by Donna Hosie
“Take Lucan, as well as Gareth, Bedivere,” says my aunt. “I don’t trust Melehan. I never have.”
“And take me too,” says Rustin suddenly.
“No, Rustin,” replies my aunt. “You’re in enough trouble.”
“Then a bit more won’t hurt, and it’s not as if I can’t cope with a bit of trouble now, is it,” says Rustin sarcastically. “Jalaya is terrified and Freya is ill. They trust me, I can help – and I made them a promise.”
“Rustin,” I call. “What are you doing?”
“Asking you to believe in me, Mila,” he replies.
But he said he wouldn’t leave me. We made a pact: to stay together.
“Bedivere,” calls my aunt. “What do you think?”
“I think this is against my better judgment, but then most of my actions for the House of Roth are against my better judgment,” replies my uncle wearily. “Rustin will follow me regardless, of that I have no doubt.”
Is that admiration in his voice? What are my aunt and uncle doing, encouraging Rustin like this?
“Damn straight I will,” replies Rustin.
“Bedivere cannot protect you, Rustin,” says my aunt.
“I’m not asking him to.”
“I will return soon, my love,” says Uncle Bed.
“RUSTIN,” I cry, but my voice gets lost on the breeze that flutters through the tent once more.
“He’ll be back,” says my aunt softly. “Bedivere will look after him, despite what we said. And I think he’s right. When we arrived, Rustin was the one in charge. He was carrying you out of the fire and holding up the girl called Jalaya. Freya was near death, but she had to be prised away from Rustin. He’s something else in a crisis you know. He reminds me a lot of your father at that age.”
I don’t know what to say. I don’t want Rustin in charge. I want him back here with me, where he can be…
Safe? Who am I kidding? I’m the most dangerous one here.
“Auntie Titch,” I whisper. “The flame made me do things I shouldn’t have done. You said the blue flame changed my mother. In what way?”
“Your mother was always…a force to be reckoned with, Mila. And I won’t lie. We hated each other when we were your age. In Logres, she placed her trust in a knight called Mordred. She became even more vengeful and she did some awful things…”
My aunt trails off. I wish I could see. The black shadow that is her outline moves. If I had to guess, I would say she was wiping her face, her eyes. I think she whispers a name. Byron.
“I can do magic, Auntie Titch. But it’s purple fire that comes out of me. It makes me angry and vengeful. Freya said I could be trained to control it, but I don’t think I can.”
“From what Freya told your uncle and I, Mila, you already have been trained.”
A cold, damp compress in placed on my forehead. The relief is glorious.
“But I haven’t,” I say. “I was getting more powerful, and I knew what to say and when to say it. A new language took over me, and it was instinctive. But every time I used it, I became more and more savage. I wanted to kill people, Auntie Titch.”
“And do you want to kill me now?” She gently presses the compress down my face, wiping away the tears I can’t reach.
“Of course not.”
“And do you want to do magic now?”
“No. Never, ever again. I won’t ever do it again. I thought I could save Lilly with it – that was why I left, because if dad knew I could shoot flames like the Gorians, I was scared he would take me back home before I could fix Lilly, and Merlin said I was the only one who could.”
“My darling girl,” says my aunt, stroking my hair, or what’s left of it. “You should never have borne all of this by yourself.”
“But it was my mess to fix. And now I can’t control the purple fire because I’ll never, ever use it again, and Lilly is going to die…”
Sobbing hurts, but it’s a pain I deserve. Spasms of agony ricochet through my chest into my scorched throat, and come out through my bleeding mouth. Hot tears stream from my broken eyes, clouding what little I could see already.
“But don’t you realise, Mila,” cries my aunt, holding my hand to her lips. “The fact that you’ve already decided to never use the flame again means you have mastered it. You can’t change what you are. It’s in your genetics. You’re a child of Camelot, and your bloodline is something that’s never been seen here before. It wasn’t meant to happen, but it did. Your mother had to make the same choice, and she chose to leave Logres for ever. That was her way of mastering the change that was taking over her. But you’re so much stronger, Mila. You’re so brave and selfless. You don’t have to leave, because you already know you’ll never use it again.”
