Avalon Rising (20 page)

How stupid we were in the face of danger to ignore something so perilous? How stupid not to realize deadly enemies were right on our doorstep, as well as in our farmlands? In all likelihood, Arthur didn’t even bat an eye, not when he was going mad, and his wife and champion were caught in each other’s arms. Perhaps they were told it was, in fact, an allied kingdom sending help. Oh God, what if the ship my father sent for had been a rogue ship, too?

Another of Galahad’s cannons hits the deck above us. Shouts are indecipherable and layered and panicked from such danger, and I can only hope that the damage is enough to give Galahad a chance to end it all.

The Black Knight turns to the door at hearing his rogues’ cries. He squeezes his fingers around his goblet, tighter and tighter and tighter, until there’s a loud snap and a chime, and every piece of glass flies outward against the dark walls. I cover my eyes from the flying shards and peek through my fingers. A lone line of blood trickles down the devil’s skin, but he is unfazed.

“A drink, darling?” he says nonchalantly. He picks up an unopened green glass bottle and readies a comb of shredded silver with a square of sugar atop. Absinthe. A ring on his hand has a strange compartment set on top. As the drink settles, he opens the tiny chamber, filled with white powder, and presses a fingertip of it to a nostril, sniffing loudly as he inhales.

I can smell the fragrance of the anise from where I sit, but I look away, making sure he sees my grimace.

“Suit yourself.” He drinks the entire shot. “I need inspiration, Lady Vivienne. I need to come up with the most exquisite way to kill Galahad. And then I need to find a way to convince you to give me the coordinates to Avalon.” He holds up his empty green glass and looks through it at the gas lantern’s light. “How will I ensure you tell me? Maybe we should discuss the situation regarding … Camelot.”

My eyes find their way back to the maps. “It was you, wasn’t it? You came to Camelot for its exodus?” I can’t help but give in to the turmoil he’ll set upon me now.

And suddenly, the Black Knight is next to me at the maps, glancing at the array of red pins. It appalls me to have him so dangerously close; it sickens me even more to think of his aeroships not a mile from my bedchambers. He has another shot of green fairy in his grasp, one I didn’t see him make. “It was my men, yes. But this map is out of date. Your kin aren’t in Jerusalem anymore. Still in the Holy Land, though, if memory serves.”

“Where are they, you monster?” I try to sound threatening, but I come off as weak and trembling. I think of my mother’s look of horror once the façade of who their saviors were was revealed. How she would have had to be strong for the rest.

The Black Knight inclines his head at my pitiful insult. “Don’t be absurd to think you’re entitled to any answers yet, Lady Vivienne.”

“Answers?” I say. “I demanded one and no more. What else is there for me to know?”

His breath is spicy licorice, and his green eye is all the greener. “A lady of your standing shouldn’t raise her voice to such heights.” But he cannot hold my gaze for long. A shudder as I stare back and a breath that speaks loudly of his discomfort are all too obvious, and he turns away as though to hide what I now recognize as fear.

Perhaps he holds no power over me after all: he could have tortured me by now. He could have cut my fingers clear off my hand with the jagged dagger tucked inside his jacket. But instead, his fists are clenched tightly, ready to strike, though to him perhaps it’s impossible. There might as well be a wall of impenetrable glass between us.

My God, there’s so much danger here, but none of it has touched me. “What has you so afraid of me?” I ask.

And then I see the slightest dip in his confident green eye, as though I’ve touched on something I wasn’t to know just yet.

“That,” I continue, pointing. “What is that? Why do I scare you? You could have easily killed or hurt me, but you haven’t. You could have slain the knight and squire, all in one go. The signet would have required a bit of a hunt, but the world is finite enough. You could have found the Grail yourself eventually. Why go through the trouble of keeping me alive?”

He swallows the rest of his green spirit as he returns to the decanter. His hands shake more noticeably now against the table as he pours a third, and the decks above us rumble from the pains of war. He glances at me. “As it is practice for men to share drink when they discuss matters of the world, shall I now pour one for the lady?”

“I think I’ve found my thirst.”

He reaches for a second glass goblet, miniature and carved with a cloudy dragon on the front. He paints the animal green with the drink and hands it to me with an ironic smile. “Fitting, no?”

I hold the glass, waiting for his explanation. Now, I’m not afraid.

