Song of the Sword

by Edward Willett

  She surveyed the mess she’d made, smiled, then went out into the hall and gently closed the door behind her.

  Wally wasn’t in sight. Ariane descended to the living room and plopped herself on the overstuffed white-leather couch to wait for him, trying not to think about everything that had happened, but unable to stop. It was impossible. Things like that just didn’t happen. She must have been hallucinating – another peculiar vision.

  But if she had been, then Wally had been hallucinating right along with her. Because here she was, in his house – in Felicia’s house – wearing Felicia’s clothes, while her own were...

  She frowned. Where were hers, anyway?

  She got up and went into the kitchen, decorated in stark black and white. As obsessively neat as the rest of the house, it made the comfortable clutter of Aunt Phyllis’s kitchen look like a rummage sale in mid-rummage. A door at the far end led into a utility room, where she could see an open washing machine. A quick look confirmed that both her and Wally’s clothes were in there, and when she glanced around, she saw her leather jacket hanging, dripping, from a hook by the door.

  She wrinkled her nose as she picked at its sodden sleeve. Soaking wet and stinking, it was something else she definitely wouldn’t have hallucinated. So somehow, some impossible how, the Lady of the Lake – or someone who called herself the Lady of the Lake, at least – had opened up a chamber of water in Wascana Lake, had spoken to them...

  ...and expected them to reassemble Excalibur before Merlin – Merlin, of all people! – could do so.

  She snorted. The Lady of the Lake was all wet in more ways than one if she thought her mumbo-jumbo was going to get Ariane to undertake a wild-goose chase like that. Mom refused the power. So will I.

  But she thought uneasily of the way the water had fled her body in the bathroom. That seemed to imply she had some of the Lady’s power already. Had she already accepted it? Some of it, at least? Did that mean she really wanted it – without even knowing what it was?

  The thought made her uncomfortable. Ironically, she also felt terribly thirsty. She returned to the kitchen, found a glass in the cupboard above the sink, and turned on the tap, letting it run for a few seconds to get cold. Absentmindedly, she stuck her fingers into the flow of the water to test the temperature.

  Rushing and gurgling down the drain and through the trap, and into the sewer pipe, flowing out toward the street to the main sewer line to the –

  She gasped and jerked her hand out of the water, and the vision – no, the sensation – vanished. For a horrifying instant she had felt as if she were about to pour down the drain with the flowing liquid, dissolving into it as it rushed to lake, river, and sea. She stared at her dripping hand. It trembled. The trembling spread to her arm, to her knees, and then to her whole body. She groped for one of the tall, black stools that ringed the granite-topped island in the middle of the kitchen, and hauled herself onto it before she could collapse where she stood.

  ~ • ~

  Wally tried to act cool when Ariane came out of the shower wearing only a towel...an act made more difficult by the fact that he hadn’t been able to find a shirt downstairs. He knew he was blushing, and knew there was no way to hide it. Worse, he also knew he looked like a twelve-year-old even though he’d been fourteen for a month, and he hated it. He was owed an adolescent growth spurt, damn it!

  Still, even if he couldn’t do anything about his scrawny body, he could at least try to be a gentleman and not stare at Ariane’s not-scrawny one. He could also try hard not to hope that her towel slipped off before she made it to Felicia’s room.

  He almost succeeded.

  As the closing door hid her from sight, he glanced into the bathroom, and frowned at the floor. “What the...?” He bent over and looked at a strange, ring-shaped puddle. The tiling was bone-dry in the centre. He couldn’t imagine how it could have formed.

  Well, it was hardly the strangest thing that had happened that morning. He went into his own room, where he rummaged in his dresser for clean socks. He tugged them on, then pulled out a T-shirt that bore the words REAL MEN HUNT DEER WITH SWORDS above an image of a leaping deer cut in half. He slipped it on, then picked up his hairbrush. As he met his own gaze in the mirror, he paused, remembering those panic-filled moments when he couldn’t keep his head above the lake’s surface.