“But all of those people I hurt in the forest…” Wrong verb. I know what I did to those bandits that attacked us. My skin will forever be scared by what I did.
“I can’t make you feel any better, Mila,” says my aunt, still stroking my hair. “I have seen more death in this world than I ever thought possible. And I remember every name, and if there was no name, I remember the face.”
“But you still to choose to stay here?”
“Home is where the heart is,” she says. “Your uncle endures our time when I come back to visit, but he couldn’t live in our world. I can live here, and so it was me that made the sacrifice.”
“I want to go home.” Even sniffing hurts. Is there a single cell of me not damaged, inside or out?
“And you will.”
“But Lilly…”
“Your father is doing everything he can.”
“But what if it’s not enough?”
I expect my aunt to say that everything will be okay, that my father – the king – will find a way. But my aunt isn’t that kind of person. She never has been. She’s always been the pragmatic one, the honest one.
“You may have to prepare yourself for the fact that not even parents can save their children, Mila. Your uncle and I know that better than most.”
“What do you mean?”
My aunt inhales. I can hear her lungs rattling.
“You had a cousin, Mila,” says my aunt quietly. She takes the compress away from my face, wets it, and places it over my eyes. The herb-enriched water trickles down my skin, mixing with the salty tears that haven’t stopped falling since Rustin left me.
“No one told me.”
“Bedivere and I asked your mother and father not to say anything to you. You were only little, about seven years old, when Patrick was born.”
“Patrick?”
“We should never have used that name,” whispers my aunt. It’s barely audible. I don’t think she means for me to hear it, but I do because of my heightened senses.
“What happened to him?”
“He caught smallpox when he was two years old,” she replies. “There had been an incursion of the disease into a neighbouring village. We tried to contain it, and to this day we still don’t know how he became infected…but he did.”
“Why didn’t you bring him back through Glastonbury Tor?” I ask.
“We tried, your uncle and I,” she whispers. “God knows we tried. Merlin had forbidden it. He knew the modern world was hopelessly unguarded against such a disease, and Patrick could have infected many…” I hear her voice fade to nothing. Guilt is suffocating it.
“I’m so sorry, Auntie Titch.”
“Patrick died in my arms. The Tor was in our sights. We knew how to evade those that were sent after us by Merlin, especially when their hearts were not in the chase. The sorcerer brought down the elements and stone upon us and still your uncle rode on. We just ran out of time. Queen Guinevere banished Merlin from attending her court for several years following it, and we never told your father what Merlin did.”
“Merlin’s a bastard.”
“Merlin saw what parents blinded by grief and despair could not,” replies my aunt. “He saw the bigger picture. Thousands put at risk if we had carrie
d Patrick through time, and we would have done, Mila. He was such a beautiful little boy. He had his father’s green eyes and thick brown hair. Huge dimples every time he smiled, which was often.”
“Why did I never meet him?”
“Because your mother and I could not bear to be in the same room, the same world, as each other back then. It was Patrick’s death that actually thawed relations a little.”
“How?”
“Your father was devastated when my Patrick died, for other reasons I will not explain to you now, Mila. It was he that made it possible for me and Bedivere to have more involvement in your life. And you and your sister are loved by your uncle and I as if you were our own.”
“Do you think Lilly will die?”
“The curse that’s within her came from that ring, Mila. Without the ring, there is no hope.”
My eyes are open beneath the compress. Perhaps it’s just my imagination, but I am starting to see more than just shadows and blurred lines. I can see a lake. A hand. A sword. And a ring.
And I will not let my parents go through the same hell as my aunt and uncle.
We’re going home. As a family.
Because family is everything, and I will do everything to keep us together.
