SANGREAL TRILOGY

II
THE TRAITOR’S SWORD

Amanda Hemingway

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Battle

Prologue: The Dead City

One: Parents and Children

Two: Magic

Three: An Entanglement of Clues

Four: A Feast of Slugs

Five: Damon

Six: The Love-Spell

Seven: The Princess and the Peas

Eight: Dancing with Demons

Nine: The White Ship

Ten: Elemental Powers

Epilogue: Autumn Leaves

About the Author

Other Works

Copyright

About the Publisher

BATTLE

Not the bladebut the hand on the hilt

Not the prizebut the blood that is spilt.

Not the songbut the cry of the steel

Not the painbut the ones who can’t feel.

Not the firebut the pulse of the heart

Not the fearbut the standing apart.

Not to weepbut the tears running red

Not to sleepbut to dream with the dead.

PROLOGUE The Dead City

It began with a city, a city in another universe.

Nathan Ward dreamed of the city, as he had dreamed of other cities long before. Most people dream of other worlds, dreamworlds parallel to our own yet subtly different, where strange things are familiar and familiar things strange – the spin-off regions of the subconscious mind. But the worlds in Nathan’s dreams were real, or seemed real, depending on the nature of reality. He went to the kind of school where teachers talked about philosophy and quantum physics, so he knew the chair he was sitting on was provably nonexistent, and the entire cosmos was made up of particles too small to believe in, popping in and out of reality whenever scientists studied them too closely. (Sneaky things, particles.) Nonetheless, Nathan was a down-to-earth boy who had yet to find a magical country at the back of a wardrobe, so it was unnerving to find one in his own head. The previous summer he had almost got lost in such a dream, and had been unable to make his way back without help.

Sometimes on these journeys he was merely a disembodied thought; at others, as the dream grew more solid so did he, while his sleeping form would fade, even vanish altogether. He was a weekly boarder at Ffylde Abbey, sharing a dormitory with other boys, and a tendency to dematerialize in the night didn’t always pass unremarked. Particles can get away with such behaviour more easily than teenage boys. At home his mother, his best friend, and the man he called uncle all knew of the problem, so there was no need to try and explain the inexplicable, but there were moments when he still felt unsafe. As if there was a hole inside his head through which his life and his very self might slip away. Dreams can too easily become nightmares, and when your dreams are real, the nightmares have teeth …

The strange thing was, when he dreamed of the city, he knew it wasn’t the first time, though the earlier times were all but forgotten, immured in a locked cupboard at the back of his memory. The dream gave him a feel he couldn’t mistake, like when you return to a place visited in early childhood. There’s nothing you recognize, yet you know you’ve been there before.

There had been a city in his dreams many times in the past, the city of Arkatron on Eos – a city at the end of time, last stronghold of a high-tech, high-magic civilization in a universe that was dying. It had been a futuristic metropolis of soaring sky-towers and airborne vehicles that wheeled and dipped around them like giant birds, and a population mantled and masked and gloved against the poisonous sunlight – a science fiction city with a ruler called the Grandir – a ruler thousands of years old, whose face was never seen and whose true name was never spoken – a ruler who had once had a whole cosmos for his empire.

But this city was different. (In his mind, he called it a city, giving it the benefit of the doubt, though quite possibly it was only a town.) It sprawled over two hills, the higher rising into a bastion of rock with a grey-walled house perched on the top, built of the same stone and blending with it, so you couldn’t tell where the crag ended and the house began. The lower hill was a hump-backed ridge crested with pointy gables and spiked with chimney stacks, but only one or two emitted a thin spindrift of smoke, and as his vision drew nearer Nathan saw windows without panes, doors ajar on empty halls, new grass growing over untrodden roads. It was a ghost town – or ghost city – except there seemed to be no ghosts left, only endless vacancy. There weren’t even any birds.

In Arkatron, focus of a universe that was ending, the city thrived after a fashion, crawling with people and lights and life, yet here, though the universe showed no signs of imminent demise, the city was dead. A Marie-Celeste of a city, whose footsteps had barely faded and whose voices might have been stilled only a little while ago. It reminded Nathan of towns pictured in history books, the outer houses made of mud bricks and rickety timbers, with shaggy thatching on the roofs, the inner of stone and tile. The hilltop house was the largest, poised in the eye of the wind, weatherbeaten and grim, sprouting irrelevant battlements and tiny turrets as if it were trying to become a castle, though no one would be fooled. It had neither moat nor portcullis, and on one side a steep little garden sloped down to wall and road. As Nathan’s thought winged earthwards he saw four children were playing there.

They might have been the only children – perhaps the only people – in the whole city. Three boys and a girl. The boys were fighting with wooden swords, banging their weapons on toy shields, shouting incomprehensible war cries. The girl was making mud pies. She looked about seven or eight years old and wore an expression of extreme concentration half hidden under the tangle of her hair. She reminded him a little of Hazel, his best friend, who often hid behind her hair, but whereas Hazel’s was brown and straight this child’s was blonde, dark blonde like wheat, and the tangle was rippled and crinkled into untidy waves. One of the boys came over, evidently to check on her, and she looked up with a sudden sweet smile which made Nathan think that when she was older, though she might not be pretty or beautiful, her smile would always win her friends. As in other dreams he could understand what the children said, though he realized afterwards that the language they spoke wasn’t English.

‘Let me play with you,’ the girl said. ‘I can fight too.’

‘Swords aren’t for girls,’ the boy retorted. ‘You might get hurt.’

‘Have one of my pies, then.’ The smile disappeared; her face closed.

‘I don’t eat mud and sand,’ the boy said, half teasing, half scornful.

‘’Tisn’t mud and sand,’ said the girl. ‘It’s chocolate.’

‘’Tisn’t chocolate, stupid.’

‘’Tis so.’

The boy opened his mouth to go on arguing, and then was suddenly quiet. Nathan found his gaze fixed on the mud pie, which was round and carefully moulded, and thought it did indeed look a lot like chocolate. There were even little flakes around the rim, like decoration …

‘Chocolate,’ said the girl with satisfaction.

A shadow swept over the scene, the advancing edge of a stormcloud. The boys ceased their game, staring upwards. A door opened at the top of the garden and a woman in a linen headdress leaned out, calling to the children to come in. There was a note of urgency or fear in her voice. The boy who had been quarrelling with the girl seized her wrist and pulled her towards the shelter of the doorway, though she seemed reluctant to go with him. A winged darkness swooped low over the city, swift as a sudden squall; on the slope a stunted tree twisted with the wind. There was a noise which might have been thunder or the booming of immense pinions. Whether the shadow was cloud or creature Nathan couldn’t tell, but he felt the icy chill of its advent, and the wind that tried to tear the tree from its roots whirled his thought away, out of the city, out of the dream, into the gentle oblivion of sleep.

When he awoke he was in his own world, and the dream seemed very far away. Nonetheless, he thought about it, from time to time, all that day, and the next. It was the Easter holidays, and he was going to be fourteen, and he had to decide what he wanted, by way of a birthday treat. ‘I want things to happen,’ he said to himself, both hopeful and afraid, for things had happened to him the previous year, to him and to others – things both exciting and terrifying – and he knew that wishing for trouble is one way of inviting it in.

He said the same thing that evening, when his uncle (who wasn’t really his uncle) came to supper.

‘You sound like a child in a story,’ said his mother, ‘wishing for adventures. After last summer, you should know better. There may have been a kind of happy ending for you, but not for others. People died.’

‘Of course I don’t want anyone to die,’ Nathan said. ‘It’s only a little wish. For my birthday.’

‘When you’re older,’ Uncle Barty said, ‘you’ll learn that things happen without your wishing for them, all the time. You may even wish for peace and quiet one day. But you probably won’t get it.’

Nathan said no more, quelled by the phrase When you’re older, because he knew his uncle was older than anyone, and had seen more things happen than Nathan would ever dare to wish for. Bartlemy Goodman had the Gift, a strange legacy which gave him not only long life but other powers beyond the norm, powers which might have made him a sorcerer or a magus, though he appeared to use his abilities mostly for ordinary things, like cooking, and brewing home-made liquor, and herbal medicines. He didn’t look at all sorcerous: true wizards should be lean and cadaverous, hook-nosed and long-bearded, but Bartlemy was fat and placid and clean-shaven, with a broad pink face, fair hair turned white with age, and mild blue eyes gazing tolerantly at the world. But Nathan had seen beneath the surface, though only a little way, and he never doubted his uncle’s reliability, or his wisdom.

It was about a week later when he dreamed of the city again. It was just a brief glimpse of people piling bags and bundles into a cart, and the reins shaken, and the plodding hooves of a horse moving ponderously away. The girl was standing there – she was older now, almost his own age, but he knew her by her hair and the smile that gradually faded as she ceased waving and her hand fell to her side. The cart lumbered down the road and out of the city, heading along a sort of causeway across a low-lying country broken into many pools and water-channels which mirrored the grey pallor of the sky. Without her smile the girl’s face looked grave and somehow resigned, as if she had seen many such departures. She turned and began to walk back up the road, until it narrowed into a steep path coiling about the hill, and then eventually became steps that climbed the last ascent to the house on the crag.

‘This is her home,’ Nathan thought, suddenly sure. ‘Those boys were just visiting. She’s the daughter of the lord or king or whoever it is rules this place.’

Her dress was patched with darns and her long hair looked as if it hadn’t been brushed for a day or more but there was something about her, the gravity that touched a face which might have been merry, a hint of resolution or confidence, the assurance of a princess. A princess without crown or ermine, with no visible attendants and few remaining subjects, but a princess nonetheless.

When she reached the huge main door she opened it herself, without the aid of butler or footman. It must have been heavy since it took a strong thrust to move it. It creaked suitably, as such doors should, closing behind her with a reverberating thud as she went inside.

Nathan’s dream followed her – into a hall that seemed to be hung with shadows, up stairs that branched and zig-zagged, along passageways and galleries with cold echoing floors and walls where threadbare tapestries flapped like cobwebs. At last she entered a room that was thick with books – books close-packed on regular shelves or piled in winding stacks or slithering earthwards like rows of collapsed dominoes. Nathan was reminded a little of the second-hand bookshop which his mother managed and where they lived, though this room was larger than his whole house, with a vaulted ceiling from the centre of which depended an iron chandelier festooned with dribbles of old wax, above a desk where an elderly man was bent over an opened volume, trying to read it with a magnifying glass. A window squeezed between two banks of shelving admitted a shaft of daylight which stretched towards the desk, picking out more books, and dust, and the man’s hair which stood up around his head like a dandelion clock. Long strands of tallow trailed from the chandelier like stalagmites in a cave.

‘Frim,’ said the girl – the man looked up – ‘the Hollyhawks have gone today, and old Mother Sparrowgrass and her boys. They wouldn’t have told me, but I went to take them a cake, and there they were, all packed up and the cart rolling.’

‘Deserters!’ said the old man. ‘What did you do?’

‘What could I do? I wished them luck.’

‘They deserve no luck,’ said the old man. ‘Running away. Bumskittles! They are your people.’

‘They are their own people,’ said the girl. ‘What have I ever done for them?’

‘Your best.’ He reached out, squeezing her hand in his own thin, bony one, then patting it. He had a strange knobbly face with startled eyebrows, round inquiring eyes and a long nose that turned up at the tip. For all his age he had a quality of youthfulness which, Nathan reflected, few young people ever exhibited – he seemed vividly alive, curious, alert, exuding enough energy for a small mobile generator. ‘Never mind,’ he went on. ‘The loyal and the true-hearted remain.’

‘Only because they have no choice. Bandy Crow is a cripple; Granny Cleep passed a hundred and twenty last year. The Twymoors and the Yngleveres …’

‘They’ll not leave,’ the old man said. ‘They’ve always been faithful to your family. They won’t abandon your father.’

‘My father’s sick,’ said the girl, ‘and growing sicker. I sometimes think the kingdom’s been under a curse since my great-great-I-don’t-know-how-many-greats grandfather first lifted the Traitor’s Sword. And since I brought the Urdemons …’

‘Don’t be silly,’ her mentor admonished. ‘You didn’t bring them. They are drawn to acts of magic –’

‘My magic.’

‘You were a child, playing games of illusion. There’s always been a little magic in your family; as magic goes, it’s fairly harmless. You had no idea –’

‘It’s still my fault,’ the princess insisted, brooding into her hair. (Like Hazel.)

‘Babbletosh!’ the old man said briskly. ‘You take too much on yourself. Just because you’re the princess, you think you can claim responsibility for everything? I never heard of such presumption. You’re like a little girl who treads in a puddle, and then blames herself for a flood. Utter foolishness! Isn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ she said with a furtive smile. ‘Sorry. It’s only … Prenders told me …’

‘That Woman,’ her mentor said with unmistakable capital letters, ‘talks a load of –’

‘Frim!’

