The Forest of Adventures (#1 of The Knight Trilogy) (8 page)

“So you’re asking me to turn
petty part-time jewel thief to get back the sword. Why’s this
beyond your own boys, Morgan?”

“You know that the sword’s
enchanted. If my boys recover it then they’ll weaken to its power;
probably use it to kill everything in sight. You’re one of the few
strong enough to resist its Pagan magic what with your whole, ‘I’ve
got a friend in God’ thing.” She smiled and rolled her eyes.

“And what’s he got that you
think I might possibly want?” She smiled, knowing she was about to
lay down her trump card. She looked at Blake, pouted and licked her
lips, building the drama, “He’s got your brother.”

For the first time since I’d
known him, I saw the Blake that lived on the inside. His face
faltered. Confused, his speech came out unsteady, “I’m not sure…”
he paused, searching for understanding, “I’m not sure I
understand.”

“Leo’s nothing more than a
puppet on his string, a thug for hire; Fear’s got him robbing
grannies for their pension, punching the girlfriends of debtors,
hooking young girls on crack to expand the business empire.”

“How…?” Blake was in too much
shock to string together his sentence.

“Well it’s not for the money is
it? Our wealth is infinite and he’s not easily brought with pretty
things, unless they’re wearing a skirt.”

“Then why?”

“He’s got your brother hooked
on crack.” She sounded almost triumphant, “Mummy and Daddy would be
so proud.”

At that moment I wanted to go
over to her and punch her right in the middle of her smug,
sympathetic smile. I looked back at Blake’s whose earlier shock had
turned to a seething anger. Every muscle in his body was tensed,
his hands curled into fists, his breathing deep and laboured and I
thought for one minute that he was going to go right up to Morgan
and do what I wanted to do but daren’t. Instead he spat out his
venom in words,

“Fine, it would seem I have no
choice but to do what you want. As for my brother, I’ll bring him
home, house him at the monastery until this…. this madness passes.
You’ll have the sword in your hands by the end of the month,” Blake
turned to leave calling after him, “and next time just send me a
text rather than this…
spectacle
.”

“I always was one for putting
the magic back into a romance, Blake.” She winked, raising her
goblet.

He stopped at the entrance
turning back, his eyes flaming, “And one last thing - if you ever,
ever mention my mother and father again then fear for your little
black heart, bitch, because I’ll not hesitate on ripping it out
with my bare hands.”

The boys on the door suddenly
sprang to life, pulling their swords.

“Down boys! He’s armless,” she
called out from within her tent. Her laughter filled the air. As we
left, we could just hear her shout out, “By the way Blake, she’s
really quite enchanting….. if you like that type.” Her laughter
rose again.

Within a short distance of the
pavilion, Blake managed to get a signal on the mobile but before he
could end his conversation with the recovery service I’d passed
out.

*

When I woke the next morning,
it was in the comfort of my own bed. I had no recollection of how
I’d arrived home and the last sensible memory I had was getting
changed into Blake’s jumper. The rest of the evening seemed as
clear - but it couldn’t have been. I felt exhausted. On the chair
next to my bed lay Blake’s navy jumper, neatly folded just as I
would have done it myself.

11. FORBIDDEN FRUIT

Mum woke me at midday with a
cup of tea. I ached all over and my head felt like a whirlpool.
There was too much for me to think about and I couldn’t catch hold
of any particular thought because where there should have been
sense, there was nothing but flashes of woodland, of rich silks and
beautiful women. The images behaved more like memories which I knew
couldn’t be possible as they were the stuff of fairytales and not
reality. I drank my tea, forcing myself out of bed with the
determination of having a productive day; a day that would ignore
all the nonsense of last night.

As I dressed, the conversation
with Sam’s consultant went round in my head as if caught on a
continuous loop. I trawled through conversation after conversation
I’d had with Sam searching for a clue, anything said in passing,
but it was useless. There was nobody else in Sam’s life beside us
except for his father. My head pounded. I closed my eyes
concentrating on a white light at the far end of the darkness.

