Avalon Rising (22 page)

“Don’t leave your home because Lancelot—” “This isn’t about Lancelot,” Lena says firmly. “This is about me. For three years, I was foolishly in love with him. I wasted time. I already knew, Marcus.” But even though it might be true that Lena is free of loving Lancelot, the tears that collect in her eyes are enough to show Marcus she still has to grieve.

She takes a large satchel and fills it with all sorts of gadgets and tools: thick, heavy rope, a monocle like the viewers I’d construct in Camelot, a crossbow. She straps a grappling hook to her back that Marcus’s own blacksmith father could have forged. Then she meets Marcus in the middle of the room.

“My letter to my father will inform him that I’ve eloped with a foreign prince who wants to take me around the world in his golden aeroship. It’s just the sort of dramatics he’d expect, and he’ll be thrilled to let this story turn into legend in Corbenic. I had to bribe my ladies-inwaiting to keep silent, and I have nothing else to offer for your own—”

“I won’t tell,” Marcus promises.

She throws her arms around his neck and kisses his cheek, and where I should feel jealousy, I feel happiness for Lena instead. “Thank you. Good-bye, Marcus.”

He holds her tightly, the friend he met too late. “Godspeed, Lena.”

She makes for the door. When she opens it, and it creaks loudly against the quiet air, she turns back. “Marcus?”

He glances up.

“I’m not sure Arthur knows what he’s asking of his knights when he offers them a place at his Round Table. Never put duty above love. All right?”

Marcus says nothing, and Lena slips into the night, never to be seen again in Corbenic.

The squire shuffles in the quiet that follows, perhaps contemplating Lena’s advice, but then he shrugs. His knighthood will save his mother. His sacrifice will have to be enough. Certainly, there isn’t any other way. Is there?

“Next stop, Camelot.” With a quick detour to the same village where he first met Lancelot. Marcus leaves the artillery room with a broken crossbow in hand, whose string is not nearly taut enough to fire properly.

Perhaps with an idea of how to fix it.

The Black Knight’s mechanical eye cuts me free of Marcus’s memory, and I return to my place in the cabin of his aeroship, where I scramble to understand everything I just witnessed.

Lena is Elaine of Corbenic, the girl Sir Kay mentioned and mocked as a thick robe of melancholy draped over Lancelot’s tired shoulders my last night in Camelot.

What the Black Knight showed me might have been the last time Marcus saw Lena until we arrived in the village, or perhaps not. Marcus was missing for a month. But from the memories I saw, they were friends and nothing more. It wasn’t betrayal.

And so death must be Marcus’s destiny, despite the Fisher King’s assurance to the contrary—was he wrong? Did I really send Marcus to die as soon as I stepped outside of Camelot?

I’m reaching for stable breath, and the much-louder and more-frequent booms of the cannons above deck are no help. The Black Knight moves his golden eye patch over his mechanical lens to watch me.

“Lena was the girl Lancelot—”

“Lady Elaine was no harlot, and she was nothing more than a friend to your lover. Pride is your biggest flaw, Lady Vivienne, and look where that got you. You couldn’t even ask the knight to confirm the truth for himself.” The Black Knight finds a well-used pipe on a small table beside his day bed and fills it tightly with feathered bits of herb. He lights it, and the smoke of the
hashish
sways into the air. “The misdirection of suggesting betrayal was someone else’s doing. A demigoddess who didn’t realize just how determined you’d become to find the Grail.”

The last words Lena gave Marcus before she left Corbenic come back to me:
never put duty above love.
Only last spring, I’d told Marcus the exact opposite when he asked me to leave Camelot with him. That we had a duty to be there.

“Duty, right.”

He’d listened, and because of that, his mother stayed in Camelot to burn with its farmlands.

“This is my fault,” I whisper. The Black Knight is right: it was pride. Pride I’d never boasted before, not until I could be away from Camelot, see the world on my own, finally, and embrace that which I’d promised I never would. I couldn’t even have simply asked Marcus for the truth—I assumed, and the prospect of humiliation was enough to turn my assumption into fact. I hurt us both with my words and actions. If our hearts could be one, I’ve shattered it. “This is my doing.”

