away.
Soon, Annie thought, he’ll start sleeping badly, and there was a tiny squeeze of fear at her heart which she could not suppress.
I sleep too deeply, Nathan thought, and I dream too little and too lightly. The portal was closed, the connection broken: he could no longer roam the multiverse in his head, following trails he could not see on a quest he did not understand. He had dreamed his way through other worlds – the ghost city of Carboneck in Wilderslee, and the skytowers of Arkatron on Eos, where the Grandir, supreme ruler of a dying cosmos, sought for the Great Spell that would be the salvation of his people. Nathan had retrieved the cup and the sword to bind the magic, and now only the crown was wanting – the crown and the sacrifice and the words of power, whatever they might be. But there had been no dreams for nearly a year, and the pleasures of cricket and the problems of history were not enough to fill his life.
‘How’s Hazel?’ his mother asked, helping herself to a piece of his toast. ‘I haven’t seen her lately.’
Hazel was Nathan’s closest friend: they had grown up almost as brother and sister, though getting on rather better than most brothers and sisters. Adolescence had brought friction, but had never driven them apart.
‘You know Hazel.’ Nathan spoke around munching. ‘She didn’t exactly like her mum’s old boyfriend, but I think she approved of him. She doesn’t approve of the new one at all.’
‘Because he’s so young?’
‘Mm.’
Annie smiled. ‘Well, all I can say is good for Lily. I think Franco’s very sweet.’
‘He’s Italian,’ Nathan objected.
‘How insular! Besides, you didn’t mind the Italians last summer.’
‘That was in Italy!’
‘Supposing I got myself a toyboy,’ Annie said. ‘How would you feel about that?’
‘You are joking, aren’t you?’ Diverted from thoughts of other worlds, Nathan looked really alarmed.
‘Maybe.’
‘Look, you know, if there’s someone, it’s cool with me – as long as he’s nice, and really cares about you – but … well, I’d rather have a stepfather than an elder brother!’
‘Nicely put,’ Annie said. ‘Still, I doubt the situation will arise.’
Nathan couldn’t ever recall her having a proper boyfriend, even though several men had been interested. He said: ‘You must have loved dad very much.’ Daniel Ward had died before he was born, killed in a car crash when he fell asleep at the wheel.
‘Very much,’ she said. Only he wasn’t your dad … Your father was a stranger who waited beyond the Gate of Death, waited for my love and longing to open the unopenable door, and when I would have given all that I had for all I had lost he took me, body and soul. He seeded my womb and sealed up my memory, and until you grew up so unlike Daniel – until I found the courage to unclose the old scar in my mind – I never knew the betrayal and rape that was hidden there.
But she loved Nathan, conceived in treachery, child of an unknown being from an unknown world, so she kept her secret. She saw his father’s legacy in the mysteries that surrounded him, but she told herself, over and over, that he did not need to know. One day, perhaps, but not yet. Not yet.
That night, Nathan went to bed thinking of the Irish Question, and dreamed of the sea.
At Thornyhill Manor, Hazel Bagot was having a lesson in witchcraft.
‘But I don’t want to be a witch,’ she protested.
‘Good,’ said Bartlemy. ‘That’s the way to start. Now, you need to learn what not to do. Otherwise you could bumble about like you did last year, conjuring dangerous spirits and letting them get out of control. Someone might get hurt. It nearly happened once, you know that; you don’t want it to happen again. The Gift is in your blood; you need to know how not to use it.’
‘Why couldn’t we have done it in the summer, when the evenings were still light?’ Hazel said. She was wishing she had stayed at home, watching Neighbours and annoying Franco.
‘Dark for dark magic,’ Bartlemy said. ‘In summer, magic is all sparkle and fun, and the spirits come to us dressed in their best, scattering smiles and flowers. In the winter, you get down to the bone, and the true nature of things is revealed.’
Hazel said no more, remembering how she had summoned Lilliat, Spirit of Flowers, to win her the love of a boy at school, and how Lilliat had turned into Nenufar the water-demon, and nearly drowned her rival.
Bartlemy gave her tea and biscuits and she sat for a while eating, insensibly reassured. Bartlemy made the best biscuits in the world, biscuits whose effect was almost magical, though he insisted there was no spell involved, just good cooking. Anyone who ate those biscuits felt immediately at home, even if they didn’t want to, comforted if they needed comfort, relaxed if they needed to relax. Long ago another cook had tried to steal one for analysis, hoping to work out the ingredients, but he had eaten it before he got it home, and the urge to commit the crime had vanished.
‘I don’t want to be like my great-grandmother,’ Hazel explained at last. ‘She lived for two hundred years, until she didn’t care about anyone but herself, and she’d curdled inside like sour milk. I don’t think I want to live on when my friends are dead; it would be so lonely. And I don’t want to be mean and bitter like her.’
‘Then learn from her mistakes,’ Bartlemy said equably. ‘You won’t be mean and bitter, unless you choose to be. I will teach you what you need to know, for your safety and others, but how you use the knowledge – if you use it – is up to you. Tonight, I think we will make the spellfire. That will do for a start.’
He showed her how to seal the chimney and light the fire-crystals, which cracked and hissed, shooting out sparks that bored into the carpet. Then he threw on a powder which smothered the flames, and the room grew smoky, and Hazel’s eyes watered from the sting of it. Presently, Bartlemy told her to speak certain words in Atlantean, the language of spell-craft, and the vapour seemed to draw together, hovering in a cloud above the hearth, and then the heart of the cloud opened up into a picture.
To her astonishment Hazel saw her mother with Franco, climbing the stairs to the bedroom, laughing and hurried. She was embarrassed, and looked away. ‘Remember, the magic responds to you,’ Bartlemy said. ‘Magic is always personal. The pictures may have meaning for you, or they may not – sometimes, their purport won’t become clear till long after – but it is something in your thought, in your mind, which engenders them. You are the magnet: they are the spell-fragments which are drawn to you. What do you see now?’ ‘The past,’ Hazel said.
‘At least, I think so.’
She saw the Grimthorn Grail surrounded with a greenish nimbus: the snake-spirals round the rim seemed to move, and a man with a dark alien face was gazing into it, speaking words she couldn’t hear. In the background stood a woman with black hair bound up in a white veil or scarf, the ends of which hung down behind her in fluted creases. Her features, too, were somehow alien – her eyes too large, the proportions of her face elusively wrong – yet she was the most beautiful woman Hazel had ever seen. She held a tall yellow candle, and either they