‘Squiffle-piffle! That’s all I was going to say. Doesn’t know her coccyx from her humerus. Why, when everyone else leaves, she has to stay around …’

‘She loves me,’ the princess said gently. ‘And Papa.’

‘Overrated, love. People use it as an excuse for anything.’ Absently, he stroked her hand again. ‘Don’t worry. We’ll find a cure for the king – and then, so they say, the kingdom will be healed. Somewhere there’ll be a formula – the recipe for a potion …’

‘Then light the lamp,’ said the girl, indicating an oil lamp on the desk, ‘or you’ll miss it.’ She removed the glass chimney, struck a match and held the flame to the wick. The sudden glow flushed her cheek and spun a shimmer of gold from her hair. As the dream faded Nathan tried to fix the image in his mind, wanting to remember exactly how she looked, but of course, when he awoke, he couldn’t.

It was deep night. He got out of bed and climbed up to the Den, his childhood retreat under the pitch of the roof. Through the skylight he saw a single star look down, watching him. But he knew it wasn’t a star: it was a spy-crystal through which, in an alternative universe, the faceless ruler of Eos could survey anything in its range. Sometimes, when the world was ordinary, that knowledge seemed like a brief glimpse into madness, but not now, not tonight.

‘Things are happening,’ he thought, with a complicated shiver, reaching back into the dream. Something had been said, something significant – something which struck a faint chord of familiarity – but he was too busy trying to re-create the face of the princess, and he couldn’t remember what it was.

ONE Parents and Children

Bartlemy Goodman was home the night the burglars came. He usually was at home. For a man who had seen so much, and done so much, he now led a very tranquil life, or so it appeared, visiting the village of Eade mainly to see Annie Ward, who was widely thought to be his niece, and rarely venturing beyond Crowford. He was known to own the bookshop where Annie and her son lodged, and believed to be a collector, though no one was quite sure of what. The villagers accepted his unspecified eccentricities, and respected him for no particular reason, except that he appeared worthy of respect. It was a part of his Gift that he could pass almost unremarked in the local community, giving rise to no gossip, awakening no curiosity, though he had lived at Thornyhill, the old house out in the woods, since the original Thorns had sold up and all but died out generations before. Without really thinking about it, people assumed that the house had been bought by Bartlemy’s grandfather, or some other elderly relative, and had passed on from Goodman to Goodman until it reached the present incumbent. They never wondered why each successive owner should look the same, or remain apparently the same age, around sixty; indeed, had anyone been asked, they would have sworn to little differences between the Bartlemys, to periods of absence following the death of one when another must have been growing up somewhere abroad. Nor did they ever wonder about the dog.

Every Goodman had had a dog, a large shaggy creature of mixed parentage and universal goodwill, with bright, intelligent eyes under whiskery eyebrows, and a lolling tongue. This one was called Hoover, because he devoured crumbs, and indeed anything else that came his way. The most wonderful cooking smells in the world would foregather in Bartlemy’s kitchen, and the generosity of the leftovers made it canine heaven. Hoover had no reputation for savagery, welcoming every visitor, even the postman, with amiable enthusiasm, yet perhaps because of him the house had never been burgled before, except for the strange incident the previous year, and in that case the stolen object (which had belonged to someone else) had eventually been returned by Bartlemy himself, though no one knew how he retrieved it. The house was isolated, unprotected by alarms or security, and with the vague rumours that Bartlemy ‘collected’ it should have been an obvious target, yet until that night in late April the criminal fraternity had left it alone.

The burglars were two youths, as the newspapers would have called them, an Asian boy from Crowford who was only seventeen, and his sixteen-year-old sidekick, who was big and ginger-haired and not very bright. Getting in was easy: they broke a window, which was stupid, because the back door wasn’t locked, and were just checking out the sitting room when the dog pounced. He didn’t bark: it would’ve meant wasting time. Bartlemy came downstairs, wrapped in an enormous dark-blue dressing-gown with stars on it, to find the ginger-haired sidekick shivering in a corner while the other boy lay on his back with Hoover standing over him. He wasn’t growling – he never growled – but the boy could see, behind the panting tongue and doggy grin, two rows of large yellow teeth which wouldn’t have looked out-of-place on a wolf. There was a knife lying on the rug a little way away. Bartlemy picked it up by the blade. Afterwards, the boy puzzled over how the house owner had known to come down, when neither the intruders nor the dog had made much noise.

‘This is – this is assault,’ the youth stammered, keeping his voice to a whisper. ‘I can sue.’

‘I haven’t assaulted you,’ Bartlemy pointed out in his placid way.

‘The dog –’

‘He hasn’t assaulted you either.’ Yet, said the ensuing pause.

‘We didn’t mean no harm,’ offered Ginger, between sullenness and fright.

‘I’m sure you didn’t. I’ll telephone the police, and then you can sit down with me, and have a biscuit, and while we wait you can tell me what you did mean.’

The call was made, and somehow the boys didn’t argue, perching nervously on the edge of Bartlemy’s sofa and nibbling home-made biscuits while Hoover stood by, watching them in a proprietary manner. Ginger was known for beating up older boys, and the little Asian made up in aggression what he lacked in size, but they sat as quiet as if they were at a vicarage tea-party, and God was waiting with a thunderbolt for one of them to burp.

‘Someone sent you here, didn’t they?’ said Bartlemy. ‘What were you looking for?’

Mouths opened and shut, and Ginger choked on a biscuit crumb, but this time it was Ram who looked most afraid.

‘No one sent us,’ he said at last.

‘It was your own idea?’

‘Yeah. Yeah. I’m the one with the ideas.’

‘Do you think it was a good idea?’

‘No.’

‘Are you sure no one sent you?’ Bartlemy persisted.

Ram turned pale, and his mouth closed tight, and he looked almost relieved when the police arrived. He knew just how not to talk to the police. He’d sat through many interrogations, he was still underage, and insofar as it concerned himself he knew the law as well as any solicitor. But this man with his unruffled manner, and his alarming dog, and his calm blue gaze that seemed to see straight into your mind – this was something far more demoralizing than any bullying copper. Ram had a horrible feeling that given time – and a few more biscuits – he would have been telling Bartlemy things even his mother didn’t know. He was secretly thankful to settle for the more familiar option.

Watching them go with a sigh, Bartlemy surmised that if they had been sent, Ginger, at least, knew nothing of it. He returned to bed, and in the half-hour before sleep considered possible lines of inquiry. A few days later, he telephoned an acquaintance in the CID.

Some months had passed since their last meeting, and Inspector Pobjoy had become Chief Inspector, helped by his recent arrest of a serial killer when most of his colleagues hadn’t believed any murders had actually taken place. Bartlemy had been involved in that affair, which had been vaguely connected to the former theft at Thornyhill, and Pobjoy still darkly suspected that he knew many facts which had never emerged. There had been too many loopholes in the case, too many loose ends. Not that Bartlemy had ever been a suspect, though perhaps he should have been, caught as he was in the middle of things. However, Pobjoy was curiously glad to hear from him, and intrigued at the news of the attempted burglary, and he agreed instantly to come to Thornyhill for a cup of tea and an informal chat.

‘You should lock your back door,’ he suggested when they met.

‘But if I did that,’ Bartlemy said, ‘people wouldn’t be able to get in.’ It was unanswerable. ‘Anyway, they broke a window. That’s the kind they were: crude, not very clever. The sort who would always break a window, if there was a window to break. I was rather surprised to find them so unsubtle. Kids like that usually give this place a miss. I would’ve expected any burglar who came here to be more … sophisticated.’

‘Apart from that business last summer,’ Pobjoy said – carefully, since he felt the subject required care – ‘I notice you haven’t really had any trouble here.’ He added: ‘I checked our records.’

‘Naturally,’ Bartlemy said. ‘I assumed you would. No, we haven’t had much trouble at Thornyhill. I prefer to avoid it, if I can.’ He didn’t say how, but Pobjoy, who was not a fanciful man, found himself wondering if the house had some intangible form of protection. Apart from the dog. He noted Bartlemy said ‘we’, perhaps including Hoover in the personal pronoun.

The canine hero of the recent burglary attempt was currently sitting with his chin in Pobjoy’s lap and the classic please-feed-the-starving expression on his face.

‘Which is why,’ Bartlemy was saying, ‘I was a little … disturbed by what happened. I can’t help feeling there must have been something – someone – behind it. On the surface, there is nothing to steal here but books, some old but unremarkable furniture, and my collection of herbs for cooking.’

‘The paintings?’ Pobjoy asked, glancing up at a landscape in oils which seemed to consist mostly of gloom and a framed drawing so crowded with detail it was almost impossible to distinguish what it portrayed.

‘Generally done by friends or acquaintances,’ Bartlemy said blandly. ‘That drawing, for instance, is unsigned. Richard wasn’t satisfied with it. Later, he went mad. People have sometimes been curious about my pictures, but their curiosity always seems to fade in the end.’

‘You said “on the surface”,’ Pobjoy resumed, his narrow eyes narrowing still further, dark slits in the lean pallor of his face.

‘I have a certain article concealed here,’ Bartlemy explained after a pause. ‘It was entrusted to me.’ He didn’t say I am telling you this in confidence. Pobjoy already knew that.

‘The article which was stolen last year,’ the inspector surmised. ‘The so-called Grimthorn Grail.’

‘Of course, it was never authenticated,’ Bartlemy said. ‘Technically, it’s valueless. But I am concerned. I have lived here a long time, and no one has ever broken in until now.’

‘Is it secure?’

Bartlemy smiled. ‘No burglar would ever find it, I assure you,’ he said. ‘No ordinary burglar.’

Pobjoy let that pass. ‘You think those boys were put up to it,’ he summarized, ‘by someone interested in the Grail.’

‘It’s a possibility I would like to check. You would know if there were any likely collectors in the market for such items.’

‘Those kind of gentlemen don’t usually have a record,’ Pobjoy said with a trace of bitterness. ‘Too rich, too influential. But – yes, I should know. I might know. I’ll ask around.’

‘Thank you.’ He poured more tea. ‘By the way, how is our murderer?’

‘What? Oh – I don’t know.’ Pobjoy looked startled. For him, once a villain was convicted and imprisoned, that should be the end of the matter. ‘We never found any trace of his accomplice – the woman who masqueraded as his wife.’

‘I suspect,’ Bartlemy said, ‘she wasn’t the kind of person who would allow herself to be traced.’ He was remembering a malignant water-spirit who had poured herself into the shape of a dead actress – a spirit now returned to the element from whence she came.

Pobjoy, who hated loose ends and didn’t believe in phantoms, fretted at the recollection. ‘Do you think she could be involved in this latest affair?’

‘Hmm … I doubt it. Still, it is an idea.’

As he drank his tea, Pobjoy seemed to become abstracted. Once, he asked: ‘How is … Mrs Ward?’, hesitating over the inquiry as if it embarrassed him.

‘She’s very well,’ Bartlemy said. ‘You should go and see her.’

‘I don’t think … she wouldn’t want …’ Pobjoy’s excuses faltered and failed; he looked around for a change of subject, but didn’t find one.

‘It’s up to you,’ Bartlemy said. ‘Annie doesn’t bear grudges.’

At one time, Pobjoy had wanted to arrest Nathan.

The inspector retreated into silence and stayed there, until Bartlemy began to talk of something else.

Nathan and Hazel Bagot had been friends from infancy, closer than brother and sister; they used to tell each other everything, but now they were getting older they needed their own secrets. Nathan didn’t tell Hazel about the city and the princess (not yet, he said to himself, not till it becomes important), and Hazel didn’t tell Nathan about the boy she was keen on at school. When they got together at the weekends and during the holidays, they talked about music and television and lessons, and feuds or allegiances with their classmates, and how parents never understood what it was like to be a teenager, because it must have been different for them. Hazel’s bedroom had evolved into a kind of nest, lined with prints and posters, cushioned with discarded clothing, floored with crisp packets and CDs, where she and Nathan could curl up and listen to her latest musical discovery – usually something twangy and foreign-sounding and faintly bizarre – while she related how her father, who had left last year, wasn’t allowed to come home any more because he’d tried to hit her mother again, and how her mother had a new boyfriend who was rather old and a bit dull but nice.

‘They met through an ad in the paper,’ Hazel said. ‘Lots of people do that now. Has your mum tried it?’

‘I don’t think she’s too keen on dating,’ Nathan said. ‘There was you-know-who last year – I’m not sure if he ever asked her for a date, exactly, but – well, obviously it didn’t work out.’ He didn’t need to say any more. Hazel knew what he was alluding to.

‘She must’ve loved your dad a lot,’ she remarked. Nathan’s father had died in a car accident before he was born, or so he had always been told. ‘I mean, she’s not forty yet and really pretty, but she hasn’t had a proper boyfriend for years, has she?’

‘No.’

‘You wouldn’t mind though, would you?’ They’d been over this territory before, but Hazel thought it was worth checking.

‘Of course not – as long as he was kind, and loved her. What about your mum’s new man? Do you think it’s serious?’

