Avalon Rising (11 page)

I shake my head, confused. “Is she a demigoddess? One of the Fisher King’s daughters?”

Gently, Rufus takes my quicklight and lifts it high, and the beams of wood send shadows soaring across the details. And then the girl changes. Her features become more refined. Her eyes catch rays of bright blue that resemble those of the advisor to a dead king. Her hair darkens until it’s honey-blonde. Her dress isn’t red at all: the shadows have painted it blue to render the garment purple, and it dips low to her chest. Something of a Lyonesse style, but one I find remarkably familiar.

And in her hand is no moon at all: the shadows have darkened the canvas, and what originally appeared to be a crescent is actually a cup. Not just any cup.

It’s the Holy Grail.

“Oh my God,” I whisper.

I take the quicklight and lift it higher.

“It’s me.”

Rufus gives me time to internalize this strangeness. The silence is eerie and unsettling, and I nearly wish the creature swimming in the waters below would breach the surface again if for no other reason than to interrupt my shock.

I realize the blacksmith might have figured out what I’ve kept from him. And I’m right.

“It’s you, isn’t it? You have the coordinates to Avalon.” He rubs his tired eyes with callused hands. “All this time I carried guilt about keeping my own identity a secret, and you’ve been keeping not one but two lies from me. Was it the wizard who told you?”

“No,” I whisper. “The Lady of the Lake, before Marcus left with Galahad’s infantry.”

Rufus scoffs, and it turns into an ironic laugh. “That was six months ago. Six months since my boy trotted out into the wild unknown, looking for that damned cup.” “I didn’t know what I could trust you with.”

“But you knew not a day ago I’d been searching for those coordinates for years! Coordinates which might have saved Elly’s life!” His anger bounces off the stone walls and comes back at me.

I should feel ashamed, but instead, the entire truth springs out of me. “I told you I didn’t know until Marcus was about to leave. How might it have saved your wife’s life? Don’t you think I would have told you had I known who you were, had I known it could save the life of the boy I—”

I stop there. I haven’t addressed these feelings for Marcus yet, or how deeply they run through me, but now is certainly not the time. “You weren’t there when Marcus saw your home burn. You didn’t see his devastation; instead, you hid from him and let him believe you were gone. I would have done anything to have delivered him from such anguish!”

Rufus slams his fist into the wall with a loud cry of anger and loss, and bits of rock and stone chip free, flitting onto his sleeve. His breathing is unstable and wobbles with the weight of grief.

“I apologize,” he says in a low voice. “Truly. I don’t know what sort of role you have in these games of demigods and idiots, how they’ll make you into pawns if they must, but if I could spare you from such a life, know that I would.”

He speaks with such conviction, with such clarity in the words he chooses, that I know it’s the truth.

When I don’t answer, he casts his violet eyes toward me. “A father should never have to bury his son. I’m selfish enough to live my life in a way that ensures that never happens. Know that.”

There’s a longing for me to understand such a love in Rufus’s eyes, but I cannot respond. I’m still wondering if this might be a game to demigods, as he said. Enough to tempt those who would defy them to steal their magic. Maybe the Black Knight is just as influential as the Lady of the Lake. Maybe this is why there’s a painting of me on the ceiling above. Maybe this is why Marcus is lost, searching for the Grail, or perhaps not.

Perhaps the blacksmith would feel differently about me if he knew I wanted to leave for Jerusalem instead of staying in Britannia.

With a heavy sigh, Rufus regards the bewitched room. “You said this was a test of ingenuity.” He faces me with a cocked smile so much like Marcus’s. “This’ll be your area of expertise then, surely.”

I respond with a smile that’s much more somber, that also wants to see his son outlive the man in front of me. Certainly, if we can find the damned king himself, he might explain how to find Marcus or why I’d be of any importance in this world. The only way Rufus and I could ever hope for answers now is by confronting these horrors head-on.

I ignore the taunting panels and their threats. Instead, I consider the barriers and beams. “Your satchel.”

Rufus shrugs it from his shoulder, tucked under the iron of his hook.

I think about the tools a blacksmith would carry, excluding the lock picks left outside the main castle; I think how I could use them. “Do you know how to build a pulley system?”

“Of course.”

I let a smile of that desired and elusive
ingenuity
flit across my face. “Then we have work to do.”

