It was Flish who ruined it, of course, Flish who rose to her feet and stalked toward both of them on her high heels like a long-legged shore bird looking for something small and slimy to stab with its beak. “You’ve got some nerve, showing up here!” she said, her voice colder than the water still dripping from Wally’s hair.
“Felicia!” Mom cried. “Aren’t you glad to see your brother?”
“After the way he’s treated you and Dad?” Flish shot back. “And me? Running away from Rex Major, after everything Rex did for him?”
So he’s “Rex” now, Wally noted.
“Stealing money and flying to New Zealand?” Flish raged on. “Disappearing? You thought he was dead, and he never even called to say he was safe until long afterward. He still hasn’t called you. He only called Dad. Some brother. Some son.”
“Felicia!” Mom snapped, and this time there was real anger in her voice. She looked around at the crew. “All of you, get out of here,” she ordered. “Take an early lunch. My kids and I clearly need to talk.”
The three crewmembers, who had been watching wide-eyed, exchanged guilty glances and then hurried out of the Great Hall, although not in the direction of the main entrance. Instead, they exited through the swinging door to the right of the dais. Wally glimpsed a modern kitchen, all stainless steel and white tile, as they passed through.
Mom turned back to Felicia. “Felicia, stop this. It’s been a difficult time for all of us. For the whole family. We’ve all had trouble dealing with it. At least Wally did finally let your father know he was still alive.” But Wally heard the uncertainty in Mom’s voice as she spoke to her daughter, and saw it in her eyes as she turned around again. “But…how did you get here, Wally?”
“I came with a friend,” Wally said. “Mom, I’m all right, really. And I’m sorry I didn’t call, but I didn’t want Rex Major to know where I was.” He gave Flish a hard stare. “He’s not our friend, Mom. You should get Felicia away from him. He’s not a nice man.”
Let her interpret that however she wants, he thought savagely. In fact, the sleazier the better.
“He’s lying, Mom,” Flish snapped back. “Rex Major has never been anything other than a perfect gentlemen to me. And he’s giving me such wonderful opportunities. Wally’s just jealous he threw that all away. And I’m not surprised he doesn’t want Rex to know where he is, considering how much money he stole from him.”
“Is that true, Wally?” Mom said.
Wally wanted to deny it, but he couldn’t without lying, and he didn’t want to lie to his mom – well, not any more than he could help, anyway. “I only took what I needed to get away from him, Mom. And I had to get away from him, to save myself.”
“Save yourself from what?” Flish said scornfully. She looked at Mom. “You want to know how he got here? He got here with the money he stole from Rex. Thousands of dollars, Mom.” She rounded on Wally again. “Bet you didn’t expect to see me here, did you?”
Anger, hot as a forest fire, roared up in Wally, and suddenly he didn’t care if Mom thought they were crazy, didn’t care what she thought. He knew the sword was feeding the flames of his fury, the two shards Ariane carried reaching out to him through the stone of the castle walls, but he didn’t need the sword to make him angry with Felicia, who had once been his best friend and hero and had chosen – her choice, not his – to transform herself into his enemy.
“And I’ll bet you didn’t expect to see me here either, did you?” he snarled. “Since you happily went off with Rex Major and left me for dead on Cacibajagua!”
“I did not!” Flish said furiously. “I made Rex Major send men for you, to make sure you were all right.”
“Liar,” Wally said. “No one came. If Ariane hadn’t found me, I probably would have drowned face down in the rain on that path.”
“What are you two talking about?” Mom cried. “Cacibajagua? Wally, you almost died? And who is Ariane?”
Flish took no notice. “That bitchy girlfriend of yours broke my leg. She might have killed me. And you didn’t care.”
“Of course I cared! What do you think drove me to Rex Major in the first place?”
That brought Flish up short. She blinked. “What?”
