“Guess we’d better ask directions,” Wally said. “I’ve been to Victoria, but I’ve never been in Beacon Hill Park. Come on.”
He led Ariane across the bridge. Together they walked along the edge of the lake until they came to a paved footpath through dripping tall trees around the same end of the lake where the aeration fountain sprayed. There they met an old man with a cane, taking a slow constitutional through the mist in a heavy overcoat and muffler, a fur hat jammed rather haphazardly on his head. “Excuse me,” Wally said politely. “Can you point us in the direction of the Fairmont Empress?”
The old man squinted up at him, an amused quirk to his mouth. “You misplace it?”
“Kind of,” Wally said.
The old man snorted. “Never heard of anyone losing something that big before.” He turned and pointed back the way he’d come. “You go up Arbutus Way to the edge of the park, turn left along Southgate. At the traffic light turn right onto Douglas – take the left fork, not the right. One more block and you’ll see the Empress off to your left.”
“How far?” Ariane said.
“About a half a mile.” Wally was still trying to convert that in his head when the old man, clearly sensing his confusion, sighed and said, “Less than a kilometre, I mean.” He shook his head. “Never heard of anyone losing the Empress. Not this close to it.”
“We’re from Saskatchewan,” Wally said.
The old man laughed. “Aren’t we all?” He poked a thumb in his chest. “Fifty years in Moose Jaw. Go Riders!” With a grin and friendly wave, he resumed his walk into the park.
Wally and Ariane went the other way, following the old man’s instructions, and within a few minutes the Empress hove into sight, like a vast ship anchored at the head of the harbour. Wally had seen it before, but Ariane stopped and stared when they could finally see it all. “Wow,” she said. “And your dad is staying there?”
Wally nodded. His eyes flicked over the grounds. They weren’t nearly as overrun with tourists as when he’d been there with his family in the summertime, but there were still plenty of people around. Behind them, as they stood at the corner of Belleville and Government Streets, rose the tower of the Centennial Carillon in front of the Royal B.C. Museum. The B.C. Legislature, looking even grimmer and greyer than usual, loomed in the mist a few hundred metres to their left.
“Must be nice,” Ariane said.
She kept standing there, staring at the hotel. As if the mist weren’t cold and wet enough, a light drizzle began to fall. Wally shivered. And still Ariane didn’t move. “Are we going in?” he said at last.
“What?” She glanced at him, surprised, as if she’d forgotten he was there. “Sorry.” She took a deep breath. “Keep an eye out for your father.”
“I will,” Wally said. “But he’s probably not in the hotel this time of day. Off doing...whatever he’s doing here.”
“What does he do?” Ariane said, turning her gaze back toward the hotel.
“He’s a management consultant. Whatever that is.”
Ariane nodded, but he didn’t think she’d really heard him. “All right,” she said. She hitched her backpack higher. “Here goes nothing.” She strode toward the castle-like hotel.
Wally trailed behind her, wondering what she was thinking, what she was feeling, what would happen if she found her mother – and what would happen if she didn’t.
The fourth shard still waited in the Caribbean – if their guess was correct – and they were running out of time.
At least it’ll be warm and dry in the hotel, he thought, and quickened his steps to catch up.
Chapter Eight
Tea at the Empress
Now that she was potentially so close to finding her mom, Ariane found herself strangely reluctant to take the next step. But she and Wally couldn’t stand in the drizzle forever, so at last she hitched her backpack higher on her shoulders – unnecessarily, but it had that feeling of getting ready for battle – and set off.
Although just whom she thought she’d have to battle, she didn’t know.
She didn’t say anything to Wally, but part of the reason she hesitated was that the shard of Excalibur she wore strapped to her skin seemed...uneasy. If that made sense when you were talking about an ancient iron fragment. But of course it did make sense when that ancient iron fragment was part of something which, if not exactly sentient, certainly had its own desires, and its own strange links to the Lady of the Lake, who had forged it, and to Arthur, who had wielded it – both of whose heirs were, here and now, trudging along the sidewalk toward the towering old hotel, its façade overgrown with ivy almost to the copper-clad roof.