A rowboat hangs on the wall. I remove my furs and cloak, exposing my bare arms to air as cold as Merlin’s insults and as dry as Azur’s desert. My breath is a fog in front of my face, and my heart pounds. Rufus and I empty Merlin’s leather satchel, and I affix it to the door’s frame so I can lean against its weight into the room without any fear of tumbling into the abyss. I suspend myself above the slick and watchful water and reach out to see how the boat is attached to the wall.

“Be careful, my lady,” Rufus says quietly, as though a word out of him might send me into the water below. But it must be me to do this, as I’m much smaller, and the leather is not terribly strong.

A hand. A wet, gray hand with nails long and pointed and black as coal seizes my wrist. A pair of waterlogged eyes on a girl’s dead face look out from the edge of the rowboat. I scream, and my balance wobbles, threatening me with a watery grave.

Lips do not rise from behind the mildew-coated wood of the boat, but still a voice speaks.
“It will disappear, it will disappear.”

My eyes widen, and it’s like I’m drowning, Rufus’s voice calling my name from so far away.

The girl suddenly turns to water and spills over the rowboat’s side. Her hand is the last to melt, and when it does, I draw away.

“Vivienne!” Rufus shouts, pulling me back. I clutch the edge of the door, grounded on the landing and shaking from the cold on my hand. Glancing at my wrist, I see no water, no marks from the tightness of the girl’s grip.
But she was there!

Rufus likewise peers at my wrist. “What the hell was that?”

But I already know. “They want me to steal magic.” And this time, I know exactly what the forthcoming spell will do: the water, and the monster in it, will disappear. All I’ll need is to utter the spell soon to come.

Rufus is silent, and for this to be his response is unnerving. He moves to the edge, looking at the rowboat hanging there. It wobbles on two long iron nails, hammered into the wood. A strange way to decorate a ballroom in a castle with such fine paintings on its ceiling, unless you might need a way out of it.

Rufus glances sideways at me. “We will not take their magic.” He spits the words and stretches his iron hook toward the nail. With a long reach and a strained voice, his hook detaches the boat and catches its side.

Instantly, I grab his other arm, knowing the sudden influx of weight will capsize him into the water. “Hang on!”

There’s sweat beading across his forehead, and he grits his teeth, anchoring himself with a long grunt. I consider the chances he’ll be lost to the water, food for whatever creature from hell swims beneath us. But the blacksmith is stronger than I give him credit for, and he manages to grab hold of the boat’s edge and uses both hands to pull it high. With a long, heavy cry, he heaves, and it slams against the stone.

The boat is one a fisherman would use on the Lord’s Day. It should fit both of us easily, with added room for the leather-rimmed wheel Rufus constructed, using the spokes in the staircase and a loosened doorknob. We took the leather from Merlin’s falconry gloves, as they’re good and tight—the old sorcerer will have to forgive us. Simple steel wires from my satchel will weave through the slot at the end of the harpoon, and I’ll send it flying through the countless beams, straight at the wall. But then begs the question of how to spring the harpoon into motion. “I have an idea,” Rufus says, dropping to a knee to search his satchel. When he finds a certain tool in his possession, he pauses, like he might be tempting a squirrel with a trick acorn. He withdraws a miniature crossbow from his belongings.

My
miniature crossbow. I draw in a quick breath.

He shrugs. “Perhaps it’s time to become reacquainted.”

I search his eyes. “How?”

“After Morgan’s war, I returned to the farmlands while the rest of you buried the king. To see Elly.” His words tighten before he’s able to push his heartbreak aside. “On the way back I saw your broken bow at the base of a tree, and I remembered how brave you were. How you went up against the witch herself, even though you could have been killed. She broke this; slammed it straight into the tree. After I’d seen you work so hard on it.”

He holds it in front of me, and it’s exactly as I remembered. The same wood, only reinforced with veins of iron, highlighted ends with copper. Even the latch is pulled back to a proper place, rendering the string taut. Through my melancholic amazement, I smile. It’s what Marcus told me needed to be fixed.

“Thank you,” I say with every ounce of sincerity I can manage.

Rufus inclines his head.

My crossbow can certainly launch a harpoon. And after defeating the wraith, I won’t spend any more time thinking about the lives I stole—had to steal, was made to steal—all because of a witch.

Rufus unravels the ring of steel line. He counts under his breath enough for the volley there and back, and adds about fifteen extra yards for the weight, the security, and the margin for error.

