Avalon Rising (15 page)

I should run. I should follow Briana and Seamus and the two burly men to whatever village or shelter they might find refuge in; I should seek the closest aeroship port and find my way back to Camelot before it’s too late.

Caldor flies straight for me—I can hear the mechanical caw made richer with my
jaseemat
—and a rush of courage invigorates me. Merlin’s silly invention might buy me time. The falcon lands, sputtering nearly empty, and the musical notes of the rogues’ calls rustle with the shine of their raised, extended blades. I wrench Caldor’s steam valve open, take out the small purse of
jaseemat,
and cast a handful inside.

The
jaseemat
dances over the copper feathers and its iron beak. Black eyes stare at mine, and they’ve never claimed to hold any sort of life—even with
jaseemat
—but there’s a change, and Caldor comes to life. Wings broaden, their span longer than both my arms stretched as far out as I can manage.

Caldor leaps into the air to catch a breath of wind. I’m on my feet and backing away, snow finding its way into my leather boots and my hair as I run. I glance over my shoulder at Caldor flying straight into the band of rogues. The falcon’s wings flap wildly—they slice open the necks of the unlucky two at the front. Shred their brightly colored garments. I tear away from the sight, at the horror of their blood on the ground. I run. Caldor will find me.

I race through trees dark like shadows, branches bare, trunks tall and unlike anything I’ve ever seen in Camelot. I’ve lost track of where Briana and Seamus ran to, and I must find a place to hide rather than try to outrun those who evaded Caldor’s deadly wings. Every path looks the same, every tree a withered twin of the next. There’s nowhere to hide.

“You cannot hide, Vivienne. But there is a way,”
Merlin’s voice whispers in my ear. As I run, I turn to the translucent blue eyes lined in gold staring at mine through the atmosphere. It’s delirium; it has to be.
“You know it already, girl. You have everything you need to beat them.”

A nudge at my memory reminds me of the spells in my pocket. Magic, yes. That could fend them off. I face my own mortality now, and magic would ensure I survive. But how could I think of doing such a thing? The spirit of Merlin is tempting me for a reason I still don’t understand, but I won’t let him win.

Besides, I have another choice. “If you mean your own sword, old man, so be it. Gawain was an excellent teacher.”

I stop running and seize Merlin’s sword from the holster on my back, holding it high. Merlin vanishes before I can see the outrage on his face for claiming his weapon as mine. Gallops—many gallops. I glance over my shoulder. Horses. Seven. Each carrying a rogue dressed like a prince of the skies: long coats lined in embroidered silver silk. Swords tinted gold bending with their arms. Devious smiles. One drops from his steed and steps forward. His eyes shine as brightly as the gold in his ostentatious blade.

“Why do you outrun us, little girl?” he says in fluid English, his vowels like music. “What is it you hide?”

I hold my sword tightly; I lift it higher.

Merlin’s voice is relentless.
“They’ll slice you into two, Vivienne. You can’t win against them.”

I ignore him. I have to try. I cannot give in to the test of magic he’s put upon me. “Nothing you can claim for yourselves,” I declare to the rogue.

He has his chin in hand, raspy with black whiskers, and he smiles at his comrades. When he turns back, his face is one of immortal stone, and his blade shines brightly enough to sever the moon from its place in the sky. The sword slams down against mine with such ferocity that fighting the wraith in the Fisher King’s castle might as well have been practice. My sword rattles from the blow, and I step back to collect myself.

The rogue’s black eyes run over my body. “Come on, little girl. Put away your plaything, and the punishment will be … lessened.”

I know it’s hopeless, but I will not surrender.

“There’s another way, Vivienne,”
Merlin tells me.

My shoulders lighten with his truth. “You’re right.”

Once the rogue is far enough away to turn his back and jeer with his friends, I reach for my firelance. I lift it high, click back the hammer. The rogue hears the sound and turns, just in time for me to send a bearing straight into his forehead.

My lip quivers at the quick death, but there’s no time to mourn. I stare at the other rogues, whose mouths drop, who reach for their own firelances. I aim quickly. There are six left. I step backward, and I fire thrice more, hitting another, but not killing him. Now I’m out of bearings.

Now I have to run.

