“I won’t tell if you won’t,” Drake teased, smiling.
“I’m not going to school.” I instantly realized how odd it must’ve sounded to Drake considering I was headed in the direction of school.
“Well, I can drop you off wherever you’re going,” Drake offered.
“Thanks, but it’s really okay. You’re going to be late,” I urged.
“Ditching school while following the letter of the law … you’re not an easy person to figure out, Lizzy.”
I had to get out of there before I said another boneheaded thing.
“Yeah, I guess. Later.” Without waiting for his response, I cut through the path next to the Ramblings’ yard, trying to banish any memory of how idiotic I’d sounded.
When I spotted the row of white fir trees along the border of the cemetery’s iron fence, I quickened my pace. I wasn’t sure what to expect, only that I had to figure out exactly who Agatha and her sister were and what they had to do with Bizzy and me.
Crabapple Cemetery was not a popular place on Halloween. There was no one there. I trudged up the grassy hill, trying to take the straightest path I could between the large tombstones clustered near the top of the hill.
For a moment outside the doorway of Agatha’s cottage, I hesitated, gathering the courage to knock.
I heard something. The voice behind the wood door was an eerily familiar one: the harsh tone of Vivienne le Mort. My first instinct was to run, but the thought of missing an information-gathering opportunity kept me on the porch. If Vivienne wanted to hurt me, she could’ve done so on my last visit to the cemetery.
Trembling, I snuck around to the side window and glanced in. Agatha stood in the middle of the room facing the window, dressed in her white linen shirt and trousers. Vivienne le Mort, in her floor-length black robe, had her back to me. The two women were close enough to touch one another. Vivienne towered over her sister.
I bent down, staying low to the ground. This time, I wasn’t taking a chance on being discovered. I could no longer see inside, but I overheard every word.
“The Sanchez girl’s thread was cut. She was supposed to die. And yet, she lives.”
“Perhaps you made a mistake, Vivienne.” Agatha’s voice floated out through the open window. I wiggled my toes, making sure I wasn’t frozen.
“Mistake!” Vivienne said, angry. I imagined the glow of her flaming eyes. “I have not made one single mistake in thousands of years.”
“I do not have the answers you seek,” Agatha said calmly.
“This is Morgan’s doing, I am sure of it!” Vivienne said. “How is she doing it? Has she been here in search of the Last Descendant or his Keeper?”
“Our sister has not set foot here, which is more than I can say for you. In fact, if you do not leave right this instant—”
“Fine. You may think me foolish, Agatha. But I will be watching very carefully. If I so much as sense Morgan meddling with my work, mark my words, I shall cut every single thread in this pitiful town first, and ask questions later,” Vivienne hissed.
“Do that and you may alter the very fate you have been so desperately waiting for,” Agatha said calmly.
“I doubt you will be so smug when Doomsday finally does arrive,” Vivienne responded.
When she finished speaking, a small black whirlwind rushed out the window directly above me and up toward the cloudy sky. I blinked my eyes once and the murkiness was gone. Other than the faint rustle of the white firs, my own shallow breathing was the only sound in the cemetery. When I heard Agatha’s voice again, I held my breath.
My body still shudders when I recall her saying my name out loud.
“You may come in now if it suits you, Elizabeth Mortimer,” she said. “Vivienne has gone.”
She must’ve known I was outside her window the entire time. At that moment, I intended to find out how. I made my way back around the cottage. Turning the knob, I pushed open the door.
The living room was empty. I tiptoed in as if I hadn’t been invited.
Agatha’s living room didn’t have much character. There was the empty rocking chair, a fireplace, and a worn loveseat by the window with a stack of books piled next to it. Most of the books were paperbacks, but at the top of the stack there was a book that was quite different from all the others. It was a thin leather-bound volume that looked very old. Its title and author, The Last Descendant by Merlin Ambrosius, were engraved in silver letters across the front. I couldn’t stop looking at it. Finally, I willed my gaze away from its cover.
