Song of the Sword

by Edward Willett

  A psychotic break, the doctors said. Had there been any warning signs? Had her mother used drugs? So many questions. A neighbour had taken Ariane in. Her mom was going to be kept in the psychiatric ward for a while. And then...

  ...then had come the phone call at the neighbour’s house. Her mom had vanished. Escaped from the hospital. No sign of her.

  And there had been no sign of her ever since.

  Ariane squeezed her arms more tightly around her legs. Ever since then, she’d been trying to hold herself together, trying to keep Ariane, the old Ariane, intact. It had never been easy. And now...the hallucination in the shower...

  Am I losing touch with reality too? Did I inherit something – some mental illness – from Mom?

  And in that moment of self-doubt, Ariane heard the sound of chanting, coming from the lake.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Staircase in the Water

  Wally Knight jerked awake in the dark and lay still for a moment, heart pounding. The dream...the battle...the enemy had...

  But the details were already fading. Which was too bad, because what he could remember of it – clashing steel and blood everywhere – had been awesome.

  He looked at his bedside clock, the docked iPhone rising atop it like the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey, and groaned. It was already 6:20, and he wanted to be out of the house in twenty minutes, just to make sure he didn’t bump into his sister Felicia. He’d originally planned to walk to one of the coffee shops on the other side of the lake and hang out there until school, but suddenly he had a better idea.

  I’ll ride my bike around the lake a couple of times, he thought. It’ll be cool to see the lake as the sun comes up. He grinned in the darkness. I wonder why I never thought of doing it before?

  He was up and dressed and kinda-sorta washed and combed and out of the house fifteen minutes later, easing his bike out of the garage between his dad’s BMW and his mom’s Prius, then mounting it and darting across Albert Street into Wascana Park.

  He took the first lap of the lake at breakneck speed, revelling in the relative scarcity of joggers on the path and in the cold invigorating kiss of the mist against his cheeks, furiously pedalling away the anger and humiliation left over from the previous night – courtesy, of course, of his sister Felicia.

  She’d failed to come home for supper – again; since she’d been hanging out with Shania McHenry and the other members of what Wally privately thought of as “the coven,” she’d been coming home later and later – and Ms. Carson, the housekeeper who looked after them while their parents were away, she of the pinched expression and (Wally suspected) never-pinched behind, had blamed him.

  “You should have told her to come home right after school,” Ms. Carson had scolded him. “Honestly, Walter, when are you going to learn a little responsibility?”

  Wally had long ago given up trying to argue Ms. Carson out of her passionate belief in his sister’s infallibility. Maybe Flish’s little clique really is a coven, he thought. Maybe they’ve put a spell on Ms. Carson.

  On second thought, that couldn’t be true, or by now Flish would’ve turned him into a toad.

  With Felicia absent, Ms. Carson wasn’t about to waste her time on the pasta dinner she’d originally planned, so Wally had to make do with cold salmon sandwiches and the wilted remnants of the previous night’s salad. He retreated to his room as soon as he could, to spend the evening playing the real-time strategy game he’d bought over the weekend. He usually played first-person shooters and flight simulators, but for some reason the game’s medieval setting had appealed to him, and he was beginning to find building castles and mustering armies addictive.

  After a couple of hours, he paused to massage his wrist, wrapped in a tensor bandage. He’d sprained it during fencing practice that afternoon. Natasha Mueller, the fencing instructor, had sent him off to the office to get a (highly prized, in Walter’s book) get-out-of-gym-free note…which was how he’d happened to be in the hallway just in time to see the new girl, Ariane Forsythe, in a knock-down, drag-out fight with Shania McHenry, while Felicia stood nearby looking pleased with herself, and how he’d happened to be in the office when Ariane was suspended for fighting. He’d felt sorry for Ariane. Just at school a week, and already Flish’s coven had targeted her for humiliation. He wondered if she’d last out the year.

  He resumed playing, but hit the pause key when he heard his bedroom door open. Ms. Carson, for all her faults, always knocked. Which meant –

  Whack! The slap on the back of his head almost pushed his nose into his keyboard. He spun his chair to face Felicia. “Hello to you, too. And, for the record – ow!”