I race into a clear meadow, and suddenly, the ground under my feet shifts, no longer stable. My feet slide, and I look down in horror at the shine of ice. I’m on a lake.

“Vivienne!”

“No, Merlin!” I cry in a state of panic. “No more!” But his voice was strange that time. It was younger, frantic. It was a voice I recognized—

An iron bearing slices the air by my ear, and I jump and scatter further back onto the frozen lake until it cracks loudly. I patter away from the weak spot spidering out in breaks of ice and water, preventing me from returning to shore. I have to go the other way; I have to risk it. Their horses won’t cross it. The air is cold enough for me to believe the ice is sturdy—

“Vivienne!”

I ignore the voice for the rogues, who fire and call after me, calling me
bruja
, a witch, a demon girl, the sorcerer’s advocate who might know the coordinates of Avalon the rest of the world simply cannot find.
How would they know?

I keep running. If I can make it to the other side of the lake …

A whip of sharp pain strikes my arm. I cry out. My hand reaches for my torn sleeve, pulling away with thick blood staining my fingers. The shock of a rogue’s firelance’s bite sends me into a bout of shakes. Soon, they’ll finish me off.

But there’s one thing I haven’t forgotten: one final resort. And if I don’t employ it, all hope is lost. The demigods would have to understand, especially the one who gave me her name.

I remember the words in Merlin’s journals as easily as I remember the layout of the clock tower.

“Do it … ”
Merlin whispers.

“Vivienne!” It’s not Merlin. But the voice mingles in my mind with the sorcerer’s like I might be possessed. “Get off the ice!”

I dart my gaze at the five rogues in front of me. The ice has made them cautious, but their faces are indicative of their determination. They’re not about to let a girl escape them.

My chin lifts, and I utter the spell, God save me. I utter the spell that would blind a man.

“
Yeuxeuse fambratcricoh kemphah solohite
.”

Each word rolls off my tongue like sweet honey I could happily drown in. A pull of my chest and a wave of heat in my veins rush over me like sunlight on my skin. An emptiness in my mind begs to be filled over and over with the same words that seem to expand into the most delectable song, and certainly to take these words as mine could never be wicked.

I aim the spell at each of the rogues. They come to a confused stop, like their surroundings have shifted into an unrecognizable place. Red trickles from the corners of their eyes, mixed with acidic fluids. A gasp escapes my lips, but not out of horror—on the contrary, I’m fascinated, and the longer I watch, the juicer the sweet taste on my tongue. The rogues touch their cheeks, pulling their fingers away to see bright blood. And then their eyes burn.

Burn.
Oh God, what have I done? My fingers spread widely in front of me as though I expect to see them wilt into nothingness from my thievery. But nothing happens.

Now the rogues panic. Their hands scratch at their sockets in desperation.

“Vivienne!”

My focus returns, and my eyes dart to the source of the voice. In the distance and through the trees, a man yanks his horse’s reins to bring the animal to a stop, and then he leaps from its back.

“Get off the ice!”

His eyes are big and round, and from the time passed since I last saw him, they’ve grown tired, too. Older. His body is just as lean and athletic as it was on that last day, the furs about his shoulder and the leather across his back worn from weather and battle. He runs toward me, and I’m unable to move in my surprise.

“Marcus,” I whisper.

The ice breaks beneath me.

I fall in, frozen water encapsulating me, and through it all, I swear I hear my own name calling back to me. It’s from above, surely, or it’s the Lady of the Lake’s eerie voice born of the water while a signet of sculpted marble loosens from my cloak’s pocket and floats away.

My arms flail through the heavenly and terrifying song for the surface, for the signet. Unable to find both. Rogues have followed me. One is slammed to the ice, his face held down by a thick leather boot that must be Merlin’s as his pistolník sends a blast straight through the rogue’s skull.

My last thought before I fall into a deep sleep is one of certainty.

But it was Marcus I saw, not Merlin.

The air around me is hot and dry, and I’m no longer drowning in an icy lake. Now, I’m walking down a sunlit corridor.

The floor is carpeted with a long, crimson runner, similar to the one in Camelot’s main castle. My footsteps render a hollow sound muffled by the fabric. But there’s an echo following me. One I cannot place.

