Avalon Rising (23 page)

Lena’s amazement fades for a somber look. “Where are we headed?”

“Greece. If we don’t crash first.” I strap the crossbow to my back, ensuring Merlin’s sword is much more secure at my waist. The firelance is comfortable in my grasp.

“Let them worry about crashing,” Lena says. She glances around the room. Her smile comes about her face easily and with a sort of zeal I can’t help but envy, like this is not a terrifying predicament but a glorious adventure. “There’s a trick to these sorts of aeroships. Weak spots, you see, that we could employ for the sake of commandeering this vessel. I learned all about them in Corbenic from old illusionists who showed me how to make rabbits disappear.”

“Yes, I know,” I reply. “I mean, I know of what you speak. But I have nothing I could use to expose their vulnerabilities.” It feels strange talking to the real version of the girl I just saw in a memory, and I ignore the discomfort by studying the firelance she gave me. It’s got a longer barrel than those from Camelot, and the chamber holds eight bearings of iron rather than the six of Merlin’s pistolník.

Lena stares at me, her lips pursed in thought before she speaks. “You all right, my lady? I thought you’d be relieved by the idea of hijacking a rogue aeroship.”

“It’s simply that … ” I stare at the weapon in my hand and think about the dead shock on Morgan le Fay’s face when I fired a bearing straight into her forehead. “Nothing. And you needn’t call me that. I was just a handmaid.” In fact, I should be the one addressing Lena as such, if she’s a princess of Corbenic.

But Lena’s silvery eyes shine at mine. “A lady is never
just
anything, Vivienne.”

Hearing how Lena boarded the aeroship
MUERTE
through passageways in the village was remarkable. The Black Knight had been much too self-absorbed to realize the window to this cabin was poorly locked, and thus easy to pick. Marcus and Owen were more interesting playthings anyway, shackled on the ground while Lena cast her rope and grappling hook to scale the side of aeroship and shimmy up to the sill. Helping me escape once
MUERTE
had taken flight seemed safer than engaging the rogues in full out battle in the middle of a snowy meadow.

“Oh, the blond one saw me. I don’t know if Marcus did, though,” Lena tells me. “I never knew him to pay that much attention to things occurring in the background.”

Her smile is subtle, but happy, and I know if I don’t ask now, I’ll never know for sure.

“You were friends in Corbenic.”

Lena glances at me. “Yes.” A moment passes, and Lena shows no sign of discomfort, but perhaps she doesn’t know what Marcus means to me. “Didn’t think I’d ever see him again, actually. But when the three of you arrived, I could tell with one look he’d taken some advice I’d given him long ago, and that brought me much delight.” She turns her smile to me and reaches for my hand. “I’m happy for you. Or I will be, I suppose, once all this Grail nonsense is sorted out.”

The next breath of air I take cleanses the idea of betrayal from my heart. Marcus wasn’t with Lena during that month he was missing. But then … where was he?

I can’t think about it now. “Why did you do this?” I ask, gesturing to the cabin. I pace in front of the door in case rogues would pass by and try to enter, or the Black Knight himself, and I’m more than ready to slam the door onto his fingers. “Did it ever cross your mind that perhaps you’d die on this ship?”

Lena leans against the wall and shrugs. “Not really. The world was already a dangerous place for me once I left Corbenic. I didn’t know if I’d make it a week before I’d starve or be murdered or abducted for ransom.”

With a giddy look in her eyes, she sneaks to the Black Knight’s bar to help herself to a quick shot of absinthe, her eyebrows raised at mine. I shake my head. One trip into the mechanical eye of the Black Knight was enough for me, and one trip was all it took to lose my liking of green fairy.

“Besides,” she adds, “this is the finish line now. Civilizations are closing in on Avalon, and according to the Black Knight, you’re the one who’s going to find it. How could I
not
want to be a part of that? Aren’t you thrilled?”

Thrilled. More like wobbling on a line between magic and fear. “I’m not sure it’s as easy as that.”

“It won’t be,” Lena says. “But even so, this is the dawn of something new. The Holy Grail is meant to balance the scales between the mechanical arts and magic. The world is going to change.”

The world has already changed one hundred fold for me: I’m a prisoner flying through the clouds in the middle of a violent, bloody scrimmage.