The hotel’s name, The Empress, was written in ivy-wreathed, elegant italicized capitals above what had once been the grand entrance, but the current main doors were further along, up the curving drive. A bronze statue of Captain James Cook glared at them with seeming disapproval from the other side of Government Street as they splashed past him through rain that was growing heavier by the minute.
When they entered the lobby, Ariane started to order them dry – then didn’t. The staff could hardly fail to notice, and that was the kind of anomaly they might happily share with Rex Major’s minions, if and when they traced Ariane’s mom this far.
The lobby was white and pillared, centred by a giant flower vase atop a round table of dark wood surrounded by a Persian rug, and lit by a skylight three stories above. It might have intimidated Ariane if she weren’t so focussed on the strange sensations from the shard – could a piece of sword blade actually squirm? Because that was what it felt like. Her pulse raced as she confronted the possibility she might actually be close to finding her mom. She stopped by the flower vase and shrugged out of her backpack.
“Why are we still wet?” Wally complained.
“Because I don’t want to draw any special attention,” Ariane said. She dug the plastic bag containing her mom’s picture out of the backpack pocket, and pulled out the photo. “Here goes nothing,” she said. Heart now pounding as if she’d run a marathon, she walked up to the front desk, carrying the backpack loose in her left hand.
The young Japanese woman behind the counter smiled at her. “May I help you?” she said. She had a slight accent.
Ariane held out the photo. “I’m looking for this woman,” she said, her mouth dry even as she dripped on the carpet. “Someone said she started working here...probably just this week.”
The woman looked down at the photo. “Oh, yes,” she said. “You’re in luck. I met her just yesterday. Nice lady. She’s working in the Tea Lobby. In fact, she should be there now: the first service started at 11:30.”
“The...Tea Lobby?” Ariane said, even as the thumping of her heart threatened to drown out all other sounds. Mom...here...today...in this building!
The last time she’d seen her mother had been a few days after that dreadful night when Emily Forsythe had staggered back to the house from her walk around the lake and collapsed on the front step, wet and raving. In the psych ward at the Regina General Hospital, she had yelled and screamed and claimed Ariane wasn’t her daughter, that she didn’t have a daughter. And then, somehow, she’d escaped from the ward and disappeared.
There’d been no word from her ever since. Nothing. Nothing at all, while Ariane drifted from foster home to foster home until Aunt Phyllis finally took her in. Ariane’s family, her happiness, had all been stripped away from her. Ariane now knew – or thought she knew – that her mom had seen the Lady of the Lake; that her mom had been offered the same quest: to find the shattered shards of Excalibur before Merlin – Rex Major – could do so; that her mom had refused the power and then had fled to try to protect Ariane. To no avail, as it turned out.
But now that she faced the imminent possibility of seeing her mom again, she realized something she had never allowed herself to realize before: while, yes, she longed to talk to her mother, she was also angry.
In fact, she was furious.
The sw
ord continued to squirm against her flank, burning hot one instant, cold as ice the next. She had to clench her fists to keep her hands from shaking.
“You take the stairs over there,” the young woman said, pointing across the lobby, “to the upstairs lobby – then it’s just straight down the hallway that way.” She pointed the opposite direction. “You can’t miss it.”
“Thank you,” Ariane said.
She turned and walked across the Persian rug to the broad curving staircase the woman had indicated, Wally following her. Halfway up the stairs, out of sight of the front desk, she suddenly got tired of being wet and let the magic dry them both. But the sword blazed as she did it, and the water didn’t just spray, it burst from them in a blast of steam.
“Whoa,” Wally said, as they reached the top of the stairs. “A little tense?”
Ariane said nothing. Fists still clenched, she stalked across the upper lobby to the hallway leading to the Tea Lobby.
While the main lobby was refined in a modern sort of way, the corridor they now entered, with its dark wood and palm fronds, evoked Victorian England. The sound of a pianist playing “As Time Goes By” drifted toward them as they approached the Tea Lobby, which was set off by chest-high barriers made to look like old-fashioned, small-paned windows with frosted glass. With Wally trailing behind, she walked up to the barriers and looked into the elegant space beyond. More Persian rugs covered a wooden parquet floor. White pillars reached up to a ceiling crisscrossed by beams of carved, dark wood. Heavy red and gold drapes, open to let in the grey light, framed windows that looked out onto the front lawn and, beyond Government Street, the Inner Harbour.
