He lay back down again, resolving to stay awake until dawn, then rouse Ariane.
He woke to full daylight in the hut and the sound of the door opening.
“What the hell?” boomed a voice.
Chapter Twelve
Castaways
Unwilling to waste any time, Rex Major had asked for his private jet to be ready to depart at 7 a.m. That meant getting up before 5 a.m., of course, but that was a small hardship for him. Arthur had not been one to let his army lie abed: when the King had said his men would move or attack at first light, he’d meant it. And though Merlin had not accompanied Arthur on all his military campaigns, he had been on enough of them to have learned the old soldier’s trick of both falling asleep and coming awake and alert at a moment’s notice.
Felicia Knight, on the other hand...
He started by knocking on the girl’s door. When that didn’t work, he tried to open it.
It was locked.
Annoyed, he went back to his own room and retrieved his keys. He unlocked the door and said into the darkness beyond, “Felicia.”
Still nothing.
His heart suddenly sped up. Had she run away like her brother before her? He perhaps did not need an heir of Arthur to make the sword work for him and accomplish his goal of uniting the world under his Command and then invading Faerie – his original plans had not included either of the Knight children since he had not known they existed – but nor did he want them out in the world working against him. Bad enough the brat Wally was at large. If his sister joined forces with him, and with Ariane Forsythe...
He flicked on the light.
A long lump lay in the middle of the king-sized bed. A groan issued from it, resolved into a single grunted word. “What?”
“I told you we have to fly out early,” Major said. “You have to get up. The car will be picking us up in twenty minutes.”
The lump rolled over. “Go away.”
Major walked over to the bed, took hold of the covers, and jerked them down. Felicia, wearing only an over-large T-shirt as a nightgown, shrieked, sat up, and snatched them back up again, holding them to her neck. “How dare you! I’m not dressed!”
“And therein lies the problem,” Major said. “Get dressed. Now. I presume you packed last night.”
“More or less.”
“It had better be more than less,” Major said. “Because you now have eighteen minutes.”
He walked back into the hallway and back to his office to check his email while he waited. His men in Nanaimo had acknowledged receiving his message; they’d be driving down to Victoria that morning to see what was what at the Empress. If they found Ariane’s mother, they’d take her to a secure location and let Major know at once.
He nodded in satisfaction. There were also one or two small business matters that required a response; he wrote terse notes dealing with each situation then pushed the chair back from his desk, turned off the monitor, and walked into the living room.
Felicia, looking surly in a blue T-shirt and jeans and bright yellow running shoes, not wearing makeup, and with hair as red as Wally’s tied back in a ponytail, stood by the door with a backpack over her shoulder. “Took you long enough,” she snarked.
She probably thought that would anger him, but in fact it made him smile. That kind of spirit was exactly what he needed to see in the future leader – figurehead leader, but still – of his armies. He looked at her critically. In Arthur’s day, it was rare for women to lead armies, but this was a new age. Her face was pretty – at least he thought it was, though he’d never had any interest in the women of Earth, not being human himself, and so was probably not the best judge. Her body he judged likewise attractive by the standards of this age. His marketing people, under his Command, could undoubtedly turn her into the kind of idealized warrior-woman that would have men battling each other for the privilege of fighting under her leadership even before she took hold of the hilt of Excalibur and the sword began working its will on those who served its bearer.
He’d seen images of a girl called “Katniss” who featured in popular entertainments about some kind of food competition, although he was unclear on what hunger had to do with warrior women. All the same, the image was compelling. Something along those lines, perhaps.
“The car will be waiting,” was all he said out loud. “Let’s go.”
They rode the elevator down in silence. The silence continued on the trip to the airport through the light traffic of the early-morning darkness. Felicia had been on his private jet before, on the trip from Regina. The minute they were on board, she said, “I’m going back to bed,” and started toward the bedroom at the back.
“Wait,” Major said.