And still, “How?” I ask. “Truly, I have no idea how something so mythical could even exist, and beyond that, I don’t know how such a balance between two starkly different elements would work.”

Lena’s shoulders fall, but it’s out of uncertainty and not defeat. “I don’t know. But I’ll stick around to find out. Can you imagine what sort of wonders must exist in Avalon?”

I want to indulge in a bit of fantasy and consider what the elusive castle in the clouds must be like. Staring out the window, I watch the stars and clouds drift by and listen to how silent the aeroship has become.

But then Galahad’s aeroship drifts into my view.

Then closer.

And when it’s close enough that I can make out the fine grain of the wood on its side, I feel my heart stop.

“Look out!” I shout, in time for both Lena and me to take cover.

The aeroship slams into
MUERTE
to cries echoing above. The wooden beams lined in thin iron on the ceiling crack and crumble, and much of it falls over us. The floor shakes. I stand and look around as Lena does, brushing off the shards of wood from her sleeves and coughing in the fog of dust. I run to the window and peer out at Galahad’s aeroship and the iron-tipped wing spiked with hooked prongs, able to grab an aeroship’s body and yank parts of it free—oh God.

The wing is too far to reach from the window, but a plan shapes in my head. “Where are the passageways, Lena?” I turn to her. “If there were any in an aeroship, where would they be?” Merlin said Lena was an expert on these sorts of details. Certainly that’s what he kept from me but told Marcus. Certainly.

Lena’s face freezes in surprise, and I know she’s wondering how I could ever realize this about her. But instead of questioning me, “In the captain’s cabin. Facing the stern.”

She points, and I follow her finger toward the spirits’ counter. On the other side is a mantle holding glasses and the Black Knight’s absinthe decanter.

I run to it, gauging the perimeters of the wall and spotting a faint outline that’s long since caked over with dust and age. The cannons are rising again, and I must be cautious. I press my ear to the wood and knock once: the sound echoes. Hollow. I push gently, and it’s tightly-sealed, but when I realize it swings on an axis, just like the stone wall to Merlin’s catacombs, another nudge breaks it free of the wall.

Lena and I stare down a passageway dark and damp and full of cobwebs, beams of wood, metal gears. An impossible path while an aeroship is in motion, lest we would be crushed by the slamming steel pistons churning the ship’s propeller.

Nevertheless, there’s no other way, and I have little time before the Black Knight will try to free his aeroship from Galahad’s grasp. And so Lena and I won’t seek to commandeer this aeroship.

We’ll escape from it.

“Lena,” I say. “I’ll need your rope.”

We switch out my crossbow for her firelance, setting it across my back so it won’t get caught in the folds of my dress or clatter against the pistons as I make my way through a hellish obstacle course. I pull back my hair and secure it atop my head in a spare steel netting of Lena’s, my fingers trembling as I set the pins.

Lena watches me. “Let me do it.”

I shake my head, glancing through the door. I’ve already begun memorizing the pattern of the pistons’ rotations on the path to a solid wood door, taking me straight to what Lena and I believe is a chamber adjacent to the wing. I take off my shawl and furs and hand them to her, feeling the chill of winter bite at my exposed, wounded arm. The blood has started to dry, and the wound no longer throbs. I unsheathe Merlin’s sword from my waist and give her the blade.

“Guard it.”

She cocks an airy eyebrow. “I will. Better than you did.”

Lena will stand watch until I’ve made it through to the wing; she’ll follow me after once, God willing, I can disengage the mechanisms from the other side, letting the aeroship glide across the currents instead of actively pedal. From then on, we might have minutes to cross to Galahad’s aeroship—I’ll have a thousand things to do all at once before the Black Knight notices the stalled ship, realizes Lena stowed away, and discovers we’re both on the path toward escape. But I cannot think about the repercussions now.

Click, click, click
go Caldor’s wings as I add more
jaseemat
to his steam valve, bringing life to the falcon in a way only alchemy could. I usher the bird to my left shoulder and pray it doesn’t drag its sharp talons across my neck to my unclothed right one.

I nod once at Lena, who returns it. She angles her body to face the door, in case she’ll need to fire her crossbow— hopefully not. I stand at the threshold of the pathway, my fingers hitting my leg in rhythm with the churning pistons. My eyes shut, and I listen. I could almost pretend I’m back inside the mechanical dragon, Victor, and my mission is to pour Azur’s
jaseemat
inside the clockwork heart and iron lungs. I open my eyes and let them adjust to the dim light; on the other side, the outline of the wooden door tells me it’ll take but a few seconds to get there. The cannons boom loudly, and a crack of the ceiling straight above my head shocks me still.