She saw her mother at once, near the far end of the Tea Lobby, wearing a long-sleeved white blouse and an elegant red vest.
Mom looked older than Ariane remembered; older than two years could account for. She’d lost weight, and her face had a slightly haggard look Ariane had never seen when she still lived at home. But when she smiled at two old ladies in big pink hats, leaning down to offer sweets, she smiled the same smile Ariane remembered, the one she had loved so much.
Her mom didn’t see Ariane rounding the dividers and walking toward her. But her smile faltered as she straightened; and then, without any warning at all, she simply collapsed. The china plates from the serving stand smashed on the floor, a single cookie rolling away as though trying to flee the disaster. The elderly ladies screamed. Other servers turned and stared.
Ariane broke into a run.
She reached her mom’s side in an instant. Her mother’s eyes were closed, but her head turned this way and that, restlessly, and she moaned, “No, no, take it away, take it away...”
Another of the servers, a black man with white hair, grabbed Ariane’s shoulders and pulled her away from her mom. “Give her air, give her air,” he said, and turned and spread his arms wide to keep any other gawkers from approaching.
Ariane wanted to lash out at him, wanted to cry, She’s my mother! But suddenly she understood what had happened, why her mother had collapsed, and in horror she turned and ran the other way, back into the hallway.
Wally hadn’t moved. He stared at her, his face white, freckles standing out on it. “What happened?”
“It’s the shard,” Ariane gasped. “The shard – she can’t bear to be around it. And it doesn’t want to be around her, either.” Heedless of the stares of a passing couple, she jerked her shirt out of the waistband of her jeans, reached inside it and undid the tensor bandage that held the first shard of Excalibur, the one they’d found in the Northwest Territories, against her skin. Its mate still lay beneath the mattress of her bed at Barringer Farm. She held it out to Wally. “Take it!”
Wally hesitated only an instant, then pulled it to him and stuffed it into his pocket.
Without another word, Ariane turned and ran back to her mother.
She wasn’t lying on the floor anymore. Instead, she was sitting up, her back to one of the white pillars. “I’m sorry, Jim,” she was saying to the black man, “I don’t know what came...over...”
Her voice trailed to silence as she saw Ariane.
The two of them stared at each other for a long moment. Ariane found she didn’t know what to say, and wouldn’t have been able to say it if she did. Her throat had seized up, constricted by the tsunamis of conflicting emotions pouring through her. She wanted to hug her mother. She wanted to swear at her. She wanted to run away. She wanted to never leave again. In the end, she just stood there and waited for her mom to do something.
“The nurse is on her way,” Jim said. “You just wait here.”
“No,” Ariane’s mom said. “I’m fine. Really.” She struggled to her feet, Jim lurching forward to help her when he realized what she was about to do. She pushed his hands gently away and stood on her own. “See?” She smiled at the elderly ladies she’d been serving, whose wide, worried eyes stared at her from beneath the brims of their hats. “I’m sorry if I frightened you.”
“Don’t mention it, dear,” one of them said.
“You might want to see a doctor,” the other said. “You might be pregnant.”
Ariane’s mom laughed. The sound, so familiar, so forgotten, pierced Ariane’s heart like a dagger. “I don’t think so,” her mom said. But the smile fled as she turned to face her daughter again. They still hadn’t spoken to each other, and her mom didn’t speak now: instead, she just inclined her head toward a corner of the room, at an empty table by the big fireplace, right up against the windows overlooking the Inner Harbour, then turned to Jim. “I’ll just have a sit-down over there in the corner with my young...niece, here,” she said lightly. “You can send the nurse over when he arrives.”
Jim seemed to really notice Ariane for the first time. “Your niece?” he said. He looked closely at her for a moment, then his face split into a big smile. “Ah, yes, I see the resemblance.” He held out his hand. “Very glad to meet you, Miss...?”
“Felicia,” Ariane said. She didn’t want to give her own name and Wally’s sister’s was the first that popped into her head.
