Door Into Faerie

by Edward Willett

  Ariane both wished she had been inside the Great Hall to see what had happened when Wally met his mother and confronted Flish, and was very happy she hadn’t been. She’d never met Wally’s mother – or his father, for that matter, although she’d at least seen him from a distance in Victoria when she’d opened up the Empress Hotel’s fire sprinklers over his head so he wouldn’t spot Wally. But all she knew about Jessica Knight was that she made movies and she hadn’t been around for months.

  Oh, and that uncomfortable business about how his father had moved out to be with a younger woman.

  She sighed. Families are hard, she thought again. Harder than magical quests.

  She’d never known her own father. He’d also moved out, whether to be with another woman or just to get away from his impending fatherhood, she didn’t know – but at least he’d had the decency, from her point of view, to do so before she was born. She didn’t know who he was, and her mom had never told her. Maybe she’d ask sometime, but not now – not when they were still trying to piece back together something approaching a good relationship.

  She thought she’d done pretty well, considering her mom had abandoned her to foster homes and pretended she didn’t know who Ariane was, after the Lady of the Lake had approached her and asked her to take the power Ariane had eventually claimed. Mom had thought she was doing it for Ariane’s good, and Ariane understood that, and could even appreciate it…

  …but it didn’t change the fact that Mom hadn’t been around as Ariane turned into a teenager, right when she could have used a mom the most.

  She still felt anger every time she thought of it, anger she tried hard to control, although the power of the shards of Excalibur she now carried with her all the time made anger much, much harder to manage than it used to be. And she’d never been all that great at anger management even before the shards hacked their way into her life.

  She knew Wally, too, felt the power of the shards, differently in some ways, but very much the same in others. And one way in which the power was the same for both of them was the anger, the desire to strike out at enemies, real or imagined, to take revenge for past wrongs. She hoped he didn’t blow up at his mom. He must feel almost as abandoned as I did. And his mom doesn’t even have my mom’s trying-to-protect-you-from-a-millennium-old-magical-feud excuse.

  There was no way she could hear anything through the old castle’s thick stone walls, but that didn’t stop her from straining her ears.

  The rain strengthened, and the wind with it, so that the water slashed almost horizontally across the courtyard, and the tops of the trees visible above the outbuildings on the far side of the courtyard thrashed frenetically. Beyond that, the treeless, heather-covered slope of the hill behind the castle rose sharply up until it disappeared into mist; the clouds had come down the hillside along with the rain, and Ariane was glad now she hadn’t had to try the trick-Merlin-into-thinking-she’d-found-the-hilt ruse she’d come up with earlier. She would have been invisible if she’d gone up there, and wouldn’t be able to see what was happening down here in the castle courtyard, either.

  She exerted a little more of her power to keep the water another few inches away from her body. She couldn’t do anything about the temperature, though, and she was dressed for May in Saskatchewan – which could be cool, but hadn’t been – not for Mother’s Day in Scotland. And, of course, since they didn’t have regular access to the Internet, they hadn’t even been able to check the forecast before they came.

  Minutes ticked by. Just to amuse herself, she not only ordered the water not to touch her, she ordered it to swirl around her and break up into smaller and smaller droplets until she sat inside her own personal cloud, cut off from the outside world. Or maybe the outside world is cut off from me, she thought, and grinned. What’s that old joke about how the English view the world? “Fog in the Channel, Continent cut off?”

  She grinned wider.

  A loud clank startled her – the latch on the castle door! She said a bad word and let the fog drop…

  …only to find herself staring straight at a black Jaguar pulling into the courtyard, Rex Major at the wheel, while at the same instant, Felicia stormed through the now-open door.

  Wally’s sister stopped dead. “You!”

  Wally himself came pounding down the hallway behind her. “Hold her!” Ariane shouted to him, and grabbed Flish’s wrist while Wally wrapped his arms her from behind.