‘’Spect 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. The eyes were a little dreamy and a secret smile lurked at the corners of his mouth. Even Nathan had never seen the picture; it would give rise to too many questions. Because there was nothing in genetics to enable two white Caucasian parents to produce a child so exotically dark … Annie herself had never really known what happened. In the instant of Daniel’s death she had reached out for him, and a Gate had opened, and in death she had found love, returning to the world of life pregnant, and it wasn’t until she saw the baby that she realized he couldn’t be Daniel’s child. He was the child of destiny, Bartlemy said, bridging the void between worlds; but it did not comfort her. One day, she would have to tell Nathan the truth – one day very soon – but she was still finding reasons to put it off. Keep him safe – keep him trusting – he doesn’t need to know …

She put the picture away again, the looming dilemma clouding her mind, excluding any memories of distant happiness.

In his own bed Nathan lay with his eyes closed roaming the landscape inside his head, looking for the way through. It was there, he knew: he had found it once before, in an emergency, taking the plunge into another universe not at random but by his own will – though the act had frightened him and he hadn’t attempted it again. But now curiosity – which kills even Schroedinger’s cat – impelled him on, stronger than fear. He wanted to see the princess again, to explore the abandoned city and find out more about Urdemons, and why the people left, and the curse on the king …

He fell a long, long way, through a whirling dark pinpricked with stars. Then there was a jarring thud, and his mind was back in his body, but his body was somewhere else. Not the city on two hills with the Gothic house on top but another city, a huge metropolis with buildings like curving cliffs and a blood-red sunset reflected in endless windows and airborne skimmers and winged reptiles criss-crossing in the deadly light. He had landed on a rooftop platform in the shade of a wall, with a door close by. He scrambled to his feet, touched a panel – after a second the door opened and he slipped inside, escaping the lethal sun. He had forgotten the hazards of willing himself into another universe. Here was no misty realm of dreams and incorporeal being: he was almost solid, as visible as a ghost on a dark night, and this was Arkatron on Eos, the city at the end of the world, and there were too many dangers both known and unknown here to menace him. Worst of all, or so he thought when he looked down, he had ignored the first rule of dream-voyages – that you will find yourself wearing the clothes you slept in. It is difficult to feel brave and adventurous in pyjamas. (The previous year, he had got into the habit of going to bed in tracksuit trousers and a sweatshirt.) However, there was nothing he could do about it now.

He found himself on a gallery overlooking a hollow shaft, too deep for him to estimate how far it was to the bottom. Transparent egg-shaped lifts travelled up and down it, supported by alarmingly slender cables. He had assumed he would be in government headquarters, since that was where his dreams usually placed him, but nothing here looked familiar. A lift stopped close by, its door opening automatically even as a section of floor was extruded from the gallery to meet it. The lift was empty. Nathan took the hint, and stepped inside. A panel offered a wide choice of buttons: he pressed the top one. Being only semi-solid he had to press twice, hard. The door closed and the lift shot upwards.

He emerged onto another gallery, but this time he had to walk all the way round to find an exit, and when he pushed the door, it didn’t move. He was too substantial to walk through it. He touched a square on the adjacent wall, but instead of the door opening there was a noise like a few bars of music – the kind of music Hazel would have liked, incorporating weird stringed instruments and very little rhythm. ‘Of course,’ Nathan thought, light dawning, ‘it’s a doorbell. This is a private apartment …’ He wondered if he should run, but there was no point. His dream had brought him here, and he had no real option but to go on.

The door opened.

A man was standing there, a very tall man (all Eosians were taller than the people of our world) wearing a long white robe with a wide hood much looser than the usual kind. Under the hanging sleeves his hands were ungloved and his mask only covered three-quarters of his face; where it ended, just above mouth and jaw, his beard began, a thick white beard unlike anything Nathan had ever seen outside the pages of a book, forked and braided almost to his waist. He stared at Nathan in silence. Nathan stared back, forgetting how shocking his appearance must be to his host. No children had been born here for perhaps a thousand years, and though Nathan was big for his age, in this universe he was shorter than the indigents, slight of build and obviously youthful. His pyjamas were too small for him, stopping well above ankle and wrist – his body had a suggestion of transparency – his face was naked. On Eos, it was rare for anyone to show their face.

When at last the man spoke, his words were strangely apposite. ‘Well, well,’ he said. ‘What in the world are you? A holocast? – or not …’

As always, Nathan understood the language. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I’m not really in your world. At least, I am, but –’

‘But?’

‘I’m from another world,’ Nathan explained. His voice didn’t sound quite right – eerily hollow and distant.

‘So it’s started, has it?’ The man’s tone sharpened. ‘It’s been long in the coming. The walls between the worlds are breaking down. Still, I don’t quite understand … What would you want of me? Whoever you are.’

‘I don’t know,’ Nathan admitted. ‘My dream brought me here.’

‘Your – dream? You mean, you are dreaming this? You are dreaming me?’

‘Yes.’

‘How very interesting. This couldn’t be part of a spell – some leakage through a portal?’

‘I don’t think so,’ Nathan said. ‘If there’s a portal, it’s in my head.’

‘Hmm.’ There was a pause.

Then the man said: ‘I am forgetting my manners. Won’t you come in?’

Nathan followed him inside. The apartment consisted of a cluster of irregularly-shaped rooms connected with arched doorways and hung with diaphanous drapes. Furniture curved with the walls; a small fountain bubbled out of what looked like a crystal cakestand in the midst of the main room; the light was vague and sourceless. Stronger light was condensed into two or three pillars of clouded glass, and in the outer wall oval windows were covered with translucent screens, flushed red from the sunset beyond. ‘My name,’ said the man, seating himself, ‘is Osskva Rodolfin Petanax. But perhaps you knew that already?’

‘No,’ said Nathan. ‘I don’t know anything very much. Is this part of the Grandir’s palace?’

‘If you mean the seat of government and residence of our ruler and his bridesister, then – no. We wouldn’t call it a palace. This is accommodation for his senior advisers and others in the higher echelons of authority. I am a first level practor – if you understand what that means?’

‘I … think so. A kind of magician?’

‘So you do know something of this world. You have been here before.’

Nathan didn’t comment. There was a niggle at the back of his mind, another of those elusive connections which he couldn’t quite place. Whenever he sought for it, it slipped away into his subconscious, tantalizingly out of reach. He knew he was here for a reason – there was always a reason behind his dream-journeys – but he had no idea what it might be, and he felt like an actor dropped into the middle of an unfamiliar play, while the audience waited in vain for him to remember his lines. His host continued to study him with absorption but curiously little surprise.

‘Have you met the Grandir?’ Osskva asked.

‘Not met, no. I’ve seen him.’

‘Whom have you met, apart from me?’

Halmé, Nathan thought, but he didn’t say so. She had concealed him from the Grandir; he could not betray her. And Raymor, her former bodyguard. And the dissident Kwanji Ley, who had stolen the Grail in this world, and paid with her life …

Now he remembered.

‘Take it,’ she had said, giving him the cup, when she was dying of the sundeath in a cave in the desert. ‘To … Osskva …’ Osskva!

‘Who is he?’

‘My father …’

Nathan sat down abruptly, holding his head in his hands. When he looked up, the practor was standing over him. ‘What troubles you?’ he said. ‘What do you know?’ His hood fell back, showing hair to match the beard, long and white. Then – perhaps to observe Nathan more closely – he took off his mask. His face, like that of all Eosians, was disproportionately long, at least to Nathan’s eye, a structure all lean curving bones with a skin the colour of tarnished brass, contrasting sharply with the hair and beard. Thick white brows swept low over his eyes, which shone with a glint of pure amethyst. The same shade as Kwanji’s, Nathan remembered. There might be many people on Eos called Osskva, but he knew his dream had not deceived him. This was the one he sought.

Only he hadn’t been seeking him. He’d been looking for someone quite different. But the dreams, he now realized, couldn’t be controlled – or not by him …

‘I once … met someone called Kwanji Ley,’ he said.

‘I see.’ The man’s face changed, his eyes hooding, as if he did see.

‘She asked me to find you.’

‘Kwanjira. My daughter. Kwanjira the rebel.’ Suddenly, he looked up. ‘Did you know she was my daughter?’

Nathan nodded, feeling uncomfortable, even though this was a dream – or at least, a dream of sorts – waiting for the question he knew would come.

‘Is she dead?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ve known it, I suppose – I’ve felt it – for months past. We didn’t keep in touch, but this time there was a differentness to her silence. There is a point when you sense no word will come again. But … you are the word. A word that has come to me. Can you tell me how she died?’

‘She was in Deep Confinement,’ Nathan said, remembering the pale emptiness of the prison pits. ‘She begged me to help her, to dream her out, and I tried, but you can’t really manipulate the dreams. I messed it up. I left her in the desert – in the sun. She made it to the cave, but not in time. When I got back – when I found her – it was too late.’ He didn’t tell Kwanji’s father what the sundeath had done to her. The guilt returned, like a sickness in his stomach, but Osskva made no move to apportion blame.

‘She always wanted to change things,’ he said with a curious smile. ‘The government – the magics – the fate of the world. In the cave … what was she looking for?’

‘The Sangreal,’ Nathan said, picturing the greenstone cup, held in Kwanji’s ruined hand. ‘She asked me to bring it to you. She thought you could perform the Great Spell.’

‘Did she find it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then she died happy. I couldn’t do a Great Spell; I haven’t the power. Even the Grandir may not have the strength for it, or our world would have been saved long since. Besides, the Cup alone is no use. It needs also the Sword, and the Crown. Once they were said to be in the cave, guarded by a monster of ancient days, but there are other rumours. I’d heard they were scattered throughout the worlds for safe-keeping, so they could not be brought together too soon, or by the wrong agency, lest the Spell of Spells should go awry … Yet you say the Sangreal was in the cave.’

‘It was a mistake,’ Nathan explained. ‘It had been kept in my world, but someone stole it. After … after Kwanji died, I wasn’t sure what to do, but I thought it was best to take it back.’

‘You did right,’ Osskva said, ‘I expect. Time will tell. If we have enough of it left. What about the sword? Was that stolen too?’

The sword. In Nathan’s head, something else clicked into place. The princess had mentioned a sword, the Traitor’s Sword …

With that question, that connection, the dream jolted. Tell me about the sword, Nathan wanted to ask, but the words wouldn’t come out. It was like in an ordinary dream, when you try to speak but your vocal chords don’t work, and everything slows down, and the person you want to speak to is receding, fading inexorably from your thought. He had felt insubstantial, a pyjama-clad teenage ghost, but now he was growing solid, and the world around him thinned, the world of Arkatron on Eos, becoming ghost-like while he alone was real. He heard the voice of Osskva, insect-small and faint with distance: ‘Don’t go. We have things … to discuss … Questions … answers …’

But he couldn’t respond, and sleep swallowed him, plunging him back into the dark.

A few weeks after the attempted burglary, Chief Inspector Pobjoy called at Thornyhill again. ‘Of course, they won’t get custodial sentences,’ he said, referring to Ram and Ginger. ‘They’re underage. Ginger has a record already, petty theft, petty assault, petty everything. Ram’s been smarter: no previous, just a government health warning. The really interesting thing is their lawyer.’

‘Dear me,’ Bartlemy said, replenishing his guest’s tea mug. ‘I had no idea lawyers were interesting.’

Pobjoy didn’t grin – he wasn’t a natural grinner – but a sharp-edged smile flicked in and out, quick as a knife-blade. ‘Boys like that – backstreet kids, no dosh – they usually get whoever’s on call that day. Legal aid, no frills. That’s what they had in the past. But this time they get a Bentley among lawyers, top-of-the-range with power-steering and champagne-cooler. Hugh Purlieu-Smythe, legal adviser to the very, very rich. It would be a giveaway – if we knew who was footing the bill. Still, it is interesting, isn’t it?’

‘Indeed. Do we know who else this Purlieu-Smythe has represented in the recent past?’

‘I’ve been finding out.’ Pobjoy sipped his tea, nibbling the inevitable seductive biscuit. Sometimes he fantasized about what lunch or dinner might be like at Thornyhill. He was a single man living alone on a diet of ready meals, takeaways, and the occasional omelette, and the mere thought of such home-cooking must be put behind him, or it would seriously disrupt his professional detachment. ‘He’s done a few white-collar fraudsters – big city types who’ve brought their cash and their bad habits into the area in search of rural peace and quiet. Then there was that local authority corruption case – he was for the developer, got him off too. Grayling made donations to police charities – all the right people wined and dined – lent his Spanish villa to a lucky few. You get the picture.’

‘Are you suggesting some of your colleagues could be … swayed by such things?’ Bartlemy inquired gently.

‘It wouldn’t be anything overt,’ Pobjoy explained. ‘Just a general feeling that Grayling was a good bloke, one of the lads. One of the chaps, I should say. Wouldn’t have thought he’d be interested in this place, though. Or that cup of yours.’