The walls are lined with windows where once there might have been gas-lantern candelabras or oil portraits of princesses or monsters. The sills frame a horizon split into two colors: countless sands and endless sky. The caws of seagulls are washed away by the ocean in the distance; I know it’s not the fresh water lakes in Britannia from the tang of salt in the air, the dryness against my cheeks, the wind tugging ruthlessly at my hair.

I continue onward, confused and lost and without a very important weight in my cloak’s pocket, but somehow certain I’m heading in the right direction. At the end of the corridor, the hall feeds into an enormous room protected from the sky by long sheets held taut by iron bars separating a balcony looking over the desert below. Sands are shadowed by scores of aeroships hanging in the sky, cannon balls sailing through the air from one to the other. There are flashes of explosions, so distant they’re nearly beautiful. The colors and scents of a war far away, though war nonetheless.

I glance back down the corridor; there’s a room at its end. In the middle is a familiar hookah, one I turned into a toy aeroship long ago. Smoke rings climb the walls and escape out the verandah.

It’s hard to see in here with so much light coming through. But clearly this place is much more progressive than Camelot, and war is either a common factor, or not as interesting as the scientific focal point of this room. Every few feet stands a mechanical man the sorcerer once told me about—
automatons
, only found in the Holy Land because of its advancement in the mechanical arts. No longer are machines simple parlor tricks, like Caldor, but actual people, serving cloths about their arms and trays permanently soldered to the hands that boast miniature glass goblets of hot tea.

Someone sits in a fashionable chair inside the room at the hall’s end. “Step inside, please.”

If the register of his voice had ever evaded me, I certainly would have recognized the tattoos etched onto his skull.

“Merlin,” I whisper. My feet pick up, running past the beckoning copper faces boasting the lush turbans Azur wore. Women with silk scarves across their faces stand beside them, a trio putting final touches on a newly-made automaton. Final twists of wrenches, soldering of iron, and perhaps one of these women is Lena, whom Merlin told me of. Someone able to create or find secret passageways in aeroships.

At the end of the hallway, the hypnotic octaves of a playing harp fills the open space. And as I enter the room, Merlin looks sideways at me, a breath of green smoke escaping his lips while dancers of flesh and blood move around him.

I stop at the door’s entrance. Merlin turns fully, his eyes a sobering mix of white and gold. The blue irises once so kind and mischievous are gone, turning him into an image of pure magic.

“Merlin,” I whisper. “What happened? Where are we?” I remember flying through the sky, a rush of wind and snow around me. I remember the sorcerer sending me to my own imminent death by crashing my aeroship, and the dreadful memory of how delightful it was to speak magical words and claim their power.

One of the women sets down a long, copper tool on a small table beside Merlin and beckons a servant carrying a tray of vanilla-scented biscuits and a bowl of shelled pistachios.

Merlin stretches in his seat, ignoring the food. “Welcome to Azur’s palace, Vivienne, dear. It’s about time you joined me here.” His hands gesture to the jewel-toned drapes, the plush cushions, the wall-lining contraptions that crush open pistachios, leaving the nuts inside perfectly intact.

The servant boy no older than ten prepares a dish of pastries. I can smell cinnamon in the hot, dry air with more spices I only ever associated with Merlin’s alchemist mentor. “Azur. Where is he?”

Merlin smiles, and it’s a smile I’ve never seen before. A sure-fire guarantee that to ask again would tell me something I’d beg never to know. I can almost see his thoughts scratched onto his golden eyes.

“Merlin, where is he?” My voice wobbles. “What happened to you? You’re supposed to be locked up, but in the woods—”

“Magic was always the right path for me, Vivienne. It was only a matter of time before I’d return to it.” He leans close to one of the women and touches her chin. The woman’s smile is cheeky.

I shake my head. This isn’t my mentor. “No. You’re wrong. Whoever you are, you’re not Merlin. This isn’t real. I’m not really here. I’m… ”

I’m in the snow or I’ve frozen in the lake, drowned by ice. But wait, there was something—

Merlin’s pistolník.

It sent a bearing into a rogue’s temple. I’m watching it happen again and thinking back to the euphoric rush of magic I’d only stolen just minutes prior, but I’m also looking at Merlin, whose cocked eyebrow seems to indicate he knows exactly what I’m thinking. “Lose something, my dear?”