  “Let go of me!” Flish screamed. Ariane ignored her and reached for her magic, intending to hurl all three of them into the clouds and away from Rex Major, who was just getting out of the Jaguar, holding something in his right hand…is that a pistol?

  But for the first time since she’d said “Yes” to the Lady, the magic failed her. It rebounded from Flish, who remained as firmly in place as if she were a Flish-shaped statue Ariane had tried to pick up from the ground with her ordinary physical strength. She could feel the power flowing to her from the shards, both shards, with Wally and Flish so close, but Flish, impervious, twisted free and stumbled backward a couple of steps. A savage grin spread across her face. “I don’t know what you’re trying to do, but it’s not going to work, is it?” she crowed. “I can feel it. You can’t use your magic on me!”

  Wally gaped at Flish, then at Ariane. “What…?”

  “I don’t know!” Ariane cried. She held out her hand. “Quick, we’ve got to get out of here. Rex Major…”

  Wally glanced past her at Major. His eyes jerked wide and his face paled. He reached out to Ariane…

  …and just as their hands met, Major raised the pistol-thing in his right hand. There was no flash of light, no crack of a gunshot, but something stung Ariane in the side of the neck, a sharp, piercing pain, and even as she dissolved into the clouds, she felt her consciousness swirling sickly away.

  •••

  Merlin swore. He knew he’d hit the blasted brat, but she’d managed to get away all the same.

  Or had she? He stared at the place from which she and Wally had disappeared, eyes narrowed. If the tranquilizer dart had had any time at all to take effect, just how much in control of her power had she been as she dissolved into the storm?

  He turned and tossed the air pistol back onto the seat of the Jaguar as Felicia dashed across the courtyard toward him. Well, as much of a dash as she could manage in her ridiculous high heels. It was really more of a teeter-tottering stagger. “Did you see that?” she cried. She’d been doing less of the surly teen act in recent months, as she’d settled into the kind of life Major’s wealth and connections could provide, but even so, he’d rarely seen her face as alight with excitement as it was at that moment. “She tried to drag me away with her and she couldn’t! She couldn’t!” Felicia spun around in the rain, arms outstretched. “I could feel it!” she exulted. “I could feel her magic sliding right off of me like I had a non-stick coating! She’ll never be able to use it against me again!”

  “She may not be able to use it against anyone ever again,” Merlin said.

  Felicia stopped spinning and stared at him. “What?”

  She was ridiculously overdressed, in her little black dress and high heels, and she looked rather pathetic with her red hair plastered to her skull by the rain, but she didn’t seem to notice, still caught up in the excitement of her unexpected resistance to the Lady’s power. Merlin wasn’t surprised by that resistance, of course – Felicia, like Wally, was heir to the power of King Arthur, and Arthur had been given control of the sword by the Lady when she’d first forged it. Felicia had not wanted the sword to help transport her away from the castle, and so the sword had refused to allow its power to be used that way. Wally could have stopped Ariane transporting him, too, anytime he wanted, but of course Wally wanted to travel with Ariane. It was as simple as that.

  The other question, though… “I hit her with a tranquilizer dart just before she disappeared,” he said. “Ever since my men almost managed to capture her in Gravenhurst using chloroform, I�
�ve realized that I can stop her using her power if I can knock her out before she can draw on it.”

  “But you were too late,” Felicia said. “She got away.”

  “She disappeared into the clouds,” Merlin corrected. “The question is – will she ever reappear?”

  Felicia’s eyebrows knit together. “What?”

  “Magic is dangerous,” Merlin said. “Not just to those against whom it is used as a weapon, but for those who wield it. When my power is at its full, I can draw demons to me from the hellish realm where they reside – I still had one I summoned before my imprisonment and had kept on retainer, you might say, that I sent to trouble Ariane’s dreams when this whole business started – but I have rarely done it. For all my skill, there is a not-negligible risk that I could lose control of the demon, and a demon who breaks free from a sorcerer controlling it always, always kills the sorcerer. I can call down lightning, as you saw on Cacibajagua Island, but were my concentration to slip, I could easily call it down on myself, and the fact I was the one who called it would no more protect me from the consequences than the fact a race car driver was in complete control of his car protects him from the consequences when he loses control. So, if Ariane lost control of her magic, well…” Merlin shrugged, “that might be the last we see of her.”