Felicia halted, heaved an exaggerated sigh, and turned around. “What?”
“Sit down here for a few minutes. I need to tell you what we’re doing.”
Felicia plopped down on one of the bench seats in the lounge at the front of the plane. “I know what we’re doing. We’re going to the Caribbean to pick up the fourth shard of Arthur’s sword Excalibur. Then we’ll find the hilt, and you’ll be able to take the other two shards away from that bitch Ariane Forsythe and my stupid little brother, and then you’ll make me queen or something. Can I go to bed now?”
“No,” Major said. “Buckle up, we’re about to take off.”
He fastened his own seatbelt as Felicia fastened hers, managing to make even that common-sense safety precaution seem like a horrible imposition. Then he leaned forward.
“I don’t know exactly where the shard is on Cacibajagua Island,” he said. “I think it’s in Jujo Cave, which is a very large sea-cave that has an inland entrance into which empties a freshwater stream. Since the Lady of the Lake would have hid it there, and she can do nothing with salt water, the shard should be near that stream. But over the centuries it could also have moved farther down into the cave.”
“If you’re about to ask me if I can scuba dive, I can’t,” Felicia said.
Major, who had been about to ask that, tamped down a surge of irritation. “That’s all right,” he said. “As I said, this is a very large sea cave. It’s popular for that very reason: even relatively inexperienced divers can dive it safely. If necessary, we will take scuba-diving lessons so that we can make a guided dive into the cave. I am confident I will sense the shard if we get close enough.”
“Sounds like fun,” Felicia said, and for once she didn’t sound sarcastic.
“It might be,” Major said. “However, it also might not be necessary.”
They were rolling down the runway. He stopped talking for a moment and forced himself not to clench his hands as the jet angled upward into the night sky.
He hated flying.
Once he heard the whine and thump of the landing gear retracting, and the plane still showed no signs of tipping over and plunging to the ground in fiery ruin, he took a deep breath and continued.
“Cacibajagua Island Diving Adventures also offers submarine tours of the cave,” he said. “It is wide enough and deep enough to permit a small submersible to make that journey at high tide. That is how we will begin, shortly after we arrive: I’ve arranged for a submarine tour of Jujo Cave. That should reveal to me where the shard is hidden. After that, we’ll see if we need to dive to retrieve it or if some other method might present itself.”
“A sub ride,” Felicia said. “Cool. Do they have a pool, too?”
“There’s a pool. And a beach.”
“Sweet. Cute guys?”
Major sighed. “We will be the only guests. I had my people arrange it. There were a handful of other people staying at the resort, but we have offered them all-expense-paid excursions to the Turks and Caicos for the duration, plus a considerable amount of spending money. I suppose it’s possible that some of the employees are ‘cute guys’...I wouldn’t know.”
“Too bad,” Felicia said. “Now can I go back to sleep?”
“Please.”
She
unbuckled her seatbelt and headed aft. He stared after her.
He didn’t know what to make of the girl. She had spirit, as he’d noted earlier, but she also seemed...willfully obtuse. Unnecessarily confrontational. He knew she was smart – as smart as her brother, Wally, according to the test results he’d arranged to have forwarded to him from Oscana Collegiate in Regina: not just exam marks but personality evaluations and her IQ score – but she hid it all behind the façade of a jaded teenager.
Teenagers had not been recognized as anything special in Arthur’s day. Girls Felicia’s age – or Ariane’s, for that matter – were often already married and mothers. Boys Wally’s age would have been apprentices or squires or labourers – not quite the equal of adults because of their smaller size and relative weakness and not given any special consideration. But during this, his second, lifetime on Earth Major had seen youth in general, and teenagers in particular, fetishized to the point of ridiculousness. He didn’t understand it. Young people had health and looks going for them, but older people had experience and knowledge.
And power, Major thought. Don’t forget power.