“Ready.” He loops one end through the harpoon and uses a clamp to melt it back onto itself. He ties it thrice and tests it with a heavy pull.

I affix my crossbow to my arm and peer through its sight. It’s a clear path of triangular wooden beams. Not an easy shot, but at least a straight one. The harpoon lies against the string.

“Steady,” I tell myself.

A sudden burst from below loosens my footing. The monster breaches the surface, and I have to regain composure or fall. Then, a splash of water—but, no, it’s not water; it passes over me and returns to the depths just as quickly.

“It will disappear, it will disappear.”

I’m afraid, but I will not let this overcome rational thought. Some of the paint from the ceiling falls onto my hair, just like the old incantations in Merlin’s catacombs when Victor came to life. I narrow my eyes on the sight again and reset the harpoon’s trajectory. It’ll slam into the wall, but there’s a small, off-balanced mechanism I’ve applied to the base that’ll act as a boomerang through pure force of momentum, unclipping itself from the arrow and slamming back.

“Steady,” I say in a barely-there whisper. When all triangular beams have disappeared into one, I release the harpoon.

It flies straight and it flies true over each of the beams and slams into the frame above the door on the other side. Instantly, the mechanism disconnects and loops the steel, bringing back the line.

“Move!” I cry. And once again, the monster below us slams against the water, and the harpoon’s point wavers in midair. I dive to the floor, covering my head in case the worst were to happen; Rufus does the same. There’s a loud
thwack
, and I jump. Silence falls.

I look beside me. The harpoon is clear through the wall no more than several finger-widths away. I give it a pull to check its strength and hitch the boat to the steel. My crossbow twists against the length of my arm and tucks under my cloak.

In my hands is another contraption: a crank. A simple gadget able to clamp over the dual strings and rotate them through two separate sprockets. More wire ties our boat to it, and soon, we’re on our way across the hall’s watery graveyard.

When we’ve reached the halfway point, I take in more of the beautiful yet horrible panels that have included me in their story. I think of how Marcus might have been astounded by the third one, and how he might have made a light comment to break the tension—anything to make me smile.

But then, there’s another shudder of land and castle, and I look over the side. I blink. Then once more.

Because the shuddering doesn’t stop. And it feels as though the wire might be stretching, or the space around us might be collapsing, or our boat is sinking further. My eyes snap up to our pulley system. Perhaps the steel line was too long; perhaps the wooden beams were too weak to hold our weight, even with the added anchoring of stone walls and iron. But that’s not it.

“The water is rising!” I shout. The crashing water is deafening, and the voice calling for me to steal magic so omnipresent and bittersweet lulls me.
“It will disappear, it will disappear.”

It slices through my mind like whatever evil in this place has thrown the edge of an axe into my skull. I wince from the pain, the intensity of the voice, the semblance of magic behind all of it, calling me to indulge in what it could save me from.

“Rufus!” I call, pressing my hands to my face as though it could alleviate the pain. When I pull my fingers away, a streak of blood accompanies my hand. More pours from my nose, and a weightlessness comes over me, making me dizzy. Oh God.

Rufus’s eyes go wide, and he turns the crank faster and faster so we can get to the other side. But suddenly the scaled gray skin of something belonging to hell rises and falls beneath the murky surface. I inhale sharply, suppressing a scream that wants to unleash itself.

The watery eyes with their dead gray pupils flash in front of me. A pair of ice-cold hands clutch my neck.
“Estakah evanesqui estach, estakah evanesqui estach.”

Magic. Certainly magic. And with a sharper edge than Morgan le Fay’s spells or even those of Merlin. The voice is old. The words are ancient and heavy.

I cry out as the shadows fall over me, but Rufus’s eversearching eyes tell me he sees nothing.

“Don’t!” Rufus says. He wastes no more strength, but I know what he means:
Don’t steal magic.

I throw the hands off. The siren screeches and falls into the waters. I glance at the door. We’re nearly there, but we’re dreadfully slow, and I must do something to help.

The crossbow. Inside the compartment is a spare bolt from Morgan’s war. Right away, I reinforce it with an additional line that might let us abandon this boat. I run the line through my palms, and the steel is sharp and fast and slices at my skin. When I’ve reached the end, the room is still rising. I aim through the doorway at the stone wall on the other side. With any luck, the bolt will break through and hold us steady.