The Night Dance

by Suzanne Weyn

  She plucked one of the golden leaves. “Isn’t it lovely,” she commented, handing it to him. The leaf tumbled from his grasp, but he snapped it up with his other hand.

  The moment he’d done it, they stared at one another in shock. “Your hand,” she said softly.

  “My hand,” he repeated as he turned it. He balled it into a fist and then stretched the fingers back out wide.

  They faced one another with expressions of disbelief and excitement. “I don’t know how, but in some way you’ve brought this about,” he said.

  “Maybe it’s this place,” she suggested.

  “Oh, it doesn’t matter,” he said lifting her and spinning her happily. “It only matters that we are together.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Encounters

  Morning light bathed Sir Ethan as he stared at the opened trapdoor in his daughters’ bedchamber. He remembered digging this root cellar himself so many years ago. This room had been a pantry behind the kitchen back then.

  Why was it open now? It made no sense to him. And yet it must have something to do with the fact that his daughters were gone.

  He paced agitatedly. He no longer cared where they had gone. The more pressing question now was, Why had they not returned?

  Memories of the evening Vivienne did not return flooded him. It was the possibility of this happening to his daughters that had driven him to build high walls and install thick bolts. This one thing that he had worked so hard to guard against had happened after all!

  Where were his daughters?

  He felt as though he would lose his mind if they did not return in the next second.

  Had that beggar harmed them somehow? He would hunt him down and kill him!

  Mary came to his side wringing her hands. “I cannot tell you how sorry I am, sir,” she apologized for the tenth time. “I must have shut my eyes for just a second.”

  “Mary, they were getting out anyway,” he replied. “It’s the fact that they’ve not returned that has me half crazy.”

  Mary crouched by the opening and peered down. “Girls, are you down there?” she called.

  “Why would they be in a root cellar?” he snapped.

  “I don’t know,” she admitted, glancing up at him. “I’ll go have a look, though.”

  As Mary descended into the opening, the physician who had come to see Lord Liddington entered, looking quite excited. “The man is awake!” he announced.

  “What ailed him?” Sir Ethan asked in a desultory voice.

  The physician went to the area where Lord Liddington had slept and picked up the jug and sniffed it.

  “Help yourself to some,” Sir Ethan offered.

  “I think not,” the physician declined emphatically. “From what Lord Liddington has told me, your girls tried to kill him with this concoction.”

  Sir Ethan stared at him, aghast. “That’s not possible.”

  “I’m afraid it is,” said Lord Liddington from the doorway. His blond hair was disheveled and his skin had grown sallow, but he moved under his own power. “I feel as though I drank a barrel of ale all by myself, but I am thankful to be alive.”

  At that moment Mary’s shrieks sounded from down in the root cellar. “Get away! Get away!”

  The men moved to the opening just as a large black bat flew up out of it. Thinking fast, Lord Liddington whisked a sheet from one of the beds and, using it as a net, snapped the bat up in it. The bat flapped frantically, getting out of the man’s grasp. But, with the sheet still over it, it couldn’t see and smashed itself into the wall. With a thud, it fell to the ground.

  Still flapping her hands over her head to ward off the bat, Mary came out of the opening. Sir Ethan assured her that the bat had been captured. “Sir, that is the largest root cellar I have ever seen,” she said. “It goes on and on and on. It’s more like a tunnel leading to who knows where. I stopped exploring when that wretched bat swooped past me. Besides, the further I went, the darker it was; it was getting black as tar in there.”

  Sir Ethan thought of his missing lanterns. He had accused the servants of taking them, but now it suddenly made sense. The girls were using them in this tunnel that somehow appeared under his home. “Mary, get us three lanterns,” he commanded. “Doctor, Lord Liddington, we must go down there and find my daughters.”

  Lanterns in hand, they were about to descend into the opening when Sir Ethan heard female voices approaching from below. “Girls!” he thundered. Though he tried to sound stern, the catch of pure relief in his voice ruined the effect.

  “Father!” Eleanore was at the head of the group and she ran to him. “I’m sure you’re very angry, and I’m sorry we have worried you, but please listen to what we have to tell you.”

  Such a mix of emotions—anger, joy, curiosity, tenderness—arose within him that he was speechless. He walked back into the room and sat on a bed as his daughters, dressed in gowns he’d never seen before, climbed up through the trapdoor. Rowena was last to come up, and behind her was Bedivere.