“Your mind, Lady Vivienne,” he finally says, “is untouchable.”

I narrow my eyes at his likely ruse in the making. “How so?”

He lifts his eyebrows and his glass, but I refuse to clink mine with his. It’d be wrong to toast with such a monster. “You don’t know what the demigods say about you?”

I kiss the glass, and the cool absinthe washes down my throat. It’s harsh, but refined. “I certainly wouldn’t be surprised to hear they’ve declared to the entire world that I’m the new inventor of Camelot with the coordinates to Avalon,” I manage through the burn.

The Black Knight drinks his absinthe, but no bout of green comes over his face, as though the liquor has not rendered him drunk. After three!

He takes my glass and sets it on the table. It lands with a heavy clank, nearly breaking into pieces. “Fascinating. I wonder what it’d be like to see the contents of your mind.” My head starts to swim, and I’m wondering now if he’s passed on his drunkenness to me in the same manner he was able to light the kindle in the hearth from afar. “What?” I say, frowning as he drifts into two people, mirror reflections of the other. The room shifts, as though the aeroship were a spinning top dancing in the sky. Cackles come from the ship’s bow, where I know the Black Knight’s men fight, where they wield the wind as their weapon. The rush of fear is a hurricane coming back to me, and I’m losing my control of it. “What are you talking about?”

“Dizzy, love?” He tilts his head in a pitying manner. I force myself to face him; I push aside the hold nausea has on me. “What’s happening? What was in that?” I focus my gaze on my empty glass, the one with the dragon bursting free from its cage, flickering flames made out of spun sand. The rim of the glass is coated in something; perhaps a fine salt, or sugar. I’m dizzy, but I wipe my finger across the surface and taste it.

“Opium?”

He has a pipe in his hand, and as he smokes, bellows of green plumes surround me until the room disappears into a fog. “For all the work you did with Merlin, you sure have no idea how opium works.”

I cough and cough, and it’s of no use because the smoke gets thicker until the entire room disappears, and I’m left in a world I cannot understand.

“Be still, and let it work. I won’t harm you, as you’ve already come to realize. But your mind must be loose.” Another breath.

I’m fighting for air and failing. My lungs burn with fire and ash, and I can’t find my way through the smoke. Oh God, if he is a devil, he might be immune to whatever he’s putting me through. And after how I taunted him, how I realized he wouldn’t kill me—no, not when there’s clearly something he fears about me. What is it? What is that voice, that honey-coated voice screaming behind the soundless smoke?

“Wake up, Vivienne, daughter of Carolyn!”
thunders in my ear, and I breathe a gasp.

The Black Knight is closer now, and he’s uncovered his mechanical eye. He stares into my gaze. I feel the same pull I felt only once before: when Morgan le Fay tried to steal the coordinates to Avalon from my mind. And perhaps the Black Knight is trying to do the same.

“Vivienne! Wake up!”
the woman bellows again.

It’s the Lady of the Lake, who promised she’d protect me. Who might have freed herself from whatever hold Merlin set upon her in the woods. And with that, I realize what the Black Knight fears.

I snap free, and in my hand is his firelance, its barrel aimed at his temple. He’s shocked by the gentle flirting of skull and iron, and oh God I’d love nothing more than to steal magic to torture him before sending a bearing straight into his head.

“You have her eyes,” he says with a tone of amusement covering his humility.

I shake my head. “I have my father’s eyes. And I may not be able to kill or hurt you with this firelance, but I am creative, too.”

He cocks an eyebrow. “I am immune to stolen magic as much as I am immune to the copper that killed le Fay.”

I incline my head. “The magic wouldn’t be stolen if it were a gift, though.” I feel the Lady of the Lake’s protection. Even in the sky, so far from her element of water, she’ll still protect me. “As for bearings, well. I’ll certainly call your bluff.”

The Black Knight drifts closer, as though to captivate me by way of his elegance or his chivalry. “Oh, darling. You think you could ever hurt me. We’re high enough in the clouds that you’d be properly tortured before the Lady of the Lake could have her revenge.”

I smile sweetly. “I think not.
Do not lie to me.
” I press the barrel against his temple. “
Darling.
”

Through his defeat he raises his chin. “Where is Avalon?”