A large gold-framed painting hung on the wall opposite the fireplace. I walked toward it to get a closer look. In the middle of a white-capped ocean, there was an island, covered with huge apple trees.
“It’s the Isle of Avalon. Stunning, isn’t it?”
I whipped around. Agatha, still barefoot in her white linen, sat in her rocking chair. I had no idea whether she’d come in quietly or just appeared.
She must have recognized the concern on my face.
“There’s no need to be alarmed. I mean you no harm,” she said. Her gray eyes matched her two neat braids. She motioned to the couch facing the rocking chair with her hand. I sat down on its edge. I didn’t plan on staying long enough to get comfortable.
“I don’t believe we’ve officially met,” Agatha continued, clearing her throat. “I am Agatha the Enchantress, of the Isle of Avalon.”
“Nice to meet you,” I said, with more reflex than feeling. Mom would’ve been pleased to know that, though terrified, I hadn’t abandoned my good manners.
“You had your first death-specter, didn’t you?” Agatha said. “That’s how you saved the girl.”
“You mean Jodi?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Are you a Hand of Fate, too?”
“Absolutely not. I am one of the Seven Sisters of Avalon and a Lady of the Lake.” Agatha’s eyes had a youthful sheen to them. Though she had gray hair, her skin was as smooth and flawless as a freshly painted wall. She seemed as if she’d just awakened from a long, restful nap.
“How do you know about my death-specter?” I asked.
“That is unimportant. What is important, however, is that I am now fairly certain my sister Morgan le Faye is responsible for sending these specters to you.” Agatha rocked slightly in her chair.
“Who?”
Agatha looked startled. “Has your grandmother told you nothing of the Seven Sisters of Avalon?”
“I only found out I was a Hand of Fate a few hours ago.”
Agatha, displeased, shook her head. “You are a direct descendant of Morgan le Faye. Her half-mortal daughter was the first of your kind hundreds upon hundreds of years ago. Whatever gifts you have, you inherited from her.”
“What happened to Morgan? Where is she?” I asked. My mind couldn’t connect any of the dots Agatha was providing.
Agatha’s eyes drifted past my own. I traced her gaze and realized she was staring at the painting on the wall above me. “I imagine Morgan is where she was when I left a very, very long time ago,” Agatha said, almost as if talking to herself. “The Isle of Avalon.”
“How do I get there?”
“You do not. Even someone like you, a mortal who has the blood of Avalon running through her veins, can only set foot there by invitation, as it is the gateway between this world and the next.”
“Well, if this Morgan woman, er, your sister, is the one who’s sending the death-specters, I have to find a way to reach her.”
“I will repeat what I said to your grandmother when she came here asking for my sister: I cannot summon Morgan, I do not communicate with Morgan, and I have never been able to control Morgan.” Agatha folded her arms in her lap.
Morgan le Faye was clearly a dead end. I attempted to shift the conversation elsewhere.
“Vivienne le Mort is another of your sisters, then?”
“Yes,” Agatha said.
“How old are you all?”
“The Seven Sisters are ol
der than you can possibly fathom.” I felt Agatha was being purposefully vague.
“What did Vivienne mean, just now, when she said that she was going to cut every single thread in Crabapple?” Once I asked that question, others followed easily. “And who is this last Pendragon person she seems so obsessed with? Is she fighting with Morgan?”
Agatha’s face grew pale. She brought both hands to her face and held her head in them. When she removed them, there were tears in her clear gray eyes. “The dreadful rift between Morgan and Vivienne began the moment I told my sisters of the vision instructing us to find a suitable Keeper to watch over Arthur. My visions have brought me and those I love nothing but agony. Now that Morgan and Vivienne have clashed over the prophecy regarding the Last Descendant, I will not place myself in the middle again.” She said it like a declaration and then paused, before adding, “If Doomsday arrives, so be it.”
“Okay … well then, what is Doomsday? If you could just explain what Vivienne le Mort is after, maybe—”
“Enough,” Agatha said, putting her hand up. Her voice hardened. “I cannot help you or your grandmother.”