  Ariane saved my life. He’d barely met her, but what had happened that morning was so amazing that he felt like he’d known her all his life. He shook his head, ran a brush through his red hair, then padded down the hall and down the stairs.

  He found Ariane sitting on one of the stools at the island in the centre of the kitchen, her face pale, cheeks shining with tears.

  “What’s wrong? You look like you’ve seen a ghost!” Wally realized the instant he spoke that it was a monumentally stupid thing to say in light of everything that had happened.

  “I don’t know what I saw. In the lake, or...” Ariane looked at her hand, then wiped it hastily on her borrowed jeans.

  “But she told you.” Wally clambered onto the stool next to her. “I heard it too. The Lady gave you – gave us! – a quest.” He relished that thought. He’d completed hordes of virtual quests, and now he was part of a real one! “To find the shards of Excalibur. ‘Seek for the sword that was broken, in Imladris it dwells...’” He grinned, savouring the words like a chunk of Belgian chocolate.

  “Stop it!” Ariane snapped, voice sharp as a slap. “Just stop it! This isn’t The Lord of the Rings. This isn’t a story. This is...I don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s all a hallucination. Maybe I tripped on the stairs this morning and I’m lying in the hospital with a fractured skull.”

  “Hallucinations aren’t this internally consistent,” Wally said. He reached out and pinched her arm.

  “Ow!” She jerked it away. For a second she looked as if she would hit him.

  Wally raised his hands. “Sorry! But see? No hallucination. Anyway, why on earth would you hallucinate me? Why not Elijah Wood?” From her expression, she’d already wondered that. That stung a little, even if he was the one who had said it.

  “But...it can’t be real,” Ariane said, though it sounded as if she was arguing more with herself than with him. “Arthur? Merlin? The Lady of the Lake? Excalibur? They’re storybook characters.”

  “Make up your mind. First you say it isn’t a story, then you say it is. You can’t have it both ways. I say it’s real. I say you’re the new Lady of the Lake.”

  “That can’t be!”

  “That’s what the Lady said – you’re her heir. That makes you the Lady of the Lake for the twenty-first century, just like she was for the eleventh or the ninth or whenever the heck she lived. And that means you have a responsibility, a duty.” He leaned in close, caught up in the excitement of the thing. “You have to stop Merlin from gathering the shards of Excalibur. It’s up to you to save the world.” And I get to help you. He grinned and leaned back again. “Man, you are so freakin’ lucky!”

  ~ • ~

  Ariane couldn’t believe what Wally had just said, couldn’t believe he was grinning at her as he said it. “Lucky?” She glared at him. “Lucky?” She stood up. “I may be going crazy, but you’re already there!”

  “You’re not crazy. And neither am I. You have to – ”

  “I don’t have to do anything!” Ariane snapped. “Except go home and face the music now that my aunt knows I’ve been suspended for three days. And next Wednesday, I’ll go back to school, and everything will go back to normal.”

  Wally shook his head. “No, it won’t. She gave you something, some kind of power – what was it she said, some kind of magic spell – ”

  Gadewch y dyfroedd byw ynoch, a chi o fewn y dyfroedd. Y p ˆwer yn eiddo i chi. The words echoed in Ariane’s mind even when she didn’t want them to.

  “I don’t care what she said!” she shouted, trying to drown out the memories of the Lady’s voice, of the waters singing to her, of the dreams of a sword in t
he water, of the wishing away of the water on her body, of the sensation of rushing away with the running water down the drain. “It’s all crap! She can go to hell!”

  She leaped up so violently her stool fell over. Wally jumped off his own to avoid being hit by it. Both stools crashed behind her as she ran out, throwing open the front door so hard it bounced and banged shut again behind her.

  A group of girls appeared at the mouth of the cul-de-sac just as she reached it. Half-blinded by tears, she dashed through them, careening off of someone who didn’t move out of her way fast enough. “Hey! Stop!” one of them shouted, but she kept running.

