CHAPTER TWO

The Staircase in the Water

Wally Knight jerked awake in the dark and lay still for a moment, heart pounding. The dream...the battle...the enemy had...

But the details were already fading. Which was too bad, because what he could remember of it – clashing steel and blood everywhere – had been awesome.

He looked at his bedside clock, the docked iPhone rising atop it like the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey, and groaned. It was already 6:20, and he wanted to be out of the house in twenty minutes, just to make sure he didn’t bump into his sister Felicia. He’d originally planned to walk to one of the coffee shops on the other side of the lake and hang out there until school, but suddenly he had a better idea.

I’ll ride my bike around the lake a couple of times, he thought. It’ll be cool to see the lake as the sun comes up. He grinned in the darkness. I wonder why I never thought of doing it before?

He was up and dressed and kinda-sorta washed and combed and out of the house fifteen minutes later, easing his bike out of the garage between his dad’s BMW and his mom’s Prius, then mounting it and darting across Albert Street into Wascana Park.

He took the first lap of the lake at breakneck speed, revelling in the relative scarcity of joggers on the path and in the cold invigorating kiss of the mist against his cheeks, furiously pedalling away the anger and humiliation left over from the previous night – courtesy, of course, of his sister Felicia.

She’d failed to come home for supper – again; since she’d been hanging out with Shania McHenry and the other members of what Wally privately thought of as “the coven,” she’d been coming home later and later – and Ms. Carson, the housekeeper who looked after them while their parents were away, she of the pinched expression and (Wally suspected) never-pinched behind, had blamed him.

 “You should have told her to come home right after school,” Ms. Carson had scolded him. “Honestly, Walter, when are you going to learn a little responsibility?”

Wally had long ago given up trying to argue Ms. Carson out of her passionate belief in his sister’s infallibility. Maybe Flish’s little clique really is a coven, he thought. Maybe they’ve put a spell on Ms. Carson.

On second thought, that couldn’t be true, or by now Flish would’ve turned him into a toad.

With Felicia absent, Ms. Carson wasn’t about to waste her time on the pasta dinner she’d originally planned, so Wally had to make do with cold salmon sandwiches and the wilted remnants of the previous night’s salad. He retreated to his room as soon as he could, to spend the evening playing the real-time strategy game he’d bought over the weekend. He usually played first-person shooters and flight simulators, but for some reason the game’s medieval setting had appealed to him, and he was beginning to find building castles and mustering armies addictive.

After a couple of hours, he paused to massage his wrist, wrapped in a tensor bandage. He’d sprained it during fencing practice that afternoon. Natasha Mueller, the fencing instructor, had sent him off to the office to get a (highly prized, in Walter’s book) get-out-of-gym-free note…which was how he’d happened to be in the hallway just in time to see the new girl, Ariane Forsythe, in a knock-down, drag-out fight with Shania McHenry, while Felicia stood nearby looking pleased with herself, and how he’d happened to be in the office when Ariane was suspended for fighting. He’d felt sorry for Ariane. Just at school a week, and already Flish’s coven had targeted her for humiliation. He wondered if she’d last out the year.

He resumed playing, but hit the pause key when he heard his bedroom door open. Ms. Carson, for all her faults, always knocked. Which meant –

Whack! The slap on the back of his head almost pushed his nose into his keyboard. He spun his chair to face Felicia. “Hello to you, too. And, for the record – ow!”

Rubbing his stinging scalp, he looked up at his sister. Way up. Felicia was thirty centimetres taller than him even when he was standing. He kept waiting for his fabled adolescent growth spurt in the hope it would even things up, but so far he’d been disappointed. Until it happened, he remained at her mercy when it came to physical confrontation. Which, with Felicia, it always did.

 “Where are my books?” she said. “I didn’t see them downstairs.”

“I put them in your room.”

“You went into my room without permission?”

“Logically, ‘take my books home’ implied permission to put them in your room –”

“You never go in my room unless I let you in. Which I won’t. Got it?”

Wally sighed. “Got it.”

“Good.” Felicia turned to go.

“So what are you going to do to that new girl?” Wally heard himself say the words, but he obviously hadn’t consulted his brain first.

Felicia stopped in the doorway and turned around. “What do you know about it?”