  “But she had the shards with her,” Felicia said. Then her eyes widened and her face, which was pale to begin with – typical of redheads – paled even further, so she looked like the flame-haired ghost of the long-dead mother-of-the-groom who was said to haunt the halls of Castle MacPhaiden. “She had Wally with her.”

  Careful, Merlin thought; he’d again just brushed up against that soft spot she still had for her little brother. Fortunately, once the sword was complete and she took it in hand, he was confident its single-minded bloodthirstiness would wipe out this final annoying hangover of her previous life, and she’d never again give her family a second thought. He imagined the same would happen to Wally, if he ever wielded Excalibur. I wonder if Ariane told him that? he thought. No, probably not. I doubt she knows. There’s so much she doesn’t know, since she’s had no contact with the Lady since this all started – thanks to my forcing my sister completely out of the world that day she popped up in Wascana Lake.

  “He’ll just reappear somewhere, lost, maybe, but safe and sound,” Merlin lied. In fact, he thought it certain that if Ariane lost her way in the clouds and dispersed to the four corners of the world as nothing more than a mist and a memory, Wally would meet exactly the same fate. “Just like the shards. They’ll simply drop from the sky, or to the bottom of some stream or lake.”

  “But if they do, how will you find them?” Felicia said, and he noted with satisfaction she seemed to have accepted his comforting falsehood about her brother’s possible fate.

  I can’t Command her, but she’s only a teenage girl. I’ll buy her another dress or another pretty necklace when we get back to Toronto and she’ll never think about her brother again.

  “If they are freed from the Lady’s influence because Ariane is…no more, I’ll be able to sense them through the two shards I have,” he said out loud, and this time he was telling the truth. “And with you to help me draw on the shards’ magic, I can retrieve them from anywhere. Even the bottom of the ocean, if it comes to that.”

  Which it very well might, if Wally and Ariane were over the ocean, heading for Saskatchewan, when Ariane…slipped away.

  He smiled. The image pleased him.

  “When will you know?” Felicia said. She wasn’t smiling, which surprised him. He knew she hated Ariane. Surely she will be glad when Ariane is dead?

  If he’d had his own shards of Excalibur with him, she would have had no doubts at all – he was certain of it. The sword loved the imagined deaths of enemies. It loved their actual deaths even more, and that attitude would have bled into Felicia. But he didn’t like to carry the shards around with him, not when Ariane and Wally could pop up at any time – as they had here, of all places. His two pieces of Excalibur were locked in a very secure and very, very dry safe in a Toronto bank building.

  “Not until I can have hold of my own shards,” he said. “Which suddenly seems a very important thing to arrange. So say goodbye to your mother. We’re driving straight to Inverness and flying back to Toronto.”

  Felicia turned and looked back through the rain at the castle. “I said what I wanted to say to her,” she said. “And that included goodbye. Let’s get out of here.”

  Excellent, Major thought. Already, the sword begins to cut through the ties of family. “I’ll contact your mother later and let her know what we’re doing,” he said smoothly. “And ask her how the filming is coming along.”

  “Whatever,” Felicia said. She sounded like her old surly self, but for once Major approved. She got into the passenger side of the Jaguar. Major crossed in front of the car and got in on the driver’s side.

  He’d never turned off the engine; he shifted into drive and headed away from Castle MacPhaiden. Whatever secrets of family history it might conceal now held far less interest for him. If Ariane were truly out of the way – and he dared to allow himself to hope that that was the most likely outcome of what had just happened – then centuries-old hints of the hilt’s whereabouts, if they even existed, no longer mattered.