  An instant later she realized who the girls had been: Shania and Felicia’s little gang, probably cutting class – and heading to Felicia’s house.

  Wally!

  She shoved aside her momentary pang of guilt. She didn’t want to think about Wally. She didn’t want to think at all.

  It was all too much. Two and a half years ago, everything had been fine, everything had been normal, she’d been just another seventh-grader, recently turned thirteen, looking forward to being a teenager at last...now her mom was gone, her old friends were gone, her old life was gone, and she was supposed to save the world? Throw away every last vestige of normality, her final chance to be just one more kid in a sea of kids and become some kind of freak instead?

  She ran until her legs and breath gave out. Back in Wascana Park, she doubled over, gasping for breath, then straightened, leaned against a tree, and slid down its rough trunk to the brown grass beneath it. Out of sight of the lake – she didn’t want to see the lake again – and out of sight of passersby as well, she buried her head in her folded arms.

  When her heartbeat had slowed and she could draw her breath more easily, she raised her head and looked at her watch. Apparently it really was waterproof: it was still running, and told her it was just after nine in the morning.

  It seemed incredible that so little time had passed since she had first heard the singing of the water.

  Running hadn’t changed anything. She couldn’t run away from reality, and as fantastic as it seemed, her reality now included the Lady of the Lake. She had no choice but to confront the ordeal, and now that she was alone and slowly calming down, she thought perhaps she could. She took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and thought back to that morning’s encounter.

  Her mother had met the Lady, too. That seemed clear. And refused the power the Lady had offered her. And then…for whatever reason…she had run away: not only from the Lady and her proffered power, but from Ariane as well.

  And then, tentatively, another thought took shape in her mind, a thought she hardly dared to put into words, for fear it would evaporate into nothing more than wishful thinking if she held it up to the light. But it wouldn’t go away, and at last she dared to let it rise to the surface: With the Lady’s power, I might be able to find Mom.

  She told herself not to be an idiot, not to let herself get sucked in by false hope. No one had been able to figure out what had happened to her mom, not the police, not Aunt Phyllis, not the media. She’d tried to accept that, tried to accept that her mother was gone forever...

  But if I can use magic...

  She blinked away sudden tears as a surge of hope threatened to overwhelm her. Even if the power is real, there’s no guarantee you can use it to find Mom, she told herself, fighting to stay sensible. She may not be out there to find. She may be dead. Everyone thinks she is. Everyone...

  ...everyone except me! And with that fierce inward shout of defiance, she let the faint flicker of hope burst into a white-hot flame that for the moment, at least, burned away all her doubts.

  For you, Mom, Ariane thought fiercely. Not for the Lady, but for you, I’ll accept the Lady’s power – whatever it is!

  For a moment nothing happened. Then the bright October sunlight shining all around her became cold and watery, as if she were beneath the surface of the lake again, looking up through rippling water. Though she knew she was alone, she heard the Lady’s voice from close behind her: Gadewch y dyfroedd byw ynoch, a chi o fewn y dyfroedd. Y p ˆwer yn eiddo i chi...Let the waters live within you, and you within the waters. The power be yours.

  “The power be mine!” Ariane whispered.

  The sense that the Lady stood right behind her lasted a few seconds longer, then faded. The sunlight regained its normal strength. She took a deep, shuddering breath as the everyday world reasserted itself. A motorcycle roared along the winding park road, and from the playground she heard the distant shrieks and squeals of small children.

  In some ways, nothing had changed. She was still suspended from school, and she still had to go home and face the consequences, just like any other teenager in trouble. But unlike any other teenager, she had a quest – not a video game quest, but a real life-and-death quest.

  An impossible quest, Ariane thought. I need to learn everything I can about Excalibur, Merlin and the Lady of the Lake.

  She couldn’t go home to her own computer, and she had to spend the day somewhere. She got to her feet and set off on the five-block walk to the central branch of the Regina Public Library.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “If I Were You, I’d Run”

  At the just-opened library, Ariane found an unoccupied computer and searched the Web until she thought her eyes would fall out of her head. But even after four hours of Googling, she didn’t feel much wiser. Millions of words had been written about Arthur, Excalibur and the Lady of the Lake, and all of the accounts contradicted each other. What was truth, and what was fiction?