Although I’d spent the whole
morning trying to convince myself that last night I’d been feverish
and out of my mind, in my heart I knew it wasn’t the case. Events
had taken place last night that I shouldn’t have seen. They were
events that belonged to a world in which I didn’t belong. Through
my headache I heard Mum shout from the bottom of the stairs, her
tone sharp and disapproving, “Mina, you’ve a visitor!”

I groaned, knowing just who it
was going to be and not feeling in the right mood to deal with
him.

“O.k. I’ll be down in a
minute,” I shouted back, whilst clipping up my hair.

Blake’s looks never failed to
take me by surprise and even though I’d braced myself before
entering the room, I was still caught by them. He turned and smiled
at me, a slight blush of colour on his cheek and I wondered if he
knew the effect that he had on me. It seemed strange to see him
sitting at our dining table, about as absurd as coming in to find
the Angel Gabriel sitting down and having a cup of tea with your
Mum. He stood, giving the impression of a Victorian gentleman come
wooing and Martha rolled her eyes as if Blake were a terrible
cliché before taking her leave to do the washing up.

“Mina, I am sorry to come
uninvited, but I need to talk to you. Do you think maybe you’re up
to a walk?”

“Sure, I’ll get my coat.” I
found myself responding too quickly and knew that I should have
made an excuse.

I pulled my wellies up over my
skinnies and grabbed Mum’s hand knitted scarf off of the peg;
another thing she’d made on one of her creative whims. We left the
house through the back door, passing Mum on the way. It was clear
that she wasn’t sure what all of this meant but whatever it did,
she didn’t approve of it. I knew well enough that even without the
details she would rate this behaviour as a betrayal of Sam and of
course the impression that Mum had of Blake was not helped by the
fact he’d returned her daughter to him in an almost dead state in
the middle of the night. Before the door closed, I heard her mutter
under her breath, “Handsome is as handsome does!”

I’d never fully understood what
this meant but it seemed one of Mum’s regular responses to handsome
men that she didn’t think could be trusted. I wondered if she saw
something in Blake that I was missing.

We walked through the garden
without speaking. It wasn’t our usual comfortable quiet but one
that swelled with the inevitability of a difficult conversation.
Leaving the garden through the rickety back gate, we entered once
more into the forest.

Blake was the first to break
the silence, “Mina, last night…” We stopped walking, the
conversation needing our whole attention. He looked at me. He was
worried. I saw the dark circles under his eyes and if he’d slept at
all last night. It didn’t look like he had.

“I remember,” I said doubtful
of my own sanity as I said it.

“So how do you explain it Mina?
Who do you think I am?” His eyes were locked on mine and in them
there was something shifting in them; something I couldn’t read.
They looked wild and I knew I should feel scared, but I didn’t.

I shrugged, “I don’t know. It’s
all fragments and the fragments don’t add up to make something
possible.”

“And why isn’t it
possible?”

His question seemed so simple
on the surface; as if
I
were the one that wasn’t in my right
mind.

“Because it isn’t - What I saw
last night can’t exist,” I said, shaking my head.

The image of Morgan came back
to me with menacing force. There was something about her that had
left me with a terrible feeling of unease and if I was honest, the
way she was with Blake made me maddeningly jealous.

“Tell me who she was.”

“I can’t. What you saw last
night, you really shouldn’t have. Morgan was playing a really
dangerous and spiteful game.”

“She fancies you,” I blurted
out and then regretted giving him evidence of my own jealousy.

“Possibly.” The way he smiled
with a mixture of embarrassment and amusement made me wonder with a
needling irritation about the history that Morgan had shared with
him.

“O.K,” I sighed, “So if you
can’t explain last night, tell me about you? How come when I first
touched you that day in English, you didn’t feel of anything? At
first I reasoned it was because you weren’t really there but I
checked with the others and they saw you too so I knew you I wasn’t
mad because that’s how you know isn’t it? Other people tell you
you’re not.” I knew I was rambling and sounded frankly as mad as a
hatter.

Blake looked at me in a way
that showed he perhaps found mad-hatters cute but his lip twitched
as he tried to find a way of explaining the impossible, “You
couldn’t feel me at first because…” he stopped as if changing
track, “…you couldn’t feel me because you didn’t know to make me
real.”