“I saw what happened.”

“She attacked Shania. Crazy bitch.”

Wally manfully did not ask if those final two words were meant to apply to Shania or the unfortunate new focus of the coven’s attentions. “She was in the office when I was getting my excuse-Wally-from-gym note. She looked nice enough. Except for the bruises.”

“She’s a ratty foster brat, and she’s only gotten a little of what she’s got coming to her. That’s all you need to know.” Felicia strode across the room and leaned into his face. “Stay away from Ariane Forsythe if you know what’s good for you. I don’t want my brother hanging out with trash like that.”

Wally had memories of a big sister who used to take him to movies and malls and midways, but then he also had memories of parents who took him to the playground, came to his school plays, and put him in his PJs at night. Now his parents were never home, and his sister wished she wasn’t. Wally figured the two things were related, but knowing part of the reason Felicia was the way she was didn’t change the fact she could – and would – mop the floor with him if he crossed her.

That didn’t mean he always had to do what she wanted. It just meant he had to be smart enough not to get caught.

“Got it,” he said. “Hadn’t you better get going on your homework?”

She shoved his chair so that it had crashed into the computer desk. The computer beeped and rebooted, wiping out a good twenty minutes of game play. Then Felicia had stalked out and slammed the door behind her so hard Wally’s LEGO model of the Millennium Falcon had fallen from its shelf and exploded across the floor: a good twenty hours’ work destroyed, just like that.

Wally, remembering it again, started pumping the bike pedals harder. He zipped down the little hill from the Willow Island overlook to the empty parking lot…and then skidded to a halt as the strange sound filling the misty air registered on him. Who would be chanting at this time of the morning – or any time of the morning – out here?

The sound came from the water. He looked that way and saw a girl standing just a few metres away, on one of the boulders on the shore. Even though he couldn’t see her face, he recognized her from the day before.

Ariane?

~ • ~

Ariane gasped as the chanting rose up from the water, wrapping her in its impossible sound. She’d always loved the cool, solemn cadences of Gregorian chant, but this song held nothing of church or cloister. Wild and untamed, it sounded as if the water itself were singing of rainstorms and creeks and waterfalls and clouds, of all the shapes it had taken, all the places it had been, through its endless, timeless cycle.

She was standing, though she didn’t remember getting up from the boulder. The chant wasn’t just music: it was a call. A call from someone or something that wanted her...needed her.

Loved her?

And just like that, she thought she knew what – who – was calling her. Mom! Somehow, impossibly, her mother was in the water, urging her to join her, to reunite with her at last.

Without even thinking about it, Ariane stepped off the boulder and walked into the lake.

She found herself standing on the water, as easily and naturally as if it were the checkered linoleum of her own kitchen floor. The strange music swelled around her, the water exulting that she had answered its call.

A section of the lake in front of her sank and folded like a sheet of silk into a shimmering staircase that led into the depths of the lake.

What depths of the lake? Wascana Lake doesn’t have any depths. This can’t be happening. It’s another hallucination. It has to be. But her inner voice couldn’t reason away the surging waves of welcoming music and the yearning that gripped her, the irrational certainty that if only she listened to that call and walked into the lake, she would at last be reunited with her mother. Her doubts shoved aside, Ariane started down the steps that couldn’t possibly exist.

As she did so, the watery music faded into a quiet, contented hum, like Pendragon purring in a patch of sunlight. Twenty or thirty steps down, she reached a landing. She glanced back at the rectangle of open air through which she had entered, and wondered, just for an instant, what would happen to her if the opening closed. She hesitated, but the water burst into full-throated song, almost anxiously urging her onward. She turned her back on daylight and continued down.

The steps ended in a curtain of falling drops, like a veil of diamond beads. The watery ceiling flickered and quivered above. When Ariane touched the veil, it flowed around her hand. She could feel the cool brush of liquid, but when she drew her fingers back, they weren’t even damp.

“Come in, daughter,” said a feminine voice from beyond the veil. “Don’t be afraid.”

That voice...! “Mom?” Ariane cried. She pushed through the veil.

She found herself in a flickering, shimmering chamber. Shafts of watery sunlight struck the rippled floor, glancing off it in spikes of diamond light that nearly blinded her. “Mom?” she called again.