“I’m not asking for help, I just want to know what you know.”
It turned out to be the absolute wrong thing to say. Agatha’s expression changed from sad to angry. “What I know? What I know? If you had any idea of the things I know, it would utterly devastate you!” Agatha stood up. Her jaw tightened as her voice rose. “What I know, you foolish child, is that if Vivienne does discover your abilities, she will destroy you … what I know is that you had better think very carefully about the choices that will soon confront you.”
“What does that mean?” I said, trying not to cower as Agatha inched closer to me.
“I will not get involved,” she said coldly. “You and your grandmother are never to return here.” As she finished, white fog seemed to shoot out of every one of Agatha’s pores.
Soon, it filled the entire room.
The vapor was so thick, I could barely see my hand when I held it out in front of me. I stumbled around the cottage, choking on the thick air. When I crashed into the stack of books by the couch, an idea seized me. The Last Descendant hadn’t left my thoughts completely since I’d seen it a few minutes before. I followed my instincts. After all, Agatha hadn’t provided me with any answers, but that didn’t mean I had to leave the cottage completely empty-handed. I grabbed the old silver-engraved book, now on the floor, and tucked it under my arm before rushing outside.
I looked at my watch. I had only minutes until Mom would arrive to check on me. Sprinting toward home, clutching The Last Descendant, I felt relief with each step distancing me from Agatha’s gloom-filled cottage. I hoped (in vain as it turned out) that I would never encounter Vivienne le Mort again.
I was in bed before Mom arrived. Because of the sprint home, I’d managed to heat up my forehead to the point that Mom was sure I had a fever. She tucked me in and placed the book she’d given to me in the waiting room, David Copperfield, on my nightstand.
“Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time,” she said.
“What?”
“It’s a famous quote—another way of saying the solution to every one of life’s problems can be found within the pages of a good book. Reading might make you feel better and David Copperfield was Dickens’s favorite of all his books. That must count for something.” Mom leaned over and kissed me on the forehead, exactly like she used to do when I was a small child. “Call me if you need anything.”
She tiptoed out and shut the door. I had to remind myself I wasn’t really sick, because when I thought about the morning’s events, I swore the room was spinning—swirling with all the things I’d never heard of before I’d first laid eyes on Vivienne le Mort. Death-specter. Morgan le Faye. The Mark of Arthur. Hand of Fate. Isle of Avalon. Banshees. Doomsday. The Thread of Life.
As soon as I heard Mom’s car pull out of our driveway, I took The Last Descendant out from under my bed. I cracked open the book. I wasn’t expecting Merlin Ambrosius’s book to be a lighthouse in the sea of anything, really, but I did harbor the faint hope that it might shed a small lamp’s worth of light on my growing pond of questions.
The Last Descendant, as it turned out, played a far simpler yet much more important role: it would be the book that changed everything.
Translations
I’ve never thanked you properly, Mrs. Tweedy, for letting us read Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf instead of some Old English version. After all, there have been a lot of major improvements made to the English language in the last thousand years. “Reading is always an act of interpretation,” you said when Opal’s mother complained that we weren’t reading the actual classics, adding that each person’s “imagination creates a different translation.”
There’s no way I could possibly relate every detail of The Last Descendant, but maybe you should consider yourself fortunate. I’m not sure exactly what kind of English Merlin Ambrosius wrote it in, but I only understood it by reading very slowly and rereading some parts. I’ll admit that some of it sounded familiar from the unit we did on myths and legends, but once I realized that one or more of the characters had some relationship to what’s been happening here in Crabapple, it got a lot more interesting.
For better or worse, this is my translation—which is quite a bit shorter than the original. But it’s like Bizzy always says: sometimes you gotta skip the salad and go straight for the meat and potatoes.
