Lake in the Clouds

by Edward Willett

  That still doesn’t mean I can trust him.

  But she couldn’t leave him stranded in a New Zealand swimming pool dressing room with only his underwear, either. So she carried on down the stairs, around the corner, and down the hall to the entrance to the men’s dressing room. She hesitated, looking around, then pushed the door open a crack and called, “Wally?”

  There was a second door inside, on the other side of a kind of airlock to ensure privacy. She took another look up and down the hall. No one was in sight. She ducked into the space between the doors and opened the second one a little bit. “Wally?” she said again.

  The door swung open. There he was, towel wrapped around his middle. She glimpsed someone else’s pink flesh behind him and quickly turned away. “Come in here,” she said.

  He stepped into the “airlock” and let the door close behind him. “I don’t have any clothes,” he said. He sounded panicked. “Or money. Or a passport. Everything was in my backpack.”

  “I don’t have any money either,” Ariane said.

  “What do we do?”

  Ariane chewed on her lip, thinking. “Look, you’re in the men’s dressing room,” she said at last. “Maybe you can find something?”

  “Steal someone else’s clothes?” Wally said.

  “Well, at least anyone whose clothes you take lives here,” Ariane pointed out. “They can call someone, get some clothes sent over. You don’t have any options. Unless you like running around in your underwear.”

  Wally sighed. “All right. I’ll see what I can do. Wait for me outside.”

  “I’m certainly not waiting for you in here!” Ariane said. Wally turned and went back inside, and Ariane stepped out through the other swinging door into the hallway…

  …which was no longer empty. A tall black woman just emerging from the women’s dressing room gave her a startled look as she popped out of the men’s. “Brother,” she babbled, feeling she had to say something. “Forgot his trunks. Just…” Her voice trailed off as the woman, shaking her head, moved on down the hall.

  Ariane leaned against the wall and sighed. Then she dug in her pocket and pulled out the third shard of Excalibur. It sang to her, sorrowfully, it seemed, sad not to have been reunited with the second shard that had been so close.

  But she could feel its power, and that was new. When she had had the first shard in her possession and Merlin had had the second, she had been unable to draw on the power of the shard she had. But she knew she could draw on this one’s power.

  It must be because of the first shard, she thought. Even though I left it behind, this one knows I have it. The fact Merlin has one of them can’t keep me from using this one.

  And there had been something else, too.

  She almost thought she’d imagined it, but when Wally had handed her the shard, during that brief moment when they were both touching it, it had seemed to surge in power, as though its song had risen from pianissimo to fortissimo in a heartbeat. It was like when he had briefly held both shards in France, and the discordant song they made had suddenly melded into one glorious harmony.

  What’s Wally’s connection to the sword? she wondered. “Astonishing,” the Lady had said when she’d seen Wally under Wascana Lake. “Of course you would be drawn to me…I wonder if Merlin…” Ariane had no idea what she’d meant by that. She doubted Wally did, either. But Major… Major probably knew exactly what Wally’s connection with the sword was. He needed Wally for something, or he would never have bothered with the whole “come live with me in Toronto” charade.

  But even so…

  She had almost died crossing the Atlantic. The only way she could see to get home – especially since Major still had her newly minted passport – was to try to use the clouds. But the Pacific was far wider than the Atlantic. And not only that…

  Not only that, she would have to take Wally with her.

  I should just leave him here now, she thought. I could take off right now.

  But he’d lost his clothes, his passport, his wallet, everything in his backpack, when she’d rushed them away from the lake. He’d be stranded indefinitely if she left him alone.

  Serve him right, she thought sourly, but she still couldn’t bring herself to do it.

  And so she stood in the hallway outside the men’s dressing room, and waited for Wally to emerge.

  Despite everything he had done to her, it felt…right.

  But she still had one little payback surprise in store for him.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The Race to Regina

  Well, this has been the most embarrassing day of my life, Wally thought as he tried locker after locker in the men’s change room. And considering how many embarrassing days he had had in his not-quite-fifteen years, that was saying something.

