was trembling, though not from the cold. I’m not the son of a god, he told himself. I’m not the savior of anything, I’m not special, I have no powers—all I can do is dream myself between worlds. I’m not going to die prematurely as a sort of sacrifice believing the sins of the world are on my shoulders.

  The thought steadied him. Of course, there were a lot of other ways he could die prematurely, particularly on Widewater, but there was no point in thinking about that. He scrambled down from the skylight and made himself a cup of hot chocolate to calm his nerves. Just for a minute, it was as if his whole view of things had flipped over into madness, and everything safe, everything normal, had been exposed as false and treacherous and insecure. He was walking on a thin skin of solid ground above quicksand, and for an instant his foot had gone through …

  He pulled his imagination up short and told himself that any parallels between the story of Christ and his own were delusions of grandeur. Whether truth or legend, Jesus had been a good man who got hold of a good idea—Love thine enemy—and bequeathed it to the world in an attempt to make things better, and it was only human nature, not some diabolical scheme, if far too often it had made things worse. Bartlemy had always said that everything was part of a Great Pattern, and Destiny would give events a tweak, once in a while, to make them fall into place, but he, Nathan, was too small, too ordinary, to merit the attention of Destiny, and his part of the Pattern was surely only a careless squiggle out on the edge, nothing to do with the unknown mantra at its heart.

  The chocolate soothed him, pumping serotonins into his brain, and he went back to thinking about Christmas presents, and once in bed he slept normally, without any dreams.

  THE NEXT night Nathan was back on Widewater. There was a moment of the usual panic when he found himself solid, alone in the midst of the open sea, paddling to keep his head above water. Then Denaero was with him, and the panic subsided.

  “Ezroc was meant to meet me here,” she said. “I didn’t know if you’d make it. I’m so glad you’ve come. The selkies haven’t waited for our attack—they’re attacking first—”

  “A preemptive strike,” Nathan said, and spluttered as a wavelet splashed into his face. “I … know.”

  “We must do something—try your plan—but the caverns are far below the reef, you won’t be able to—”

  “I’ve got a kind of charm here,” Nathan said. “A magic potion. It might help. When we’re ready, I’ll try it. Can you—?”

  Denaero was already supporting him, her webbed hands gripping him underarm.

  “Is that it?” she asked, as he lifted the vial.

  “Yes …”

  “You must have powerful witches in your world.”

  “Not very,” he said. “That’s why I’m not sure if it’ll work.”

  “Try it now!”

  Ah well, he thought. Here’s to Hazel. He pulled out the cork and drank it down in one go.

  He expected it to taste awful, like medicine, since potions and medicines were vaguely connected in his mind, and all medicine was unpleasant. Instead it tasted mostly like water—water with an edge, the kind you get in advertisements, water that has trickled down from mountain springs and done various exciting things on its way to the bottle. It had a flavor of summer, and a flavor of shadows, and a tang of something familiar that Nathan couldn’t quite place, something to do with childhood. He almost swallowed the pearl by accident. Then he recorked the vial and left it dangling against his chest.

  He knew at once it had worked. He wasn’t treading water anymore, merely floating, as much at ease as a jellyfish. He slipped from Denaero’s grasp and turned to face her. “My God!”

  “Which god?” Denaero asked with interest.

  “Any old god! It works—it really works. Look!” He dived, somersaulted, came up for air that he didn’t need. He couldn’t decide if he was breathing underwater or if breathing was no longer a requirement. This was magic the way it ought to be, the storybook kind, the fairy tale—he was like Kay Harker in The Midnight Folk, who had flown with a bat, dived with an otter, swum with a mermaid. This was enchantment. He kicked and his body leapt from the water like a dolphin, crashing down in a cloud of spray. When he came up again, Denaero was seizing his arms, shaking him.

  “What are you doing? D’you want every fish on the reef to come after us?”

  “Sorry. Sorry …”

  “I’ve been hiding here for a week—I’ve been so quiet, so careful— and now you come along and start splashing about like a baby whale—”

  “Sorry.”

