Twist of the Blade (14 page)

“I guess this is good-bye,” Aunt Phyllis said.

Conscious of the old man behind the counter watching them stoically from beneath the shade of a green John Deere baseball cap, Wally said, “I guess so. We’ll let you know how it goes.”

“You’d better.” Aunt Phyllis looked at Ariane. “Be careful,” she said softly. “I know I said you can take care of yourself, but...I’m supposed to be your guardian.”

“You can’t guard me from what I have to do,” Ariane said. She gave her aunt a hug and Wally, surprising himself, gave Aunt Phyllis a hug too. Aunt Phyllis looked a little teary-eyed as she pulled away, but all she said was, “Take care.” Then, rather abruptly, she turned and left.

Wally started to follow her through the door, thinking he’d wave good-bye as she pulled away. But when he looked toward the van he saw a blue Taurus pulling in behind it –
one of the cars that had passed them right after they left Regina
. He jerked back so fast he stepped on Ariane’s feet.

“Hey!” she protested. “I need those toes!”

“He’s here,” Wally whispered urgently to Ariane.

Ariane stared at him. “Who?”

Wally glanced at the man behind the cash register, who was now reading a newspaper, apparently uninterested in them. Wally took Ariane’s arm and pulled her to the end of the convenience store farthest from the counter. A gigantic moose head guarded an open doorway leading to what Wally knew from previous visits were two tiny, one-person washrooms. “Rex Major’s man,” he said in a low voice. “One of the cars that passed us just pulled in. He must have pulled off somewhere and then come back on the highway after we’d gone by.”

Ariane stared at the door. “Aunt Phyllis –”

“I don’t know if she’s realized it yet,” Wally said. He looked out the nearest window, just in time to see the mini-van drive past, heading on up the highway toward Saskatoon. But the Taurus didn’t follow. Wally swore. “I think he’s coming in here. We have to hide –”

“Only one place we can,” Ariane said. “Come on!”

She ran under the moose head toward the bathrooms. Wally headed toward the men’s, but Ariane grabbed him. “He could be going in there!”

“Right,” Wally said, annoyed at himself for not thinking of that, and followed Ariane into the women’s room instead. It was a tight fit with their backpacks, but they made it. Ariane bolted the door...and then they listened, barely breathing.

They heard voices. One sounded like the man at the counter, the other was unfamiliar.

“What if he’s asking about us?” Wally hissed. “The man will tell him we headed to the bathrooms....”

Ariane looked at him, then grinned. “I can fix that.”

She twisted herself around and turned on the water in the sink.

There were footsteps outside the bathroom. Ariane whispered, “Grab hold of me.” Wally, suddenly realizing what she intended...and wondering
why
they had bought bus tickets in the first place, when they could have done this all along...took hold of Ariane’s arm as she quietly unlocked the bathroom door, then plunged her hand into the stream of water.

The bathroom vanished around them...though Wally thought he saw, just before the water took them, the door beginning to swing open.

Wally had travelled through the water with Ariane several times, but the sensation wasn’t something you got used to. One minute his body was there, solid as always, clothes, shoes and the weight of the backpack pressing against it, his weight pushing the soles of his feet against the floor. The next, all those sensations vanished. Darkness swallowed him. He could feel that he was rushing somewhere at a great rate of speed, but he couldn’t tell where: he had no sense of direction, left or right, north or south, up or down. But what was most frightening of all was the sense that his mind was dissolving along with his body, slowly melting away into the water that he had somehow, impossibly become. He wondered what would happen if Ariane let go of him.

But she won’t
, he thought.
She would never do anything to hurt me.

Unless the Lady’s magic and the shard change her.
And then, suddenly, his body became solid again, submerged in water tinged with chlorine. He straightened convulsively; his feet found bottom, and his head broke the surface. Gasping, water streaming from the hair plastered to his skull, he stared around him.

They were in his house, in his swimming pool. Ariane turned to look at him. “I guess we didn’t need the bus tickets,”
she said, echoing his earlier thought. Wally laughed a little shakily.

They climbed out, and Ariane drove the water from their bodies, leaving them and everything they wore and carried as dry as though it had never been wet. “Will Mrs. Carson be here?” Ariane said.

Wally shook his head. “She goes to church early on Sundays, and then she goes out for lunch with some friends. She won’t be back until dinner.”

“And when is your flight?”

“Not until 4 p.m.”
Assuming there are seats left
, he thought. There had been when he’d made the anonymous (he hoped) phone call to figure out the flights that would get him to Europe, though, and that had just been the evening before. If for some reason the planes had filled up, they’d have to delay at least another day, heightening the risk of Major figuring out what they were up to.

“Then we might as well hang out here.”

Wally nodded. “Why didn’t we think of this in the first place?” he said, feeling put-out at his own dim-wittedness. “The bus tickets were a mistake. What if we’re making other mistakes, missing things we should have thought of?”

“It still isn’t exactly second nature, this whole magic-travelling thing,” Ariane said. “It’s only been a month since this all started. It’s hard to believe.”

“A lot has happened since then,” Wally agreed.
Not all of it good
, he added silently, thinking of Flish.

They made their way upstairs to the couch in the living room. Wally turned on the TV. The sports channel was showing curling, and he hated curling, but it seemed to be too much trouble to change it. And soon it didn’t matter, because ten minutes after they sat down he glanced at
Ariane and saw she was fast asleep.