“No,” I say, unsure if he indeed means his prized weapon. It was in Marcus’s hand—not Merlin’s. “But that’s impossible. It’s yours. You’d never give it away.” The thief Merlin sneers. “Ha! Thinking about gadgets and weaponry when really you should be asking something else. Haven’t you wondered why it is I sent you to the Perilous Lands? Crashing to the countryside? Why I put you straight in Sir Marcus’s path? Go on, Vivienne—ask.” The violent tremors in his voice shake me. Suddenly, there’s a sharp pain in my right arm, spidering down the length of it, and I can no longer bear it. “What, Merlin?” I hold tight to my shoulder, hoping to ease the pain, and when I look at it for myself, I watch blood ooze through my fingers.

Merlin moves faster than sound, and suddenly he is straight in my face. The whites in his golden eyes turn bright red.

“Ask me what I’ve told Sir Marcus, but not you.”

A loud crackle punctuates the sorcerer’s final words and wakes me from my dream, but I do not open my eyes. A quick pop follows a rush of warmth around me, and I steal seconds to rest in this peaceful limbo. It’s a heavenly winter morning, and I’ll have tea with my mother before kissing my father on the cheek as Owen drags me out the door. He’ll go to the knights’ quarters to show off his archery skills, and Guinevere and I will go on a hunting day trip with Arthur.

No, that’s not the world I live in anymore, and that truth twists my stomach into a knot.

I open my eyes to a threadbare woolen blanket around me. My hair’s draped over my shoulders, tangled, but dry. I’m in a small room. Layered stones and bricks serve as walls, and a fireplace crackles away. The room is decorated with oak furniture and noble gray-and-black furs. Not Camelot; not home. Even poor Caldor is nowhere in sight.

I realize I’m on a soft bed, and through my foggy vision, I spot a lean figure move in front of the fire. My heart skips a beat when I remember the vision of Marcus pulling me from the water to safety, the muddled memories of him wrapping furs around me and lifting me atop his horse. Now he crouches in front of the hearth. The fire is well-tended to, and he stares absent-mindedly into it. Lost in thought and a million miles farther than that.

Marcus. Here,
real
.

Suddenly, all the times I’ve wondered if he was alive or dead mean nothing—how could they when my illogical heart always knew I would see him again? That no matter what, there was always hope when it was a question of whether we should love.

I watch him for a long time: fine, pointed nose, unsure violet eyes, the rounded shape of his lips over a graceful chin. I can’t see the inked dragon climbing his neck, but his piercing has healed cleanly, an arrow’s shaft flying through two spots in his ear and disappearing under his tangled hair.

His worn leather breastplate has vanished for a black woolen tunic, light enough to sit in front of the flames as he uses an iron fire poker to usher the red cinders around the fireplace. He doesn’t notice me watching from his periphery. His eyes are captivated by the hearth. Breathing steady and mouth serious. Alive, real, and here, like a dream coming to life as I will it.

When I can bear it no longer, I speak. “Marcus.”

His eyes, kohled but smudged, snap over to mine, and his face fills with relief.

“Vivienne,” he breathes, the hardness in his face vanishing. He comes to the bedside and presses his lips to my forehead, tangling his fingers in my hair. “I was so scared.” His arms tighten around me as he draws me into an embrace on the bed. A dullness throbs in my arm where the rogue shot me. But I don’t care. I can’t care. Not now.

I pull him closer. “I knew I’d find you.”

When I close my eyes, I feel the icy bite of the lake fighting me in the water. I feel Marcus’s hand wrap around my wrist, a gigantic tug akin to being slammed through a pane of glass. I hear his voice shouting my name, muffled, muted.

“It was impossible,” I say, “and there was no reason to believe … especially with the—” The pistolník, I want to add. But I don’t yet understand my dream of Merlin in Jerusalem, and I can’t bear to decipher it now.

His warm hand cups my face. “When you fell through the ice, it was like seeing the farmlands burning all over again. What happened? How did you
get
here?”

The rogues’ gleaming eyes might haunt me forever. “I crashed. Or, at least, my aeroship did.” Merlin’s chilling presence is gone. I don’t know what possessed the sorcerer to send me to the countryside, nearly killing me in the process. Perhaps he’s completely turned to magic now. Or perhaps it really was to send me straight into Marcus’s path.