‘It isn’t actually mine,’ Bartlemy murmured, but the inspector held to his train of thought.

‘Grayling isn’t much of a one for history and culture,’ he said. ‘We’re looking for the classic movie villain, right? Sinister type with very big bucks and an art collection no one ever gets to see. I have to say, most of the super-rich around here like to show off their paintings, at least to their chums; no point in having them otherwise. They collect for status, not pleasure. The Grail’s a little obscure for them.’

Bartlemy made an affirmative noise.

‘Myself, I’ve only come up against Purlieu-Smythe once before,’ Pobjoy resumed after a pause. ‘Another kid. Not quite like our Ram and Ginger, though. Poor little rich boy wanted for stealing a car, even though Daddy has four and Mummy two. Beat up a girl about a year ago, but someone talked her out of going to court. The boy’s a nasty little psycho in the making. Not yet eighteen.’

‘And the father?’ Bartlemy queried. ‘I assume it was he who employed the lawyer.’

‘Respectable,’ said Pobjoy. ‘Squeaky-clean businessman, plenty of good works, pillar-of-the-community image.’

‘Highly suspicious, in fact,’ said Bartlemy with a faint smile.

Pobjoy read few novels, but he took the point. ‘Real life isn’t much like thrillers,’ he said. ‘Pillars of the community are usually stuffy, but …’

‘Upright?’

‘Yeah. Just one point: he’s a publisher. Educational books, art, that sort of thing. He might have heard of the Grail.’

‘His name?’

‘I shouldn’t be telling you that.’

Bartlemy offered the policeman another biscuit.

‘Hackforth. Giles Hackforth. The company’s called Pentacle Publishing.’

‘A long-established firm,’ Bartlemy said. ‘Very reputable. So … we can infer that Hackforth is a cultured man, who might well have an interest in local antiquities, and the folklore that accompanies them.’

Pobjoy nodded. ‘I’d say you were imagining things,’ he went on, ‘if it wasn’t for Purlieu-Smythe. But lawyers like him don’t do charity work. There has to be a connection with someone, and Hackforth seems to be your best bet. I don’t see what we can do about it, though. Suspicion isn’t evidence.’

‘As you say. However, all information is valuable. Is there anything more you can tell me about him?’

Pobjoy hesitated. ‘Your nephew, Nathan Ward …’ There was a certain constraint in his manner. He was still uncomfortable at the mention of Nathan’s name, not least because in his view any individual, once suspected, was suspect forever, and he found it hard to change his mindset.

‘What about him?’ Bartlemy’s tone, as always, was mild.

‘I heard he was at Ffylde Abbey. Scholarship boy.’

‘Yes.’

‘So’s the problem child. Damon Hackforth. Should have thought they’d expel him, but apparently not. I expect Daddy’s buying the school a new wing or something.’

‘Ffylde Abbey is fundamentally a religious institution, remember. Perhaps they feel they cannot abandon the stray lamb – they want to bring him back to the fold.’

The inspector, cynical from experience, made a sound something like a snort.

‘Don’t dismiss the possibility,’ Bartlemy said. ‘I’ve seen things that would surprise you.’ And, on a note of irony: ‘You do not know the power of the light side.’

But Pobjoy missed the allusion. ‘I ought to be going,’ he said, finishing his tea. The biscuit plate was empty.

‘Next time,’ Bartlemy said, ‘you must stay to lunch.’

Nathan was accustomed to his uncle’s cooking, but habit didn’t take the edge off his appetite. He, Hazel and their friend George Fawn were devouring roast lamb with teenage enthusiasm the following Sunday and talking about Jason Wicks, the village’s aspiring thug, when Bartlemy inserted his question.

‘Do you have any problems of that kind at Ffylde?’

‘The teachers keep a close eye on things,’ Nathan said. ‘They try to stamp out bullying before it gets really nasty.’

‘No school bad boys?’ Bartlemy persisted. Annie looked thoughtfully at him.

‘There’s Nick Colby … he was caught insider-trading. He overheard his father talking about a merger and bought up shares for half the class.’

‘Did you get some?’ George asked, awed.

‘He’s the year below me.’

‘Anyone else?’ Bartlemy murmured.

‘Well … Damon Hackforth, in the Sixth. He’s been in trouble with the police. We’re not supposed to know, but of course everybody does. There was a rumour he’d be expelled. He’s always having long talks with Father Crowley. I expect they’re trying to reclaim him – some of the monks are very idealistic.’

‘Do you think they’ll succeed?’ Bartlemy asked.

Nathan made a face. ‘Don’t know. I’ve never really had anything to do with him, but … he gives off very bad vibes. You can feel it when he walks past. A sort of – aura – of anger and aggression. Worse than Jason Wicks. Ned Gable’s parents know his parents, and Ned says they begged the school not to chuck him out. They must be pretty desperate about him.’

‘They care about him, then?’ Annie said, flicking another glance at Bartlemy.

‘I expect so.’ Nathan was still young enough to assume that parents generally cared about their children. ‘He’s got a sister who’s an invalid. Ned says Damon’s jealous because she gets all the attention. She’s very ill – something they can’t fix, where she just goes on and on deteriorating. Muscular dystrophy, maybe. Something like that. She’s in a wheelchair. Ned says she’s very pretty and clever.’

‘How awful,’ Hazel said, thinking of a girl who had everything she didn’t, trapped in a wheelchair, wasting away.

‘Awful,’ Annie echoed, thinking of the parents, with their violent, mixed-up son and dying daughter.

‘Stupid,’ said George, ‘being jealous of someone who can’t even walk.’

‘Good point,’ Bartlemy said. ‘Most of the unhappiness in the world is the direct result of stupidity – of one kind or another. Who’s for baked apple?’

Afterwards, when Nathan, Hazel and George had left, Annie said: ‘So what’s your interest in this boy Damian?’

‘Damon. Did I say I was interested?’

‘You didn’t need to say. I could see it.’

‘I don’t know that I am interested in him,’ Bartlemy said. ‘I might be interested in his father.’ He told her about his conversation with Pobjoy.

‘Is it going to start again?’ Annie whispered. ‘Like last year?’ She was remembering a man with a crooked smile who had been nice to her – a thing made of river-water with a woman’s face – a very old corpse in a white-cushioned bed. And the secret she had never shared with her son, the secret of his paternity …

‘You’ll have to tell him,’ Bartlemy said, as though reading her mind.

‘That’s for me to decide.’ Annie’s tone was almost tart. ‘He doesn’t have to know yet. Perhaps he never will.’

‘That’s just it,’ Bartlemy sighed. ‘He ought to know. It’s important. It may be relevant.’

‘To what?’

‘Trouble,’ Bartlemy said. ‘Like last year.’

TWO Magic

As the light failed, Bartlemy moved round the living room, drawing the curtains. He was alone now except for the dog, who stood by one of the windows, staring through the latticed panes with cocked ears and a faint stirring of the hackles on his neck. When Bartlemy joined him, he thought he saw a movement outside – the branches of a nearby shrub twitched, new leaves shivered as if in the wake of something, but whatever it was, it had gone too swiftly for him to have even a glimpse of it. ‘Something small, I think,’ Bartlemy mused. ‘Smaller than a human.’ Hoover glanced up at his master, his shaggy face alarmingly intelligent. ‘Well, well,’ Bartlemy said. ‘I see.’

When the darkness deepened he swept the hearth and laid a fire that wasn’t made of coals. Presently, pale flames leaped up, casting a flickering glow that played with the shadows rather than dispersing them. Bartlemy threw a powder on the flames which smothered them into smoke. The chimney was blocked and the air in the room thickened, till the eyes of both man and dog grew red from the sting of it. Bartlemy began to speak, soft strange words that swirled the air and shaped the fume, sucking it into a kind of cloud which seemed to spin inward upon itself, until there was a shifting at the core, and the smoke cleared from an irregular space, and in the space was a picture. At first it looked like a television picture, only the definition was far better, but as it developed the perspective changed, until it was no longer smoke-deep but profound as reality, a peephole into another place. Sound followed image, and a draught came from it bearing the scent of roses. Bartlemy saw a woman in a garden cutting flowers. The garden was beautiful and the woman well-dressed, but when she lifted her head her face was pinched and sad.

Then the picture changed. Smoke-magic is wayward, unreliable; it can be encouraged but not controlled. The scenes that passed before him were fragmented, their meaning often obscure, with no logic in the sequence, no connecting thread – though Bartlemy knew that much later some connection might be revealed. After the garden the vision darkened. He saw a man whose hooked profile jutted beyond the overhang of his cowl, lit only by a furtive candle-glimmer, head bent towards another and whispering, whispering, while his auditor, a dwarf with more beard than face, listened with dread in the twist of his brows. Bartlemy knew this must be Josevius Grimthorn, ancient warden of the Grail, who had died fourteen hundred years ago, and his henchman (or henchdwarf), a creature long imprisoned beneath Thornyhill Darkwood, until Nathan and Hazel, exploring in the valley, had accidentally freed him. Then came the cup itself, a chalice of polished stone, glowing green in a dim recess, and what appeared to be a gallery of those who had sought for it. The Jewish collector, starving in Dachau – the grandson of an SS officer, drowning in a rainstorm – an old woman, older than she looked, tangled in river-weed – a greedy academic, clutching the wheel of a car, driven mad by phantoms who had eaten his mind. All insane, drowned, dead. And then those who had survived: Eric Rhindon, the purple-eyed exile from an alternative universe, Rowena Thorn, last descendant of a vanished family, Julian Epstein, the badger-haired man from Sotheby’s – and Nathan, who had brought the Grail back from another world so it could return to Rowena, its rightful guardian. And now Bartlemy held it in trust at Thornyhill, the house where her ancestors had lived, until the moment came for which it had been made – whenever that moment might be.

There are three elements to a Great Spell: the female principle, the male principle, and the circle that binds. The Cup, the Sword, the Crown. Relics from a different Time, a different cosmos, forged endless ages ago and hidden away – the Cup in this world, the Sword and the Crown none knew where – guarded by alien forces – until in the city of Arkatron on Eos a ruler thousands of years old should find a way to complete the Spell and save his people from destruction …

But the smoke-magic could not pierce the walls of this world, nor reveal the purpose of the Ultimate Powers (if there was one). Bartlemy saw only the kaleidoscope of quick-change images, the clues that led and misled. A blue-eyed schoolboy with a soft mouth, and Hazel watching him, covertly, from behind her hair – a star that wasn’t a star, looking down on Annie’s bookshop – a phantom in a mirror, too vague to have form or face but slowly solidifying, gone before he could make it out. And then they were inside the bookshop, and a man with an anxious forehead was leafing through a book, a very old book with handwritten notes at the back, in an ink that wasn’t black but brown with age. An ink, Bartlemy thought, that might once have been red. The man bought the book – Bartlemy heard Annie’s murmur of thanks – and the picture followed him out of the shop, and down the street, and somewhere in the background there was a little sound like a sigh, the released breath of an archer who sees his arrow hit the bull’s eye at last. But there was nobody there to breathe …

Lastly a dark figure in a dark room, long-robed, his back to the watcher, presumably Josevius again. He was dribbling powder through his fingers to form a magic circle – there was a hiss: ‘Fiumé!’ and a gleam of fire ran round the perimeter. And then came the muttered rhythm of an incantation, and a slow pale form coalesced at the circle’s heart. The magister, Bartlemy thought, summoning one of the Old Spirits – the Hunter, the Hag, the Child, the One We Do Not Name – in the deal which cost him his soul. But Bartlemy had used few fire-crystals, and as the last one crumbled to a smoulder the image faded into smoke. He unblocked the chimney, and the air cleared, and Hoover came and rested his chin on his master’s knee.

‘Well,’ Bartlemy said, ‘was that helpful, or wasn’t it? Do we know anything we didn’t know before? Or – at the risk of sounding like Donald Rumsfeld – do we only know things we don’t know?’ The dog made a whiffling noise. ‘Who was the man in the bookshop? Would Annie have any idea? It might be worth making a little drawing, and showing it to her. It’s a pity I’m not a better artist, but my creative skills are usually confined to the kitchen. Still, I can always cheat. Magic is about cheating, after all.’

Hoover gave a short, sharp bark.

‘Yes,’ said Bartlemy. ‘I take the point. If I can cheat, so can others. I’ll bear it in mind.’

He poured himself a glass of something that smelt of raspberries and blackberries, of cinnamon and cardamom, of Christmas cake and summer spice – but most of all of alcohol. When he had taken a sip or two he remarked with uncharacteristic force: ‘I wish I knew what the hell was going on.’

Hoover thumped his tail by way of agreement.