  Rubbing his stinging scalp, he looked up at his sister. Way up. Felicia was thirty centimetres taller than him even when he was standing. He kept waiting for his fabled adolescent growth spurt in the hope it would even things up, but so far he’d been disappointed. Until it happened, he remained at her mercy when it came to physical confrontation. Which, with Felicia, it always did.

  “Where are my books?” she said. “I didn’t see them downstairs.”

  “I put them in your room.”

  “You went into my room without permission?”

  “Logically, ‘take my books home’ implied permission to put them in your room –”

  “You never go in my room unless I let you in. Which I won’t. Got it?”

  Wally sighed. “Got it.”

  “Good.” Felicia turned to go.

  “So what are you going to do to that new girl?” Wally heard himself say the words, but he obviously hadn’t consulted his brain first.

  Felicia stopped in the doorway and turned around. “What do you know about it?”

  “I saw what happened.”

  “She attacked Shania. Crazy bitch.”

  Wally manfully did not ask if those final two words were meant to apply to Shania or the unfortunate new focus of the coven’s attentions. “She was in the office when I was getting my excuse-Wally-from-gym note. She looked nice enough. Except for the bruises.”

  “She’s a ratty foster brat, and she’s only gotten a little of what she’s got coming to her. That’s all you need to know.” Felicia strode across the room and leaned into his face. “Stay away from Ariane Forsythe if you know what’s good for you. I don’t want my brother hanging out with trash like that.”

  Wally had memories of a big sister who used to take him to movies and malls and midways, but then he also had memories of parents who took him to the playground, came to his school plays, and put him in his PJs at night. Now his parents were never home, and his sister wished she wasn’t. Wally figured the two things were related, but knowing part of the reason Felicia was the way she was didn’t change the fact she could – and would – mop the floor with him if he crossed her.

  That didn’t mean he always had to do what she wanted. It just meant he had to be smart enough not to get caught.

  “Got it,” he said. “Hadn’t you better get going on your homework?”

  She shoved his chair so that it had crashed into the computer desk. The computer beeped and rebooted, wiping out a good twenty minutes of game play. Then Felicia had stalked out and slammed the door behind her so hard Wally’s LEGO model of the Millennium Falcon had fallen from its shelf and exploded across the floor: a good twenty hours’ work destroyed, just like that.

  Wally, remembering it again, started pumping the bike pedals harder. He zipped down the little hill from the Willow Island overlook to the empty parking lot…and then skidded to a halt as the strange sound filling the misty air registered on him. Who would be chanting at this time of the morning – or any time of the morning – out here?

  The sound came from the water. He looked that way and saw a girl standing just a few metres away, on one of the boulders on the shore. Even though he couldn’t see her face, he recognized her from the day before.

  Ariane?

  ~ • ~

  Ariane gasped as the chanting rose up from
the water, wrapping her in its impossible sound. She’d always loved the cool, solemn cadences of Gregorian chant, but this song held nothing of church or cloister. Wild and untamed, it sounded as if the water itself were singing of rainstorms and creeks and waterfalls and clouds, of all the shapes it had taken, all the places it had been, through its endless, timeless cycle.

  She was standing, though she didn’t remember getting up from the boulder. The chant wasn’t just music: it was a call. A call from someone or something that wanted her...needed her.

  Loved her?

  And just like that, she thought she knew what – who – was calling her. Mom! Somehow, impossibly, her mother was in the water, urging her to join her, to reunite with her at last.

  Without even thinking about it, Ariane stepped off the boulder and walked into the lake.

  She found herself standing on the water, as easily and naturally as if it were the checkered linoleum of her own kitchen floor. The strange music swelled around her, the water exulting that she had answered its call.

  A section of the lake in front of her sank and folded like a sheet of silk into a shimmering staircase that led into the depths of the lake.