  It got worse. Good news! He found an open locker. Bad news! The man it belonged to was clearly twice Wally’s size. But at least what he had left in the locker was a pair of grey sweatpants – with some kind of animal paw print in bright green on the rear end, Wally saw with resignation – that had a drawstring he could pull as tight as he liked. He secured the waist, then rolled up the legs. The result made him look like a circus clown with no talent for costuming, but at least it covered him more-or-less respectably. The sweatshirt he also found, which was adorned with a purple-blue skull that featured a Union Jack around the right eyehole, four red stars in a diamond formation on the left side, and the enigmatic word HANDSKULL in capital letters underneath that, could actually have served as his only item of clothing, since it hung down within spitting distance of his knees. There were no shoes and he was sure there was no way he could have worn them if there had been. Barefoot it is, he thought, and with a furtive look around the almost-empty dressing room, half-expecting some naked giant of a rugby player to come roaring at him for stealing his clothes, darted for the door.

  Ariane was waiting for him in the hall. She looked grim, but a half-smile still twitched across her face when she saw him. “Suits you,” she said. The not-quite-a-smile faded. “Let’s get out of here.”

  They walked out through the glassed-in lobby of the pool, Wally’s odd get-up earning a doubletake from the teenage girl at the counter. I’ve always wanted girls to give me a second look, he thought sadly. That’s not quite how I imagined it.

  There was a big grassy park on the other side of the parking lot. They walked out into it. Wally twisted his head up to look as a jet came roaring in, seemingly at tree-top level at the end of the park, and he realized with a start that they were right next door to the Queenstown airport.

  Which does me no good at all. He had no money, no passport, no clothes. It was all back at Lake Putahi.

  “What do we do now?” Wally said. Ariane was walking silently ahead of him, trudging across the park as though she intended to walk all the way to Canada, which was roughly the direction she was headed.

  “I’m not sure there is any ‘we,’” Ariane said. She stopped at last, and turned back to Wally, fists clenching at her sides. That’s not a good sign, he thought uneasily. He smiled tentatively at her. She didn’t smile back. Instead, her fist came lashing out and caught him on the cheek, so hard he found himself on the ground on his hands and knees without quite knowing how he had ended up there, ears ringing and the taste of blood in his mouth. He raised a shaking hand to his face. “Ow,” he said. “Now I know how Draco Malfoy felt when Hermione punched him.” He tried to say it lightly, but in his heart he was terrified. Had he really broken things so badly with Ariane?

  With the Lady of the Lake, he reminded himself. She put your sister in the hospital. And she’s got one of those shards in her pocket right now.

  He scrambled to his feet, took a couple of steps away just in case, and then turned to face Ariane, putting one hand to his bruised face. “Ow,” he said again.

  Ariane was grimacing and shaking her hand. “I think I hurt myself more than I hurt you,” she said. “Ow.”

  “So are we even?”r />
  “No, we’re not even.” Ariane sounded close to tears. “Wally, you can’t imagine…when I realized you’d stolen the shard, taken it to Rex Major…why did you do it?”

  “I told you, over Skype,” Wally said. To his surprise, his voice was trembling. “I thought it was the best thing for you. I didn’t like…what the shards were doing to you. What you did to Flish. Then you hurt me, in the cave.”

  “So you decided to hurt me?” Ariane cried. “Wally, I thought we were friends.”

  “We were…we are.” I hope, Wally thought desperately. Oh, I hope… “Ariane, I see now how wrong I was. I just…I let Major into my head. He can’t Command me, but I believed him anyway when he said he really wanted what was best for you and the world. I believed him…right up until he started lying to me. When I found out he’d kidnapped Aunt Phyllis. After that…” He felt his voice catch in his throat, and cleared it noisily. “After that, I felt like an idiot. I felt like a traitor. I felt as badly as you could possibly hope I would feel, Ariane. And I set out to make it right. I rescued Aunt Phyllis. I got here in time to tell you she was free so you could escape with the shard. I almost froze to death…”

  “Next time pack a wetsuit,” Ariane said. She was blinking hard. “Wally…I want to believe you. I want you back as a friend. I want your help in this quest. The Lady gave it to both of us. It didn’t go well in France when I tried to do it myself. I need you. But I have to know I can trust you.”