The summer term had begun badly for Hazel. Maths, never her favourite subject, had taken a turn for the worse, and although Nathan usually helped her with it he was busy with his own commitments and somehow, when they did meet, they always had better things to talk about. George was quite good at understanding maths, but less good at explaining what he understood about it. Now, she was floundering in a quagmire of incomprehensible numbers, struggling with the feeling, long familiar to her, that there was no point in trying to think during lessons because it wouldn’t get her anywhere, so she might as well give up before she started. Her own stupidity made her angry, and she turned the anger outward on others. She was used to the idea that Nathan was cleverer than her – Nathan was cleverer than everybody – but it was galling to find herself taking second place to George, whom she had always slightly despised, in a friendly sort of way.

But far more serious was the Jonas Tyler situation. Of course, he didn’t know she liked him – they’d only ever exchanged a few words – she didn’t want him to know, or anyone else – but that was beside the point. She’d seen him twice talking to Ellen Carver, not ordinary talking but the low-voiced, intimate kind of talk that people do when they are close to each other, and Ellen’s friend Sarah said he’d asked Ellen out to a coffee shop. Jason Wicks, already six foot two, went to pubs and terrorized the older villagers of Eade by drinking beer on street corners and throwing the cans into people’s gardens, but Jonas, though he probably drank beer, only did it in the privacy of his own home. Nonetheless, to Hazel a coffee shop represented a possible venue for seduction – the seduction, that is, of Jonas by Ellen, rather than vice versa. She spent her maths lessons brooding about it, and went home on the school bus sitting alone, wrapped in silence. Safe in the lair of her bedroom, she fought with frustration and inchoate rage, feeling herself ugly, undesirable, with a brain that wouldn’t work and a body that let her down. She remembered her great-grandmother – Effie Carlow with her raptor’s eye and witch’s nose, living in an isolated cottage, frightening people, frightening Hazel, drowned in river-water after a spell too far. You too have the power … She didn’t want to be like that, she didn’t want to be old and mad and scary, dabbling in charms and cantrips and other illusions. But the thought of Jonas with Ellen was gall and wormwood to her – it seemed to her, in the blackness of her heart, that she had nothing to lose.

She got out the bottles she had already selected, Effie’s notebook with its peely cover and scratchy writing, the beeswax candle she had bought the day before. Effie’s notes said nothing about a candle, but Hazel felt it was appropriate. (In Buffy, Willow always lit candles when she was doing magic.) She ought to go into the attic – Effie had used the attic sometimes – but the lock was broken and anyway, she had once seen something there she didn’t like. The bedroom was her place, private and secure. She wedged a chair under the door handle and cleared the dressing table by dint of shoving things onto the floor, fixing the candle in place in front of the mirror. Then she remembered the matches were in the kitchen and had to un-wedge the door to fetch them. Finally, she was ready.

She had drawn the curtains but it wasn’t dark and the candle-flame looked dim and unimpressive, a tiny gleam against the many-coloured chaos of her room. The theme music from Lord of the Rings filled the background; she had hoped it would be suitably atmospheric. In fact, atmosphere seemed to be lacking. She read out the words Effie had penned, fortunately in block capitals for clarity, unfortunately in an unknown language with no guidelines as to pronunciation. Words – as far as she could tell – intended to summon a spirit to her assistance. There was something about drawing a circle, setting boundaries to confine the spirit, but the clutter of her bedroom offered little scope for magic circles, and anyway, she looked on this as a trial run, believing nothing would happen. She had faith in science, in Nathan’s alternative universes, but not in magic, despite experience. Not in her magic.

Nothing happened.

She tried the words again, attempting a French-style pronunciation which seemed to go well with them. (Her French wasn’t great but it was better than her maths.) Her voice sounded more confident now – if nothing was going to happen, it was safe to be confident about it.

The candle-flame stretched out into a thin spool of brilliance. The room seemed darker, even if it wasn’t. Behind the flame, the mirror clouded. Hazel became aware of her heartbeat, pounding at her ribs. Thought stopped; she couldn’t tear her gaze from the mirror. Mist coiled behind the glass, slowly resolving itself into a face – a face that wavered at first, as if unable to decide how it should look, then settled into a slim, pale oval, with silver-blue eyes and silver-blonde hair that fanned out in an intangible breeze. A face curiously resembling one on a magazine cover that stared up from the floor – but Hazel didn’t notice that.

‘You have called me,’ said the face, in a voice that echoed strangely for a second, then grew low and soft. ‘I have come.’

‘Who are you?’ Hazel whispered. She had once seen the spirit with whom her great-grandmother had had dealings – the same malignant water spirit whom both Annie and Bartlemy had encountered – but it had looked nothing like this.

‘I am Lilliat, the Spirit of Flowers,’ said the face, and scattered petals seemed to flutter through her fanning hair, and pale blooms opened in a garland about her neck. ‘What is your wish?’

‘Do you – do you grant wishes?’ Hazel stammered, doubting, incredulous, trying to quell the leap of hope inside her. She was no fairytale heroine, rubbing a lamp to get a genie. This was the real world (or at least, this was a real world) where rubbing a lamp gave you nothing but a cleaner lamp.

Lilliat laughed – a laugh as silvery as her hair. ‘Sometimes,’ she said. ‘It depends on the wish – and the one who wishes. You are young for a witch, very young, but there is power in you. I can feel it. Green power, new and untried. Between us, we will try your power. What do you wish?’

‘There’s a boy,’ Hazel said, too quickly, rushing into the fairytale before it could evaporate. ‘I want him to – to notice me. To like me. Me and no one else.’

‘Yes …’ Lilliat closed her eyes, though it made little difference. The lids, too, were silver-blue. Sparkles danced on her eyelashes. ‘I see him. He is dark, very dark, with hair as black as a crow’s wing and –’

‘Wrong boy,’ Hazel said hastily. ‘That one.’ She pointed to the photograph which she had placed beside the candle.

Almost, Lilliat frowned. ‘Show him to me.’

Hazel picked up the photo and held it out in front of the mirror. As Lilliat studied it the flowers at her breast seemed to wither, and the blue shadows on her skin deepened, and her lips grew pale. But when she spoke again the fairy colours returned, and there were wild roses in her hair.

‘What is his name?’

‘Jonas Tyler,’ Hazel said, and somehow, saying his name made the magic real, and she knew she had taken an irrevocable step, though in what direction she couldn’t guess.

‘It shouldn’t be difficult for a girl like you to enchant him,’ Lilliat said sweetly. ‘A girl with youth in her eyes, and power in her blood … Look at yourself!’

Hazel’s face appeared beside her in the mirror – a different Hazel, beautiful and aloof, changed and yet the same, with her hair lifted off her face by Lilliat’s phantom breeze and silver shadows on her skin …

There was a long pause. Then Hazel said: ‘I found these potions –’ she indicated the bottles on the dressing table ‘– I thought they might help. What do I do?’

Her reflection faded.

‘What need of evil medicines?’ Lilliat said. ‘You have seen yourself – yourself as you truly are. I will do the rest.’

‘Thank you.’ Hazel felt grateful, hopeful, doubtful. Little showed in her face, but Lilliat saw it all.

‘A favour for a favour.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Don’t you know the stories?’ Her tone was still soft, still with an echo of silvery laughter. ‘There is always a price. The mermaid who sold her voice to turn her fishtail into legs, the prince who toiled seven years to break a witch’s spell … But what you ask is a little thing. The price will be small, no more than you can afford.’

‘Money?’ Hazel said. ‘I don’t have much money.’

Lilliat laughed again – laughed and laughed – and the flower-petals turned to bank notes which scattered around her like butterflies, and golden coins were shaken from the shower of her hair. ‘Not money,’ she said at last. ‘Money is a humbug. I am not human.’

Suddenly, Hazel felt cold.

‘What is the price?’

Nathan, back at school after the weekend, found himself wondering if his uncle’s interest in Damon Hackforth had been merely idle curiosity. He wasn’t sure – Bartlemy’s manner was too subtle for him to be sure – but he was a perceptive boy, and he knew Uncle Barty wasn’t idly curious by nature. When the opportunity presented itself, he encouraged Ned Gable to talk about his parents’ friends.

‘I really don’t like Damon,’ he said. ‘You can feel the violence coming off him, sort of in pulses. Like a dodgy electric current.’

‘He’s dodgy all right,’ Ned affirmed. ‘Stupid, too. I mean, why steal a car when they’ve got five in the garage? His dad’s got pots of money – he’d probably give him one for his eighteenth if he stayed out of trouble. He won’t now, though.’

‘What’s his sister like?’

‘Melly-Anne? I told you.’

‘Meliane?’ Nathan echoed.

‘Melanie-Anne. They shorten it.’

‘How old is she?’ It was a starting point.

‘She’s quite old. Twenty-one or two. She’s really nice. The Hackforths had a do there once, some charity thing, Mum made me go. Melly-Anne talked to me for ages – she was lovely. That was before she was in the wheelchair. At least a year ago.’

‘What did you say was wrong with her?’

‘Muscular dystrophy – multiple sclerosis – one of those diseases that’s slow and fatal and can’t be stopped. Beginning with M. Mum says old Hackforth’s so desperate, he’s trying potty cures now.’

‘Potty cures?’ Nathan said, bemused.

‘New Age stuff, weird herbs, acupuncture, that kind of thing.’ Ned was a shade impatient. ‘Potty, poor sod. Still, you can’t blame him. I mean, when you’re desperate, really desperate, I suppose anything’s worth a try.’

‘Are you sure Damon’s jealous of her?’ Nathan asked. ‘With her dying and all that.’

‘He’s warped,’ Ned explained. ‘You know? Warped inside. Like – like when you leave something out in the garden all winter, a rake or something, and the rain gets to it, and it goes all bendy, and you can’t straighten it up.’ It was a metaphor that might have surprised his English master, who rarely connected Ned with metaphors. ‘That’s Damon. He’s bendy. They won’t be able to straighten him. I expect he’ll go to prison in the end.’

Nathan didn’t say any more. The cricket season was under way, and there were important things to discuss. But he made up his mind he would tell his uncle what he had heard, just in case he wanted to know.

At night in the dormitory Nathan was torn between trying not to dream and the urge to revisit the dead city, to return to Osskva and say all that needed to be said, to see the princess again. (He didn’t even know her name.) Somehow, he sensed that if he resisted the dreams would not come, but if his curiosity became too much for him then the dreams would take over, and his sleep would be no longer his own. He wondered if particles in physics experienced these dilemmas, or if they simply popped in and out of the world as a matter of course, because it was their nature. And he remembered a saying he had heard or read somewhere: ‘Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward.’ So he wasn’t really surprised, the next night, to find himself back in the dream.

Not Arkatron: the other city. The city on two hills (he must try to learn some names). His awareness skimmed over the marshland, glimpsing the cloud-shapes sliding across the broken pools, breathing the foul-smelling gases that rose here and there in slow bubbles. The reed-beds were as tall as a child, and although he saw no living thing he caught the occasional whistling call of some solitary creature, probably a bird. Then he rose high over the city, circling the princess’s house before plunging down into the narrow darkness of a chimney and emerging at the bottom slightly startled by the speed of his descent.

He found himself in a bedroom, or more accurately a bedchamber: it was too large, too full of shabby grandeur, to be merely a room. The ceiling was very high and the windows tall and heavily curtained – as in so much of the house, daylight was plainly unwelcome, forcibly excluded even when it had the chance to get in. There was a fourposter bed on a dais at the far end draped with still more curtains, layers of curtains, brocade frayed into threads and moth-eaten muslin, looped and scooped and tied with tattered cord. In the bed, supported on a lop-sided stack of pillows, was a man in a nightcap. He looked both fat and thin, his limbs like knotted pipe-cleaners, his rounded body smothered under a mound of rucked-up bedclothes. The rag-end of a bandage showed beneath the hem of his nightshirt. Another person stood beside the bed, holding a candle which dripped wax onto the coverlet. Nathan recognized him at once, even in the gloom – his dandelion-seed hair and elongated nose. The man from the library.

‘You could do with some light in here, Maj,’ he was saying. (Madge? Nathan thought.) ‘Let me open the curtains – open the windows. Fresh air, that’s what you need. Air and light!’ He set down the candle, almost setting fire to the drapes, and went to the nearest window.

‘It was Mrs Prendergoose,’ the invalid explained. ‘She thought the dark would help me sleep. Anyway, she says daylight is bad for the sick. And fresh air.’ He sounded almost apologetic.

‘Fiddle-fuddle! Twiddle-piffle! Woman’s a fool. Nurse to the princess, indeed – Nell’s so healthy she’s never needed a nurse. Wouldn’t have survived otherwise. Prendergoose couldn’t nurse a sick rabbit – or cook one, come to that.’ Daylight spilled in, revealing their surroundings to be even shabbier than Nathan had suspected, sombrely furnished and cobwebby about the corners. ‘Did she give you lunch?’

‘Beef jelly. She says it’s very nourishing.’