  He listened with rapt attention as they told him everything that had happened, including all they’d discovered about their mother. “We couldn’t get here before dawn because we were searching for Bedivere and Rowena.”

  “We tried to turn the sailboat around but we couldn’t,” Gwendolyn picked up the story. “Once it let us off on shore we went back to find them on foot. They had gotten lost in some very strange place, and it took them hours and hours to find their way back, but as soon as we found one another, we came straight back.”

  “You say you were bothered by a spirit disguised as a bat?” Mary asked, casting an eye on the creature in the sheet that was still on the floor.

  They all stared at the lump underneath. Sir Ethan picked a pillow off the bed and stepped toward it. If it wasn’t dead already, it soon would be.

  As he knelt, intent on smothering the bat, he was aware of someone standing behind him. Turning, he looked up into two blue eyes he remembered well. Vivienne had come silently into the room.

  “You don’t need to do that,” she said. She held a thick glass box in which she put the unconscious bat. “I brought this from Avalon. It will keep her from spiriting away, and she will be tried in Avalon for her crimes.”

  “Vivienne,” he said, overcome by the sight of her.

  “I’m home,” she replied.

  His face clouded with anger as he stood. “Is that so? Just like that—you’re home? Do you mind telling me where you’ve been? I suppose you’ve made a new life for yourself, have a new home, a new husband.” He turned his back on her, struggling to control his emotions.

  She ran her hand along his arm as she had those many years ago when they first met in the lake. “This is my only home. You are my only husband,” she said gently. “I have done nothing all these years but try to return to you. I will tell you everything that has happened, but be assured that my only thought has been of you and my twelve princesses.”

  She drew him around to face her, and as he looked into her fathomless blue eyes he knew he could not let suspicion or mistrust interfere with the gift of her return. In truth, in the deepest, most hidden regions of his heart, he had never stopped hoping for her eventual return.

  “I knew you would come,” he murmured in a gruff, emotion-filled voice as she laid her cheek on his chest.

  EPILOGUE

  With the return of Vivienne, Sir Ethan no longer lived in terrifying fear that his daughters would also leave him. The bolts were knocked off all the interior doors and replaced with delicate hooks for purposes of privacy only. The opening in the floor, however, was boarded shut. Now that the girls had free access to come and go, there was no need for it, and no one wanted to risk any odd enchanted things coming up to bother them.

  Rowena and Bedivere were married, although Vivienne told them that in the eyes of Avalon they were already husband and wife. “You went through the mystical grove that connects soul mates at the most profound level,” she said. “In the
bronze forest you shared your sadness and helped one another through it. When you passed that, you looked to the future together. It is the silver grove of hope. In the golden forest you experienced the complete happiness of being together.”

  “Did its magic heal my hand?” Bedivere asked.

  “True love experienced in the golden forest heals everything,” Vivienne told him.

  The wedding was to be a lavish event with half of Glastonbury invited. Bedivere and Rowena went into the town to seek the children who had brought Bedivere to his sleeping mat and shared their last potato with him. They searched up and down the beggar’s alley, leaving behind food they had brought in a basket.

  They found the children by the town well, crying. Their mother had died of smallpox. They were crying from hunger since there was now no one to provide even one potato.

  Rowena and Bedivere looked at one another. Was there a place in their life together for these children? Nodding, they answered the unspoken question that had been on both of their minds. Taking the boy and girl by the hand they brought them back to the manor.

  It was while they were walking down the road with the children that they met Brother Louis. When he saw Bedivere, he was elated. “Come back to the monastery with me,” he cried. “I am holding a trunk for you there. A messenger came by with it. He asked if I knew a one-handed knight. I remembered your infirmity, but I had no idea where to find you. I said I would try to find you, and here you are. Marvelous!”

  At the monastery, they opened the large trunk that someone had packed with finely made clothing, books, boots, and many other things Bedivere had owned when he lived in Camelot. In it, too, was a pouch of gold coins he had been given by the many people he had aided with his knightly skills. He split the coins into two piles and gave half to the monk. “Keep the coins for the monastery and give the clothing to the poor, for I have no desire to be reminded of my old life. Those days are gone. In return, tell anyone who asks that I have joined your monastery and will have nothing to do with the outside world.”