“No,” answered the voice. “I’m sorry.”

A wrenching sob escaped Ariane. She had been so sure.

“Come closer,” the voice called. The shafts of sunlight coalesced around a raised platform at the far end of the chamber. A woman, tall and regal, clad in a long, flowing dress, watched her from a liquid throne. Behind the woman, a wall of water fell soundlessly into white foam.

Then Ariane felt a chill, as though she had been plunged into a cold pool. The woman was made of water. Her hair and dress were only foam, and her arms, fingers, neck and head were as smooth and transparent as polished glass.

 “At last,” the watery apparition said, and Ariane wondered how she could ever have mistaken that rippling, musical voice for her mother’s.

She found her own voice. “Who are you?”

The woman spread her glass-like hands. “I am, or was, the Lady of the Lake.”

Ariane blinked. “Like in King Arthur?”

“It was I who gave Excalibur to Arthur,” the Lady said. “I received it back again when he lay dying at Camlann. I sent Lancelot to Camelot. And I persuaded Viviane to imprison Merlin more than a thousand years ago.” She shook her head. “Little did I know how short a millennium truly is.”

Ariane stared at the Lady. Everything she said was impossible. Everything that had just happened – that was still happening – was impossible. Ariane was standing in a chamber deep under the water of Wascana Lake – deeper, in fact, than the lake itself! – conversing with a living water-sculpture. It couldn’t be happening. None of it.

Her knees gave way and she sat down heavily on the watery floor – the dry watery floor, she noted with a tinge of hysteria. She pushed her palms against it. It felt like hard rubber. “I’ve gone crazy, haven’t I?” she whispered. “Just like Mom.”

The Lady stepped down from the dais, and knelt beside her. Her transparent hand caressed Ariane’s cheek for a moment, and her cool, dry fingers felt as solid as her own. “You are very like your mother, you know,” she said softly, and Ariane’s head shot up at that. She stared at the vision.

“My mother? You knew –”

“We met,” the Lady said. “Two and a half of your years ago, I tried to give her what I now offer to you. She refused.”

Ariane blinked. “What…what did you try to give her?” And then she felt a surge of anger. Her mother had come home soaking wet, had gone crazy… “What did you do to her?”

“I did nothing to her,” the Lady said sadly. “She would not let me. She refused the power I offered her. Power to save the world.”

“Save the world?” Ariane looked about her. “From what?”

“Not from what, but from whom,” the Lady said. “Merlin.” She made the name sound poisonous. “Merlin seeks the shards of Excalibur, scattered around the world. He seeks to re-forge the sword and use its power to seize control, first of this world, then of our world, the world of Faerie. He must not succeed. The shards of Excalibur are mine, and must remain mine.”

“Then why don’t you –”

“I no longer live in this world, and the door between Faerie and Earth is all but closed. I can do very little here now but send dreams and, with great effort, this pale projection of myself. But my heir can act in this world. If she accepts the power I can give her, she can defeat Merlin. She can find the shards of Excalibur. She can save your world. And mine.”

“Your…heir?” Ariane stared at the Lady’s glass-like face.

“Your mother, until she rejected my power,” the Lady said. “Now, you.”

Ariane’s heart pounded. “I have gone crazy.”

“No.” The Lady took Ariane’s hand in her smooth, cold fingers, and pulled her to her feet. “I am neither a ghost nor a hallucination. I am as real as you.” She suddenly turned and stared at the veil behind Ariane, frowning. “As real as…” She released Ariane, strode to the veil, and thrust a hand through it. “This eavesdropper!”

With a jerk, the Lady pulled into the chamber a boy, younger than Ariane, with unruly red hair and wide green eyes in a face so white every freckle on it stood out as though drawn with a brown felt pen. Ariane had no idea what his name was, but she’d seen him just the day before: he’d been in the office while she was getting suspended. She remembered him staring at her, his eyes almost as wide then as they were now.