‘Probably right,’ said the old man with an abrupt volte-face. ‘Things that taste boring often are.’ He came back to the bed, twitching aside both covers and nightshirt to expose a bulky mass of bandaging from calf to thigh. In the stronger light the invalid looked very ill. His face must once have been round and merry, but his cheeks had dropped to the jaw and his eyes sunk deep in their sockets. There were grey shadows on his skin, dark as bruises. His nightcap slipping sideways should have given him a comic look, but instead the effect was merely pathetic. Nathan noticed a tiny crown embroidered on it and realized who he must be.

He’s the king. Of course. The king who’s sick. Maj … your Majesty …

The old man undid the bandage. Nathan couldn’t see very well but there seemed to be a long wound running half the length of the leg, imperfectly closed and seeping an evil ooze. The old man began to clean it, using a white cloth and water from a silver basin. Then he scooped dollops of thick paste from a jar and applied them to the infected area. ‘Honey,’ he muttered. ‘Amazing stuff. Extraordinary healing properties. Intelligent creatures, bees.’

‘It’s awfully sticky,’ the king pointed out. Some of it had found its way onto the bedding.

‘It’s supposed to be sticky. Change the linen later. Give the Prendergoose something useful to do.’

He covered the lot with padding and a fresh bandage, winding it round and round while the king, with a palpable effort, lifted his leg off the mattress. When it was over he fell back on the pillow-stack, his voice suddenly hoarse and faint. ‘Frimbolus!’ He seized the old man’s collar, trying to draw him closer. ‘Will I – will I ever be cured? Tell me the truth! How long has it been – ten years – twelve? What if I never get well again?’

Frimbolus detached the grasping hand and laid it gently down on the royal stomach, giving it a pat in the process. ‘Ten years,’ he said, in the tone of one who likes to get things right. ‘Nellwyn was four when it happened. There’ll be a cure – there’s always a cure. Anyway, we have to keep trying – mustn’t lose hope. Maybe the honey will do the trick. Magical stuff, honey. One of these days –’

‘Will I live long enough to be cured?’ the king said with a fretful movement of his head.

‘Spineless guffle!’ Frimbolus responded. ‘You’re the king, aren’t you? Duty – responsibility – loving daughter – loyal subjects! No business to go dying on us.’

‘How are my subjects?’ the invalid asked, sounding very weary. ‘They haven’t seen me for so long. Do they still remember their king?’

‘They’re doing all right. The princess looks after them.’ He doesn’t know, Nathan thought. They haven’t told him about the people leaving. ‘Important thing is to keep your spirits up. They mustn’t see you like this.’

‘Spirits … up …’ The king managed a smile, as though mocking himself, and then seemed to fall asleep.

Frimbolus emptied the basin out of a window, picked up the soiled bandages and left. Nathan tried to follow him, but the dream plucked him away, transporting him through a network of dim corridors where tapestries billowed in phantom draughts and embroidered horsemen galloped past him. Fireplaces yawned, dust sifted through the still air, pattering footsteps fled from him, vanishing into the muffling gloom of the house. Reality receded; the dream became surreal, the building a vast Gormenghast where his thought roamed endlessly, trapped as if in a maze, searching for something he couldn’t find. Then suddenly there was an open door, daylight, normality. Another room, another scene. A room whose fourposter bed looked small and inviting, patchwork-quilted, its curtains sewn with silver stars, its pelmet carved with more stars and a crescent moon. There was a sheepskin rug on the floor and a dressing-table with an oval mirror – a much bigger mirror than Hazel’s, Nathan noted. It was the sort of mirror in front of which a queen might have sat, ermine-collared and velvet-gowned, applying her eyeliner or demanding verification of her beauty from some supernatural source. But the person sitting there had untidy hair and a darned dress and a smudge of dirt on her cheek. The princess.

He knew now her name was Nellwyn, Nell for short. Princess Nell. It suited her.

Behind her was the woman he had glimpsed once before, calling her and the other children in from the garden. Her head was bundled up in a species of wimple and her plump face was worn with time and worry. It was the sort of face that Nathan would have called comely, an old-fashioned word which in his mind meant homely, pleasant, almost but not quite pretty. It was marred by the worry-lines on her forehead and the pursing of her mouth. She was brushing the princess’s hair, taking it a section at a time, dragging the brush through thickets of tangle while Nell winced and complained.

‘Prenders, please … Ouch! Why can’t I just leave it, like the other girls do?’

‘You’re the princess. You’re not supposed to look like other girls.’

‘Megwen Twymoor comes from one of our oldest families, so does Bronlee Ynglevere, and they don’t have to spend hours brushing their hair. I know: I asked.’

‘Megwen Twymoor looks like a gipsy, and Bronlee is barely six, so she doesn’t count. A woman’s chief beauty is her hair.’

‘I’m not beautiful,’ Nell said, pulling faces at the mirror. ‘Anyway, there’s no one here to see me.’

‘That’s not the point,’ said her nurse (Nathan was sure that was who she must be). ‘You don’t want to get into bad habits.’

‘I’d love some bad habits,’ Nell sighed.

‘One day you’ll go away from here,’ the nurse persisted, ‘and then things will be different. You’ll go to balls and parties, wear pretty dresses, dance with young men. Your hair will be threaded with flowers and pearls. If you would go to your mother’s family –’

‘I won’t go,’ the princess interrupted. ‘We’ve been through this a hundred times. I won’t leave my father, I won’t leave Wilderslee. That’s that.’

‘Think again, mommet. This is no place for a young girl. I can look after your father. I asked him, the other evening, I said how would he feel, if you went away for a bit, just for a visit, met more young people –’

‘You go too far.’ Nell tugged her hair free of the brush and turned to face Mrs Prendergoose with an expression Nathan thought of as princessly. Proud, a little haughty, very grownup. Her voice was quiet and cold. ‘You had no business to discuss such matters with him. Whether I go or stay is not up to you.’

‘But your father said it was a good idea, he said –’

‘I am the princess, as you are always reminding me. I may not be princess of much, but it still counts for something. Princesses don’t abandon the kingdom when things go wrong, they don’t run away and go to balls when their people are suffering. Being a princess isn’t about brushing your hair and wearing silk dresses; it’s about duty and honour and love. I love my father, I love my subjects – those I have left. I’m not going. Don’t ever presume to bring up the matter again.’

The woman looked slightly daunted, but still tried to protest. ‘Who are you to talk of love? You know nothing about it. I’ve loved you from babyhood – I only want what’s best for you. Who’s turning you against me? It’s that Frimbolus Quayne, isn’t it? He’s always been jealous of me – jealous of my position here …’

‘You may leave now.’

‘What about the Urdemons? They appeared first when you were a child, playing with magic. If you go, maybe they’ll go.’

‘Leave.’

Nell’s face had hardened with determination. Mrs Prendergoose whisked round, dropping the hairbrush on the floor, and left on a flounce.

Alone, Nell picked up the brush, yanking in vain at her tangles. The hardness faded from her face; she looked confused, doubtful, on the verge of tears. ‘It’s not your fault!’ Nathan wanted to tell her. ‘Whatever’s happening, it can’t be your fault. Listen to Frimbolus.’ She was surely too young, too brave, too good to be the cause of something evil. He wanted to reassure her so badly he thought he would materialize, but the dream-barrier held him back. Nell had set down the brush in frustration, murmuring a word he didn’t recognize: ‘Ruuissé!’ When she shook her hair it sparkled for a moment as if powdered with glitterdust, and the snarls unravelled by themselves, and the long waves rippled down her back as if they were alive. As the magic dissipated she swept the loose tresses over her shoulder and started to twist them into a thick braid.

Suddenly, the room darkened. The wind – or something worse than wind – screeched around the walls. The darkness pressed against the window, and in it there were eyes. Huge eyes full of a yellow fury, hungry and soulless. But the princess didn’t scream or run. She jumped to her feet, knocking over the stool she had been sitting on, confronting the apparition. Her body shook with anger or fear or both. ‘Go!’ she cried. ‘All I did was tidy my hair! All I did – Go, you foul thing! Go!’ She thrust the hairbrush in front of her like a weapon, since that was all she had. For a second something like the muzzle of an animal was squashed against the pane, the mouth distended into an unnatural gape ragged with teeth. Then it seemed to dissolve, changing, becoming an ogre’s leer with thick lips and warty snout, before it melted back into the dark, leaving only the eyes. They shrank, slowly, until the shadow swallowed them and they vanished, and the pallor of a clouded afternoon came pouring through the glass, bright as sunshine after the horror of the dark.

But the princess turned away, dropping on her knees beside the bed, her face in the quilt, sobbing not with relief but despair. Nathan struggled to touch her, to comfort her, but he could feel the dream fading, drifting away from him, and his will couldn’t hold it, and he slid helplessly back into sleep.

‘Do you recognize him?’ Bartlemy asked, holding out a sketch which, despite his best efforts, made the average Identikit picture look like something by Rembrandt.

‘Should I?’ Annie said, clearly baffled by the artwork if not the question.

‘I believe he bought a book from you, probably not long ago.’

Annie studied the sketch with a wry expression. ‘I don’t think …’

‘I’m not much of an artist, I know,’ Bartlemy conceded. ‘Even with a little assistance, I’m not going to win any prizes. But I hoped there was enough of a likeness to give you some idea. The book might have been a description of local folklore, a history of satanic practices, even a grimoire. That sort of thing. Or so I suspect.’

‘I sold a couple last month to a dealer,’ Annie said, ‘but that was on the Internet. I don’t know what he looks like – we’ve never actually met.’

‘This man came in personally.’

‘Are you sure?’ He nodded. ‘I’m sorry, I can’t recall anyone … like this. Not lately, anyway. I don’t remember everybody who comes to the shop, but even so, it’s a small place, most of my customers are regulars – collectors, enthusiasts, or just people who can’t live without a book and find it cheaper to buy second-hand. I notice strangers. This man isn’t a regular – at least, I don’t think so.’ Her faint grimace betrayed her doubts about Bartlemy’s portraiture. ‘If he came in recently, I ought to recognize him.’

‘Never mind,’ Bartlemy said. ‘It’s probably my drawing that’s at fault. It isn’t important.’

‘Isn’t it?’ Annie asked shrewdly.

‘I don’t know,’ Bartlemy admitted. ‘That burglary attempt was … unusual. I’m not normally troubled by that sort of thing. I’d like to know what was behind it – if anything.’

‘And this man?’

‘A face in the spellfire. No more. He may not be relevant. He may be involved with something else, something that has little to do with us. Using smoke-magic is like surfing fifty TV channels with no way of knowing which is which. Without reference points, you can’t tell if you’ve got the programme you want or not …’

Annie smiled. ‘That’s a very modern metaphor,’ she said, ‘for such an arcane pursuit.’

‘Magic isn’t really arcane,’ Bartlemy said. ‘It’s been around a long time, that’s all. So has drawing – people were doing it on cave walls – but that doesn’t make it arcane. And I’m better at magic than I am at drawing. Not much better, but a little. I prefer cooking to both.’

‘Ah, but your cooking is definitely magical.’

‘Not magic,’ said Bartlemy. ‘Just practice.’

After he went, Annie found the picture still on her desk. Perhaps he hadn’t considered it worth keeping. She tucked it in a drawer, in case he should want it back, and sat down at the computer in quest of an obscure dictionary of wild flowers for a local botanist. The click of the door-latch made her look up, smiling on a reflex – but the smile cooled when she saw Chief Inspector Pobjoy.

She said: ‘Hello. Can I help you?’ in a tone that was strictly polite. She still wasn’t prepared to forget his suspicions of Nathan.

Sensing hostility, his thin features grew a little thinner. ‘Just passing,’ he said. ‘Since those kids broke in at Thornyhill, I thought I should keep an eye on things.’

Annie allowed herself to thaw a fraction. ‘You must think we’re prone to trouble,’ she said.

‘I think …’ He checked himself. ‘There’s a lot I never learned about that business last year.’

‘The accomplice,’ Annie said promptly. ‘The woman who pretended to be Rianna Sardou. You never heard any more about her, did you?’ She herself knew the truth quite as well as Bartlemy, but it wasn’t the kind of thing you could explain to a policeman. It occurred to her that it was unkind to mention it, but in view of Pobjoy’s record she decided she didn’t care.

‘We’re still looking,’ he said, privately annoyed because he knew they weren’t, and the fugitive would never be found. He felt he had lost control of the conversation, and told himself it had been a mistake to come in, succumbing to the urge to see her again. ‘I wondered … It was a terrible experience for you. I hope you were able to get over the shock.’

‘Shock?’ Annie echoed blankly.

‘Discovering the corpse. I’ve seen a few – I’m used to it – but it wasn’t pretty.’

‘I was all right,’ Annie said. ‘I’m tough.’

She didn’t look tough, he thought, with her slight, compact figure, her soft short curls, the muted shades of her skin and hair. But there was a vein of strength under the softness, a core of something hidden – his detective instincts could sense it, even though it was out of reach.

He said awkwardly: ‘I just wanted to be sure. You can get help with these things, but … I should’ve come sooner.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Annie responded, confused by the pointlessness of the exchange. ‘It was nice of you to bother. Er … about the burglary at Thornyhill: do you believe there was something behind it?’

