Unlucky Charms (The Cold Cereal Saga) (29 page)

“How’d
they
get out?”

“Pretty girls would let them out in exchange for favors, mostly.”

They watched the window of the cell door as if that might be some damsel’s cue, but none was forthcoming.

“You ever hear Merle tell about how he got out of his prison under the earth?” asked Scott. “The one all the stories say Nimue put him in?”

“Don’t think so.”

“He knew she was gonna do it, and he knew he couldn’t really stop her from doing whatever she wanted. So he found a cave on Avalon with a tunnel he could dig out that led far away, and had a back door. And one day, when he and Nimue were still acting all smoochy, they went by this cave, and he told her, ‘Oh no! I’m getting a vision that I’m doomed to die in that cave! But how could anything bad happen to me on Avalon?’”

“Heh.” Mick chuckled. “Smart man. Nimue wouldn’t want to spoil the story.”

“Right. So she ‘trapped’ him right where he wanted, and he could work on his second time machine, the one for Arthur, in peace.”

They fell silent. After a few minutes of this, Scott decided there may be nothing quieter than two people not talking to each other in a dark room in a tower they can’t leave. If they weren’t careful, they might just forget how to speak altogether, and the decades would pass without notice, and Scott would be dead ten years before Mick mentioned, “
Yeh’ve been awful quiet.
”

“He gets a weird look on his face sometimes when he talks about the old days,” said Scott. “Merle, I mean.”

“I’ll bet he does do.”

“He almost even talks like he and Nimue cared for each other a little bit. But how could he like her? She’s awful.”

Mick said, “Ah, love she’s a python/she’ll pull yeh in snug/an’ yeh’ll die with a sigh/’cause yeh think it’s a hug.”

“Did you just make that up?”

“Aye.”

“I’m gonna let my mom give me the boy-girl talk, if that’s okay with you.”

“Aye.”

“Thing is, maybe Nimue actually cared for Merle a little too? ’Cause he asked her for a final favor before she sealed him in, and she actually did it. It starts out as one of those Arthur-in-prison stories, actually.”

“Any useful tips?”

“Mmm … no.”

“Well, tell it anyway.”

“Okay, you know Morgan le Fay hated her half-brother Arthur, right?”

“Hoo, yeah. Pretty li’l changeling, but she was always barking.”

“Well, she manages to snare Arthur in this enchantment while he’s out hunting. He wakes up, doesn’t understand what’s happened, but he’s in the dungeon of this real nasty knight named Damas.

“Damas is feuding with his brother, Ontzlake, and needs a champion to do his fighting for him because he’s a coward. So a pretty girl comes to the prison—”

“Natcherly.”

“—and tells Arthur that Damas will let him go if he fights Ontzlake’s champion. So Arthur agrees, and Morgan le Fay, pretending to be the good sister, sends him his sword Excalibur and its scabbard. But they’re both fakes. She sends the real ones to Ontzlake’s champion, Sir Accolon.

“The day comes, and everybody’s gathered to watch. Arthur and Accolon both fight bravely, and both score a lot of hits. But Accolon can’t bleed because he has the magic scabbard, and meanwhile his sword is the best in the world. Arthur’s sword actually
breaks
. But still he won’t fall, though he knows there’s been some trick. And now Nimue comes and stands at the edge of the crowd, watching.”

If there is one thing on which the old stories agree, it’s that Nimue did not act right away. She waited and watched as Accolon and Arthur landed still more blows. But only Arthur’s wounds bled, and the lawn was dark with his blood. Near to Nimue, a seated woman remarked that it was a wonder the swordless knight could still stand. No one knew who either man was—they wore helmets.

“Fools, both,” Nimue muttered, though whether she meant Merlin and Arthur, or Arthur and Accolon, or Merlin and
Nimue
, was a secret she was keeping even from herself.

She didn’t kill Merlin. She would never kill, not like that mad Morgan. Now
there’s
a girl she should have left at the nunnery—still barely more than a spoiled child, and getting ever harder to control. But no—she didn’t kill Merlin. She left his fate to the gods. And to story! The stories that clung to that man, like the stink of every mess he’d ever stepped in. Such a man would have another chapter, surely.

She’d trapped him to protect her interests. The interests of her people.

But oh, his last request, that she rush here and save Arthur. Naturally. And humans say the
Fay
are overdramatic.

Nimue sighed. “
Fine
,” she said, and waved her hand just as Accolon was about to shamefully slay the weaponless king. The fact that her timing made for the best possible story was not lost on her. By her magic arts, the sword Excalibur fell from Accolon’s grasp and landed near Arthur. The young king seized it, and attacked. Nimue didn’t stick around for the ending.

After he’d gotten his sword, Arthur snatched back the scabbard. He ceased to bleed, and now Accolon was suddenly bleeding profusely. The contest was over soon, though both men were sorely wounded. Accolon died shortly thereafter.

Arthur was taken to an abbey to heal, where he slept with Excalibur in his arms. But he was careless with the scabbard.