“I joined Major – for a while – because I didn’t like what the shards were doing to Ariane,” Wally snarled, still furious. “What they made her do to you. But then I found out what Major was really like. He held Ariane’s Aunt Phyllis hostage. He threatened to kill Ariane’s mom. He would have let me die on that hillside. You’re blind, Felicia. Your hatred of Ariane is keeping you from seeing what Major is really like.” He glared at her. “Or maybe it’s the glitter from that necklace that’s blinding you. You’re so in love with yourself and Rex Major’s money you don’t care what he’s done or plans to do. You don’t care about anyone but yourself!”
He knew at once he’d gone too far. Flish’s eyes narrowed again and the moment of doubt, of openness, vanished as though it had never been.
She opened her mouth to retort, but Mom cut her off. “Stop it, you two! Sit down!” She pointed to the dais. Wally hesitated, still glaring at Flish. “Sit down!” Mom said again, even more sharply, and both of them responded to the parental version of Merlin’s Voice of Command by walking stiffly to the dais and sitting just as stiffly on either side of Mom.
“Someone tell me what’s going on,” Mom demanded. “Shards? Threats? Hostages?”
Wally shook his head. “I can’t,” he said stubbornly.
Flish didn’t speak at all, just sat with her lips pressed into a tight white line.
Mom looked from one to the other. “Never mind, then. Tell me later. What matters is family. You two are family. We can work this out.” She put a hand on Wally’s knee, and her voice softened. “I know it’s been hard, Wally.” She glanced at her daughter, and put her other hand on the girl’s knee. “Felicia.” She looked down, away from either of them. “Since your father…” Her voice died away.
“Took up with a blonde bimbo?” Flish offered harshly. “Dumped you for a younger woman? Started fu –”
Mom’s head jerked up. “That’s enough, Felicia!” She took a deep breath. “Yes. Since all of that. I didn’t…I know work has kept me away a lot these last few years, more than it should have, maybe, but I never thought he’d…” She shook her head. “I didn’t know how to cope. I couldn’t come home. I couldn’t bear…I couldn’t bear to see him, and I couldn’t bear to see either one of you, because I felt like I’d betrayed you – we’d betrayed you, failed you. I didn’t know how to talk to you about what had happened. I barely even knew how to think about it. I kept playing with possibilities in my mind, like it was a movie scene I had to direct, but I could never get the script or my own performance to come out right. And I couldn’t begin to imagine how you might react. So I just…hid. Ran away.”
She blinked away tears, and smiled, a little wetly, at Flish. “I was so happy when Rex Major said he’d fund this project, not just because I needed the funding, but because I hoped that maybe it meant I would see you more. And here you are.”
She turned that smile, teary-eyed and tentative but genuine, on Wally, and the sight of her tears melted away a lot of his anger, dousing the flame of his rage in a flood of love and regret. “But to see you here, too…to have both of my children together on Mother’s Day…I never thought…” Her hands squeezed their knees. “Don’t fight, children. Please. Can’t we just…enjoy being together, as a family? Like we used to? We could go down to the village, sightsee, get something to eat…”
Wally looked at Flish. For a moment they weren’t enemies, weren’t rivals on opposite sides of a quest to find the shards of Excalibur. They were just brother and sister, and Wally discovered, almost to his surprise, that he really wanted that moment to last, as much as he had wanted the moment when his mom hugged him to last.
But he still needed to know if what his mom was working on might point them – or Rex Major – to the hilt of Exc
alibur. And changing the subject right now seemed like the best way to keep the fragile peace among them anyway. “Mom…what is this project you’re working on anyway? Is it a movie?”
“Not exactly,” Mom said. “It’s…well, it’s a personal odyssey. A journey of discovery. Our family’s history is…unusual. Your father’s family, the Knights, and my family, the MacPhaidens, have deep roots in the British Isles. Deep roots, and tangled ones, too.”
Wally blinked. “What does that mean?”
Mom smiled at him, clearly pleased he was taking an interest. “It’s the strangest thing. Down through the centuries, the two families keep intermarrying. Generation after generation, a Knight would marry a MacPhaiden. Sometimes the woman was a Knight, sometimes she was a MacPhaiden, like me. Sometimes the pattern skipped a couple of generations…but before you knew it, the Knights and MacPhaidens found each other again.