Chapter Twenty-Six
The Heir and the Spare
My aunt leaves me, at my request, to check on my sister. Although I’m desperate to know how Lilly is, I won’t be here for the update. Everyone in the camp is distracted. I have one chance, and I must take it now.
The pain I’m in is beyond description. Rustin said I exploded. My parents have no word for it because they won’t talk about what happened in the forest.
But my aunt understands, and so does Freya. I think that was her aim all along. I lost control in order to gain it. I will never succumb to the purple flame again. What I do now is not as a child of the Gorians, or as a child of Camelot, but as a sister.
I’ve made my choice. My sacrifice.
I was upset Rustin went off with my uncle to help save Freya and Jalaya, but now I’m glad. Perhaps serendipity exists in medieval times too. Others would call it luck. I’m going to need a lot more of that before I’ve finished. Rustin would only try and stop me - more than likely he would come too - but this is my choice, and I have made peace with who I am and what I must do.
I’m going out into the lake and I will meet the Lady who dwells there head on. She can have me, if she gives the ring back. Merlin called me and Lilly the heir and the spare. I think he was right, but he got it the wrong way around. The firstborn is the spare. The one that messes up and creates the grief. Second kids are the ones who have the chance to get it right.
I’m the spare. I’m the one who made the mistake. Lilly’s only ten. She didn’t know what that ring was capable of doing. It was just a silly sparkly trinket to go with the rest of her silly sparkly stuff. She deserves the second chance.
But I knew. And I will never be able to live with the guilt if Lilly were to die, or never be cured, and I hadn’t tried everything.
Absolutely everything.
I move my legs first. The bed I’m on is low-lying and so my bare feet reach the ground quite quickly. I still have to scream into a square cotton pillow to stifle my screams. Everything burns. I feel like I’m still on fire. My skin is stretched so tightly, every movement seems to break a layer. When those layers have been exhausted, the agony dives even deeper, biting at muscle, tearing at bone.
My sight is still shot to pieces. I can see blurred objects, but nothing is defined. I drag myself to the edge of the tent and feel my way along the heavy cloth to the opening. The breeze caresses my cheek. The air feels cold, too cold to be daytime. That’s even better. I may be lumbering around like a half-blind Frankenstein’s monster, but in the dark, the knights are less likely to see me.
Adrenaline is starting to pump through my bloodstream. I can feel it, taste it. It dulls the pain, just a little, as I linger by the flap of the tent. With my sense of hearing still on uber strength, I listen for voices and movements. The knights who were on duty outside the tent have been summoned to the meeting my dad and the queen are co-hosting. I can hear my father’s voice now. He’s in full-on teacher mode, but it’s distant.
No. My father is not in teacher mode, he’s in king mode.
Inhaling deeply, I step outside the tent and clench up. If anyone is going to see me, it’ll be now. No one does, but I don’t have long. Auntie Titch will be coming back soon from Lilly’s tent.
I have to get to the lake.
I wouldn’t have a clue where to go if I could see with complete clarity, but in the darkness, I’m completely lost. I can see balls of red fuzzy light, dotted around the landscape of shapeless tents. I know they’re flaming torches. I can smell the burning moss and the pungent liquid they were doused in, prior to being lit.
I can’t smell my way to the lake though, and getting down on all fours and feeling my way to the water will just take too much time. Taste is obviously out, and so I have one sense left. Thankfully, that isn’t just working clearly, it’s cranked up to superhero strength.
Closing my eyes, I try and block out all of the background noise: the various tones of the male voices in the distance; the neighing of horses, my father; the snuffling of nocturnal animals foraging for food; even Queen Guinevere telling someone to “sit down and hold your tongue.”
Water. I can hear the gentle lapping of water over stone. I know it’s stone and not sand because of the way the water drips as its left behind when the ripples draw back.
I’m dressed in bandages because I was awake the last time they were changed. Rustin’s voice didn’t crack so much afterwards, so when he said I was healing well, I actually believed him. My fingers and feet are free, which helps as I feel my way though the night. The ground is damp and squelchy through my toes. It actually tickles a little which makes me smile, but that hurts and so I don’t do it again.
