“I’ll wait on the steps just outside the door,” Ariane said.
Wally nodded. They walked to and up the steps together. Ariane stopped on the small porch at the top, beneath a wooden overhang that kept off some of the rain, and gave Wally a quick kiss. “For luck,” she whispered into his ear.
He nodded, gave her a rather sickly version of the Wally-grin, and turned and pushed open the heavy door. Made of oak and bound with rusty steel, it certainly looked as old as the castle was supposed to be. Ariane caught a brief glimpse of a vaulted hall as Wally turned and pushed the door closed again. Then he was gone.
Since she was alone and they’d seen Rex Major drive away, she ordered the rain that found its way under the overhang to stay away from her, sat down on the top step – dry despite the mist and drizzle – and settled in to keep watch.
Chapter Four
Family Reunion
It was an odd thing, when he thought about it, but Merlin had never before been to Scotland. In Arthur’s day it had been wild and untamed lands populated by barbarians – and, as Rex Major, Merlin had been to enough functions in the south of England during his second lifetime on Earth to know there were plenty of Englishmen who thought it still was.
Yet here he was at last, in the twenty-first century.
He just wished he was there, because he had a lead on the location of the hilt of Excalibur, the last missing piece of the sword forged by the Lady of the Lake and given to Arthur back when his beloved sister and he had been on the same page – as they said in these modern times – about what they wanted to accomplish on Earth. Alas, his sister had withdrawn into Faerie with all the other…elves, he supposed some would call them, although he hated that term and the pointy-eared connotations of it. Still, to be sure, “elves” was better than “fairies.” That had been when the Queen and her puppets, the Council of Clades, had decreed that Earth was not to be annexed after all, but abandoned, and that humans were to be left to their own devices, with the door between the worlds shut and sealed.
Merlin had refused to go, and had as a result been imprisoned – in an oak tree, of all things – for a millennium, through the treacherous wiles of the sorceress Viviane, who, he was furiously certain, had acted at his sister’s command. But the Queen and the Lady had been unable to close the door between the worlds completely – Merlin’s hand rose to the ruby stud in his right earlobe; a bad habit, he would admit, at least to himself – and so a trickle of magic had continued to seep through, slowly wearing away the walls of Viviane’s enchantment like water wearing away stone, eventually freeing him.
He’d been working ever since to try to find the shards of Excalibur. That sword, reforged, could open wide the door between the worlds once more, giving him access to all his magical power of old, and a path to conquering Faerie and freeing it from the hidebound tyranny of the Queen and Council. To do so, of course, he first had to conquer Earth – or, at least, enough of it that he could build an earthly army with modern weapons to send through the door into Faerie.
He should have been able to do so unopposed. Who but himself could even know the sword existed in this world where Arthur himself had been reduced, not only to a mere legend – which would be bad enough – but to a fit subject for musical theatre, for God’s sake?
But his blasted sister had known or suspected his prison would not last, and had put in place her own plans, gifting her power to a line of humans, her “heirs,” before she abandoned Earth. And those humans had continued to pass her magic along unknowing, generation after generation, until, learning that Merlin had escaped, she chose to wake it.
Her first attempt had failed, the bearer of her magic refusing the powers she offered, but the daughter of that woman had accepted it – and had been a pain in Merlin’s neck, and other parts of his anatomy, ever since.
Ariane Forsythe. A mere child whom he should have easily been able to crush or to cow, she had somehow managed to get two of the shards. Assisted by Wally Knight, his other candidate for most annoying teenager of the twenty-first century – a very broad category, for if there was one thing he detested about the current age it was its unhealthy obsessions with the young. Wisdom lay not with the young, but the old – as he should know, being the oldest man – if he used the term broadly – on Earth.
And yet, there had been a silver lining to Ariane’s and Wally’s interference, because it had turned out that Wally Knight was also heir to power – the power of King Arthur, for whom the sword had been specifically crafted. Unlike Ariane, who shared no genes with the Lady of the Lake – she was, after all, no more human than Merlin himself – Wally was an actual physical descendant of Arthur, through the king’s rebellious son Mordred, and it was through his particular line, out of all the hundreds or thousands of family trees that by now shared a common ancestor in Arthur, that the magic had descended. Wally was attuned to the power of Excalibur as no other human could be…
…well, no other human but his own sister, Felicia.
When Merlin had begun his campaign to gather the shards of Excalibur, he’d had no idea an heir of Arthur could still be found. But the moment he’d realized what Wally was, he’d grasped the possibilities. He’d wanted Excalibur merely to open the door into Faerie. But Excalibur had other properties, too. Wielding it, Wally would be the most dangerous swordsman the world had seen since the original Arthur. Admittedly, that was of less importance now than it had been in Arthur’s heyday – but it was only one indication of the sword’s power. More importantly, an heir of Arthur, bearing Excalibur, would be a leader of men par excellence. They would fall at the sword-wielder’s feet, begging to be led into battle. A new Arthur with Excalibur in hand would inspire fanatical loyalty in the forces, both human and Faerie, that Merlin intended to assemble to sweep away the Queen and Council of Clades like tumbleweeds in a prairie wind.
