Earth's Magic (5 page)

Merlin took the old road down to the lake, its once-paved surface broken by centuries of frost and thaw. The whole of Derwentwater was no longer frozen as it had been in the depths of winter, but a wrinkled film of ice still floated on the surface,
glowing like silver dragon skin in the pale light. He cast a worried glance at the baby dragon now stirring restlessly on his shoulder. The little thing probably needed to be fed again. But fed what? Then he remembered a withered carrot he’d put in his pocket intending to take it to his black mare in the stables that afternoon.

Fumbling in his pocket with gloved hands, he drew out the carrot and offered its tip to the dragon. A quick sniff, then rapid crunching and noisy smacking. With a satisfied puff of smoke, the dragon curled up again and closed his ruby red eyes.

“Good boy, Sil. I suppose that name will do, since your true Faerie name, whatever that is, stays secret. But I assure you, Sil, you could find a better, safer person to pal around with than me.”

Merlin looked up and realized that in the brief time he’d been paying attention to the little dragon, the weather had changed. A heavy mist was rising out of the lake. Odd, he thought, since the temperature didn’t seem right for mist. Still, a white wall of it was rolling over the water toward him.

He frowned. This had a whiff of magic about it, though of what kind he wasn’t sure. And who, exactly, was he supposed to meet? Faerie was full of strange, powerful, and unpredictable characters. Pushing rising anxiety aside, he cautiously continued his way around the north end of the lake and then down its far side. The cluster of leafless birch trees stood like white-robed women knee-deep in mist. As he approached, the mist rose higher, cloaking the trees completely.

He knew that this rare pocket of trees lined a rocky inlet of the lake, but the mist was now so thick, he didn’t notice he had reached the inlet until his booted feet splashed into water. He stepped back, and feeling his way with the tip of his staff, he carefully followed the indented shore.

Suddenly the nature of the air changed. Diaphanous mist
became rippling silver light. He knew he had crossed from his world into another. Or perhaps into a place between worlds.

Merlin shivered, not with fear but with awe. Ahead at the edge of a silvered lake, a glowing shape was forming. Light wavered and became solid. A figure beckoned. He knew her.

The Lady of Avalon.

M
EETING

“L
ady,” Merlin whispered as he stepped toward her. Her hair was the color of afternoon sunlight, and her moon-pale face was exquisitely beautiful. She stretched out her hands in greeting, but her welcoming smile seemed oddly tinged with fear.

“Come, Merlin, young-old hawk, I have much to tell you but fear I have little time.”

“What could
make you
afraid, Lady?”

“A
geis
placed on me. A solemn pledge I made centuries ago not to reveal the hiding place of a certain … thing. Much was bound into that pledge, that injunction. If I break it, I could bring about the ruin of all Avalon.”

She looked tensely at him, the blue-green of her eyes glimmering like sunlight slanting into a deep lake. “What I am going to tell you now, Merlin, is not the secret I am pledged to keep, but it comes perilously close to it.”

“Then why risk telling me any of it, Lady?”

“Because the consequences of
not
telling you could be so much worse. Great events are drawing near. You must sense this, I know. A battle, perhaps a final battle, is brewing. All of our worlds, mortal and immortal alike, are teetering on the brink of
destruction—destruction more total than the Devastation that humans caused centuries back. Not just another isolated battle, I am speaking of a worldwide upheaval, though its epicenter may indeed be here in Britain. Part of what I know may tip the balance. And you are the one with whom it must be shared.”

Merlin felt an overwhelming urge to run screaming from this place between worlds. What she was offering sounded to be a heavy, chilling responsibility. These last few years he had acquired great power, regaining some of his old powers and gaining new ones. But he had also, for the first time, enjoyed the fringes of what might almost be called a normal life. That, Merlin realized now, had brought him more joy than he had ever known.

“Lady, I am just one person—defective and mortal. This responsibility is not for me. Surely there are others more suitable to bear it.”

She looked at him with a sadness that seemed bottomless. “You, Merlin, are the
only
one who can bear it. If you do not take it up, I fear the world is doomed.”

At the chilling finality of those words, Merlin shivered. For endless moments, he stared into the fluid silvery light that surrounded them. It pulled at him, sucking him into itself. Images swirled through it, images of people and places he had loved—Heather, Arthur, Nimue, his mother. Among them were brief glimpses he had enjoyed of Avalon and memories of the warm, wild Wales of his childhood.

There were less cherished images swimming there as well—battles, companions he had lost, the beautiful, deadly face of Morgan Le Fay. And through it all wove the glittering, ominous tail of the comet. The dark and the light—they were all tied together in ways he could feel but not understand. Yet, he realized fiercely, he needed to understand. Everything seemed to hinge
on it. Perhaps taking on this burden, whatever it was that the Lady was asking, was the only way to learn, the only way to make some difference.

At last, yanking his gaze from the swirling images, he looked again at the Lady. “Tell me what I need to know.”

“I will tell you as much as I can without actually breaking the
geis
I am under. But I must be quick. Maintaining an untraceable space for long is difficult.” She sat on a luminescent stone at the water’s edge and patted the spot beside her, inviting Merlin to sit as well.

“Long ago, things in the Otherworlds and in yours were less definite, less divided than they are now. The dark and the light intermingled, were part of the whole. They had not yet divided, not yet seen each other as the enemy that must be overcome and dominated. It was then, near the beginning of things, that I fell in love. And he loved me too. You know of him, I am sure, but he was not then as he is now. Arawn, Lord of the Dead, King of the Netherworld, Ruler of Annwyn, land of chaos and death.”

Merlin shuddered. The Welsh had long told stories of Arawn, stories spoken in hushed tones around a fire or tales to frighten little children into behaving. But Merlin had only known him as a shadowy mythic figure, and he preferred to keep him that way.