Five minutes after that, so was he.

Wally woke first, blinking at the silent TV, now showing someone ski jumping in the Alps. Ariane had slumped against him and was still fast asleep, her breathing slow and steady. He looked down at the top of her head and felt a pang of tenderness like the one that had seized him in the cab coming from the hospital. They’d been through a lot together in the past month. His life had changed in so many ways since the day he’d seen her in the school office, right after her first fight with Flish’s coven. He’d encountered the Lady of the Lake, been given a quest, helped recover the first shard of Excalibur....

...found out his parents were splitting up, watched his sister move out....

...seen his sister in the hospital, put there by Ariane.

She didn’t mean to do it
, he told himself again, still looking down at Ariane’s head, breathing in the clean, sweet smell of her hair.

But that, he thought, was just another way of saying she couldn’t really control the power she’d been given. So what would happen when she had
two
shards of the sword? How would
that
change her? How long would it be before she wasn’t recognizable as Ariane at all, but became entirely the Lady of the Lake?

And what would
that
mean, to her...and to them?

Again Wally was struck by how little they really knew about the Lady – what she wanted, and why she wanted it. Rex Major...Merlin...wanted to rule the world, at least in some sense, but claimed that might actually be a
good
thing, since it would enable him to use magic to help solve the world’s problems
and
to free his own world from what he saw as tyranny. The Lady, on the other hand, wanted to cut Earth off from magic altogether.

What could Ariane do with her power if she were free to use it for something other than searching for the shards of Excalibur? Could she make it rain in places suffering from drought, fill irrigation ditches in parched fields, reroute rivers? And if
she
could do all that, what could Merlin do if he had
his
full strength? Maybe he really could end war and poverty and famine.

Ariane sighed and snuggled close, like a kitten seeking warmth. Wally rested his cheek against the crown of her head, and his doubts eased again. This was
Ariane
he was talking about. The best friend he’d ever had.
She gave the first shard to Rex Major to save me
, he reminded himself.

But that was before she had ever used the shard’s power. If Major had told him the truth, the more she used it, the more it would change her, and next time, she might choose the shard over him.

No!
he protested, his cheek still warm against her hair.
Nothing could change her
that
much.

But he’d thought that about a girl before. He’d thought nothing could ever change his sister into anything other than the loving older sibling he’d grown up with. And look how wrong he’d been about
that
.

He sighed. Sometimes he hated his own brain.

He looked at the TV stand again, and at the digital TV box that topped the stack of electronics. Glowing green numbers proclaimed the time. He straightened abruptly and shook Ariane. She mumbled something, then her head lifted and she looked around, yawning. “What?”

“We need to get to the airport or I’ll have a job getting my ticket and getting through security in time to catch my flight,” Wally said. He left the couch and headed for the wireless handset on a table at the foot of the stairs. “I’ll call a taxi.”

“I can’t believe we’re really doing this,” Ariane said. “You’re flying to France on your own, and I’m...” her voice trailed off.

“We went to Yellowknife on our own,” Wally pointed out, punching numbers. “That trip started with us swirling down the drain. This is just a plane ride.”

“For you,” Ariane said.

Wally didn’t reply right away. The taxi company had answered. He gave instructions and disconnected. Then he looked at Ariane. “You can do it. You
have
to.” That didn’t sound as encouraging as he wanted, so he added, “I have faith in you.”

She gave him a quick smile. “Thank you.”

He smiled back, feeling warm.

A car horn honked. He looked at the door in surprise. “That was quick. He must have been just around the corner.” He picked up his backpack and Ariane grabbed hers as well. “Here we go.” He went to the front door and held it open. “After you.” Ariane gave him a little bow, and swept by. Wally turned and locked the door, pocketed the key, then followed her down the walk.

Just before he got in the taxi, though, he glanced back at his house, wondering if he’d ever see it again.

He shook his head.
Don’t go getting morbid, Wally.You and Ariane beat Rex Major once. You can do it again. The Lady of the Lake and her Faithful Sidekick. No evil sorcerer stands a chance.

Grinning, he climbed into the taxi. “Airport,” he said.

CHAPTER SEVEN

BON VOYAGE

In the taxi on the way to the airport, Ariane listened to Wally describe the itinerary that had been outlined for him by the Air Canada representative over the phone the night before. It seemed straightforward, if exhausting. He’d first fly to Calgary, a short hop of about an hour, then transfer to another flight, which would take him over the pole to Frankfurt. From Frankfurt he would fly to Lyon, France, arriving some thirty hours after he’d left Regina. The plan was for Ariane to meet him at the airport.

Assuming I haven’t dissolved into cold mist above the Atlantic
, she thought, and swallowed.

They’d chosen Lyon, rather than Paris, because Ariane’s best guess for the shard’s location was the south of France. Based on her experience with the first shard, she expected to be able to home in on the second shard much more easily once she was closer to it. In fact, she hoped that as soon as Wally had gone through customs, they could simply duck into a bathroom, zoom to the shard, grab it, zip back to Lyon, and hide out in the hotel room Aunt Phyllis had reserved for them until Wally could book a return flight. If they were lucky, and flights permitted, they might not even have to use it.