  “You can,” Wally said. “Ariane, I promise. I was an idiot. I won’t be taken in again.”

  Ariane looked down at the ground. When she looked up again, her eyes were shining. “All right, Wally,” she said. “I believe you. And I forgive you.”

  Wally wanted to hug her. Actually, he wanted to kiss her. But that seemed a little too much too soon, so instead he just folded his arms over the ugly sweatshirt and mumbled, “So, what now?” He glanced over his shoulder. “I can’t fly out without my passport, and it’s at the lake. So is my backpack. And my real clothes.” He looked down at his ridiculous getup, and sighed. “They wouldn’t let me on an airplane looking like this anyway.”

  Ariane chewed on your lip. “An airplane will be too slow,” she said. “There may be another way.”

  Wally blinked. “What?”

  Ariane dug in her pocket for the third shard. She held it out. “Touch it,” she said.

  Wally reached out a finger. Again, as he had on the island, he felt…something. He couldn’t quite say what. A feeling. A sensation. A hot flash, maybe. He jerked his finger back.

  Ariane had obviously felt more. She smiled a real smile for the first time since she’d seen him on the island. “I don’t think you’re going to need an airplane, Wally,” she said. “But let’s go get your backpack just the same…if it’s still there.”

  He blinked. “What…?”

  She held out the shard again, this time with her fist around one end. “Take hold of this,” she said. “And don’t let go. But don’t grip too tightly. It’s still pretty sharp.”

  Gingerly, he took hold of the end she’d offered him. “I don’t under…” The word would have ended in squeak…if he had still had vocal chords.

  One instant they were standing in the grass of the park. The next they were rushing upward, and…expanding. He felt huge, enormously huge, as big as…

  …as big as a cloud!

  This is how Ariane got to France, he thought, though how he could be thinking anything without his head he had no idea. She said she couldn’t do this with me!

  Just for an instant he wondered if she were so furious, and so Lady-like, that she intended to kill him, letting him drift away, dematerialized, or worse, materializing him at ten thousand feet and letting him fall. But he shoved that doubt away. If he wanted Ariane to trust him, he had to trust her.

  The strange thing was, as they rushed through the clouds toward the mountains that towered over Queens-town, he could still feel his hand clutching the shard of Excalibur, hard and sharp and present, even though it was as invisible and immaterial as his own body. He even knew he could let go of it if he chose. He thought that was probably a really, really bad idea, though. Instead he clutched it tighter, and actually felt pain as the sharp edge cut into his flesh.

  That makes no sense, he thought. Where are our bodies really?

  Then suddenly their bodies “really” were with their minds again, as they materialized in Lake Putahi and waded ashore. Wally released the shard and looked at the thin line of red on the ball of his thumb. Ariane wished them dry while Wally took a nervous look around, half-expecting Rex Major and his men to still be there. But there was no one.

  There was no sign of his backpack, either. He groaned. “Major must have taken it.”

  Ariane knelt down and put her hand in the water. She closed her eyes for a second. “No,” she said. “No…it’s still here. Just give me a second.” She waded back into the lake.

  Wally looked at the shallow half-inch cut where he had gripped the shard too tightly while still in the cloud. It stung. He sucked at it as he watched Ariane disappear in a swirl of disturbed water. Twenty seconds went by…thirty…and then she reappeared in a fountain of spray. She waded out again, his backpack clutched in her hand. Water sprayed out from her and the backpack. When she handed it to Wally, it was bone dry. He pulled out his own clothes. “Turn your back,” he told Ariane.

  “I’ve already seen you in your underwear, you know,” Ariane said sweetly. “So have half the kids in Queenstown, back at the pool.”

  Wally blushed. “Turn your back anyway,” he said.

