Daughter of Fire (37 page)

The stone did not sit on the ground but just above it, surrounded by a faint, shimmering light. At first she thought the light was the dawn that slowly broke behind the stone, but it was then she realized that it was not yet dawn. The light came from within the stone.

This was the stone of her vision, the source of her power drawn to the shimmering light that radiated from the stone. With a sudden inner calm, she laid her hands against the stone as she had the wall at the royal tower.

This time, there was no bone-aching cold, no sensation of being fragmented or slowly torn apart as she passed through the stone. This time there was no pain or weakness. It was like a curtain parting, passing through incredible warmth from darkness into the light as she stepped through.

As she emerged into the light, she felt a hand touching hers with such unconditional love and strength, as if she was being reborn, slipping from the womb of the mortal world into the spiritual world of her soul.

Vivian felt the folds of the mantle settle quietly about her and a soothing warmth, as though bathed by a radiant sun. She slowly opened her eyes to look into the eyes of the one who waited for her.  She cried out, stepping into his embrace.

“Daughter,” he said, holding her close.

For long moments he simply held her as he had when she was a babe. His words were as tender and soothing as the hand at her hair. Tears glistened at her eyes.

“I thought you had abandoned me,” she said with cheek pressed against his shoulder.

“Never.” His voice was filled with unexpected emotion. His arms tightened about her as if he was afraid to let her go.

“All is well, child. You are safe here.”

The sun was warm at her back. A soft breeze bathed her face.

Here there was only light and sunshine. The fortress and all of London that lay beyond it were gone. Only the stone remained, the monolith shimmering in the light. Then it, too, slowly faded until she could not see it clearly if she looked directly at it, but could see it at the edge of her vision.

“Come,” he said, pulling her to his side as he kept his arm about her shoulders. “Your mother waits. And I have learned not to keep her waiting. Especially when it comes to her daughters.”

They walked together from the wood which was not a wood at all but an orchard, filled with trees heavily laden with fruit that ripened in the sun. She cast a sideways glance at her father’s patrician profile.

He was still handsome, the son of a king according to some ancient legends, sprung from the joining of ancient gods according to others. To her, he was teacher, mentor, keeper of the wisdom of the universe, and above all the father whose love was unconditional and never-ending.

“The garden is beautiful,” she said in awe as they approached the simple cottage. It amazed her while everything on the other side lay shivering beneath winter’s frozen mantle and would for some months to come.

“Larkspur!” she cried out with delight, some of her urgency and fear easing. “I have had no larkspur for months. And look how beautiful it is. And anise, foxglove, lily of the valley, angelica.”

He smiled, for a time the fear easing around his heart. Perhaps, he thought, he would persuade her to stay.

“There will be plenty of time to wander about the gardens. But I fear if we keep your mother waiting any longer you will need to prepare a potion for the tongue-lashing she will give me for keeping you from her overlong.”

Not content to wait for them to come to her, Ninian ran down the garden path toward them.

“Mother.” Vivian’s voice broke softly as slender arms went around her. With her father she could be as strong as the falcon that flies the heavens, but with her mother there was no need of it. She could be vulnerable and very human, with mortal doubts and uncertainties. For it was a mortal bond they shared just as she also shared a very different bond with her father. But it was Ninian who now sensed something in
her
.

She held Vivian from her, studying her with a woman’s eyes, needing only the insight of a woman who has loved passionately to see it in another.

Ninian stroked her daughter’s face. “Come. I have brewed a special tea. Then we will eat.”

Her mother pulled Vivian between them and they walked back toward the cottage where wonderful aromas emanated through the open windows.

As they reached the cottage, Vivian was aware of a void of loneliness, its presence only recently lifted, and the equally strong awareness that it was her presence that filled the void for a time. As she turned to ask the question, her father sensed it.

“They are not here,” he answered. “It has been a long time since they returned.” He frowned. “I had hoped that you might all come back.”

Something in his tone alarmed her. But he said nothing more of what was bothering him, and prevented her from knowing his thoughts. She knew he would not allow her to know until he was ready to speak of them.

Only one had ever managed to make him reveal something against his will, and that was her mother. He always said that his love for Ninian made him vulnerable to her as no other.

“Let us eat,” he said.

Her mother had prepared all her favorite foods—bread with rosemary, fresh spring carrots in honey, and garden stew subtly flavored with hints of herbs. There was the pungence of star leaf, the subtle taste of lister, which lingered at the back of the throat, and the hint of cassin seed. All of which could no longer be found in any wooded thicket or glade.

There was also her father’s favorite wine. The essence of peaches mingled with the other aromas, to fill her senses with a longing of memory.

They spoke of memories in the way that all families do when brought back together after a long absence. And yet her mother and father seemed hardly older than when she was first allowed to return after her first vision in the flames. Everything here remained constant, unchanging. Here, Vivian felt renewed. She gained strength here, and she knew that on the other side, beyond the portal, barely any time would have passed at all; only a few seconds or minutes perhaps.

Vivian helped her mother clear the bowls and tankards from the evening meal. The fragrance of floral candles permeated the air as shadows filled the room. Beyond the small cottage, the sun sank low over the orchard. Again Vivian felt an urgency of something looming beyond the horizon—the same urgency that had brought her through the portal.

“Father, I must speak with you.”

The special magic of the shared memories was broken. She felt it in the sudden silence between her parents. A look passed between them and she was aware of a sadness in her father’s face that she had first glimpsed when stepping through the portal.

He sighed heavily. “Walk with me, daughter.”

They left the cottage together, walking through the gardens to the orchard and beyond, climbing the footpath of the ancient verdant hillside. Vivian paused frequently to glance back, with a sense that things had already changed and she was only just becoming aware of it. Something had been set in motion and even now changed the course of their lives.