“What do you mean? That’s not a
proper answer Blake. It doesn’t explain anything.”

“It explains everything.”

“And if I touch you now?” My
voice quivered in the air.

“Do you want to touch me Mina?”
His question came out almost like a breath and spoke a double
meaning that was at once delicious and terrifying.

My breath caught on its way
out. There was nothing more I wanted to do in that moment than to
touch him, to let my hand reach for his most secret out of the way
places where nobody else touched. I held out a wavering hand and
then snatched it back; cradling it into myself as if I was afraid
of being bitten.

“So tell me, am I going mad?” I
whispered.

“You’re not mad.” He smiled, “A
slightly over active imaginative perhaps but definitely not
mad.”

I blushed and not for the first
time I wondered if he had the ability to read my most private
thoughts, “Then tell me about last night,” I said.

“I can’t, I really can’t. It’s
not that I don’t want to but…”

“No excuses. If you feel
anything for me Blake then you need to tell me.”

He kicked at the leaves under
his feet and looked at me, sizing me up, working out the measure of
his love for me. O
h my god, he loved me.
The thought came at
me like a charging bull. Suddenly I was trapped, out of control.
When the love was mine it belonged to me and now…

“It was all true. Everything
you saw. Everything that you’ve pieced together is real. The woman
in the pavilion last night was Morgan of Gore; you’ll know her in
legend as Morgan Le Fay. She’s connected to my family through
marriage, but it’s distant and we’re not alike - we don’t hold the
same beliefs. She’s of the old ways, the time of pagan spirits, the
time we identify as The Dark Ages.”

“Is she a witch?” I asked,
trying to grab onto anything concrete and slightly familiar so that
I might understand.

“She’s what We term a
sorceress, or to put it more politically correct, a ‘tolerated
opposition’. She argues that none of our kind should bend to our
knees for anyone; God included.”

“But it can’t be - Morgan Le
Fay is a fairytale.” I shook my head and I was grabbed by the
insane realisation of what this all meant, “Just how old is she
Blake?”

He smiled, wryly aware of being
viewed as melodramatic, “Morgan is as old as the myth itself -
perhaps even older than that.”

“So are you…?” My question
trailed off as I became conscious of how ridiculous I was
sounding.

Blake laughed. “No, I’m not an
immortal; I can bleed and die like any other man.” The intensity of
his words was lightened with a smile.

“But you are…” I stopped,
searching for the right word, “…
special?
”

“Well thank you, Mina, I think
that you’re pretty special too,”

He teased, laughing a gentle,
warm laugh that broke the tension and I blushed in response.

“That’s not quite what I meant
Blake and you know it. I think I deserve some answers,” I said,
attempting to get a sense of being in control of a situation which
I was anything but.

“You already know the answers
Mina.”

Blake’s eyes lingered on mine,
his pupils a yawning darkness on the edge of which I stood with a
desperate temptation to fall. He moved his head closer to mine and
I watched with the fascination of the hypnotised as his lips
tantalisingly parted with a promise. His teeth pulled at his lower
lip with the indecision of whether or not to kiss me. His tongue
flicked over the flesh of his bottom lip making it appetisingly
soft and moist. A sigh escaped from between his lips and landed on
mine causing a shiver of delight to make its way playfully through
my body. My heart found a deep and pounding rhythm which in the
still and quiet of the forest seemed to reverberate off every
surface. Everything was so painfully beautiful and every part of me
ached for him to take the risk and kiss me.

“It’s not really what you want
Mina,” he spoke softly.

He brushed the side of my face
with his hand, touching my forehead with his. “Not today. There’ll
be a time but you’re tied to Sam and he’s in no position to free
you from that. I’ll not kiss you until you’re free to be kissed. I
don’t want it to be spoilt by guilt.”

A switch went down and anger
flared in me from displaced passion.

“Blake,” my words faltered. I
jerked my head away from his hands. “You’ve misunderstood
everything, I don’t love you. I love Sam.” The words I spoke
weren’t a lie but they weren’t the truth either.