I lean over my knees, letting my hair drape around my face. As I do so, the part of me determined to make up for my sins madly searches the Black Knight’s cabin. Hearing the vision of Lena speaking of passageways reminded me of what Merlin said aboard
CELESTE
before he sent it crashing to the ground. This aeroship is much more luxurious than my own, but there might be tricks to the design. Tricks like passageways that could somehow let me escape this cabin and take this ship as my own. Passageways a demigod might never realize exist.

But a desperate inventor would, and a desperate inventor is someone the Black Knight should fear. Enough so that the words of magic I read in Merlin’s journals and heard while in the realm of the Fisher King come rushing back to me, and I have to silence them before I steal again.

The Black Knight’s footsteps on his cabin floor are quiet. I feel a soft pat on my shoulder.

“Be enlightened, Lady Vivienne. Learn from your mistake. You might never again see Sir Marcus—”

Another loud boom and shuddering of wood and sails.

“—regardless, you have the chance to do some good. You could seek Camelot’s subjects, fight the fools I sent there to lure Arthur’s knights and the rest of the world from Avalon.” Another long inhale. “I’ll sweeten my offer. Show me how to find the Grail, and I’ll show you how magic could be employed for a greater purpose.”

I’m running what he said over in my mind, and I feel Merlin’s spells burn in my pocket. I know the spell that would blind a man. Perhaps there were more in Merlin’s clock tower than just those I snatched to bring with me, spells the sorcerer would use to offset the weight that is
Redia
, the spell to resurrect. Oh how lovely it’d be to kill the Black Knight right now and commandeer this aeroship myself, even if it would be at the cost of my own soul …

I snap free from the temptation and think of Camelot’s subjects. My mother. I can only pray Marcus chose the nobler path, deciding against seeking the Fisher King’s signet from my aeroship wreckage, instead joining Galahad and Percy in attacking
MUERTE
. They could rise up against the Black Knight. Defeat him. Then we could return to my aeroship and retrieve the signet ourselves. And perhaps this want I feel for magic could be stopped once the Grail is in our hands.

The Black Knight kneels next to me, and I feel a wisp of smoke cut against my cheek.

“I know you worry about the consequences of magic. I know you think of le Fay or the sorcerer. Perhaps you look back fondly upon memories of Arthur’s queen and the stories she told you of Lyonesse. Perhaps they were enough to send nightmares to every child in all corners of the world. But it’s not like that. To embrace magic, Lady Vivienne, is to realize there are some of us who can rise above humanity and become
great
. Nature does value the strong. You’ve known this your entire life. Think about the ingenuity you employed when you built a toy aeroship that amazed even Merlin.”

“How could you know that?” I whisper. I wonder if he might try again to use his mechanical eye on me. If I’ve finally weakened. Surely, the Lady of the Lake hasn’t abandoned me now, but she might have discovered I’ve stolen magic. I could be lost forever.

“I might know you better than you think, Lady Vivienne.”

I won’t believe that. “No, it’s that you’re more afraid of my connection to the Lady of the Lake than you dare admit. That’s why I’m still alive. You cannot use torture to extract the coordinates of Avalon from me, because her vengeance would be worse than anything you could conjure up.” I’m nearly enjoying taunting him. We draw closer to Avalon the higher we fly, and the limit of my patience is being tested, and suddenly Vivienne, the former lady-inwaiting, has become Vivienne the Conniving.

A sneer crawls across the Black Knight’s jaw. “Do not tempt me,” he growls through gritted teeth. “There are many ways she could destroy me, but I’d most definitely make her retaliation worth it.”

He returns to his spirits’ counter to set his empty miniature goblet. The shine of the glass shows me a faint rendering of my own twisted reflection: my eyes are wild. In them, a fast flicker of gold, like Merlin’s, before they flash back to my own. Or like Morgan’s, as she sought coordinates from me. Guinevere’s, once, strangely enough.

“The handmaid has two days to consider my offer.” He glances one last time at me. “We’ll reach the Great Sea of the Mediterranean then.” He leaves, closing the door behind him, and instantly I hear him shout orders to those fighting a war of the skies.

Then there is nothing. Only the memory of Marcus’s time in Corbenic, which I must push away and consider later. I wish for escape, but the gears and cogs spinning in my mind assure me I’d need another set of hands if I were to pull it off, let alone a bloody aerohawk if I were to go anywhere.
Blast.

I don’t know what will happen once we arrive in Greece. I don’t know how the Black Knight is so sure I’ll tell him where Avalon lies. Beneath these questions is another, one that was quiet once, but now grows into something I can no longer ignore: why do I so desperately want to find the Holy Grail?