  “Stop saying sorry.”

  “Sorry.” His chances of impressing Denaero, Nathan reflected, had always been practically nil. Evidently they still were.

  “How long will the magic last?” she went on.

  “Maybe twelve hours, maybe more. My friend—the witch—wasn’t certain.”

  “She doesn’t sound like much of a witch to me,” Denaero said, flatly contradicting her earlier statement about the efficacy of his native witches.

  They lapsed into a largely pointless quarrel that ended with Denaero apologizing for impugning Hazel’s sorcerous skills and then glancing up, with one of her swift mood changes, her face lightening as Ezroc came winging down from the sky.

  “I couldn’t bring a selkie,” he said. “There was no one I trusted, and Nokosha wouldn’t listen. He’s set on war. I’m glad Nathan’s here, but—”

  “He’s taken a magic potion, which means he can swim like one of us,” Denaero said. Having established his otherworldly credentials, Nathan realized there was little he could do that would surprise them. “We don’t need anyone else.”

  “I’ve been wondering how we’re going to move the boulder sealing the main entrance,” Nathan said. “Considering it was put there by the Goddess—I mean, is it very big?”

  “I’ve no idea,” said Denaero. “This is your plan. You sort it out. First we have to get in through the secret door—that’ll be difficult enough—then we’ll deal with the rest, opening the caves and—”

  “I thought you knew the way,” Nathan interrupted.

  “Yes, but I’ve never been inside. Only the High King and the shamans are allowed to do that, and they don’t talk about it. It’s forbidden to everyone else. There’s a guardian on the door—”

  “What kind of a guardian?” Nathan said with foreboding.

  “I don’t know exactly. Something nasty. I saw it once, but I was very young. I just remember lots of teeth.”

  “It wouldn’t be—a dragon? I mean, this is the Dragon’s Reef…” He had known all along there would be a dragon.

  Unexpectedly, Denaero gave a peal of laughter. “We have dragons here,” she said. “I’ll show you one. They’re very frightening … Ezroc, can you wait for us?” And, in words of familiar ill omen: “We may be some time.”

  “I’ll wait, but not too long. Nokosha plans to attack with the dawn. I should be with him. The northfolk are my people—I have to stand by them. It’s a question of loyalty—you understand?”

  “Oh yes,” said Denaero. “Men’s stupid honor, and their stupid loyalties, and their stupid stupid wars. I understand.”

  “I’m not like that,” Nathan said.

  “You’re from another world.”

  Nathan was silent, not certain his world was deserving of a separate category. The whole muddle of honor and loyalty and war and general stupidity was, he suspected, more or less commonplace throughout the multiverse.

  Ezroc said: “It’s not long till sunset. You shouldn’t delay.”

  Nathan thought, too late, that they should have been better prepared—Denaero had her dagger but he needed a weapon of some kind, and explosives for moving the boulder, and all sorts of things he didn’t have and couldn’t get.

  “Farewell,” said the albatross. “May the winds of fate bring you long life and good fortune.”

  “The Force be with you,” Nathan responded, unable, on the spur of the
moment, to think of anything else.

  “May the tides of destiny carry you to the pathways of the moon,” Denaero intoned formally.

  “Live long and prosper,” Nathan quipped.

  Finally, they dived.

  And now this was magic indeed. The water no longer dragged or resisted him—instead it seemed to flow not just past him but through him, as if he were part of it, moving with its currents, rocked in its storms and its gentleness. He remembered how, at the end of Andersen’s “Little Mermaid,” the eponymous heroine had felt her breast melt into foam, and he began to comprehend what it meant to be merfolk, to be a creature not so much half fish as half sea, a spirit at one with its element. Little wonder they felt no pressure even at great depths, and their fealty to Nefanu was less worship than kinship—the same tides flowed in the veins of merfolk and Goddess alike. Humans, he had learned at school, are about 60 percent water, but he sensed the potion had somehow increased the percentage, melting his too solid flesh, transforming him into a being whose pulse beat was the waves and whose lifeblood was the surges of the deep.