  It was early afternoon when she left the library for the nearby Cornwall Centre mall. She bought a copy of Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine at the magazine store she passed along the way, and read the book reviews and one of the short stories while eating a giant slice of second-rate pepperoni pizza in the mall food court. After that she poked through stores, and returned to the food court for a fruit smoothie. As the mall filled up with workers on their way home, she knew she couldn’t delay it any longer.

  She had to face Aunt Phyllis.

  Twenty minutes later she stood on their porch, hesitating and trying to figure out the best way to deal with her aunt. She might be able to delay the inevitable if she could get to her room before Aunt Phyllis realized she was home...but when she opened the front door, her aunt was standing between her and the staircase, arms folded, face pinched into a frown. “Ariane Elizabeth Forsythe, you stop right there!”

  Ariane didn’t have much choice, short of knocking Aunt Phyllis down.

  “I received a phone call from the school quite early this morning,” her aunt continued. “From Mr. Stanton.” She unfolded her arms. In one hand she held the pink notepad that usually lay beside the phone. She nodded sharply to flick the reading glasses perched on her head down onto her nose, then peered through them at the paper. “He informed me that my niece and legal ward, Ariane Forsythe, ‘has been suspended for three days for fighting, and is not to return to school until next Wednesday, at which time she must report to the office to arrange for mandatory counselling.’” Aunt Phyllis lowered the pad and glared at Ariane. “Mr. Stanton said you attacked a girl in the hallway yesterday after school. Is that true?”

  She started it, Ariane wanted to say, but realized she’d sound like a petulant little kid. “Yes.”

  Aunt Phyllis’s eyes widened. “You admit it?”

  I just did, didn’t I? Ariane fought the anger kindling inside her and kept her voice steady. “Yes.”

  Aunt Phyllis’s face flushed. “No explanation? No excuses?”

  Ariane didn’t want to drag Aunt Phyllis into her war with Wally’s sister and her friends. The last thing she needed was her aunt storming into the school demanding to see the principal. Things were bad enough without getting labeled a crybaby.

  “No.”

  “Ariane, how could you?” Aunt Phyllis’s voice, suffused with anger and disappointment, grated on Ariane’s nerves like fin
gernails on a blackboard. “You promised me you’d changed.” Scrape...scrape...scrape. “You promised me you wouldn’t get into trouble like you did at your other schools. Is this how you keep your promise? What would your mother say?”

  Ariane’s relative calm, teeth-clenched though it was, vanished. She barely recognized her own voice as she yelled, “You leave Mom out of this! This has nothing to do with her.”

  Pendragon, who had just started down the stairs to greet her, hissed.

  Aunt Phyllis’s eyes blazed. “I will not. I’m your legal guardian. I wish to God your mother were still here, but she’s not. And I –”

  “Don’t talk about her like she’s dead! She’s not dead!”

  “Maybe not. But she might as well be. She’s not here, and she’s not coming back. And you have to face that fact. I’m sorry for you, I’m sorry you have to grow up so early, but that’s the way it is. I miss her as much as you do –”

  “That’s a lie. She’s my mother. You can’t possibly miss her as much as –”

  “The hell I can’t!” Aunt Phyllis’s voice began to tremble. “Emily was – is – my baby sister. I practically raised her after our mother died. I never thought I’d have to raise her daughter too. But she’s gone, and she left you to me to look after, and now I find out I’m apparently not doing a very good job. But you know what? That just means I’m going to have to try harder.” She drew herself up to her full height, still half a head shorter than Ariane. “You’re grounded, young lady. For a month.”

  “A month? That’s not fair!”

  “Fair or not, that’s the way it’s going to be.” Aunt Phyllis stepped aside. “Go to your room. We can talk about this in a more civilized fashion after you’ve had a chance to cool down.”