He got up and moved down the hallway to his on-board office, where he sat at his desk and called up some overseas sales reports he hadn’t had a chance to review the day before. He might as well put the three hours to Cacibajagua Island to good use. He’d be busy once he got there.
He smiled as he thought of his men closing in on Ariane’s mother, of the submarine tour to come, of the fourth shard of Excalibur he was certain waited for him in Jujo Cave, and of the fact that for once he saw no chance of Ariane and Wally interfering. As Felicia said, he would soon have two of Excalibur’s shards, and with her to help him draw power from them, he would soon after have the hilt, and then the entire sword.
He fingered the ruby stud in his earlobe. Today is going to be a good day, he thought again, as he had thought the day before.
He set to work.
<•>
“What the hell?”
Ariane snapped awake from a troubled dream and stared up, disoriented, at a man silhouetted in a doorway against a grey sky. For an instant she didn’t know where she was. The silhouette seemed to have come from her dream, a nasty dream in which the demon Rex Major had once sent to trouble her sleep had returned to chase her once more through the endless woods of those haunted nightmares.
But the figure in the doorway was no demon, she realized as her eyes adjusted. Rather, it was a tall, thin black man wearing white shorts and a white golf shirt with the words “Cacibajagua Island Diving Adventures” neatly stitched over the breast pocket. He stared down at the two of them, without rancor but with enormous confusion; Ariane lying on the floor in her swimsuit and Wally, who, in his trunks beside her, was just then sitting up and blinking.
“Are you guests?” Then he shook his head. “You can’t be guests. Rex Major has rented the whole island and sent the other guests packing, and he didn’t say anything about you two.” He had a strong Jamaican accent.
Ariane’s heart rate hadn’t settled from the shock of her sudden awakening. The man’s mention of Rex Major sent it racing again. “Rex who?” she said, then thought maybe that was a bit over the top – everyone knew who Rex Major was. But she rushed on. “We don’t know Rex Major. We’re...” she hesitated. They hadn’t come up with a cover story. They hadn’t intended to be found.
“Shipwrecked,” Wally chipped in.
“Shipwrecked?” The man looked bewildered. “What ship?”
“Not really a ship,” Wally said. “A boat. A sailing boat. My...sister and I sailed out from...um...Cockburn Town yesterday and, well...we got lost.”
Cockburn Town? Ariane stared at Wally. Is that even a real place?
“Cockburn?” the man said.
Apparently so.
“Just the two of you?” the man continued.
“Our parents rented the boat,” Wally said. “But they were being boring and shopping and we thought we’d just take it out for a spin around the harbour...we’ve sailed lots back home in Saskatchewan on the lake...and, well, things got out of hand.”
“Fog,” Ariane said brightly, figuring she ought to say something.
“It was grey yesterday,” the man said. “Still is.” He shook his head. “You were lucky not to drown,” he said severely. “Sailing the ocean is not like sailing a lake.”
“Don’t we know it,” Wally said fervently.
“But how did you end up here?”
“The boat...capsized,” Wally said. “In the dark. We swam ashore. We found the hut, and took shelter. We figured someone would find us in the morning or we could make our way to the resort.”
“What happened to your shoulder?”
“During the accident,” Wally said. “Hit it on something.”
The man shook his head. “Not just lucky,” he said. “Protected by God. You should have drowned a dozen times over.” He stepped back from the hut door. “Well, get up and come out here.”
They stepped outside into the warm grey morning. Ariane looked around. The sea lay a good three hundred metres away, across a nightmarish tumble of rocks. A light mist kept her from seeing very far out.
So their story was they had somehow managed to swim ashore, then walk across rough rocks without bloodying their bare feet, and by pure happenstance find the only hut on the beach, one which hadn’t even had a light on it. Ariane wouldn’t have believed it, but on the other hand, she supposed, from the man’s point of view, here they were, and how else could they have gotten there?
Just like when I pop into a swimming pool out of nowhere, she thought. People don’t believe in magic, so they’ll discount the evidence of their own eyes.