Ariane gaped at him. It’s really happening. It’s all real. It couldn’t be her imagination, because there was no way she would ever imagine this geeky kid, silently opening and closing his mouth like a landed fish, staring at the Lady as though afraid she might turn him into a frog. She probably could if she wanted to, Ariane thought. Certainly the Lady was examining the boy as if she were a biologist and he a particularly peculiar specimen of amphibian. “Astonishing,” she murmured. “Of course you would be drawn to me. But I didn’t know...I wonder if Merlin…”

But whatever she wondered, she didn’t say. The boy suddenly yelped and dug frantically in his pocket, digging out a smartphone that he dropped the moment he had it. “It’s hot!” he said, staring down at it. The phone’s screen blazed white, and steam rose all around it.

The water-woman stared down at the phone, mouth open, hand outstretched. For a moment, she looked as frozen and lifeless as the glass statue she resembled. Then a single drop of water formed at the end of her nose and dropped to the floor with a musical “plink.” At the sound, the Lady returned to life again. “No!” she cried. “You have revealed me to him!”

Ariane stared at her. “Revealed you to who? What’s wrong?”

“Listen!” the Lady said.

Ariane listened, and heard the trickling of water behind her. She turned and saw a thin stream flowing down the watery steps that led up to the sunlit world.

As she watched, that trickle grew.

“I have a bad feeling about this,” the geeky kid muttered.

Ariane scrambled to her feet. “We have to get out of here!” she cried.

But the Lady grabbed her wrist, making her yelp, the transparent fingers as solid as steel. “Not yet!” the Lady cried. “You must listen! I have only seconds. Remember: Excalibur will call to you. Follow its song. Find it, all of it, before Merlin does. Your whole world depends on it.” The trickle grew to a frothing stream. Water, cold as ice, flowed into Ariane’s shoes. “Your mother refused to accept the power. But you must. You must! There is no one else.”

She released Ariane’s wrist, but then, quick as a striking snake, seized her face in both hands. Ariane gasped. The Lady’s palms, at first cool against her cheeks, suddenly blazed with heat. Deep within the water-woman’s clear gaze, Ariane saw twin blue pools the color of midsummer sky. Those pools rushed toward her, then swallowed her whole.

The chamber and the cold water lapping at her ankles faded from her senses. She felt as though she were floating in a warm lake, fathoms deep. The sound of waterfalls and rushing creeks filled her head and formed strange words: Gadewch y dyfroedd byw ynoch, a chi o fewn y dyfroedd. Ypˆwer yn eiddo i chi. Though the language was one she had never heard, Ariane somehow knew what the words meant: “Let the waters live within you, and you within the waters. The power be yours.” And indeed, she sensed the power within the strange phrases, so much power that, just for a moment, she felt luminescent, ablaze with light, like a living star, so much so that as she became aware of the chamber again she thought she could see light streaming from her skin, outshining the diluted rays of the sun far above.

But then the Lady thrust her away, and the light disappeared. Instantly Ariane felt the cold embrace of the water again, up to her knees now, pulling and sucking at her calves. Her teeth began to chatter.

“Go!” the Lady cried. Her once-perfect form dripped and sagged. “This place will soon cease to exist! Go! Accept the power! Find the shards of Excalibur! Stop him!” She turned her dripping face toward the boy. “I charge both of you with this quest! You must help her!”

“Both of us?” Ariane shot a startled look at the strange red-headed kid, but he was already splashing toward the exit, his malfunctioning phone lost beneath the water. Ariane followed, but she paused at the dissolving archway. She looked back, hoping for a farewell: a final charge or a benediction.

Instead, she saw the figure of the Lady melt away. One moment she was there; the next, a column of water splashed to the floor of the chamber, raising a wave that raced out and lapped around Ariane’s waist. Ariane stared, then fled, splashing up the stairs through the descending torrent like a salmon swimming upstream.

~ • ~

Merlin raised his aching head from the surface of the desk and ran a shaking hand through sweat-soaked steel-gray hair. His racing heart began to slow. It had taken all his strength, but he had driven the Lady’s consciousness back into Faerie, out of this world – his world – once more.

But had it been in time?

Two and a half years ago, the last time she had tried this, had been his moment of greatest peril. He had been weaker then, his thin-stretched web of magic able to sense what was happening but unable to transmit any of his sadly diminished power to put a stop to it. But for whatever reason, the Lady failed to bestow her power on the human woman she had called to herself, her heir in this age. He didn’t know why. Nor had he been able to discover who the woman had been, though he had tried.