  And the water brought him messages—the rippled pattern of a nearby shoal of yellowstripe, flickering through the coral, the silent swoosh of a passing ray, the shifting coils of a moray eel stirring in its lair.

  “Follow me,” said Denaero. “I will show you the dragons of Dragon’s Reef.”

  Now that he was so far down, he could see the form of the Western Reef more clearly: the ocean currents or some other phenomenon had eroded the rock in such a way that the upper section spread out like the cap of a giant mushroom while the supporting cliff had been eaten away. What remained was a species of thick trunk joining the reef to a broad plateau of rock below—rock in shelves and planes and strata— with here and there a chasm opening on blue darkness, so Nathan guessed the seabed must be much farther down. The reef was the highest point of a sprawling mountain ridge, a strange formation coral-grown and sun-touched, teeming with the life of the shallows, while far beneath was the eternal midnight of the ocean vales where creatures lived that never came up for light. Even under the overhang of the mushroom cap it was gloomy, though the potion seemed to have endowed Nathan with mervision, and he could distinguish rippling curtains of weed and the glimmer of tiny fish darting to and fro.

  Denaero paused by one such curtain, parting the stems. “Look!” she said. A piece of the weed had broken free and hovered in the gap, a curling tendril like an S with too many bends, sporting leaves that fanned in the current and decorated with waving spines thin as gossamer. At one end was a minute encrustation like the head of a dragonet, with round sea-beryl eyes and tip-tilted snout. Denaero stroked beneath its chin with her fingertip, and suddenly Nathan saw it was real, though its camouflage was perfect, not a weed fragment but a miniature dragon as delicate as a butterfly, with leafy fins and sinuous body.

  He had a feeling there were such creatures in our world—he must have seen them on television—but it was different, so different, when you saw them for real. The sea, he decided, with or without sorcery, was indeed a magical place.

  “This is one of our dragons,” Denaero said. “Isn’t he beautiful? But I don’t think he would be much good at guarding anything.”

  They swam on, descending farther, gliding above the lower stratum of rock. Overhead they saw the arch of the Dragon’s Bridge, while below them the ridge was split by a long canyon with a path of sand visible between its walls. There the march of the lobsters had passed, but Denaero appeared untroubled by the recollection. Merfolk lived in the moment, Nathan thought; both her peril and her fear were forgotten, replaced by the anticipation of fears—and perils—to come.

  Beyond the bridge, along the borders of the main reef, they plunged still deeper, past great bastions of stone, down into the dark. Denaero plucked a sea star from the rock and held it in front of her, a small nodule of light in the vast glooms of the sea.

  The pressure here would be instant death to an unprotected diver, Nathan guessed, and for a second he worried that the spell might fail, but that was like worrying about an air crash when you were on a plane: there was nothing you could do, so why bother? He pushed the worry aside and went on.

  “I didn’t realize the reef was so big,” he said to Denaero when they’d been swimming for some time.

  “It’s the greatest of the twelve,” she said. “One reef for each tribe— one king for each kingdom—but ours is the largest. Even the Long Reef of Imarnu is shorter. That’s why my father is High King.”

  After a while she continued: “The caverns are under the mountains. The main entrance was supposed to be somewhere along the top, but no one knows exactly where: the boulder would be overgrown with coral and weed now, indistinguishable from the surrounding rocks. It isn’t a secret, you understand; it’s just that nobody knows where it is.”

  “And the door that is meant to be secret?” Nathan said with emphasis.

  “It’s at the foot of the mountains. In the dark.”

  It would be, Nathan thought.

  Now it was altogether black. The tiny glow of the sea star showed Denaero’s hand, her arm, the swirl of her hair coiling in her wake. Every so often some small luminous creature would swim past, flourishing a glitter of antennae: ghost-shrimps, translucent worms, strange hairy fishy things whose filmy bodies appeared almost too insubstantial to exist. Their only substance was the light, the kernel of phosphorescence they carried within them like an internal lamp, gleaming in the ocean night. And once in a while Nathan had the impression of something far larger in their vicinity, as a long string of lights hove out of the blackness, like portholes on the side of a submarine. (He wasn’t sure submarines had portholes, but even if they didn’t, that was the image his brain supplied.)