Far below, she caught a glimpse of her mother in the garden, gathering herbs. She stopped and looked toward them on the hillside, shading her gaze with her hand against the glare of the setting sun at their backs. She sensed Ninian’s love as though the words were carried to her on the wind, and sensed something else.

“You must follow your destiny, my child, my daughter of fire. Know that I will always be with you.”

As they walked on, the sun turned the verdant hills to burnished gold in the setting sun, then to deep purple as the sun slowly slipped below the horizon and shadows fell across the ancient place where he took her.

It had not changed in all the years since he had first brought her there, and each of her sisters in turn. Legend said that after the great conflict, Merlin was buried in the hollow hills, in a chamber with luminous golden walls that gleamed from the light of a single candle set in a niche at the wall.

It was also said that a beautiful young maid with powers of her own joined him, leaving the mortal world for this immortal place. And as Merlin lay on his funeral bier made of white stone, she gave him the gift of herself, along with a sword, ravaged and scarred that she brought from a place called the Water of Time.  According to legend, the sword was Excalibur.

“Father?”

He turned from the window and smiled at her, not quite dispelling that sense of sadness about him. Crossing the chamber, he sat on a gleaming white stone bench in the middle of the chamber. Overhead, the chamber was open to the night sky where dozens of stars winked in a twilight heaven. The bench had once been the place where he lay, waiting for death.

It was Ninian who brought him the sword, who had a hole cut in the top of the chamber open to the sky so that he might see the stars and had a bench cut from the large stone. He always returned to this place that had once been intended for his death, to think and contemplate the world that lay beyond.

“I have seen something, father. Something powerful and terrifying. A great darkness over all  the land.”

He shook his head sadly and she sensed that he still tried to shield his thoughts from her but was seized by something so strong and powerful that it seemed to drain the strength from him, so that he seemed physically changed. No longer a vital, powerful man, but bereft of his powers and standing before her suddenly much older than only moments before.

“You must tell me.” She went to him, with a growing alarm for things she still could not see but sensed, even with his efforts to keep them from her. She took hold of him by the shoulders and she almost cried out at how old he suddenly felt beneath her hands.

“What is it?” she demanded. “What is the darkness that I’ve seen? What does it mean?”

“Sweet child.” His gaze, when he finally looked up at her was filled with unshed tears. “I hoped it would never find you. I prayed it would not happen.”

Then some of his strength seemed to return in the fierce emotions that crossed his face. Vivian felt the strength at his arms, as though he was seized with an sudden, violent rage.

“I vowed it would not touch any of you. I shielded you from it! It is the reason I sent you and your sisters away into the mortal world. I hoped you would be safe. And now...” The rage remained, but tempered once more by a growing sense of fear.

“Now,” he repeated, as though gathering himself, “It has found you. Forgive me, daughter, that I could not prevent it.”

She had never seen him like this. Her father, who was all-knowing and all-powerful, always so strong and sure of himself, the wise counselor, teacher, and mentor she and her sisters had always looked to for guidance. Now he was consumed by some overwhelming grief that she did not understand.

“You must tell me everything, Father, from the beginning.”

There in the golden chamber, with darkness lowering over them, and a canopy of stars glistening above, Merlin told her of the Darkness.

In all the great patterns of the galaxies, there was a balance of forces that kept the planets aligned. It created order out of chaos. But always there was the threat that chaos would overpower order—with wars, famine, pestilence, and death.

The Darkness that existed in the world of Beyond was the ruler of chaos, kept at bay only by the power of the Light. But always there was the struggle for domination.

In the years of her father’s youth, the Darkness had grown more powerful, emboldened by the lack of a strong king to sit on the throne of England and rule the kingdom. The Darkness grew, reaching out, seizing and destroying all that it could in a quest to rule the kingdom.

With Merlin to guide him, a powerful young king defied the Darkness and for a time ruled over the kingdom. That king was Arthur, and the kingdom prospered. But Arthur was betrayed by those he loved and trusted. Not even Merlin could protect him from that betrayal and Arthur was struck down in battle.

It was said by those who believed, that after Arthur’s death, Merlin was hunted into the hollow hills and slain, his powers of Light banished from the kingdom forever.

The kingdom was lost and once again Darkness swept over the land, bringing five hundred years of war, famine, and death in the form of one invader after another who conquered and laid waste to the land.

There was none to oppose or stop it. Merlin was gone. And so the Darkness rested, retreating to the far recesses of memory, confident in its power.

From time to time there were faint stirrings of hope, and from hope legends grew—that Merlin was not dead. As the legend grew, so too were there malevolent stirrings. For the Darkness sensed that its hold on the shattered kingdom might not be secure.

“I am the cause of it,” he said, tenderly cradling her face in his hands. “I should have foreseen that it would happen. But I could not.  For the first time I found happiness.  Your mother brought me life and I loved her as any mortal man would. You and your sisters are the blessings of that love.” His expression grew somber.

“But from the moment you were born, I felt the presence of the Darkness gathering once more. Watching. Waiting, as before.”

She closed her hands over his, unable to stand the torment she saw in the expression at his face.

“How could you be the cause of it?”

The gentleness faded, replaced by a fierceness she had never seen before. “It wasn’t enough that I was banished to this place, trapped in the mists of time where my powers were rendered useless except in what I might see. It wasn’t enough that your mother was forced to give up everything to live with me here because I could not be part of her world. Now, the Darkness has come for you!”

Vivian felt his torment as she wrapped her arms about him. It was as if she was the parent and he was the child in need of comforting.

“What of William of Normandy?” she asked. “I saw great change that would come over all of England in my vision and knew he would defeat King Harold. Is he the king that England has waited for all this time?”

“It is not William,” he replied. “He will be king for a while, but as before there will be much strife.”