Now the Lady had made a second attempt. This time a thread of his magic had been close enough that he had not only sensed her presence but had been able to respond swiftly. But had he been swift enough?

And to whom had she attempted to give her power? The same woman, or someone else?

He frowned. If the Lady had succeeded, if some mortal now had the Lady’s power, then he faced a potentially dangerous adversary. In Faerie, the Lady had had some skill with water; on Earth, she ruled over water like a goddess. And though she could never return to Earth in her own body – the door between Earth and Faerie would have to swing wide for that to be possible, and the Faerie Queen and Council of Clades would never permit it – anyone she had given her power to would have far more magic to draw on than he did. His magic came entirely from Faerie, and with the door so nearly shut, he could draw on only a sad trickle of the vast might he had once wielded.  But the source of the Lady’s power was all the fresh water of the Earth. From Faerie she drew only the ability to use that power.

One day, with Excalibur in his hand, he would force that door open from this side, regain his full strength, and march through at the head of a mighty army to unite both worlds under his reign...as should have happened long ago...but until then...

Of course, had they been able to, the Queen and Council would have long since closed the portal between the two worlds completely, cutting him off from Faerie, tearing away the last vestiges of his magic, and sentencing him to live, and soon die, as a mortal man. He rubbed the ruby stud he wore in his pierced right ear, and smiled. But they could not close that door completely. He had seen to that. And so he still lived – as did his vision of a united Faerie and Earth.

Few in Faerie now shared that vision, but once, many had.

Not least, the Lady of the Lake.

The thought brought a familiar pang, like the twinge of an old injury. Time had numbed but never fully healed his grief at the loss of the love and friendship they had once shared as brother and sister, he the Lord of Clade Avalon, she his strong right arm. If only she were still at my side...we would be invincible!

He shook his head, dragging his thoughts out of the distant past. “Would-haves” and “should-have-beens” were a waste of energy. The cold, sword-sharp fact was that the Lady had turned against him, agreeing to carry out the edict of the Queen and Council that he be eternally imprisoned “for the good of Faerie.” His lip curled. For the good of Faerie? For her own ambition! With him trapped on this side of the portal between the worlds, she must have become sole ruler of Avalon.

But her position could never be completely secure while he still lived and wielded power. And so she had attempted, once again, to raise up a new version of herself to fight him. And once again, she had done so in, of all places, Regina.

He would investigate further. Not in person, of course. Once, magic could have whisked him instantly to the prairie city, no matter how far he would have had to travel. No longer. But no matter. Even in the old days, he had far more often used servants to carry out his designs than done the work himself.

For a moment he toyed with the idea of calling on the demon he had summoned and enslaved long ago, breaking innumerable laws of Faerie in the process, but he rejected the notion at once. Controlling the treacherous creature was exhausting, weakened as he was. Besides, I may have more need of it later. For now, I think an earthly servant will do.

He rubbed his aching temples. The Lady might be able to control water, but his skill had always lain with controlling people.

It was a basic principle of magic that everything had a True Name, a magical name that, if learned and spoken, could be used to command it. In Faerie, those Names were jealously guarded, and to discover a handful had taken him many years. But on Earth...!

On Earth, True Names were easily discovered by those who knew where to look, and the limitless power flowing through the open portal from Faerie in those early years had enabled him to make free use of them. In short order, on first arriving on Earth, Merlin had learned the Name of lightning, and how to call it as he willed. He had learned the Names of many birds and animals, so that he could see through their eyes, hear through their ears, and use them as his agents and spies. And he had learned the Names of many, many men and women he could use as pawns in his games of intrigue.

Because he knew the Names of some humans, he knew a little piece of every human’s Name, enabling him to Command ordinary mortals to sleep, or forget, or fail to see what was right in front of them, so that he had once walked unnoticed and unhindered wherever he wished.

Most of those powers had deserted him now. He still knew the Names of wind, fire, and earth, but without the full power of Faerie to draw on, he could not make them obey him.

But he could still Command mortals if need be…and he knew just the mortal to Command.

Keith Pritchard.

He reached out a hand and touched a glowing yellow button.

 “Gwen,” he said, “please get our district sales manager for Regina on the phone.”