I look deep inside my earliest memory. At the clear picture of a castle in the clouds. It’s plain as day and only made more real by what the Fisher King unlocked. “You’ll never know.” I click back the hammer.

The Black Knight smiles as though his death is not seconds away. “You’ll show it to me.”

I shake my head. “It’ll never be yours.” The barrel digs deeper into his temple.

His smile remains tight on his face, but he holds up a halting finger in pathetic protest. “It appears, darling, your mother is quite as determined as you are to survive.”

I freeze. The firelance loosens from his skin, and I feel the weight of it fall to my side.

He glances at the map next to me. “So, the Holy Land. Is that where I sent Camelot’s subjects? To a world you longed to escape to anyway, even if hundreds—no,
thousands—
of rogue aeroships have invaded its skies? If so, do you really want to spend all this time in Greece instead? Be reasonable, Lady Vivienne. I could send you in your own aeroship to meet the ridiculous alchemist fighting to reclaim his home, or the mother who fights more viciously than you do with a blade. You could be away from all this Avalon nonsense.”

I cannot let my face give away my thoughts. I blink away the tears that want to rise out of fear for Azur and my mother. I lift my weapon high again. Press the barrel deep into his temple so that the Black Knight grits his jaw. I harden my face, ready to kill.

His eyebrows slowly rise. “Wait. Let me gain your trust. I’m a demigod of my word. To prove as such, I have something important for you to see about your beloved knight and the barmaid.”

My heart skips. He’s bluffing.

He’s bluffing, he’s lying, whatever it takes to get the coordinates to Avalon. I must have heard him wrong; I
know
I heard him wrong. It’s the absinthe talking, and perhaps this is all just a nightmare, and I’ll wake up tomorrow in my warm bed. I’ll wake up, and it’ll turn out all this never happened. My brother didn’t find us. Marcus didn’t save me from the icy waters. The Black Knight is a man I made up myself, using the lens from Caldor’s eye when Merlin and I conquered the woods Morgan bewitched, and the crisp green eyes of Arthur, whose death I still mourn.

But no, the Black Knight looks plainly at me, hiding nothing, letting me see everything his soul encompasses. He is a walking paradox, his soul gone and his body here. Not a ghost in the machine, but Merlin’s antithesis.

He smiles as his hand tilts the firelance away from his temple. And, God help me, I let him. “You want to know, don’t you? Isn’t there part of you just
dying
for the details?” His voice drawls into a raspy whisper, graceful in its waver.

Anger crawls over my skin, and I cast it away by shoving the barrel under his throat. “You don’t get to mention him; you haven’t the right.”

He suppresses a choked cough. “Just one more taste of green fairy. For someone protected by the Lady of the Lake, for someone whose mind is eternally locked from my mechanical eye, it’ll be nothing more than the sweetesttasting honey you’ve ever had.”

My mother’s kind eyes, brilliant mind, warm touch … I imagine her in turmoil.

The Black Knight’s green eye shines. “Let me tell you about Sir Marcus and Lena. To ease your mind, to show you can trust me.”

He’s lying. He’s bringing this up to control me.
I cannot trust him.

“Do not mention him again,” I warn. But I cannot kill him now. He speaks of Marcus, and God, Marcus—

“Darling.”

I pull away in defiance and drop my firelance; I’m as far from the monster as I can get and as far as my dizziness will allow for. He flips his golden eye patch to the other side, letting me see my rounded reflection in his mechanical eye. Another miniature goblet of absinthe has found its way into his grasp. “I know the truth.”

“How?”

Even without a real eye looking back at me, I know what he says is the truth. “I looked into Sir Marcus’s eyes and saw it for myself. Whatever fate you believe to be his was an intentional lie told by someone you trusted once.”

“Why?”

“To mislead.”

It doesn’t make any sense. The booming cannons above threaten to throw me off-balance, and the Black Knight seizes my wrist to keep me from falling.

“To mislead whom?” I ask.

And then, the light changes, and there’s movement in his glass eye piece, similar to how Merlin’s looking glass would turn at the beckoning call of Azur’s
jaseemat
. The Black Knight offers me the miniature goblet.

I seize it. Lift it to my lips and tilt it so that the cool green liquid can touch my lips.

“To mislead you, darling,” he answers.

As the drink flows down my throat, I look straight into the Black Knight’s mechanical eye to see for myself.