  He would take his own two shards of Excalibur in hand, and without the power of his sister to interfere, he would soon enough have the whole sword.

  And then this world, and his own, would see what real power was.

  He smiled, and accelerated into the rain.

  •••

  Something’s wrong! Wally thought.

  Travelling with Ariane was always terrifying, like being trapped in a dream, one of those dreams where you can’t see anything clearly but you know something horrible is lurking just out of sight, ready to grab you, and you wake up with your heart racing, drenched with sweat.

  But this…this was different.

  Always before, when they entered cloud or stream or lake, he had felt that Ariane was still with him, disembodied though they both were. He could feel her as surely as if he stood next to her, holding his hand. Indeed, that was the way he usually interpreted it, as her hand somehow still being solid in the swirling watery darkness. He could always feel her fingers clutching his, a firm anchor ensuring he didn’t go whirling away into the chaos and vanish forever.

  But not this time…

  This time, he could feel those fingers slipping away. Her grasp felt loose, her “hand” insubstantial and flimsy, and growing more so. And he could feel the chaos closing in on them both, could feel bits of himself dissolving, darkness nibbling at the edges of his consciousness. For the first time in all the journeys they’d made together, he didn’t feel as if Ariane were in control. In truth, he didn’t feel as if she was there at all. It was if she were unconscious, or almost so…

  Unconscious.

  He remembered Rex Major raising his right hand, something in it that looked frighteningly like a pistol. There hadn’t been a gunshot, but there had been a flicker of something, a silver streak through the rain.

  He’s tranquilized her! Wally thought, and real panic roared up in him. She’s fading, and I’m fading with her. There’ll be nothing left of us…nothing left of me…nothing left of the shards…

  No.

  Wait.

  His thoughts came slower and slower, as if every notion had to fight its way through thickening clouds and darkness, and would soon drown in the waters rising all around. The shards of Excalibur would not allow themselves to dissolve into nothingness. They had power, more than enough power to ensure they survived. Ariane had them with her, somewhere in this darkness, this howling storm. And Wally…Wally had his own connection to them. He could sense them, they influenced his emotions, sometimes he could even draw on their power, when he had to fight.

  Could he draw on it now?

  He had to focus. Had to concentrate. He fought through the thi
ckening darkness and fog, searching, searching…

  …and suddenly, there they were.

  They shone in his mind, two bright stars, hard as diamond, impervious to the dissolution threatening to claim Ariane, threatening to claim Wally. He drew hungrily on their power, on their razor-edged reality, and felt himself coming back together, his mind sharpening, his senses strengthening. He could feel Ariane again, now, her “hand” slack in his, but still there. She hadn’t dissolved completely, not yet, and he wasn’t going to let that happen to her.

  It. Would. Not. Happen. Could not, because Wally had another power to draw on, a power greater than the power of the shards, the same power Ariane had drawn on to race faster than she’d ever been able to before, had ever even thought possible before, across the breadth of North America to rescue her mother from Major’s thugs. She’d told him how she’d found out that day that she could do more with the Lady’s gift than she’d ever imagined, and that the power she’d drawn on had been…

  Love. Ariane loved her mom, and love had given her wings.

  And Wally…Wally loved Ariane.

  He’d loved her before she’d realized – or admitted – she loved him. He loved her with all his heart and soul and being, and that love hadn’t faded with his body, or hers. He could feel that love burning inside him, as though his heart had turned to flame, and he drew on it hungrily. With all the extra strength he could draw from the shards of the sword, he poured his love into the fading sense of Ariane’s presence, calling to her, begging her to come back to him, to come back to the light and warmth of his love, to leave the cool seductive world of mist and water…

  …and she responded. She brightened. It was as though a light suddenly shone all around the two shards, lighting up the fog. He couldn’t see her, he’d never been able to see her in this strange realm of the Lady’s power, but her hand suddenly felt strong and solid in his once more, and then the shards blazed in his mind like twin suns as she suddenly reached out to them and drew power from them…