  What depths of the lake? Wascana Lake doesn’t have any depths. This can’t be happening. It’s another hallucination. It has to be. But her inner voice couldn’t reason away the surging waves of welcoming music and the yearning that gripped her, the irrational certainty that if only she listened to that call and walked into the lake, she would at last be reunited with her mother. Her doubts shoved aside, Ariane started down the steps that couldn’t possibly exist.

  As she did so, the watery music faded into a quiet, contented hum, like Pendragon purring in a patch of sunlight. Twenty or thirty steps down, she reached a landing. She glanced back at the rectangle of open air through which she had entered, and wondered, just for an instant, what would happen to her if the opening closed. She hesitated, but the water burst into full-throated song, almost anxiously urging her onward. She turned her back on daylight and continued down.

  The steps ended in a curtain of falling drops, like a veil of diamond beads. The watery ceiling flickered and quivered above. When Ariane touched the veil, it flowed around her hand. She could feel the cool brush of liquid, but when she drew her fingers back, they weren’t even damp.

  “Come in, daughter,” said a feminine voice from beyond the veil. “Don’t be afraid.”

  That voice...! “Mom?” Ariane cried. She pushed through the veil.

  She found herself in a flickering, shimmering chamber. Shafts of watery sunlight struck the rippled floor, glancing off it in spikes of diamond light that nearly blinded her. “Mom?” she called again.

  “No,” answered the voice. “I’m sorry.”

  A wrenching sob escaped Ariane. She had been so sure.

  “Come closer,” the voice called. The shafts of sunlight coalesced around a raised platform at the far end of the chamber. A woman, tall and regal, clad in a long, flowing dress, watched her from a liquid throne. Behind the woman, a wall of water fell soundlessly into white foam.

  Then Ariane felt a chill, as though she had been plunged into a cold pool. The woman was made of water. Her hair and dress were only foam, and her arms, fingers, neck and head were as smooth and transparent as polished glass.

  “At last,” the watery apparition said, and Ariane wondered how she could ever have mistaken that rippling, musical voice for her mother’s.

  She found her own voice. “Who are you?”

  The woman spread her glass-like hands. “I am, or was, the Lady of the Lake.”

  Ariane blinked. “Like in King Arthur?”

  “It was I who gave Excalibur to Arthur,” the Lady said. “I received it back again when he lay dying at Camlann. I sent Lancelot to Camelot. And I persuaded Viviane to imprison Merlin more than a thousand years ago.” She shook her head. “Little did I know how short a millennium truly is.”

  Ariane stared at the Lady. Everything she said was impossible. Everything that had just happened – that was still happening – was impossible. Ariane was standing in a chamber deep under the water of Wascana Lake – deeper, in fact, than the lake itself! – conversing with a living water-sculpture. It couldn’t be happening. None of it.

  Her knees gave way and she sat down heavily on the watery floor – the dry watery floor, she noted with a tinge of hysteria. She pushed her palms against it. It felt like hard rubber. “I’ve gone crazy, haven’t I?” she whispered. “Just like Mom.”

  The Lady stepped down from the dais, and knelt beside her. Her transparent hand caressed Ariane’s cheek for a moment, and her cool, dry fingers felt as solid as her own. “You are very like your mother, you know,” she said softly, and Ariane’s head shot up at that. She stared at the vision.

  “My mother? You knew –”

  “We met,” the Lady said. “Two and a half of your years ago, I tried to give her what I now offer to you. She refused.”

  Ariane blinked. “What…what did you try to give her?” And then she felt a surge of anger. Her mother had come home soaking wet, had gone crazy… “What did you do to her?”

  “I did nothing to her,” the Lady said sadly. “She would not let me. She refused the power I offered her. Power to save the world.”

  “Save the world?” Ariane looked about her. “From what?”

  “Not from what, but from whom,” the Lady said. “Merlin.” She made the name sound poisonous. “Merlin seeks the shards of Excalibur, scattered around the world. He seeks to re-forge the sword and use its power to seize control, first of this world, then of our world, the world of Faerie. He must not succeed. The shards of Excalibur are mine, and must remain mine.”

