Chapter 1

Nora sat in the train compartment by herself, an open book on her lap, watching the fields drift past. The engine was chugging away somewhere behind her, pulling her along. She was falling backward through the landscape, into a forgotten space that lay beyond it. As she fell, she thought about the argument she had heard the day before, through the closed door of her grandparents’ bedroom.

“Why should we send her to live with that horrible woman?” her grandmother had demanded. “She’s perfectly happy here.”

“Hush,” replied her grandfather. “She’s only twelve. That woman is her mother, and she loves her. And there’s the brother.”

Nora had wondered if her grandfather meant she loved her mother or that her mother loved her.

“Brother! Half of a brother. Partial.”

“But still a brother. And still a mother.”

“Why is that woman still here? Why can’t she go back to where she belongs? Back to America? Why can’t she leave the girl in peace?”

“Peace! Where is there peace?” Her grandfather began angrily, but then his voice softened, and Nora was sure he was thinking not just about the big war raging all around them but also about his son who died years before, when he went off to Spain to fight the Fascists. Nora’s father. A man whom she could barely remember and whom her grandparents could never forget. “There’s no such thing anymore. Not here. Not anywhere.”

She returned to her book.

An hour later, the book was beside her on the seat and she was looking down at the Tamar from an iron bridge that stood hundreds of feet above the river. She knew the bridge had been built ages ago by Isambard Kingdom Brunel. It was, she told herself, “a marvel of Victorian engineering.” The view was spectacular to the point of being disorientating. The little pleasure boats and fishing vessels were so far below her as to seem mere points of colour on a grey canvas, their smallness emphasized further by the great steel warship standing guard over the estuary mouth, guns pointed out at the endless wastes of the Atlantic.

Nora looked back up to the horizon to see the carefully ordered Devon landscape slipping away, and she knew that rushing up behind her, unseen, was Cornwall, unknown, a great adventure. She thrilled at the idea she was crossing the river to a different place, a place that all the books she’d read described as somehow older than the rest of England, a remnant of a different, almost lost world. She was infected by this nostalgia and let herself dream about ruined castles, stone rings, and witchy moors.

She woke as the train descended wind-swept hills into a forest of tall evergreens. The view seemed very rugged and un-English to her. Maybe German. Or Swiss. But even more surprising than the alpine landscape was the small man sitting across from her playing solitaire on the fold-out table beneath the window. He had on an old-fashioned, well-worn, but very neat, dark suit. His head was suspended in a halo of grey hair, heavy caterpillar eyebrows bunched together in concentration. A moustache drooped over his straggly goatee. His hands hovered over the cards. The fine hairs on the back of his fingers and hands grew thicker and blacker as they crept up his wrists and vanished into the mellow white of his shirt. Nora watched through half-lidded eyes as the little hands started to dart about and the cards snapped and cracked in a blur of intricate movement.

She watched in a reverie for quite some time. The sun flashed in and out of the tall trees along the track. The creak and moan of the carriage sounded like an old sailing ship, like they were cutting across the waves on a breezy day. Occasionally, the old man looked up at her slyly from beneath his beetled brow as his fingers danced about. When their eyes finally met, Nora smiled at him, and he gave her a small smile in return.

“Good sleep, yes?” he asked, and she could hear the burr of an accent, maybe something Teutonic, something that matched the scenery.

“It was lovely,” said Nora and stretched. She dug around in her bag and found the can of peppermints her grandmother had packed for her. She popped one in her mouth.

“Would you like one?” she proffered the can to the old man.

“Thank you,” he said, plucked one out, and began sucking on it noisily as he returned to his cards.

“What funny cards!” Nora said. “I thought you were playing patience, but the cards don’t seem quite right.”

“It is a piquet deck,” the old man said. “It has fewer cards than a bridge deck.”

He looked up at her, and this time his smile was so big that, for a second, his bright eyes vanished entirely.

“It is better for telling the future,” he said. “Fewer mistakes.”

“Can you read the future?” Nora asked.

“No,” said the old man. “But sometimes I can read the cards, and the cards can read the future.”

Nora giggled. “Can you read my cards?”

“Well,” he said, “I have been winning. And that always makes one a little more hopeful about such chancy endeavours as divination.”

He shuffled the cards into a tidy stack and had Nora cut them and shuffle them herself. Then he shuffled them again and laid out four, face up, in a cross: the jack of hearts, the jack of spades, the queen of diamonds, and a nine of hearts. He made Nora cut the deck again and lay the top card out in the middle of the cross. It was the king of spades. He frowned.

