Avalon Rising (27 page)

“No.” His anger subsides only a bit, and he shakes his head. “It’s not my problem.”

“—and had we returned to Camelot empty-handed, there would have been no way to help them! Are you too selfish to see how the Grail—”

“Selfish?”
he shouts, matching my voice’s volume. “After all the years you worked with Merlin, can you honestly say this has
nothing
to do with wanting to know more about the Grail? It’s the only
logical
reason you’re here.”

I feel my eyes widen in vehement anger. “I left Camelot because the people I care about in Jerusalem are in danger! And because Kay told us you were missing for a month! A
month
, Marcus! And you won’t tell me where you were? I had every right to assume you’d betrayed Camelot
or
me.”

His eyes fall shut. “You know the truth: I didn’t betray anyone. Especially you.”

“Then you’ll die, Marcus!” I shout, and now I know his death is inevitable. I cannot stop the welling tears from spilling over my cheeks. “Marcus, I can’t just wait for you to die.”

And maybe we could go back to Camelot, to the safety of the Lake of the Lake’s protection. But what if my failure has undone her promise and Camelot is just as deadly a place for Marcus to be as these shores with their scents of war and rogues? Jerusalem was attacked, why wouldn’t our home be next? At least here in Greece, I’m with Marcus— if I were locked up in Camelot’s towers or sent north, I could do nothing to save him.

Marcus’s anger softens. I cover my eyes and wipe away my tears. I feel him step closer and pull me into a tight embrace. His fingers run through my tangled hair.

“Viv,” he says over and over, and it’s the first time he’s used my nickname. “I won’t die. Not for many years. The Black Knight abandoned us, and there are no rogues for miles.” He takes a breath, and it shudders with a sob, leftover from the bout of tears we both spilled. “We could leave. We could find my father, go to Jerusalem, bring Merlin back somehow. I’ll go with you. I’ll follow you anywhere. But we can’t stay here.”

I’m staring into his eyes, wondering why he’d ever give up on the Grail when we’re so close, and to leave could mean him relinquishing his vow, and oh I’m so tired, and the Grail is right there …

“Vivienne, please. Let’s go.” His eyes lock with mine, and I look deeply into them, and maybe the Lady of the Lake was wrong and Marcus won’t die. He presses his lips to my forehead, and I want him to hold them there forever. “I cannot bear this ruthless part of the world anymore.”

But if all this proves to be too much, and you can no longer bear such magic in a ruthless world, turn back. Won’t you?

I blink. Those were Merlin’s words Marcus just spoke.

But that’s impossible—a coincidence. So I consider Marcus’s suggestion. What would happen if we simply left? We could go to the Holy Land to help Azur and leave the task of stopping the Black Knight to someone else. We could search for Camelot’s subjects. Perhaps this could be our destiny. Perhaps destinies aren’t always written in stone.

But, no. “Marcus,” I whisper, pulling my hand from his stubbled cheek, “I have to stop him. Lena followed me onto his aeroship, and escaped to Galahad’s. Their aeroship caught in a tailspin. I watched them fall from the sky. If they didn’t make it, I can’t let that be for nothing. You understand that, don’t you?” I search his eyes until I know we’re both thinking of his mother and how it was the only reason he told me not to give the coordinates to the Black Knight.

Our fingers fall in line with each other. There’s a seawater wind around us and a sweet and familiar home between us, as though home is something you make with the ones who hold your heart. I press my lips to Marcus’s cheek and hold them there.

He wipes the back of his hand against his lashes, freeing exhausted, frustrated tears. “All right.”

There’s no need for a plan. In his violet eyes, I see how he thinks. Only a half-day’s trek up the shore is another aeroship port free of rogue ships, occupied with commercial ones—I can see the port from where we stand, the fluttering of wings, the rotation of propellers. We’ll return to the countryside, to
CELESTE
. Fix it together. It might take a day, but with its speed and with the
jaseemat
I’ll create, we could catch up to the Black Knight and stop him somehow. There will be no time to trek back to see if Galahad and Percy and Lena survived, but our hands clasp tightly together, and I know Marcus will follow me to the stars, if I were to ask him.

Then I remember what he confessed to me only moments ago, and though I’m choked up and exhausted and devastated beyond belief, what I feel for Marcus transcends even that.

