The Sword of Straw Read Online Free Page B

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 to steal the cup. That’s logical.” He added, with a creditable French accent: “A kind of
éminence 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 specters, 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 Schrödinger’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 crisscrossing 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