The cascade poured down the hillside to their right, down from the hilltop lake where they had surfaced when they’d arrived on the island, splashing over black rocks overhung with greenery. Birds chattered and swirled overhead against the leaden overcast.
“It is a half-hour walk back to the resort,” the man said, “and I do not recommend it in bare feet.”
Since the last place they wanted to go was the resort, Ariane said nothing about the fact they each had a complete change of clothes, including shoes, in their backpacks.
“Fortunately,” the man said, “the submarine is headed this way. It carries only two passengers this morning, so there is still room for you. It can surface in the cataract chamber when the tide is mostly in, as it is now, and tie up to the dock. It will get you back to the resort in comfort and then we’ll see about getting in touch with your parents and letting them know you’re all right.”
“Two passengers?” Ariane’s heart jumped. “Didn’t you just say Rex Major has rented the whole island?”
“Yes, that is right,” the man said.
“So one of the passengers is...Rex Major? The...computer guy?”
“Yes,” the man said. “You will meet a celebrity. Fortunate yet again.”
Ariane swallowed. “And the other passenger?”
The man shrugged. “I do not know her name. A young woman of his acquaintance.” His teeth flashed white in a sudden grin. “I am sure Rex Major is always accompanied by a young woman if he chooses to be.”
Flish! Ariane exchanged a horrified look with Wally.
“How long until they get here?” said Wally.
“The sub is approaching the underwater entrance of the cave as we speak,” the man said. “It must move very slowly, of course, for safety reasons. But it will reach the cascade chamber within forty-five minutes or so. And I must go to prepare the dock.” He gave them a stern look. “Stay here,” he said. “Do not wander off.”
“Wait!” Wally said, as he turned away. “What’s your name?”
“Jacob Lewis,” the man said. Then he headed down the stairs to the cavern they had explored the day before, unhooking a walkie-talkie from his belt as he went and speaking into it. “You will not believe it,” they heard him say. “I have found two children...yes, in
the hut...shipwrecked, they say...”
His voice faded.
“At least Rex Major won’t be hearing the other end of that conversation if he’s already on the way,” Ariane said.
“It won’t matter if they make us get into a freaking submarine with him – and Flish!” Wally said. “We have to act fast.”
“Act how?” Ariane said. The impossibility of the situation struck her again, heavy as a blow to the stomach. “You say the shard is under the rocks, but there’s no way we can move them. All Major has to do is Command Jacob and the rest of the resort staff to blow them up, and they’ll do it for him. And lock us up somewhere without access to fresh water while they’re at it.”
“But there is something we can do,” Wally said urgently. “I thought of it last night.”
Ariane stared at him. “What?”
“There’s plenty of fresh water in the cavern from the cataract.”
“It’s already splashing on the rocks. No matter how much force I give it, it won’t shift those boulders.”
“No, water won’t,” Wally agreed. “But ice could.”
“Ice?” Ariane blinked. “I suppose I could make a lever of ice, but it would just snap. And it’s not like I can make a glacier....”
“Ariane, you’re not thinking straight,” Wally said. “Ice cracks rock all the time. Water expands when it freezes, and almost nothing can stop it. Get fresh water into those rocks, then freeze all the water at once, and the expansion will spread them apart. Do it again, with more water. And again. And before you know it, they’re going to crack and tumble...and reveal whatever they’re hiding.”
“But the shard is under seawater.”
“We can dive to get it, as long as we can uncover it,” Wally said. “The Lady placed it in the pool, but the rocks must have come down in some earthquake or other. Move them, and we’ll see the shard right where she left it.”
Ariane felt a flicker of hope. It died almost at once. “But we can’t do it now,” she said. “We can only do it at low tide. Right now the rocks will be almost completely under seawater. We need to get in there when most of the rocks are uncovered and only the fresh water is pouring down on them.” She looked down the stairs. “And Jacob will be back any minute.”
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