“I love you, too,” I whisper against his sun-kissed skin. No matter what sort of motives I might have for finding the Grail, he must know.

He pulls back to look at me, eyes welling like an ocean. And then he presses his lips against mine, his skin raspy and scratching my cheeks, but I don’t care.

Even when I shut my eyes and see the chalice the Black Knight seeks, with Marcus’s arms tight around my waist, I couldn’t possibly care about a damned thing.

The sky is pink with the falling day, and the sun’s light flickers on the small waves, but the sea cannot hold onto those rays forever. We’ll make camp tonight and set out for the aeroship port at dawn.

Our fire burns strong. We built it together, and as we piled the wood, I gave Marcus his quicklight, even though I’d long since missed his early December birthday.
“A debt repaid,”
I’d said of the peace offering, reminding us both of the one I used to blow up a harvester in the farmlands. He’d taken it and rolled it in his palm to see the engraving, running his thumb over the letters of his name. And smiled.

Then Marcus set off in search for more dried leaves and shipwrecked wood, and as I wait I sit watching the glow dance across the sand, climb the kindle, his heavy cloak across my shoulders as the night sea air brings a chill. Every so often I glance up at the budding stars and let myself feel the absolute peacefulness of these parts. The wind is silent, and thus, so is the sea.

When he returns, he doesn’t speak right away, and when he sets down a bushel of dried branches, I feel the thump when they fall into the sand. He’s still angry. Whenever I think of what Rufus asked of me, a wave of guilt threatens to drown me, and I wish it’d be quick about it.

“Where is he now?” Marcus says with an irrefutable sharpness to his voice. He’s crouched in front of his supplies, sifting through his satchel in a way that demands attention. “You said he went with you to the Perilous Lands, but from there you came after me, and I found you alone in the countryside. Where is my father?”

I remember the look of utter disappointment in Rufus’s face when he realized I’d leave without him. “Sir Tristan’s aeroship crashed in the Perilous Lands,” I say. Marcus glances sideways at me, but I cannot read his expression yet. “They managed to survive; they were fixing their aeroship by the time we arrived. The knight allowed your father passageway to Jerusalem. I wouldn’t have just left him alone in a desolate place.”

Marcus doesn’t move for a long minute, and then he returns to stripping wet leaves from the branches he’s collected in fast, vicious strokes. As he works, I glance up at
MUERTE
ascending. It’s nowhere near close to reaching Avalon. I shut my eyes and see the map in my mind for myself—the Black Knight still has three days of journeying.

Marcus brings the freshly-cleaned branches to the fire and drops them. He sinks onto the sand next to me and stretches his legs out, crossing his boots at the ankles. In the barn, back in the farmlands of Camelot, he looked the same way, but his appearance has roughened even in the two days since I last saw him. His eyes are heavier with melancholy, and his frame has grown stronger, like he’s become a man in these six months.

When he leans back, a wince crosses his face, and he sits up, his wounded palm bleeding through the bandage. I take his hand and unravel the cloth covered in sand and sea water.

“I’m not sure what I’ll say when I see him,” he says as I change the bandage to a clean one. “The last time we spoke wasn’t a good memory.”

“Why not?” I ask quietly, not sure if I’ve won the chance to inch closer.

He shrugs. “It was before the trial.” He doesn’t say he means Lancelot and Guinevere’s, because the memory of that day has been branded onto our minds. “My mother had lost the right to stay in the infirmary, and my father had arranged for a neighbor to take her back to our farm. I argued with him that I could bring her to another kingdom—”

I tie the bandage in place and drop his hand. He looks at me, and I remember how after the trial, he tried to convince me to join him in leaving.

“—but he was convinced my knighthood wasn’t far off, and that would be enough. We had to stand by each other, like a family.” He looks into the fire. “Did he ask of me?”

I watch the last six months melt off him like he’s turned back into that mischievous boy. When he glances at me again, his eyes are so big and round, and the young beard on his jaw is misplaced against his features.

“Yes. Of course he did,” I whisper.

Marcus swallows. “What did he say?” His voice breaks at the end of his question.