The Lady smiled at Merlin’s startled face. “Light and shadow, each cannot exist without the other, you know. It is part of the world’s balance. We two, different as we were even then, we loved each other, we completed each other. But he insisted that we must have no children. I was saddened by this. When I pressed him for a reason, he said an ancient prophesy foretold that our child would hold the key to ending the growing power of Arawn’s dominion. That dark power was what he and others craved, and its strength was drawing him away from me even then.

“But in most ways we Eldritch women are no different from humans, Merlin. I longed for a child, and finally I let one happen. By then Arawn was having little to do with Avalon or the other lighter areas of Faerie. He was elsewhere when I gave birth and never knew it had happened. The baby grew to manhood among the Eldritch in Avalon, and few suspected who his father was. But my son had an adventurous spirit, and though I cautioned him against it, he ventured often into the mortal world. There he met a human woman whom he came to love as deeply as I loved Arawn.”

The Lady was silent a moment, twisting a bronze band she wore around her wrist. Then she continued. “Together those two had a child of their own, half mortal, half Eldritch. The knowledge of that birth was kept from all in Avalon but me. However, shortly afterward, through a careless word among the folk of Avalon, Arawn learned that he himself had a son. In his black rage, he sought him out and would have killed him. I begged Arawn, in memory of our love, to spare him. So, relenting, Arawn enchanted our son, binding him into a form in which he could never fulfill the prophecy. He bound me too under this
geis
, on pain of unleashing havoc on Avalon, to never reveal the form of our son’s entrapment nor its location. You see, Avalon’s very survival is in my hands. I cannot break that
geis.”

The two stared at each other a moment. Then the Lady asked, “Merlin, are you beginning to see where my tale is leading?”

Merlin felt his flesh ripple with cold. His throat was so dry, he could barely force words from it. “Lady, say more of the woman whom your son loved.”

She smiled. “A mortal woman, lovely and kind. She was the daughter of a Welsh chieftain. To him and her people, she never revealed who was the father of her child. The Eldritch, after all,
were feared by most mortals, and she wanted to protect her child from that fear. But for the shame it caused her family that she had this child of an unknown father, she was sent away to live with nuns and raise her son there.”

A sob broke from his throat as Merlin struggled to hold back tears. Finally, he whispered, “Yes, she was lovely and kind. But she never would tell me who my father was, though I begged her to. Once, though, perhaps to ease my confusion when my strange powers were coming to me, she revealed that he was Eldritch.”

Slowly Merlin looked up. “That means, Lady, that you are my grandmother.”

Her smile was soft. “Yes, child, though that is another secret no one shares. And I have been so proud of you, little hawk, for all you have endured and all you have done.”

Impulsively, she enfolded Merlin in an embrace that melted him with all the love he had seldom known. Then, looking into his eyes, she said, “Merlin, do you know now what you must do?”

“Find … my father.”

She nodded. “The key which the prophecy says he holds, I believe, unlocks more than the fate of one realm. It could hold the solving, one way or another, of the crisis to which all our worlds are heading. But surely he must be freed to use it.”

“But how can I free him? I don’t even know—”

“Merlin, listen. When Arawn bound our son into this enchantment, he made it so that it could be broken only by one of his own flesh and blood. And as I was prevented from breaking the enchantment by the terrible pledge, Arawn felt safe. But he does not know of you. He never learned that our son had a son of his own.”

The light rippling around them flickered a moment, then returned to its silvery glow.

“We haven’t much time,” the Lady said, alarm taut in her voice. “You must go soon.”

“But can you give me no clue where I can find my father, where I can at least begin to search?”

“No. But I can give you this. Perhaps you know its mate.”

She pulled a bracelet off her arm and handed it to Merlin. He stared at the bronze band encircled by the flowing pattern of running deer. “My mother had one like it,” he whispered. “She said my father had given it to her. And I … I have now given it to the person I most love.”

“That is good,” the Lady said. “I hoped that you would. It is meant to be a love gift. And I believe I know her too. She is powerful herself, and she is the one—the
only
one, I think—with whom you can share these secrets. I sense she has a role to play in this yet. But I beg you, tell no one else. The risk is too great. And if you succeed and find my son, give him this bracelet from me.”

As Merlin slipped the bronze band onto his own wrist, the little dragon sleeping on his shoulder stirred. The Lady laughed. “Ah, you have one of Blanche’s brood, I see. She will be pleased, in her ill-tempered dragon way.”

Merlin craned to look at the dragonlet, who had opened one red eye. “Yes, but this one seems a bit odd for a dragon.”

“A vegetation eater, then? Well, some are. That’s part of the great balance. Otherwise, the world would soon be denuded of livestock. Here, he should enjoy this.”

From out of the silvery air, she pulled a plump pink fruit that smelled of honey. She held it up to the dragon, which snapped at it, sucking and smacking until it was gone. Then he curled up again in the fur-lined hood and snuggled back to sleep.

Again the light flickered, faded, and came on more weakly than before. “Hurry,” the Lady said urgently. “You must go. There must be no trace of our meeting.”

Around them the silver light churned, swirled, and dissolved into mist. The Lady was gone. Merlin stood alone by the rocky inlet of Derwentwater.

He found his staff lying against a rock. In a daze, he took it up and began walking back along the lakeshore toward Keswick. Only slowly did he notice that the fading mist was lit not by moon and comet light but by the shrouded sun. More hours had passed than he’d realized.

He was tired—tired to the core of his bones, it seemed. But he was also too agitated and overwhelmed by what he had learned to think about sleep. There was so much that needed doing, so much that needed thinking about. And he sensed there was little time for any of that.