  Ariane smirked and turned her back. Wally got dressed as quickly as he could. “All right,” he said after he’d zipped up his jeans. When Ariane turned around he was pulling on his socks and shoes. “That’s better,” he said with relief, and stood. He put his hand on his hips. “Now tell me…how did you do that? You said you couldn’t travel through the clouds with me!”

  Ariane shrugged. “I couldn’t…until you were touching the shard, too. I don’t know why, but that gives it way more power than when I’m holding it all by myself.” She looked up at the clouds. “I think…I think I can get both of us all the way back to Regina through the clouds. Without running out of steam like I did crossing the Atlantic.”

  “Like you…” Wally felt a chill. “What?”

  Ariane gave him a steady look. “I couldn’t use the first shard’s power while we had only uncovered two of them and Rex Major had the other,” she said. “I reached for it, and it wasn’t there. If I hadn’t found a cruise ship to materialize on, I would have died.”

  Wally felt sick. “Ariane…I didn’t know…I never would have…” He closed his eyes and hung his head. “I was such an idiot.”

  “Like you said, you didn’t know,” Ariane said.

  “I could have killed you.”

  Ariane shook her head. “Rex Major could have killed me. And I think he would have been fine with that.” She took a deep breath. “You’ve got money now?”

  Wally nodded.

  “Then let’s go back to town and get something to eat. I need to be fuelled up if we’re going to do this.”

  “Major is probably already at the airport,” Wally pointed out.

  “It’s not a race,” Ariane said. “He doesn’t know where the first shard is.” She frowned. “But I’d still like to get back before him. Because if he starts looking hard enough, he’ll find Aunt Phyllis again. I’ve got to reach her before he does. Better make it fast food.” She reached out her hand to Wally. “We won’t take the clouds this time.”

  “Not the swimming pool again,” he groaned.

  Ariane laughed. “No,” she said. “We’ll find something else.”

  Wally took her hand. She led him into the water, and let it suck them down and away.

  •••

  Ariane sat across from Wally eating a foot-long submarine sandwich. Normally she only ordered a six-inch one, but she needed all the cal
ories she could get before they attempted the flight to Regina.

  Wally’s cheek was purpling where she’d slugged him and her knuckles still hurt. That whole punching people in the face thing looks way easier on TV than it is in real life, she thought. She shouldn’t have done it – but it had felt good.

  And that little bit of violence hadn’t been coming from the sword, either.

  She’d told Wally she’d trust him. She wanted to trust him. But there was still a tiny seed of doubt as she looked at him: residual damage from the hurt he had caused her when he’d betrayed her to Rex Major. She hoped it would heal with time. He looked the same as always…ears too big, face freckled, red hair and a rather alarming grin. He still wasn’t handsome. But she didn’t think he was homely anymore either. He was just…Wally.

  It felt good to have him back at her side. It really did.

  But that little thread of doubt still lingered.

  He finished his sandwich, tilted his bag of chips to shake out the last few bits, slurped down the last of his Coke, burped, said “Excuse me,” a little shamefacedly, and then wiped his face with his napkin. “All set,” he said.

  She realized she’d been staring at him instead of eating. She hastily downed the rest of her own meal, then stood up. “No time like the present,” she said.

  The sandwich shop was only a block from Lake Wakatipu. They walked back to the same place where they’d materialized when they’d arrived from Lake Putahi. Wally had pointed out they could have just used the big lake the first time instead of popping up in a swimming pool. Ariane had sweetly pointed out that showing up in his underwear downtown would have been way more embarrassing than showing up in the pool had been, and he’d had to admit she had a point. A low stone wall separated the lakeshore from the street, but an opening not far off led down onto the beach. There were other people down there, but they were some distance away. Ariane took out the shard and held it out to Wally. “Here we go.”

  He looked a little pale – she couldn’t blame him for that – but he reached out and grasped the other end of the shard firmly, even though his hand was bandaged from the previous trip. I told him not to grip too tightly, she thought, but she couldn’t really blame him for that, either.