I think back to my memories of flying against the sky with Rufus. Of constantly quarreling with him. I think of how much he resembled the son I fell in love with. “He said he was proud of the man you’d become. He said he put too much on your shoulders, and that he’d give anything to have you back.”

Marcus looks straight into the fire, and I watch his lip quiver and a tear smear across his cheek. He wipes it away, leaving there streaks of sand and dirt from the branches he collected, and shuts his eyes. I draw away to give him space, but his hand seizes mine.

“No. Don’t. Don’t pull away. And never let me draw away from you again.” His watery eyes find mine in the moonlight. “Promise me.”

I nod and press my lips to his temple.

He takes my cheek in his palm and pulls my lips to his. A fire rushes through my body at this kiss, so different from the others he’s given me since he found me in the countryside. It’s a kiss of honesty, of knowing the truth we were keeping from each other has been set free, despite the consequences.

He breaks our kiss, stares at me. And he’s never looked at me that way before. It’s a way to ask what hasn’t been asked, or a way to let souls whisper to one another, making sure one wants what the other is desperate for. He bites his bottom lip and creases his brow, and then he moves closer until our bodies are inseparable, but still it’s not enough. Another kiss.

But then it’s a kiss that wants no boundaries, that wants to return to the barn in the farmlands with rain pouring down on us and wet linens between us and a vengeful witch seeking us and vow and reputation ruling over us. That wants to touch skin, taste skin, breathe skin. That wants my nails running across the dragon inked on his neck.

It becomes a kiss that wants to find the inn where people saw Marcus’s tattoo and knew he was a knight of Camelot and ignore them for the warm bed beneath us. It’s a kiss that knows we’re completely alone on these beaches. Of his fingers digging into my hips and clenching the folds of my skirt, of my nails in his hair and running down his chest, untying his tunic and losing all control of my fingers in the process.

It’s a kiss peppered with the quiet whispers coming from lips pressed against ears, and furs and blankets binding us together, and it’s a kiss that wants the cover of night to stay forever.

The sea spills over my feet as I scrub sand from the brackets of my viewer. Once shining, they reflect dawn’s sun and the dark shapes of gulls flying over these shores. I can’t believe in other parts of the world dwells winter when the air around me is this warm.

Behind me, Marcus packs our weapons and tools onto his horse. I hear his nearly silent footsteps in the sand and turn. He stuffs his hands in his pockets, his tunic left untied and open to the heat. He smiles a crooked smile at me as his eyes lock onto mine.

“Should get a head start before the sun breaks past the horizon.” His hands run over my hips and around my waist, and he presses a kiss to my forehead. His voice sounds different now, breathier. Husky and wild, like his whispers in my ear while night cloaked us from the world.

I look up to the sky at
MUERTE
’s voyage. Its propellers are magnificent, and its sails are breaths of mighty wind captured. Just as magnificent was the Black Knight’s mechanical eye, and I find myself wondering if he’s able to see me right now.

Marcus takes my hand, and together we walk to his horse, but before we can ride off for the aeroship ports, I realize Marcus might not know everything I’ve learned.

“Marcus,” I say, dropping his hand. “The aeroships that left from the cliffs before Morgan’s war.”

“What about them?” he calls, reaching the horse and strapping my satchel to its saddle.

“They were rogue ships.”

He shakes his head and sets his pistolník into the locking mechanism in the saddle. I still haven’t studied it for myself, but there’ll be another time for that. “That’s impossible. Arthur wouldn’t have allowed something so dire as an evacuation of his own people go unchecked.” His words are terse; he might be thinking of the devastating memory of Arthur’s fall. But as he fiddles with the saddle, I realize he’s no longer paying attention. I take his hand so he looks at me.

“I saw it on the Black Knight’s aeroship. Their map, they’d had it pinned. The monster himself told me so. Marcus, my mother. That was the deal he and I spoke of. We have to send word to Lancelot when we reach the aeroship ports.”

He thinks for a long time, so focused, before he blinks himself free of whatever thought has nearly consumed him. A quick nod. “We’ll send word.”

Curiosity has claimed me. “What is it?”

His face hardens. “I was thinking that it could have been the Black Knight’s way to encourage you to hand over the coordinates instead of using torture or … magic. And how thankful I am that didn’t happen, but it is strange … ”