“I don’t know if you know this, but your great-great-grandmother on your father’s side was actually a MacPhaiden, related to me. So your Great-Grandfather Knight was a mixture of the Knights and the MacPhaidens, just like you two are.”
“That’s…interesting,” Wally said, but his mind was racing. This magic business is even weirder than I thought. Somehow the Lady’s magic, instilled in Excalibur, had wound its way through the lives of his ancestors, generation after generation, binding the Knights and MacPhaidens together, ensuring that the thread of magic originating in King Arthur was passed along, that it would appear the moment it was needed, when at last Excalibur was to be reforged.
There was a legend, he remembered, that King Arthur had not died, but had simply been spirited away, to reappear and claim the throne of Britain again when the island nation was in its greatest hour of need. Maybe there was something to that, although Wally and Felicia Knight popping up in Regina, Saskatchewan, perhaps didn’t quite fit the bill.
Mom could never guess the Arthurian connection, because she couldn’t possibly trace the family back that far. There simply were no records of the time of the historical King Arthur, which was why there was serious doubt that he was historical.
For a moment he was tempted to tell her…but just as she had been unable to picture a scenario in which she successfully talked to her children about the breakup of their parents’ marriage, he was incapable of coming up with a scenario in which he claimed to be the heir to King Arthur on a quest to reforge Excalibur, the quest given to him by the Lady of the Lake – whose own heir also happened to be his girlfriend – without his mother figuring he was crazy or on drugs, or both.
The part about me having a girlfriend might be the most unbelievable of all.
“I’ve always wanted to visit the British Isles and trace our family history as far back as I can,” Mom said. “Castle MacPhaiden here seemed like a good place to start, even if the way it came into the family was rather…unsavoury.”
“This whole MacPhaiden/Knight thing sounds pretty unbelievable,” Wally said. “All that intermarrying… wouldn’t someone have noticed before now?”
“It’s not as easy to tease out of the records as you might think,” Mom said. “The MacPhaidens and Knights seem to have gone out of their way to keep a low profile for…well, for centuries. Some records even look like they were altered by someone trying to hide the connection. I might not have twigged to it at all if not for the papers left by your Great-Grandfather Knight – you remember, he immigrated to Cannington Manor, told your Grandma Knight when she wrote that book of hers a story about fleeing to Canada with a great treasure.” She grinned at Wally. “You’ve always liked fantasy stories, so you’ll like this. My theory is your Great-Grandpa believed the two families stayed so close down through the centuries because they were nothing less than the sacred keepers of the Holy Grail, and that he honestly believed that the Grail was the ‘treasure’ he’d brought with him. And apparently promptly lost. Certainly your Grandma never saw it.”
“Great-Grandpa Knight was probably just crazy,” Felicia put in. She sat with her arms folded across her expensive necklace, glowering at Wally. “It runs in the family.”
But Wally hardly noticed the jibe. His mind was racing even faster than his heart had been when he’d first come into the Great Hall.
How could he have forgotten Great-Grandpa Knight and his mysterious “treasure?” He’d even told Ariane and Aunt Phyllis about it, way back in the fall when all this had started, one night when he’d gone to their house for dinner. He remembered describing Great-Grandpa’s time as one of the Cannington Manor “bachelors,” the single men with no inheritance or place in their families, sent out west to make their way in the world. Supposedly they had come to Cannington Manor to learn to farm, but most of them seemed to have come to party.
He’d even mentioned Great-Grandpa’s claim of having travelled to Canada with a treasure, and his conviction he dared not return to Great Britain because it wouldn’t be safe.
It had just been a story, a way to make conversation. Like Flish, he’d always figured maybe Great-Grandpa Knight was a little crazy, a little paranoid.
But what if he hadn’t been?
What if he really had had a treasure? And what if it really was an ancient artifact – but not the one his mother was thinking of? Not the Holy Grail, but the final piece of the sword Excalibur, the hilt, given into the safekeeping of Arthur’s descendants for more than a millennium, the magic within it constantly weaving around its guardians, always keeping the Knights and MacPhaidens close.
The thought boggled his mind, and maybe it was just wishful thinking.