He shrugged. ‘Maybe. Could be just teenage youths going off the rails as usual. At that age, they think they can get away with anything.’

‘Really?’ Annie said, her hostility reviving. She assumed he was alluding to Nathan. ‘I’ve always thought kids were a lot like adults, both good and bad, only braver – more reckless – more generous. Life hasn’t yet taught them to be careful, to hold back, do nothing. Children are trusting and confident where people like me – and you – are cynical and afraid.’

‘I didn’t mean …’ He wanted to apologize, but couldn’t find the words. Instead, he said: ‘I don’t think you’re afraid of very much.’

She stared at him, surprised and disconcerted. Before she could find something to say, another customer came in, and Pobjoy, with a mumbled goodbye, had gone. Annie, feeling the encounter had been oddly unfinished, returned to her computer screen.

But the wildflower dictionary was proving elusive and her mind wandered. She studied the latest customer, idly, conscious that she had come across him somewhere before though she didn’t think it was here. He was a heavily-built man who looked as if he had once been heavier: his skin had that ill-fitting sag which occurs when someone has lost too much weight too quickly, and his jacket flapped around his midriff. His hair was thinning above an anxious frown; possibly he was unused to second-hand bookshops. Annie’s routine Can I help you? made him turn, and suddenly she remembered.

‘I’ve seen you before,’ she said. ‘At Ffylde. It must have been the carol service last Christmas.’

‘Yes.’ He didn’t appear to consider it a talking point.

There was a short pause. ‘What are you looking for?’ Annie asked.

‘A – a book. A book on pagan customs, magic rituals … A grimoire.’

Annie suppressed a jolt of shock. (After all, someone who wasn’t traumatized by a dead body shouldn’t be jolted by a request for a book, particularly in a bookshop.) ‘At the back in the left-hand corner,’ she said. ‘Under Arch and Anth.’

As he moved away Annie opened the drawer, glanced down at the sketch, closed it again. Presently, the man came back to the desk carrying an old book with a stained cover which Annie had bought in a job lot several months ago and never looked at properly. He gave her the money, clutching his purchase as if afraid somebody might take it from him, and refused her offer of a bag. She thanked him, making no further parent-to-parent overtures. When he had gone, she picked up the phone.

‘Barty?’

‘Yes?’

‘Can you see the future in the smoke as well as the past?’

‘Sometimes,’ he said. ‘But there are many futures. What you see may not always come true. The future can be changed, if you are resolute.’

Annie waved this irrelevance aside. ‘A man just came in and bought a grimoire. I can’t tell if he’s the man in your picture – it could be a coincidence – but –’

‘There are no coincidences in magic,’ Bartlemy said. ‘Did you get a chance to learn his name?’

‘No,’ Annie said, ‘but I recognized him. I’ve seen him at Ffylde, at the carol service. He must have a son there.’

There was a thoughtful silence.

‘What was in the book?’ Bartlemy asked.

‘I never really looked at it. Drawings I think – sigils and stuff. Incantations in Latin – you told me those don’t normally work. Some hand-written notes at the back. I don’t remember anything else.’

‘A pity. Still …’

‘If you had told me to check any grimoires in stock, I would have done,’ Annie said with dignity.

‘I know. Magic is invariably unpredictable. You’d think I would have learned that by now. But at least we have the link with Ffylde: that’s something.’

‘Do you think he’s the father of that boy you were so interested in?’ Annie inquired. ‘The one who’s always in trouble.’

‘That,’ Bartlemy said gently, ‘really would be a coincidence.’

‘Would it?’ Annie said.

It was a couple of weeks before Nathan had the chance to tell his uncle what he had learnt about the Hackforths. ‘Dear me,’ Bartlemy said. ‘I seem to have shown my curiosity very plainly. First your mother catches me out, now you. And I thought I was being subtle.’

‘Oh, you were,’ Nathan said. ‘Hazel and George didn’t notice anything. Mum and I are more observant – and we know you better.’

Bartlemy smiled. ‘I must be more careful,’ he said.

Nathan was sitting on the hearthrug in the living room where he had sat when he was a baby, while Hoover rolled onto his back to have his tummy rubbed. ‘I ran into Damon the other day on the stairs,’ he remarked. ‘I mean, literally. He was sprinting down two steps at a time and he clouted me with his shoulder, I think it was an accident but I don’t know. I sort of stumbled and said something – Look out, look where you’re going – something like that. Anyway, he swore at me like it was my fault. A bit later he stopped me in the corridor. “You’re the wonderboy, aren’t you?” he said. “Keep out of my way.” He looked like he really hated me. It was bizarre, I don’t know why he should even know who I am – or care. He’s four years ahead of me.’

‘What did you say?’ Bartlemy asked.

‘Nothing. I was pretty surprised – and the whole thing seemed awfully silly. You know, as if he was the bad guy in a Western: This school ain’t big enough for the both of us. Stupid.’

‘Well done,’ said Bartlemy. ‘As Kipling put it: If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs … Restraint is a rare gift at your age.’

My head is the problem, Nathan thought ruefully. Aloud he said: ‘There must be something behind it. Are you going to tell me?’

‘Tell you what?’

‘What you know – or guess.’

Bartlemy was silent for a long moment, considering. ‘What I know is very little,’ he said. ‘I wondered about the attempted burglary here, that’s all. I gather the two boys involved were advised by a very expensive lawyer, the kind they wouldn’t get on legal aid. Among other people this lawyer has previously worked for Giles Hackforth, in a matter concerning his son. The connection is very tenuous, you see. I’m trusting you not to discuss this with anyone.’

‘Not even Mum?’ Nathan said.

‘That’s different. I wouldn’t ask you to have secrets from Annie.’ Nathan looked a shade disappointed, possibly because having a secret from his mother was, in his view, the benchmark of maturity. ‘Since we’re being so frank, have you had any significant dreams lately? I’ve noticed a certain … restlessness in you. Maybe it’s your age. You don’t have to confide in me if you don’t wish to.’

‘There was one,’ Nathan said slowly. He explained about Osskva. ‘And … I’ve had a few dreams about another world. Not like Eos. More … like some period from history. Mediaeval, I suppose.’ He didn’t intend to mention the princess.

‘Hmm.’

‘Uncle Barty, do you think I have these dreams because I want to, or because something else makes them happen? Or – are they just random?’

‘Do you want to?’ his uncle inquired.

‘I – yes, I do. It’s frightening sometimes, but in a stimulating way – an adventure. With this new world, I want to know it better, find out more. Like when you visit another country –’ Annie had taken him twice to France, once to Holland ‘– only another universe is a million times more exciting. I mean, anyone can go abroad.’ He grinned, looking suddenly very young.

‘Indeed,’ Bartlemy said, ‘but remember, any dream you have is not a sight-seeing trip. I believe there is a purpose behind your wanderings, though I am not yet sure exactly what it is. Does this new world seem to have any connection with the Grail?’

‘No,’ Nathan said, ‘but they talk about a sword. The Traitor’s Sword.’

‘Ah,’ Bartlemy said. ‘Well, dream carefully.’ It was not the first time Nathan had been told that. ‘Take the precautions I taught you. Keep the Rune of Finding in your room, and drawn on your arm. Use the herbal mixture I gave you which helps to bring the spirit home. Don’t get lost.’

‘I won’t,’ Nathan said confidently.

‘He is always confident, Rukush,’ Bartlemy told the dog when he had gone. ‘I hope he is careful too … The sword. Well, well. There is a pattern developing here. The Grail relics – if I can call them that – were evidently hidden in different worlds, and it seems to be Nathan’s job to retrieve them. At least, that’s what it looks like. He’s clearly on the trail of the sword now. But who gave him this task, if anyone did? The Ultimate Powers? Those who maintain equilibrium throughout the multiverse rarely involve themselves so personally. Or could the knowledge of what he has to do have been born in him, part of the heritage of two worlds? Maybe this is the special destiny for which he was created. After all, I’ve never heard of any other mortal – and few immortals – able to move so easily between universes. Objects – occasionally; but not people. People are too perishable. And what of the Grandir of Eos? This evidently fits in with some long-lost plan one of his forebears made to save a dying cosmos, but … Yes, that’s the trouble. But.’ He added with a sigh: ‘I wish Annie would tell Nathan the truth about his conception. The time is coming when that information may be essential for his safety.’

Hoover looked at him with an expression both alert and meaningful.

‘All right,’ said Bartlemy. ‘I’ll talk to her.’

But Annie, when the time came, proved more recalcitrant than ever. ‘It isn’t just that he doesn’t need to know,’ she said. ‘I think it might be safer if he didn’t. Suppose I tell him his real father could be a – a being from another universe, a superhuman entity who impregnated me for a mysterious purpose? At least, I expect so, since he obviously didn’t do it for fun. Anyhow, that may explain to Nathan why he can dream himself into other worlds, but then he’ll start agonizing over his destiny, and all that sort of thing, when he should be agonizing over exams – he’ll worry about the father thing – it could distance him from his friends. I don’t mean it would make him conceited, but it isn’t good for any boy to be told: You’re special. You aren’t like the others. You have a Destiny with a capital D.’

‘I wasn’t going to tell him any such thing,’ Bartlemy objected.

‘I want him to be just a normal boy,’ Annie went on. ‘The adolescent years are difficult enough, without adding otherworldly complications. I know we can’t stop the dreams, but as long as his – his journeys stay in dream-form they’re manageable. He still sees them as a kind of storybook adventure, not the main focus of his life. Let’s keep it that way.’

‘You want Narnia to stay in the wardrobe,’ Bartlemy said. ‘But Narnia was the kingdom of childhood; when the children grew too old, they weren’t allowed to return any more. The universes in Nathan’s head are rather different. The signs show his dream journeys are intensifying, not diminishing, as he grows up. Without the knowledge he needs, you may endanger him.’

‘Do you think I haven’t thought of that?’ Annie said. ‘I think of it all the time. It’s bad enough worrying if your children are out at night – what they’re doing, who they’re with, all the usual – but I have to worry when Nathan’s home in bed. Barty, I don’t know if I’m right – maybe I’m just a coward about telling him the true story – but I think he’s better off dreaming in ignorance. Once he gets it into his head he’s carrying some huge doom on his shoulders, the weight of it could crush him. Let him walk lightly for the moment. Let Narnia stay in the closet where it belongs. We don’t know who his father was, or what he intended.’

‘There are indications –’

‘We don’t know. We’re just trying to – to second-guess fate. My recollection of … what happened … is closed. Maybe that’s deliberate, to protect me, or Nathan. Anyway, I won’t tell him until I know it’s necessary – if it ever is.’

‘By then,’ said Bartlemy, ‘it may be too late.’

Annie averted her gaze, and he said no more, sensing the muddle of her thoughts – hope, doubt, dread – unsure of his own arguments, or if he was in the right at all.

Later, left alone, Annie’s mind returned to that sealed door in her memory, and what lay beyond. The anger she had never told rushed through her like a bushfire, so she was shaking with the force of it. She had passed the Gate between worlds – the Gate that opened only for the dead – in a moment of selfless love, seeking one who was gone, and in that moment another had taken her, violated her, sending her back with his seed in her womb and his lie in her heart. It had been thirteen years before she could open the door even a crack and let a fragment of memory through – thirteen years of wondering and secret fear, searching in vain for Daniel in her son’s face and form. Now, whenever she dared to think about it, the anger leaped from a flicker to a flame, all but consuming her. Perhaps that was the real reason why she avoided telling Nathan – because she was afraid he might see it, and misunderstand, thinking it was directed at him. Or because her anger was a thing so deep, so private, that no one must know it was there – no one must see her damaged, betrayed, revengeful – until the moment came when she could let it out, and it would rage across the barriers of the worlds to find the one who had done this to her.

She wondered if other victims of supernatural impregnation had felt the same. Rosemary with her baby, Leda, ravaged by a swan (she had often wondered about the technicalities of that). And Mary, who had been honoured and overwhelmed, according to the Bible – but then, Annie reflected, the Bible was written by men. Maybe she too had known that instant of raw fury because her body had been used without her permission, invaded by a superior being who thought he was above the rules, and humans were his creatures, to do with as he pleased. Annie had been brought up a catholic, and, like anyone who lapses from a stern religion, God was real to her, both her Father and her Enemy. Her relationship with Him was Freudian, a matter of love and hate, and somehow the God of her childhood mingled with Nathan’s progenitor, and their betrayal was as old as Time. Gods demanded constant worship and sacrifice, but what did They do for mere mortals? As far as she could see all you got was forgiveness for the fate God Himself had dished out to you, and that only if you were lucky. She lost herself in imaginary conversations with Mary, and in the end found she was trying to pray for the virgin mother with her lost innocence, because the reflex of prayer is strong in the human spirit. But she didn’t know Whom she could pray to, because with God beyond the pale, there was Nobody left.