Around the beginning of time, seven sorceress sisters lived together on an island called Avalon. The Isle of Avalon, sometimes called Glastonbury or Elysium, was the gateway between the mortal world and the world of spirits. It sat in the middle of the sea, surrounded by a bank of clouds, thick with beautiful trees that bore the most delicious apples. Agatha the Enchantress, Vivienne le Mort, Nona, Argante, Morgan le Faye, Cathuba, and Fial all lived happily on the island, laughing, playing, and singing together. Avalon was a joyful, magical place and the sisters were the best of friends.
They also ate a lot of apples.
The Seven Sisters of Avalon, also known as Ladies of the Lake, enjoyed each other’s company, but they also had a more serious pursuit. According to the story, they were the gatekeepers between the mortal and spirit worlds, guiding each soul’s transition from one world to the next. The one inflexible rule was that the sisters could only leave the island or interact with mortals if they all agreed that destiny required it.
The wisest of the sisters was Agatha the Enchantress, known as the White Lady. She was Avalon’s prophetess, who saw visions of the future in the waters of the Sooth Spring, the powerful oracle near the center of Avalon. Agatha advised the sisters, relying on her visions to settle the rare disputes between them.
The second sister, Nona, watched over the creation of life. As a gifted cook and farmer, she naturally controlled the fertility of the world and all creatures in it. Argante, the strongest of the sisters and a fierce warrior, was entrusted with watching over the vitality and vigor of the human body. Fial, responsible for the intellect and passion of mortals, was learned in all areas of knowledge and possessed impressive artistic talents. Cathuba was the most empathetic of the sisters, and her talents lay in her ability to communicate with every type of living creature—she concerned herself with mortals’ interaction with the world around them.
The two most notorious sisters were Vivienne le Mort and Morgan le Faye. These two were entrusted with each mortal’s thread of life. Every mortal’s life—the amount of time and unique fate granted to each person from birth to death—was measured by his or her thread. Morgan le Faye was tasked with measuring each life and Vivienne with cutting it.
The two sisters worked together. Morgan would have a death-specter and Vivienne’s cut would send a banshee to usher the mortal’s soul through Avalon to its proper resting place. Quite simply, Morgan knew the why and the when of a death and Vivienne was responsible for the how.
The sisters were as
beautiful as they were notorious. Morgan had waves of long black hair and piercing sea-foam eyes and wore a long red-hooded cloak and sandals made of gold. She had a reputation for being cold and calculating, preferring logic above all else.
Vivienne le Mort was the exact opposite of Morgan le Faye in both temperament and appearance. The youngest of the sisters, Vivienne had flaxen hair and magenta eyes that clouded over when she grew angry. She wore a dark robe that set off her lovely golden hair and was known for her hair-trigger temper. She could go from calm to cruel in a matter of moments.
The Last Descendant explains that for many years, the sisters lived peacefully, never leaving Avalon. One day, Agatha the Enchantress had a vision that the mortal world’s delicate balance between life and death, hope and despair, was in great danger. Agatha’s vision required the sisters ensure that the mortal Arthur Pendragon become king. Among other things, they were to find a suitable Keeper for Arthur—a trustworthy and perceptive mortal who would alert the sisters to all potential dangers Arthur might encounter. Arthur, according to Avalon’s oracle, was to guide civilization out of the Dark Ages. The righteousness of the selfless Arthur Pendragon, paired with Avalon’s power over fate, would restore balance to the mortal world.
Vivienne and Morgan watched carefully over Arthur from his birth forward. Fial recruited one of the most powerful sorcerers in the land, Merlin the Magnificent, to be Arthur’s tutor and advisor. Argante forged a sword for him called the Excaliber and trained him to use it to defeat men stronger than himself. Cathuba taught him of the world’s natural order and how to tame every kind of beast.
Vivienne and Morgan oversaw his thread of life, ensuring he was protected as he grew and matured. After careful consideration, the sisters decided that Guinevere, the daughter of the dutiful King Leodengrance, should be appointed the mortal Keeper for Arthur. Guinevere was unusually intelligent, trustworthy, and altruistic. Her intelligence was matched only by her beauty, which caused people to confide in her and tell her all sorts of useful information.
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