Wally had betrayed him, returning to Ariane’s side – teen hormones, he thought in disgust – but Felicia was different. She hated Ariane, and was almost as furious with her brother as Merlin was with his sister. More, she wanted power. True, she’d always thought of it in terms of popularity and fame and wealth, but the desire was the same, and Merlin could work with it – had worked with it. Felicia would do what he needed done, and after all, this wasn’t post-Roman Britain anymore. Rex Major was a modern-day businessman and diversity was all the rage. Who better to lead his new armies than a woman?
With Felicia’s help, he’d retrieved the fourth shard from its hiding place in a cave in the Caribbean. She’d been a little squeamish about the way he’d dealt with her brother, who had grabbed the shard from Felicia and almost escaped with it. But he’d calmed her down by convincing her that he’d sent help for Wally after they’d left him unconscious on the side of a hill, knocked out by the blast of a lightning bolt Merlin had called down just behind him.
Of course, he’d sent no such help. If Wally had died, it would have made things easier all around, and possibly broken Ariane’s spirit, but until Felicia was thoroughly under his thumb, he needed to make a few concessions to her childish sensibilities.
He thought he’d made great progress on the getting-her-under-his-thumb front over the five months since. She’d settled very contentedly into her new life with him in Toronto – not too surprising, since it was exactly the kind of lifestyle she’d always aspired to. He introduced her everywhere they went as his niece. Gallery openings, operas, dinners, charity balls – she’d eaten it up. He wondered if she were aware that it was widely rumoured she wasn’t really his niece at all, but something else entirely.
Which was true, of course, but not at all in the way the gossipers thought.
Meanwhile, he’d been waiting…and waiting…and waiting for a hint as to the location of the final piece of the sword – the hilt. The two shards he had should have called to it – but they wouldn’t, not while the infuriating Ariane had two of her own. Always before, he’d located a shard when some piece of technology infiltrated by the
web of magic he had spun through the Internet drew close to it. But wherever the hilt was, no one seemed to be coming anywhere near it with an active smartphone.
He’d had a team of researchers trace Ariane’s family back as far as they could, to see if there might be some hint in that history as to where the hilt might be hidden, to no avail.
But then, during one of his regular conversations with Jessica Knight, née MacPhaiden, Wally and Felicia’s mother – whom he called regularly, as he did her estranged husband, to reinforce the magical Commands that kept them from wondering just what they were doing allowing their eighteen-year-old daughter to live with a much older man in a luxury penthouse in Toronto – she’d told him about her exciting new film project, for which she was currently raising funding. It was to be a personal odyssey in search of her family’s roots in the British Isles, and it had suddenly occurred to him that maybe he’d been barking up the wrong family tree; that the hint as to the whereabouts of the hilt of Excalibur might lie, not with the heirs of the Lady, but with the heirs of Arthur.
Jessica had told him that she was still short of funds, and he’d promised not only to fund the project fully, but also to bring Felicia to the British Isles so she and her mother could learn about their family history together. Jessica had been ecstatic. Merlin thought the project was unlikely to really pay off in a solid lead as to the whereabouts of the hilt of Excalibur, but the truth was – though he would never have admitted it to anyone – he was getting more than a little desperate. Months had gone by, and nothing. What if the hilt was simply…gone? It had been more than a thousand years since the shards of Excalibur had been scattered, after all.
He thought that was impossible. He thought magic would work its way through events to protect the sword, just as it had clearly worked its way through history to bring the heir of the Lady’s power and the heirs of Arthur’s to Regina at the same time, to accept the Lady’s quest to find the shards before Merlin did – but a thousand years was a very long time, especially on Earth in the past few centuries, where things had changed so fast and so much. Unlike in Faerie, where nothing ever changed, and never would unless Merlin changed it.
So here they were, at a dime-a-dozen castle near one of the drabbest and most unremarkable villages Merlin had ever seen anywhere (and considering the general state of villages in Arthur’s day, that was saying something). Jessica had set up shop in the Great Hall – if you could call it that; compared to the Great Hall of Camelot it was a broom closet – and was getting ready to record a segment whose script she’d already shown to Major – all about how this castle had been stolen from its original builders by her ancestors in a bloody massacre at a wedding, and how it was from here her great-great-great-great-something or other had blah-blah-blah and…
None of it had anything to do with Arthur, and so Merlin had excused himself from the set – politely; he could act the part of a gentlemen to perfection – claiming he needed to run down to the town on business. Which was true enough – the village had Wi-Fi, and the castle did not, or at least none he could access.
But not far from the castle, as he drove along the rain-swept road, he suddenly sensed power – a power he recognized instantly.
Ariane Forsythe, heir to the Lady of the Lake, was near. Very near. And that could mean only one thing.
Far from acting on a long shot or embarking on a wild-goose chase, they’d come to exactly the right place at the right time. If Ariane was here, then either the hilt was here, or some hint of its whereabouts could be found here.