  He lost all sense of time. They seemed to have been swimming through the dark forever, in an unchanging midnight where the sun would never penetrate. In another state of being he had been afraid of the water—the blue rush of bubbles, the air expelled from his lungs—now he was so much a part of it, he felt himself losing touch with the world above, as if the ocean deep was his long home and there was nowhere else he had ever been, nowhere else to be.

  They had not spoken for what felt like hours. The vast silence of the undersea got inside them, making speech, like breathing, seem an alien thing, a function of other beings, in other worlds. Even Denaero appeared affected by it. As for Nathan, all the universes he had ever seen shrank to an atom of memory; he felt absorbed into the dark and the gigantic entity of the sea.

  Denaero’s voice came as a shock, intruding on the silence like the whisper of a bell.

  “It’s somewhere here,” she said.

  The light of the sea star showed the mountain roots sinking into sand, and details of the cliff rising like a wall above him. “I followed my father here once,” Denaero volunteered. “With the shamans. I was very small, and I swam in their wave pattern. They never detected me.”

  She was always curious, Nathan thought. Going into forbidden places, making the wrong friends, doing the wrong things. Quibbling, quarreling, being difficult. And suddenly, in a distant sort of way, he was reminded of Hazel—Hazel who was farther away than the farthest sun, in another element, another universe—a speck of familiarity on the outer reaches of his thought. Hazel his companion, his ally and friend. And with the idea of Hazel came the awareness that the sea was not the only world, and somewhere every ocean came to shore, and the sands reached out beyond the waves toward daybreak and the realms of Land.

  It was strange how, in every world, sooner or later there was someone who reminded him of Hazel.

  “Here!” Denaero said, on a note of triumph. “This is it.”

  There was a pointed arch cut into the rock, little more than a crude triangle tapering from a narrow base to the apex some seven feet up. By the faint purplish glow of the sea star Nathan saw that it framed a door—an ordinary door, apart from its shape, with a handle in the form of a whorled shell and hing
es that seemed to be made of bone and fastened with leatherwrack, though in the dim light he couldn’t be sure. Spongy growths padded the frame and in the center the carved head of a fish protruded, its mouth open in a threatening gape and set with a full complement of what looked like genuine teeth, long and curved and gleaming with a toothy gleam.

  “It’s a special door,” Denaero explained, knowledgeably. “You turn this and pull, and it opens. I saw my father do it.”

  Nathan was about to say something mildly sarcastic when he realized that under the sea a door would generally be just a hole in the rock. “Clever,” he commented blandly. “Where’s the guardian?”

  “I’m not sure. I think it might be—that.” She indicated the fish head. “I was only a child when I saw it, and there’s never much light. With all those pointy teeth, it did look scary.”

  “If there’s no guardian,” Nathan said, “what keeps people away?”

  “They stay away because they’re told to,” Denaero said. “Anyhow, there’s nothing to go inside for except air. The treasures belong to the Goddess: no one would touch them. And who wants to be in a cave full of air?”

  “Well, we do,” Nathan pointed out. “Is it locked? The door, I mean.”

  “What’s … locked?”

  “Never mind.”

  Denaero passed him the sea star and, taking the knob in both hands, twisted it and pulled. The door swung back sharply, throwing her against Nathan—she laughed her sudden laugh, making bubbles in the water. Nathan dropped the star, retrieved it before it could swim away, and they both peered inside. Beyond was a small stone chamber— perhaps three people might have stood there, huddled close together— and a second door, this time with no fish head.

  “What do we do?” Denaero asked.

  “I suppose we go in.”

  He stepped through the gap and tried the other door, but it wouldn’t open. “What did your father do?”