“Don’t think about it,” Lena calls. “You cannot hesitate!”

She’s right. I set my eyes on the door, blocking out the unstable feel of air under my feet, the deafening cries of rogues, the sharp metal scent of blood spilling from knights who might have made it to this aeroship’s deck, or perhaps the other way around. The pistons slam against the propeller every two and a half seconds, but it’s every tenth that there’s a two-second gap. Long enough for a girl to get past five. If she’s quick about it.

Slam!
goes the first piston.

“One,” I count. “Two. Thr—”

Slam!
it goes again.

I step as close to the first piston as I dare, only inches away come the next two and a half second mark. I feel the wind as the heavy steel pillars pass me. Another cannon strikes the deck, and I shake enough that my hand accidentally catches on a piston, scratching most awfully against it. I wince, pulling further back, but only so that on the tenth second—

Slam!

I run.

I’m holding my breath, and I’ve got my skirt in my fists, and I’m running like my life depends on it, and surely it does, and Caldor chirps by my ear, and the damned thing might be sentient enough to be afraid. There are still three pistons to rush past, and the shuddering of the aeroship from another cannon sets me off-balance. I might be crushed, but my boot catches friction on the wooden path, and I can hear the winding up of the mechanism that would send the pistons straight into me, and it forces me faster, and just as the blocks of steel crash into each other, I reach the end and slam into the door.

My hands press against the blessed wood, and my ears fill with the split-second crashes. Below, the propeller spins like mad, and the Black Knight and his rogues cry orders to kill the knights, slice them, decapitate them, keep them alive long enough—

“Viv!” calls Lena from the other end.

I nod and look about for a way to open this door, praying I won’t come face to face with any rogues in the meantime. It nudges open and leads to the navigation room— empty, thank God. A small box of a chamber, only big enough for perhaps two, and a world of pulleys and gears hanging from every part of the ceiling and walls. There’s a table in the dead center covered in parchment and levers, the gauges likely measuring the aeroship’s ascent, using the same knowledge as Merlin’s navigational device. Caldor flies to a windowsill as I step up to the table. I have to turn off the propellers so Lena can pass through. And then we must use the wing hooked to escape to Galahad’s aeroship. I glance past Caldor out the window: we’re right above it.

I turn back to the controls. “All right, Vivienne, you can figure this out.”

I’m the inventor who built Merlin’s mechanical dragon. I’m the lady-in-waiting whose firelance shot and killed Morgan le Fay. I’m the girl who freed the Fisher King from his earthly curse. Surely, I can manage to override a few measly mechanisms.

“Can you, now? Or is that more pride talking?”
Merlin’s spirit whispers.

I shut my eyes at the memory of his voice and find myself wishing the old fool were really here
.

“I am here, girl. Look around you.”

I open my eyes, and the ghostly wisp of Merlin with his shocking gold-white irises materializes into the man I once knew. He rushes back to his form, and it’s no longer the masked man who was about to transform into a dragon’s spirit, or even the smooth, easy-walking figure in the woods. Now he’s the Merlin I know, with his inked skull and emerald-stone cane and the limp that requires it. His eyes are old, but his, and there’s no longer any sharpness to his appearance.

“Vivienne.”

I want to burst with happiness. And with only a smile, Merlin has lost years off his face. I rush forward and embrace him. His shaking hand clasps over the back of my head and holds me close as though he’s just as shocked as I am that he made it here.

“How is this possible, Merlin? Did Azur—”

“No, girl. I still have much work to do.”

The impossibility of it forces me to pull away. “Then how are you here? How can I touch you? Why did you take control of my aeroship and send me crashing to the countryside? Why aren’t you helping Azur with the chaos in Jerusalem? Merlin, what happened?”

The sorcerer wields a long, slow breath. “So many questions whose terrible answers you already know.” A glint of copper catches his eye, and he ducks his gaze to the sill, where Caldor sits. Merlin chuckles and reaches to scratch the mechanical falcon’s chin. “Hello, old friend. Didn’t think I’d get to see you again.”