“Felicia,” Jim said.
“Flish for short,” Ariane said, just because she could.
“Flish,” Jim corrected. He indicated the corner table. “Well, Flish, you sit right over there and keep an eye on your aunt.” Jim turned back to the small crowd that had gathered. “Everything’s fine, ladies and gentlemen,” he said loudly. “I apologize for the disturbance. Please, return to your tea.”
Ariane’s mom walked over to the corner table without looking back at her daughter, sat, and still didn’t look at her, instead staring out at the misty grey harbour. Captain Cook still looked unhappy, Ariane noted as she sat down across the table from her mom, her heart pounding again. “Mom?” she whispered finally, her throat so tight she could barely get even that single strangled syllable to pass through it.
“Oh, Ariane,” her mom said, still looking out at the harbour. “What have you done?”
“I found you,” Ariane said. “I...”
“You took the power,” Emily Forsythe said. And now, at last, she turned. Tears glimmered in her eyes, left glistening tracks as they spilled down her cheeks. “You took the Lady’s power. How could you?”
“I...” Ariane didn’t know how to explain. “Merlin...he had to be –”
“You’ve made him your enemy,” Ariane’s mom said. “You’ve made him our enemy.” She suddenly leaned forward and took Ariane’s hand. Her heart thumped at the touch. She’d longed for that touch for so many long, lonely months. “I refused the power because I knew that was what would happen,” her mom said. “I ran away because I didn’t want Rex Major to find out about you, to come after you. I gave up my life, our life, to protect you...and you threw all that away. Why?”
Every word seemed to twist the blade her mom’s laugh had first plunged into her heart. She’d never imagined this: never imagined she would find her mother, and her mom wouldn’t be happy about it...would be angry. Angry
with her.
Then her own anger kindled. Just a spark, but even though she was not wearing the shard, had left it with Wally out in the hallway – she hadn’t turned to see, but she was certain he must be watching them – the sword’s power fanned it instantly to a bright, hot flame. She jerked her hand free. “You want to know why I took the power?” Ariane almost snarled. “I took it because my mother abandoned me when I was thirteen years old! I took it because I’d been raised by strangers for two years! I took it because I was in trouble and being bullied! Again!
She heard herself becoming loud, saw heads turning their way. She reined herself in. “I took it to protect myself. I took it to protect the world. But the main reason I took it was because I thought it would help me find you. Now I have. And now I find out you don’t even want me here.” She heard her voice rising again, knew people were staring, but she didn’t care. “You probably never wanted me. That’s why you really left, wasn’t it? Your daughter turned into a teenager and you didn’t want to have to deal with that! So you ran way, just like my father did when I was born!”
Mom’s face went white. “Ariane, no...” She reached out, but Ariane snatched her hands off the table.
She couldn’t sit there anymore. She stood up. “I’m sorry I found you, I’m sorry I’m such a disappointment to you. But I’m not sorry I took the power. I’m going to complete the quest you refused. I’m going to get every shard of Excalibur. I’m going to see the sword remade, and I’m going to drive Merlin back into Faerie where he belongs. And then maybe...maybe...I’ll come looking for you again.”
It was a great exit line. She had every intention of turning and stalking coldly away after delivering it. But before she could her mother surged out of her chair, rounded the table, grabbed her, and pulled her into an all-encompassing embrace.
Ariane stiffened, arms straight at her sides. She heard her mother’s sobs, felt her body shaking – and then she felt something else: a connection, a tingle of power she recognized.
Her mother might have rejected the Lady’s offer, but the blood of the Lady – the line of magic stretching back unbroken to the days of King Arthur – still ran in her mother’s veins as it did in her own, and Ariane could sense it. She hadn’t, until the hug, but now it was as if a thread had been strung from her mother to herself, a gossamer-thin but unbreakable connection. The sensation made her gasp, and helped drive back the Excalibur-fuelled portion of her anger. That left her own seething cauldron of emotions, and though anger was part of that bubbling mix, it was only a small part. The largest part was still love – and it was love which brought her arms up and around her mother at last, and made that thin thread of connection between them thicken and thrum with sudden power.
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