  “Then why don’t you –”

  “I no longer live in this world, and the door between Faerie and Earth is all but closed. I can do very little here now but send dreams and, with great effort, this pale projection of myself. But my heir can act in this world. If she accepts the power I can give her, she can defeat Merlin. She can find the shards of Excalibur. She can save your world. And mine.”

  “Your…heir?” Ariane stared at the Lady’s glass-like face.

  “Your mother, until she rejected my power,” the Lady said. “Now, you.”

  Ariane’s heart pounded. “I have gone crazy.”

  “No.” The Lady took Ariane’s hand in her smooth, cold fingers, and pulled her to her feet. “I am neither a ghost nor a hallucination. I am as real as you.” She suddenly turned and stared at the veil behind Ariane, frowning. “As real as…” She released Ariane, strode to the veil, and thrust a hand through it. “This eavesdropper!”

  With a jerk, the Lady pulled into the chamber a boy, younger than Ariane, with unruly red hair and wide green eyes in a face so white every freckle on it stood out as though drawn with a brown felt pen. Ariane had no idea what his name was, but she’d seen him just the day before: he’d been in the office while she was getting suspended. She remembered him staring at her, his eyes almost as wide then as they were now.

  Ariane gaped at him. It’s really happening. It’s all real. It couldn’t be her imagination, because there was no way she would ever imagine this geeky kid, silently opening and closing his mouth like a landed fish, staring at the Lady as though afraid she might turn him into a frog. She probably could if she wanted to, Ariane thought. Certainly the Lady was examining the boy as if she were a biologist and he a particularly peculiar specimen of amphibian. “Astonishing,” she murmured. “Of course you would be drawn to me. But I didn’t know...I wonder if Merlin…”

  But whatever she wondered, she didn’t say. The boy suddenly yelped and dug frantically in his pocket, digging out a smartphone that he dropped the moment he had it. “It’s hot!” he said, staring down at it. The phone’s screen blazed white, and steam rose all around it.

  The water-woman stared down at the phone, mouth open, hand outstretched. For a moment, she looked as frozen and lifeless as the glass statue she resembl
ed. Then a single drop of water formed at the end of her nose and dropped to the floor with a musical “plink.” At the sound, the Lady returned to life again. “No!” she cried. “You have revealed me to him!”

  Ariane stared at her. “Revealed you to who? What’s wrong?”

  “Listen!” the Lady said.

  Ariane listened, and heard the trickling of water behind her. She turned and saw a thin stream flowing down the watery steps that led up to the sunlit world.

  As she watched, that trickle grew.

  “I have a bad feeling about this,” the geeky kid muttered.

  Ariane scrambled to her feet. “We have to get out of here!” she cried.

  But the Lady grabbed her wrist, making her yelp, the transparent fingers as solid as steel. “Not yet!” the Lady cried. “You must listen! I have only seconds. Remember: Excalibur will call to you. Follow its song. Find it, all of it, before Merlin does. Your whole world depends on it.” The trickle grew to a frothing stream. Water, cold as ice, flowed into Ariane’s shoes. “Your mother refused to accept the power. But you must. You must! There is no one else.”

  She released Ariane’s wrist, but then, quick as a striking snake, seized her face in both hands. Ariane gasped. The Lady’s palms, at first cool against her cheeks, suddenly blazed with heat. Deep within the water-woman’s clear gaze, Ariane saw twin blue pools the color of midsummer sky. Those pools rushed toward her, then swallowed her whole.

  The chamber and the cold water lapping at her ankles faded from her senses. She felt as though she were floating in a warm lake, fathoms deep. The sound of waterfalls and rushing creeks filled her head and formed strange words: Gadewch y dyfroedd byw ynoch, a chi o fewn y dyfroedd. Ypˆwer yn eiddo i chi. Though the language was one she had never heard, Ariane somehow knew what the words meant: “Let the waters live within you, and you within the waters. The power be yours.” And indeed, she sensed the power within the strange phrases, so much power that, just for a moment, she felt luminescent, ablaze with light, like a living star, so much so that as she became aware of the chamber again she thought she could see light streaming from her skin, outshining the diluted rays of the sun far above.