  “As you wish,” Brother Louis agreed. He handed Bedivere a large envelope. “The messenger said to give you this as well.”

  It was a letter written by Arthur before his death. In it, he bequeathed to Sir Bedivere land in North Wales. “You’ll like this,” he told Rowena. “It’s by Llyn Dinas, a beautiful lake. Arthur and I once fought a giant there, and he knew it was very close to my father’s land. At that time the wizard Merlin was with us and he hid a treasure by a nearby hill. I wonder…” A thoughtful look came over his face as he studied the map enclosed with the letter.

  On the day of the wedding, Bedivere gave Rowena a gift, a bouquet of bronze, silver, and gold made from pieces of the forest that he had picked along the way and kept hidden in the pockets of the tunic Mary had given him that night. “Your mother says this bouquet will never die, like my love for you,” he told her.

  Bedivere had a regal wedding outfit made and was shockingly handsome on the day of his wedding. The children, Amren and Evanola, walked down the aisle ahead of the bride, strewing flowers in her path as she followed on the arm of Sir Ethan.

  Vivienne sat on the side surrounded by many friends and kinsfolk from Avalon that the sisters would meet for the first time at the party. She and Ethan had decided that they would go to Avalon to live together for the rest of their days. This decision was based on the fact that though she could not give Ethan immortality, the magic on Avalon would extend his life for many, many years—and they had so much time to catch up on.

  The party was the best anyone had ever seen. Eleanore danced every dance in the arms of Lord Liddington, who had forgiven her for nearly killing him when she had explained that it had been an accident, “in a way.” She’d only meant to render him unconscious.

  At the end of the wedding party, Sir Ethan announced that he would be leaving with Vivienne, though they most certainly would be in touch. Any of the girls who wanted to come with them and study mystical ways were welcome. “You are princesses in Avalon,” Vivienne reminded them in an attempt at gentle persuasion.

  Rowena declined, saying that she and Bedivere were headed for Wales. Eleanore also said no. Edgar, Lord Liddington, had hinted that he had a castle he’d like her to consider running as his wife.

  Gwendolyn, Helewise, Chloe, Isolde, and Mathilde thought life on Avalon sounded exciting, though.

  “Could Ione, Brianna, Bronwyn, Cecily, and I stay here at the manor?” asked Ashlynn.

  “Yes, I suppose so,” Sir Ethan agreed. “I’ll insist that you keep the servants on for your safety.”

  “Oh, we’ll need them, especially Helen and Mary,” Ashlynn told him, “because we’d like to turn the place into an inn.”

  There was a murmur of approval as this seemed like it would be a fun enterprise. It turned out to be as good an idea as they thought. Even though only five of the sisters actually ran it, they named it the Inn of the Twelve Dancing Princesses.

  And each sister, in her own way, went on to live exciting, happy lives. But most ecstatic of all was Rowena with her knightly, chivalrous, kind shepherd husband and their two adopted children.

  Thanks to the unearthed treasure of Merlin, neither they nor anyone in the Welsh town, with which they generously shared it all, ever wanted for anything ever again.

  Sir Bedivere sometimes told the local children tales of Sir Arthur and the knights of the Round Table. When he did, he did not think of the bloody warfare or the despair he’d known. He remembered, instead, the thrilling adventure, the bravery and nobility. And if a note of sadness ever crept into his voice, he would look up to see Rowena standing nearby and he would remember how she had connected with him on the battlefield—how she had saved his life that day and forever after.

  About the Author

  SUZANNE WEYN loved researching and imagining life in the fifth century. She learned much about the legends of King Arthur, Morgan le Fey, the Lady of the Lake, and Sir Bedivere—studying their historical roots and mythical variations. Melding these myths with the age-old fairy tale “The Twelve Dancing Princesses” was a joyful labor because the tale—though well-loved from her childhood for its exotic, mysterious nature—always seemed to her to need another narrative piece. Inventing that piece was pure pleasure.

  Suzanne is also the author of South Beach Sizzle, written with Diana Gonzalez; The Bar Code Tattoo; The Bar Code Rebellion; and Reincarnation. Her Once upon a Time books include Water Song and The Crimson Thread. Visit her at SuzanneWeynBooks.com.