Morgan le Fay stole into the abbey while Arthur slept. Not daring to touch the sword, she snapped up the scabbard and rushed back to her horse. Arthur woke and pursued her with his men, but she ran her horse dead from exhaustion, then alit on the tip of a sawtoothed cliff over the sea. She held the scabbard aloft, and for a moment it was edged with fire against the setting sun. “So sorry,
brother
,” she hissed through clenched teeth as her hair blew ragged around her. “Brother. Brother brother
brother
.” She could hear horses approaching as she threw the scabbard off the cliff into the sea. Then she turned herself to stone.

“He lost the scabbard,” repeated Scott. “If he’d kept it, maybe things would … I don’t know … would have turned out different.”

“Yeah,” said Mick. “Like maybe he never would have gotten in Merle’s time machine in the first place, an’ the worlds wouldna’ have split.”

Scott shook his head. “Merle says the time machines didn’t cause the split.”

“I know what he says. An’ I know he needs to believe it. But I don’t believe it.”

“I wouldn’t believe a bit of this,” said the Queen of England to Merle and John, “if it weren’t for the fire-breathing finch. Nothing better to convince you that you’re trapped in a Harry Potter novel than a fire-breathing finch.”

“We’re not out of the woods yet, Your Majesty,” said Merle. “Better keep our voices down.”

She shifted in the backpack, unused to keeping her balance while being borne along by a man three times her size. “I shan’t argue. But if my continued imprisonment is so important to the … fairies’ plans, one might expect them to have me a shade better guarded.”

“I don’t think they believed it possible that anyone from Earth would make it to this world, much less to this cave,” said John. Still, he was pretty pleased himself with how well things were going. Then they reached the mouth of the cavern and heard an intake of breath behind them.

They turned. The woman in the scarlet cloak had appeared at the bottom of the passage, and she pulled down her hood to reveal a frizzy mushroom of red curly locks. She was a ginger, a wild-haired, half-feral woman-child.

“Oh, shoot,” Merle muttered. “That’s Morgan le Fay.”

“MEN!” she screamed. “MEN OF ADAM! TAKING
THE PRIZE
!”

Her scream raked down the corridor like nails on chalkboard, rattling shale loose from the walls and ceiling.

John and Merle stumbled, ears ringing, down the hills of Avalon. Morgan shrieked once more behind them, a keening, birdlike noise. And now the Hairy Men were pouring like roaches from every cave, every hole in the ground, scurrying in clusters, long lines, converging on the interlopers. And all of them appeared to have slings and stones.

“Their caps!” screeched Morgan. “Merrow caps! Don’t let them get to the water!” She chanted behind them and swung her arm like she was throwing an imaginary fastball. And where that invisible pitch would have landed, the earth heaved with a seismic belch, flinging John and Merle to the ground in a shower of sod and tossing brownies everywhere.

“She’s not one of those killing-is-dishonorable Fay, is she?” John groaned.

In a moment they were completely surrounded. Which was, ironically, the only thing keeping them alive, since the brownies were reluctant to sling stones when they were all facing one another.

“I always suspected I’d die like this,” said the queen.

Merle started. “Really?”

“No. Not really. That was something we in Britain call ‘humour.’”

“What do you think, Finchbriton?” said John.

The bird winged his way forward and burned them a path through the crowd. The brownies eeked and howled.

“Forget what I’ve told you!” screamed Morgan. “KILL THEM ALL! KILL EVEN THE
QUEEN
RATHER THAN LET HER ESCAPE!”

Stones came down, thudding, clanging, cracking against larger stones. John did his best to cover them with the chickadee shield as he brought up the rear. Merle was shouting something about knowing where he was going.

“Oh,” Merle said now. “Whoops.”

“Whoops
what
?”

“This is … my old cave,” said Merle, pointing to a pile of boulders. “The one I was, you know, trapped in. I thought we could hide in it, use the old back door. But of course it’s collapsed.”

They ducked behind a cairn of stones. The brownies’ bullets chipped away at the edges of it. The water’s brink was maybe a hundred yards away. John tried to remember his better track-and-field times from school.

“Think we can make it?” he asked.

“No, I do not,” came the queen’s muffled voice in answer. “Don’t let’s be reckless.”

“Well, they’re afraid to get too close because of Finchbriton, but there’s nothing to keep them from circling around and firing on us from all sides.”

In fact, that seemed to occur to the brownies as well. They were starting to skirt a wide perimeter around the stone bunker. Merle dug into his sack and produced his flare gun. He shot a couple flares to either side, and they landed near the advancing brownies, who backed immediately away. The flares didn’t burn long on their own, but while they did, they made an odd green light that the Hairy Men could plainly see wasn’t natural.

“Well done,” said John. “They think we have some kind of magic. Magic ammo. But how long is that going to last?”

Sometime after the flares burned out, the brownies resumed their hesitant advance, so Merle gave them another couple of flares to look at. After that they seemed content to hunker down and sling stones.

Every now and then, some patch of earth exploded. As if Morgan was blindly casting about, not caring who or what she killed.

Another stone landed near them, which was nothing special in and of itself, except that this one was on fire. So was the next. They made the grass smolder and give off a dark smoke.