“I think that card is for me,” he said. “It usually is. Let us try again.”

They repeated the process, and while different cards appeared in the cross, the middle was once again occupied by the king of spades. And it happened in the same way the next time. And the next. Then again. And again.

“It’s all a muddle today,” he muttered as they stared at the card. “It has been since this morning.”

“But it doesn’t seem a muddle,” said Nora. “It seems quite the opposite. What does it mean?”

“It means we should play a different game,” the old man said.

“Oh please,” Nora said. “What does it mean? Is that my mother’s new beau? Is he another black-hearted beast?”

“Almost certainly if such has been her habit, but you don’t need cards to learn something like that,” said the old man, and then he changed the subject. “I’ll teach you piquet. It’s a very old game. Very old indeed. Older than this silly cartomancy. Rabelais played it, you know? Piquet. Think of that! Rabelais!”

“Who’s Rabelais?” asked Nora.

“He was an ass,” said the old man. “He was a marvellous ass, a marvellous dreaming ass.”

He began to shuffle the cards.

Penzance was the end of the line, and the old man scurried away with his cards before Nora could say a proper goodbye. She felt nervous as she gathered her things and did so slowly. It had been such a long time since she’d seen her mother, months and months really, and she paused to take a deep breath before she stepped out of the carriage and onto the almost deserted platform. And then her mother was there, waiting for Nora, holding the hand of a small boy of three. Nora had forgotten how tall and beautiful her mother was. Not forgotten, really. Misremembered. She preferred to think of her mother as pretty in a commonplace sort of a way, as she looked in the photographs Nora had tucked away in her notebooks and half-read novels. But in person, it was impossible to imagine her mother as anything other than beautiful. So beautiful that she never quite looked like she belonged in the scenes in which Nora found her. The scenes in which Nora accompanied her.

Nora once heard her grandfather telling her grandmother that their daughter-in-law was an actress who’d wandered from the stage to the street without noticing the transition. This seemed right, as if her mother had never stopped playing the role she’d chosen for herself when she first left her parents’ mansion in Paterson, going to Wellesley to become “an independent person,” which was how she always described herself to Nora when discussing this part of her life. Which was what, Nora wondered. What was an independent person, exactly? What was her mother’s role, precisely? Who did she pretend she was? Not independent, thought Nora. Not really. Certainly not financially. They were perpetually waiting for money to be wired to their hotels and apartments. So maybe it was something else. Her mother had seen some success as a singer. And she’d been married to Nora’s father for some time, with about the same degree of success. She also liked to organize parties. And meet new people. And travel. And chatter. But who did she think she was? Leda? Callisto? Demeter? She was certainly willowy and elegant, fay, like the drawings of the nymphs and dryads in Bulfinch’s Mythology, the type of creature that in the old stories always attracted the attention of the most brutal and violent gods.

“Nora!” her mother cried out, releasing the little boy’s hand. He had dark hair and eyes, and Nora returned his gaze as she was enveloped in their mother’s embrace. When her mother eventually straightened up and looked down at her, eyes bright with tears, Nora felt pleased at the sight of them.

“Sweetheart,” she said. “I’ve missed you so much.”

But Nora was still staring past her at the boy.

“Oh! Introductions! Nora this is Sam.” Her mother laughed happily. “He’s your brother.”

“Half brother,” said Nora. “Partial.”

***The Dark King Swallows*** the World by Rober G. Penner

About The Dark King Swallows the World:

While isolated and friendless in World War II Cornwall, Nora, a precocious American adolescent, loses her younger half-brother in a car crash. Overwhelmed by grief, Nora’s mother becomes involved with Olaf Winter, the self-professed necromancer Nora believes is responsible for the accident. Desperate to win back her mother’s love from the nefarious Mr. Winter, Nora embarks on an epic journey and is plunged into a world of faeries, giants, and homunculi. Eventually she reaches the land of the dead where she confronts the dark king who rules that realm, attempts to retrieve her half-brother, and heal her mother’s broken heart.

About Robert G. Penner:

Robert G. Penner lives and works in Winnipeg, Manitoba. He is the author of Strange Labour, one of Publishers Weekly‘s Best Science Fiction Books of 2020. He has published numerous short stories in a wide range of speculative and literary journals under both his name and various pseudonyms. He was also the founding editor of the online science fiction zine Big Echo.