But what if it wasn’t?
He didn’t want Felicia following his train of thought – though it might already be too late. What if Rex Major had been driving off as they approached precisely because he had already heard Wally’s mom say something that had sent him racing back to Canada to look for the hilt?
He forced a laugh and studiously avoided looking at Flish. “I like fantasy stories, Mom, but get real. There’s no such thing as the Holy Grail.”
His mom shrugged. “Of course not. But it’ll be a great angle to hang the film on. The Holy Grail is an evergreen. If I can just tie the family to the Knights Templar I’ll really have something.”
“So what are you shooting here?” Wally said, looking around the Great Hall.
“Just the introduction,” Mom said. “A description of the bloody wedding feast at which this castle changed hands in 1478.”
“Who killed who?”
“Whom,” Mom corrected. “It was the MacPhaidens, I’m afraid. The wedding, which was supposed to bury the hatchet between them and the clan that had built the castle, was really just a ruse to get them inside the keep. Two years later the daughter they used as bait married someone else in this very hall.” She shuddered. “Cold-blooded lot, our ancestors.”
“Let me guess,” Wally said. “The daughter went on to marry an ancestor of the Knights.”
His mom nodded. “Weird, huh?”
“Weird,” Flish muttered. “Like this whole conversation.” She got to her feet. “I can’t take this anymore. It’s not just the history of this family that’s weird. The whole family is weird.” She jabbed a red-painted fingernail at Wally. “Rex Major will be back soon. If you know what’s good for you, you won’t be here when he comes back. Remember what happened last time you crossed him. Get out of his way, get away from that bitchfriend of yours, and you won’t get hurt again. And that’s the last thing I have to say to you.” She withdrew the accusing finger. “Goodbye, Mom. Maybe I’ll see you later…but don’t count on it.”
She stalked down the dais steps and headed toward the archway leading to the main entrance, high heels clicking on the stone floor. Mom leaped up. “Flish!” she cried. “Come back!”
“I’ll get her,” Wally said hastily. He had to be with Flish when she met Ariane on the steps. “I’ll…” be back in a minute, he intended to say, but again, he didn’t want to lie to his mother, and he didn’t know if that
was true. Most likely, it wasn’t. He let the sentence drop into silence and ran after Flish.
“Flish, wait!” he called as she reached the archway. Somewhat to his surprise, she actually did, turning to face him as he ran up to her.
“I told you, I’m done talking to you,” she snapped.
“But we haven’t really talked, have we?” Wally said, trying to sound reasonable. “We couldn’t, with Mom there. Flish, I –”
“I think we’ve talked enough,” Flish snarled, and spun and headed down the hallway toward the main entrance.
Wally hurried after her. When she emerged from the castle door, and Ariane grabbed her, he wanted to be close enough to go with them. Otherwise he’d have to wait for Ariane to come back for him, and Rex Major might return in the interim. And Flish had gotten one thing right – he did not want to be there when Rex Major came back. Not out of fear for his own safety – well, not just out of that fear – but because the last thing he wanted was for Rex Major to start thinking about Jessica Knight as a hostage. Or to start thinking about the family history, and Great-Grandpa Knight’s mysterious treasure.
Flish disappeared into the main entrance hall. Wally quickened his steps, and rounded the final corner just in time to see her open the main door. Thick fog seemed to have descended on the castle – he couldn’t see a thing outside except a grey mist…
Which suddenly vanished, revealing Ariane.
Flish stopped dead, but Wally broke into a run.
Chapter Five
Fading into Darkness
“Keeping watch on the castle steps” would probably have sounded pretty exciting in a book, but in real life, as Ariane quickly discovered, it offered roughly as many thrills as watching paint dry.
Or not dry, considering how hard it was raining.
At least I’ll have plenty of water to work with if Rex Major comes back.
Not that she thought that was likely. He had probably dropped Flish off to watch whatever her mom was doing in the castle while he went off to the village, or even farther – Ariane had only the vaguest idea of distances in Scotland, but she doubted it was very far to anywhere compared to what she was used to in Saskatchewan – to attend to business.
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