I already know what my vice would be. The way magic tasted when I stole it, and the way it felt as it sprang from my lips … oh God. I might have been wrong to think I understand the power magic has on the world.

I must find the Grail fast. But would that save me or destroy me?

A creak breaks the silence, and I dart my eyes toward it. A chirp, a bit of a whir. Sounds of the mechanical arts that are as familiar to me as my mother’s voice. I search the room, furrowing my brow and glancing about, but perhaps it was a drunken rogue outside my door fiddling with a broken firelance. Perhaps it was the wood adjusting to the cold air at this height.

Another creak. An iron coat hanger and a selection of fine jackets hides the Black Knight’s closet from view. The same closet creaking from before. I inch closer, as quietly as I can manage. It must be ajar, that’s all.

A small finger sets itself between the door and the frame. I yelp in surprise and cover my mouth with my hands. A burst of copper wings and beady black eyes finds its way into the Black Knight’s cabin.

“Caldor!” I exclaim as my mechanical falcon takes flight around the Black Knight’s spirits’ counter and lands on the floor beside me. But this is impossible!

“You have no idea what sort of a challenge it is to keep a determined mechanical falcon silent, my lady,” a girl’s voice says. I glance at the closet as a face I’ve just seen—in the tavern and in several of Marcus’s memories—peers out at me. “Thankfully the devil left when he did.”

Her eyes are wild with adventure, and her lips are smiling with pride.

Somehow, Lena found a way aboard the aeroship
MUERTE
.

“Lady Vivienne. We were parted too quickly the last time we met,” Lena whispers as she ducks her head around the closet door and checks the cabin. There is no sign of the Black Knight or any of his rogues, and that doesn’t seem likely to change. Another cannon ball strikes the aeroship, another shuddering of wood and iron, but it’s of no concern to Lena, who draws back her hood and smiles. “Hope you don’t mind company.”

From what I saw of Lena in the Black Knight’s mechanical eye, I realize that to see her as a stowaway is not surprising in the least.

But still, “What are you doing here?” I say too loudly before I remember to lower my voice. Oh God, what she might have heard the Black Knight say …

Lena’s eyes shine as she pulls her arsenal from her back. “Oh, I’m always game for a little adventure. And since Marcus gave up everything to ensure your safe return, I figured what little I could do to help must be done.”

My eyes widen, and a gasp escapes from my lips as she reveals Merlin’s sword and presents it to me.

“You dropped that. Thought you might want it back.”

Then she pulls out a firelance and a crossbow and hands them over, too, reserving a long-barreled fusionah with a wraparound blade for herself. “I figured you might be low on bearings. Probably not used to firelances like ours in Corbenic, but it should do the job.”

“How did you get aboard?” I ask, unable to sheathe the marvel in my voice, though I do miss my own crossbow, rescued and reinforced by Rufus only to be lost in
CELESTE
’s crash.

Lena straightens in the same low-cut peasant blouse from the tavern draping across her arms and décolletage, but she’s covered her shoulders in a deep Corbenic-blue cloak lined with silver embroidery. “When a ruckus broke out in my tavern, I took an underground route to the next inn, which let me witness you aiming a firelance straight into the Black Knight’s ugly face. After he followed you, I found myself face to face with this little chap—”

She sets her arm next to Caldor’s sharp talons, and he hops aboard. We pet the copper feathers at his chin.

“—covered in snow and ice, and nearly running out of steam.” She shakes her head in amazement. “Never before have I seen such a magnificent illusion, my lady. You’ll have to show me how it works.”

I can’t help but steal a second to be proud of Caldor; I open the compartment in its chest and pull out the reserve of Merlin’s
jaseemat
for the bird. Lena watches me cast it into the steam valve, and when I utter the instructions to bring it to life, Caldor inflates with vitality and flits around the room, wingspan broadening past our arms.

“Magnificent!” Lena exclaims.

Her voice is loud, and with that, I run to the door and peek through the slice of light telltale of the war outside this cabin. The Black Knight is occupied with Galahad’s battle; the cannons have slowed as each aeroship repairs their sails and masts, but soon they’ll start up again. I shut the door and rest my back against it, clicking over the lock and sliding a chair under the knob to keep it locked from both this side and the other. Caldor flits to the counter and tucks its feathers close to its body.