The next day, when Nathan telephoned from school, she asked him: ‘Are you dreaming again? About – another world?’

‘A bit,’ he conceded after a pause.

‘Take care,’ she said, ‘won’t you?’

‘Yes, Mum. There’s no danger, honestly.’ Except the Urdemons …

But Annie knew without being told that there was always danger, and it wasn’t in Nathan’s nature to take care.

THREE An Entanglement of Clues

At Crowford Comprehensive, Hazel saw Jonas Tyler and Ellen Carver talking in the corridor after English, and her heart quailed.

‘Don’t know what she sees in him,’ another girl said, but Hazel knew, and gloried in the knowing, because seeing something in him was her secret, and even Ellen Carver would never see what she saw. The hidden sorrow that he bore, the mystery behind his infrequent smile and the blue of his eyes. (He smiled more often when he was talking to Ellen, but Hazel told herself that was forced.)

Back at home she looked again at Effie’s notebook, and the hand-labelled bottles, but still she hesitated. There was a poem she vaguely remembered from an anthology she had read with Nathan when she was a child, the usual sort of nursery doggerel, but the underlying horror in it had made a strong impression on her. In it there was a woman or girl, sitting alone and lonely, wishing – and a body came in to join her, piece by piece, starting with the feet and working up. But at the climax of each verse ‘still she sat, and still she sighed, and still she wished for company’. When all the body was there, something unpleasant happened to the girl, Hazel couldn’t recall exactly what, except that it was nasty. Perhaps she got eaten. Anyway, she couldn’t help feeling she was in a similar position. Still she sat, and still she sighed, and still she wished for company … Fairytales, cleaned up for Victorian consumption, might tell you that if you rubbed a lamp you would get a genie who would obey your every command, but Hazel knew better. Wish-fulfilment always had its price, and the price was always more than you wanted to pay.

She didn’t trust magic, even if it worked (especially if it worked). She didn’t trust Lilliat, with her silver-blue eyes and the unnatural breeze in her hair. Lilliat had called her price trivial, but in her heart Hazel knew what was being asked of her, and it was too much. Even for the infrequent smiles of Jonas Tyler. Besides, what was the point of attracting him by magic? One day the magic would fade, and there would be no reality underneath. Or so she told herself, struggling for rationality. (But one day was in the future, and for a teenager the future was too remote to touch the urgency of present desire.)

Still she sat, and still she sighed …

She wished for Nathan, to take her mind off things, but Nathan wasn’t there.

The evenings were growing longer now, and she went for a walk in the woods by way of distraction, because there was no witch paraphernalia out there to tempt her. When she was much younger and her father was still at home she used to run to the woods to be alone, sometimes climbing a tree and staying up there for hours, wrapped in the quiet and the privacy of her leaf-bound world. Now she was older and her father had gone she preferred her bedroom, but that day the lure of the woods drew her back. She found her favourite tree and scrambled up into the branches, just to prove she still could. And then somehow it was easy to lapse into her former quiescence, back against the tree-trunk, legs crooked, pulling the hush of leaf-murmur and wind-murmur around her like a cloak. She felt her self merging with the self of the tree, becoming bark and root, sap and acorn, reaching deep, deep into the darkness of the earth, listening to the sound of growing, and burrowing, and the tingle of new life uncurling and groping towards the light. And then she was stretching up to the sky, straining with twig-tip and leaf-tip to reach the sun. She didn’t know that this oneness with things was a part of the power she feared to indulge; all she knew was that it made her feel peaceful, and somehow complete. The tiny denizens of the tree-tops came close to her, untroubled by her presence; a squirrel scurried over her thigh.

Presently, she saw the woodwose.

She had met him once or twice before, but only with Nathan, who had been his friend from infancy. She knew he was very shy. He was a stick-thin creature only a few feet high, with a pointy face all nose and the sideways eyes of an animal. His voice was as soft as a rustle in the leafmould; his movements altogether noiseless. She didn’t hear him approach; rather, she became aware of him, one twig-pattern among many, perched on a nearby bough, watching her. Perhaps he had been there all the time.

It was a long while before he spoke.

‘Tell Nathan …’

‘Yes?’

‘He’s here. Hiding in woods, skulking behind bushes. Spying on the house where the wise man lives. He kills rabbits with slingstones and eats them. I don’t know what he wants, but he won’t go away.’

‘Who?’ Hazel asked, quiet as a breath.

‘Him. The hairy one from down in the valley, where the old old house used to be. You let him out, you and Nathan. He stole the thing, and ran away, but he didn’t go far. He sleeps in a fox’s hole, down in the Darkwood. I think he strangled the fox. Tell Nathan.’

The dwarf, Hazel thought, remembering the curious little man she and Nathan had inadvertently released from his underground prison – someone who, Bartlemy claimed, might once have been the assistant to Josevius Grimling-Thorn. He had stolen the Grail, and thrust it back into its native world, though no one knew why.

‘I’ll tell him,’ Hazel promised.

The woodwose gave a tiny nod of acknowledgement. ‘He likes to know … everything that happens here,’ he elaborated unexpectedly. ‘I watch. I listen. I wait for him. He doesn’t come now for many months, but I’m still here. Tell him …’

‘He has to go away to school,’ Hazel said. ‘Even at weekends he has homework, rugger matches, cricket matches, stuff like that. He can’t always find time for everyone.’ She hadn’t seen so much of Nathan that year, and although she knew it wasn’t his fault the woodwose’s words stirred a tiny niggle of resentment. Woody, Nathan had told her, had been his playfellow when he was little more than a baby, an imaginary friend who wasn’t imaginary, tugged from some lost universe in childish innocence for companionship and games, unable to return to wherever he had come from. We’re Nathan’s closest friends, Hazel thought, and now we’re both neglected.

She said: ‘I’ll come back. If you like.’

Woody considered her offer in silence. ‘Do you have Smarties?’ he asked at last. ‘Nathan used to bring Smarties.’

‘I can get some,’ Hazel.

Nathan hadn’t dreamed about the princess for nearly three weeks, and he was desperate to find her again, to help her or merely to see her – there was little help he could offer in his insubstantial dream-state, but he was sure that soon he would begin to materialize, because that was the pattern his dreams had followed in the past. He saw Hazel that weekend only briefly, pleading homework and tiredness. She told him about Woody and the dwarf, and he was pleased she had formed a bond with the woodwose; somehow, it excused him from having to spend precious time with either of them. Not that he saw it that way – his dreams filled his thought, and he wasn’t seeing anything very clearly. He tried to help her with her maths, but, sensing his reluctance, she made less effort, and in the end he gave her the answers without an explanation, taking a shortcut because he was in a hurry to leave.

‘I need an early night,’ he said.

‘Are you dreaming again?’ she asked – like Bartlemy, like his mother – picking up the meaning behind the words.

‘Yes.’ He didn’t temporize, not with Hazel. ‘I’ll tell you about it another time. I don’t know enough yet. It’s a new place, a new world …’

‘Can’t you dream me with you?’

‘No. I mean, it would be dangerous – you could get trapped there – and anyway, I don’t have that much control.’

You could if you wanted to, Hazel thought, suddenly convinced of it, and when he had gone she sat for a long time, her mind stuck on a single thought, going nowhere.

Nathan, meanwhile, went to bed early and, inevitably, couldn’t sleep, let alone dream. He didn’t want to risk probing the frontier of his own volition – it might only transport him to Eos – so he sat up reading till the words ran together and he hoped exhaustion would take over, slipping across the borderland into slumber only after what seemed like hours of weary wakefulness. Even then, he woke again after a short period when his dreams were commonplace and unmemorable, slept and woke and slept again. And now, at last, his sleep was deep enough, and the portal in his head opened, and his soul poured through.

He dreamed. Not of the princess as he had wished, nor of the city on two hills. He dreamed of the Grandir, the white-masked ruler of Eos: broken visions of him all jumbled together. The Grandir in his semicircular office high above the city, gazing out between the screens at the panorama of sunset, the western sky all fire and blood, and to the east the light reflected in a million windows, so the city sparkled like a monstrous piece of jewellery. A mounted xaurian flew past, unusually close, its hooked wingspan slicing the image in two, its bluish body turned to mauve in the glow. Then the scene changed, and the Grandir was in his secret chamber where the star-globes floated in darkness, compressed spheres of inter-dimensional space existing both in that world and in others, projecting onto the ceiling, as on a screen, glimpses of alternative universes. One of them hung in the sky above the bookshop, a star hidden among the stars, watching over Nathan and his mother – or spying on them. And then the Grandir was walking down a corridor towards a door marked Danger – it slid back automatically and there was the underground laboratory, and in a huge cage to the right was something so horrible Nathan drew back, not wanting to see it, feeling the horror of it from a distance and struggling to pull out of the dream …

Everything changed. He was in a grey daylight room plentifully layered with dust and shadows – the cleaners had obviously gone with everyone else, taking their brooms and brushes with them. On a table by the window was an enormous open book, the reader’s place marked with a spoon. Nearby, someone silhouetted against the light was pouring things from one bottle into another, from bottle to jar, from jar to bowl. Occasionally, the mixture thus produced would change colour, or give off a tiny puff of purple smoke, or the sound of birds singing, or an eye-watering variety of smells. A diminutive oil-lamp with a naked flame, currently pale green, stood to hand; every so often the man would lift bottle or jar in a pair of tongs and warm it over the flame, whereupon the contents would bubble, or steam, or scream, until removed. As Nathan drew nearer he saw the man had a fluff of thistledown hair and very mobile eyebrows that soared in excitement and plunged in doubt according to the progress of his experiments. Frimbolus Quayne.

Nathan was eager to talk to him but it was no good; though his sinuses smarted from one of the smells he still felt hopelessly insubstantial. Nonetheless, when the door opened he drew back instinctively into the shadows, well away from the window. The woman who walked in – or rather, bustled; she was the sort of person who bustled a lot – was the princess’s nurse, Mrs Prendergoose.

She started to speak, but Frimbolus held up a hand. ‘Hush, woman! I am doing something very important. It needs the utmost concentration …’ He held a glass jar over the flame and carefully added a single drop of liquid from a phial which smoked. Inside the jar, there was a small – a very small – explosion. When things settled down, what remained appeared to be fluid, lime-green and phosphorescent. ‘Blinkus!’ Frimbolus swore. ‘Ah well, I didn’t really think it would work. But it was worth a try. Madam, what can I do for you?’

Mrs Prendergoose didn’t look as though she liked being called Madam – clearly she felt it had offensive undertones – but she got straight to the point. ‘I want to talk to you,’ she said, ‘about the princess.’

‘What about her?’

‘She’s not a child any more, she’s a young lady –’

‘Dear me, is she?’

‘– and a pretty young lady, too, or she would be, if she got the chance to prettify herself a bit. Instead – look at her! Her dresses are all in tatters and we can’t get the material here to make new ones – her hair’s always in a tangle no matter how hard I brush it – she sits around in the gloom all day worrying about Urdemons and the state of the kingdom when she should be choosing her gown for a party – she never gets to meet anyone or go anywhere …’

‘What do you suggest we do to remedy these ills?’ Frimbolus inquired.

‘She needs to get away – right away. She could go to her uncle, the duke of Quilp, or those cousins in Marplott – she stayed with them a few years back, and there wasn’t any trouble then.’

‘Trouble?’

‘You know what I mean, don’t pretend you don’t. There wasn’t none of this business with magic and monsters that’s driving the poor child out of her mind –’

‘I thought you said she wasn’t a child?’ Frimbolus interrupted.

Mrs Prendergoose ignored him. ‘I’m not saying it’s her fault – she’s the sweetest thing in nature, just growing a bit obstinate – but it wasn’t till she started playing around with magic that them Urdemons turned up: you can’t deny it. There’s got to be a connection, hasn’t there?’

‘Oh yes, there’s a connection,’ Frimbolus said, with a wealth of sinister meaning. ‘That doesn’t mean it’s cause and effect. You’ve been stuffing her head with notions of self-blame, haven’t you? Telling her she’s the plague-carrier, the imp among cherubim? Thyrma Prendergoose, if this kingdom was properly run I’d see you executed for treason! As if Nell doesn’t have enough to bear, without shouldering a load of guilt that doesn’t belong to her!’

‘How dare you!’ The nurse was shaking with anger. ‘How dare you talk to me of – of treason! I love the princess, and if you did you’d want what I want for her. If she went away all this magical nonsense would stop –’

‘How do you know that?’

‘The magic’s here, bad magic, it’s common knowledge. Or it would be, if there were any commoners left. The king’s sick, the family’s cursed – cursed with that evil sword they’ve been hanging on to for centuries – a sword that jumps up all by itself and stabs people. A sword like that, what do you expect? That’s where all the bad magic comes from. I won’t have my Nellwyn spending her whole life under a cloud. If she could get away from the sword, she’d get away from the curse. She could have a normal life, be happy … That’s all I want for her.’

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