Marcus is quiet, thinking, and I’m ready for the next five or ten or ten million questions he’d have, but instead, he leans against the pillows beside me and presses his hand to my forehead. “How do you feel?” His words are quick and clipped, without their usual warmth, and neither of us has mentioned the rogues yet.

My fingers fall timidly to his soft tunic in hopes touch could bring back that warmth. His body feels firmer, stronger. I think about his question, but I’m dizzy, tired, hungry. Eager to keep my fingers wrapped up in his shirt.

“It’s been a long few days,” I whisper. Then, another thought. “Where have you been? Kay arrived in Camelot and said it’d been over a month since anyone last heard from you!”

He exhales, eyes taking his attention elsewhere as the back of his hand runs blissfully over my cheek and down my neck. He’s thinking of how to answer.

But then I remember the fall into the ice more clearly, and oh God, tell me I imagined the signet floating away from me. “Where’s my cloak?” I whisper, frantically searching the room for it.

“Wait, you’re hurt—”

Marcus’s hand touches my shoulder to help me sit up, and I cringe. A shooting bolt of what lightning must feel like courses through me, and all thoughts of ice and water vanish. He pulls his hand away.

“Sorry,” he says with all honesty. He tightens his lips for a brief second, as though searching for uncomfortable words. “I, um … ” He gestures to my hurt arm, and when I move again, I feel thick fabric bound to my bare shoulder under the blanket. Completely bare. A rosiness warms my cheeks.

“A fine sleeve was sacrificed for the sake of your arm.” Marcus emits a quiet laugh. Then his eyes widen. “Oh! I didn’t see anything. I swear.”

The bandage is too tight, and I twist to relieve the tension. It must be clear on my face, because Marcus frowns. “Can I?”

I nod, and he pulls the blanket to my waist. He’s completely torn off the arm of Guinevere’s dress, and the fragments left behind he’s tucked into the ridge of my corset. I’m startled by my naked shoulder in full view of Marcus’s wide eyes, but he does his best to avert his gaze and focuses on the white cotton tied around my arm.

“Let’s see,” he whispers, shuffling my legs away so he can get an easier look. His fingers untie the knot, and his cheeks redden as he works. He blinks too often for complete focus, takes a long breath, and glances up until we’re staring at one another. “Behind you.”

I look over my shoulder at the strips of cotton lying on a small wooden table beside us. My free hand finds a few, and I give them to him. “You didn’t say where you were.”

His eyes settle on mine, and he tucks strands of tangled hair behind my ear. In his gaze lingers a scene he won’t let me see for myself. “I was … on my way back.” Now his neck reddens, too, and I’m not sure if it’s because of the fire burning too ferociously in this small room, my skin under his sneaking eye, or a blatant lie I don’t believe he’d ever tell me.

I cock my head to the side. He must see my incredulity. “On your way back? Sir Kay made it to Camelot before you could.”

“Honest.” He removes the bandage, and I cringe at the wound’s fiery ache, the bold red of my blood spilling from the dent in my skin. “But the quest is strange. Unlike before. We’re so close—
they’re
so close.” He shuts his eyes in frustration. His hand darts to his neck, where his dragon tattoo has long since healed, but is covered in obsessive scratches.

I gasp at the sight of them and pull his hand from the reddening skin. “What happened?”

His furrowed brows deepen his eyes. “The ink marks us terribly out here. Arthur meant it to, but what I wouldn’t give … ” He takes a breath, and then the subject changes. “Owen has gone mad.”

I sit up. “Where is he?” Worry for my brother pulsates through me.

Marcus gently ties the bandage around my arm and then reaches for my hand. “The land is raw and dead surrounding Athens, and there is no way a place such as Avalon could be anywhere near it. The rogues retreated, but it didn’t bring us any closer, and that sent Owen into a craze, forcing Galahad to banish him from Camelot.”

Banishment? Sir Kay never mentioned this. Oh God. “I couldn’t stay,” Marcus continues. “I—” He freezes, his mouth formed around the words he wants to say, but a strange sort of connection between us shatters, and there’s no sense in hoping for him to continue now. I remember the pistolník that killed the rogue, and I wonder if Marcus happened to come across one similar to Merlin’s while out here.