He didn’t stop at once – he didn’t want to spook his quarry. Instead, he carried on a couple of kilometres farther, until a bend in the road took him out of sight of the castle. Then he pulled the Jaguar over to the side of the road, got out, and hiked back through the rain until he could see the fortified hill again through the mist – which unfortunately had grown so thick he had to trudge almost back to the very spot where he had sensed Ariane’s power, not far from a small loch.
He squinted up at the castle’s dim bulk, and saw them, just for an instant – two small figures at the foot of the wall. Ariane and Wally, searching for the hilt. They vanished, and he turned and jogged back to his car. Ignoring his wet feet and sopping suit, he opened the trunk – the boot, they called it over here – and brought out a small black case he’d taken to carrying with him everywhere, hoping he’d have a chance to use it. It looked as if he’d get his wish at last, and the thought made him grin in fierce anticipation.
He put the case down on the black leather of the passenger seat, then eased the Jag around and drove back up the hill to Castle MacPhaiden.
•••
In all of the adventures he’d had thus far in the quest for the shards of Excalibur, Wally’s heart had never raced the way it raced as he climbed the steps of the castle to meet his mother.
She’s not as scary as Emeka, Major’s henchman I clobbered with a tree branch outside the YMCA in Gravenhurst…or Major himself…or being dissolved into water or clouds and magically transported halfway around the world, he reminded himself.
To which himself replied, Wanna bet?
Beyond the thick wooden door lay a surprisingly small entrance hall – well, surprisingly small if you thought of the old castle as a modern house, but maybe not if you thought of it as a place designed to be easily defended. At the end of a hall lit by a wheel-shaped chandelier of black iron and furnished with an old, scarred table and two uncomfortable-looking chairs carved from dark wood along the right wall, the corridor turned sharply left beneath a faded red tapestry. Wally went to the corner, only to find yet another hallway, this one even narrower and not furnished at all. There was a closed door on his left, and another closed door directly ahead, where the corridor bent to the right.
Now he heard voices coming from around that corner. He walked down to it, his sopping-wet runners silent on the worn stones of the floor, water dripping from his hair down the back of his neck, and found that the corridor continued only a short distance farther. At its end, a surprisingly small suit of armour – Wally didn’t think he could have fit into it – stood guard next to an arch that opened to the left. Light flooded through that arch, the unnaturally bright illumination of movie lighting.
Wally went to the archway, and took a cautious peek around the corner into the Great Hall.
The chamber was reasonably impressive, if perhaps not all that “great;” he figured it was about twenty-five metres long and maybe ten metres wide. Set in the left wall he could see an enormous fireplace, big enough to stand up in. In the right wall were the four tall windows he had seen from outside, filled with tiny diamond-shaped panes of glass.
Two doors opened off the far end of the Great Hall, both closed; the one on the right looked like a swinging door, which definitely wasn’t original equipment. Between the doors rose a dais, three steps up from the floor, that might once have held a throne. Another ancient, fading tapestry, this one depicting warriors battling each other in front of forested hills, covered the wall behind the dais. It was in front of that tapestry that his mom had set up her lights and cameras, the crew running around doing the usual preparations that always looked aimless to Wally even though he knew there must be some sort of method to it. His mom sat on the top step of the dais watching the two men and the woman work.
Beside her sat Flish.
Wally stepped back from the arch. With the camera lights shining in their eyes he didn’t think they could see him in the shadows, and it gave him a chance to study them both.
The Rex Major lifestyle clearly agreed with Flish, who, just like in the picture they’d seen in Weyburn, looked older than her eighteen years – and way overdressed, in a short black dress and high heels. A necklace glittered in the lights; probably not diamond, he thought, but then again, maybe it was.
Mom had her hand on Felicia’s knee and was talking to her earnestly. Wally wondered what they were talking about.
Well, one way to find out.
He took a deep breath and a hard swallow, then stepped through the archway and started walking the length of the Great Hall toward his mother and sister.
Between the lights and their conversation they didn’t notice him right away; in fact, the cinematographer saw him first. “Hey!” the man said. “You’re not supposed to –” Then his eyes widened. “Whoa! Wally, is that you?”
“Hi, Jim,” Wally said.
Everyone stopped what they were doing and stared at Wally, who kept walking, across a floor that seemed to somehow extend further with every step so that the dais and his mother and sister never seemed to get any closer. At first they just stared at him, too, both of them. Then his mom rose wavering to her feet. “Wally?” she choked out.
Flish just sat like a statue, glaring at him.
He hadn’t planned what he was going to say, he realized as he opened his mouth, but then he heard himself say, “Happy Mother’s Day,” and suddenly Mom was running toward him, and the distance between them he’d seemed unable to close evapourated in an instant. She grabbed him in a fierce hug and pulled him close, and suddenly all the years and all the problems evapourated too, and Wally was a small boy again and his mom was just Mom, and as long as she was hugging him, nothing could be wrong with the world.
The moment couldn’t last, and it didn’t last, but Wally wouldn’t have traded it for all the money – or all the magical swords – in the world.
Door Into Faerie Page 4