The sound of the water is getting closer. I was also wrong about smelling my way to the lake. There’s something washing over me in waves. It smells like lilies. My mother loves lilies. My sister was named after them.
It’s a sign I’m in the right place.
My bare feet slip as the ground changes. Damp mud and grass becomes shingle stone. I drop several inches, and can’t help but cry out as spasms of pain shoot up my legs. My stomach cramps and I bend over, catching my breath.
Then I hear girly laughter and wind chimes.
She’s already here. Waiting for me.
I keep walking towards the water. The pebble shoreline is harder to navigate and I walk, with my arms outstretched for balance. Forget Frankenstein’s monster, I must look like a Mummy, complete with flailing bandages.
“Have you come to claim your reward, Lady Mila?” whispers a woman’s voice. I’m expecting it, but I still get an ice-cold jolt of panic in the pit of my stomach.
“Where are you?” I reply. “Show yourself.”
Nimue laughs. “And why would I go to the effort of that?” she whispers; her voice is like delicate bells. “It would draw from my returning strength, and you are still incapable of seeing my magnificence, child of Camelot.”
The cold water of the lake is now lapping at my toes. Will Nimue drag me down into the depths if I go any further? I have to make contact with her if I’m to get that ring. I have to get the Lady of the Lake to show herself to me. An outline – even a blurred one – is better than nothing. I need to distract Nimue, and I can do that by getting her to talk.
“What did you mean by claiming my reward?” I ask. “Reward for what?”
“A reward for returning me to my rightful place, Lady Mila,” replies Nimue. “For seventeen winters I was trapped in the Ring of Morgana, and I felt the harshness of every one. Darkness and cold steel were my constant companions. And then I saw the light and his face again. It gave me hope and strength. Enough to summon the blue light that drew you and your kin to me like a moth is drawn to the fla
me. Your mother may have tried to smother the Gorian life from you, Lady Mila, but you are born of Arthur and Logres. The moment you touched the ring, I was awakened. When you did it for a second time, you poured into me your Gorian lifeblood, which gave me enough strength to hold on to your sister, knowing that the people who tried to vanquish me would have no choice but to return my spirit to Logres. Here, where my beloved Avalon was waiting to embrace me.”
So Merlin was right. I did awaken the power of the Lady of the Lake. If Nimue thinks her revelation is going to scare or intimidate me, she couldn’t be more wrong. All she’s done is make my resolve even stronger.
I inch into the lake. The cold water is such a relief to my fire-ravaged skin. I’m finding it hard to resist diving in. My ankles and then my calves are massaged by the cool water. I can feel the bandages starting to slip away. These aren’t 21st century crepe bandages. They are thicker. Made from heavy cotton.
But as I take another, longer, stride into the water, I realise the bandages aren’t slipping away with the weight of the water, they’re dissolving.
And the cold water isn’t numbing the pain in my legs, it’s healing them.
“What are you doing, child?” asks Nimue. Her voice is now harsher.
I crouch down and let my fingertips glide through the lake. Then I cup both hands together, scoop up some of the water and splash it over my face before dabbing carefully around my eyes.
The smell of lilies is so pungent I can feel the delicate hairs in my nose bristle. There’s no smarting of pain, no burning. I drop to my knees and splash the water from the lake over my face and shoulders. Then I drink from it. A small sip at first, but as the ice cold water trickles down my throat, I am lost to the need to truly quench my paining thirst.
“Get out of my sacred lake,” cries Nimue. “It is not for you to claim.”
Slowly, I stand up. As I turn around, with the water still lapping around my calves, I see Nimue. My sight has been restored, healed. Just like my dream foreshadowed. Nimue doesn’t appear as a ghost, but as a fully corporeal figure. Her long wavy blonde hair is gently floating around her shoulders. Her body is dressed in a long, powder blue dress. She’s barefoot and wearing no adornments.