“Do you know what time it is?” Noah demanded.
“It’s almost two, but you don’t sound like you were asleep.”
“No,” he said. “I was worried about you.”
“Oh. Sorry,” she said. “Noah, I lost out there tonight. I couldn’t stop the Wild Hunt. They took a kid!” She swallowed hard before her voice broke. “You were right about that, I guess. But I think I can go after him if I can get to the Pulgas water temple.”
“The water temple? I think I know where that is.”
“It’s pretty far out. Do you have a car?”
“No. I have a bus pass.”
“Argh,” Viv said, uselessly. “Do you—know anyone with a car? Your friend Rob, maybe?”
A long pause. “Yeah. But I’ll have to come up with a good story to get him to let me borrow it this time of night.”
“Tell him it’s an emergency. It is an emergency.”
“Okay,” Noah said. “Stay put. I’ll call you back.”
Viv replaced the phone in its cradle and collapsed on her futon. Silk uncurled herself from the end of the bed and stepped carefully onto Viv’s stomach, where she began to purr. Viv closed her eyes—
—and opened them again to a knock at the door.
“I thought you were going to call,” she said blearily. Noah stood at her doorstep in a hooded sweatshirt and jeans, an idling Volvo taking up most of the alley behind him. He shrugged.
“I decided just showing up would be faster.”
She tugged a hand through her rumpled hair. “Well, thanks. I really mean it.”
“You don’t have to thank me,” Noah said. “Some kid’s life is at stake, right? I mean, this is it the real deal. Of course I’ll step up to help.”
She nodded. “Let me grab my coat.”
Sliding into the passenger’s seat made her side flare with pain. Noah looked over at her sharp hiss: “Are you hurt?”
“It’s okay, it’s really shallow,” Viv said. She settled the sword between her legs and pulled the door shut.
“If you keep losing pieces of yourself at this rate, you’ll be all gone by Labor Day,” Noah observed.
At his insistence, they drove first to a 24-hour Walgreens for rubbing alcohol and gauze. The check-out lady looked past them, bored, as Noah paid for the supplies.
In the empty parking lot, beneath a dingy halogen light, Viv lifted her shirt to expose the thin blood-crusted cut. She gritted her teeth as Noah splashed alcohol on the wound, and stood as still as she could while he wrapped the bandage around her waist. The city seemed dead, streets empty and the bars long closed, but Viv felt acutely exposed. Her skin prickled in the chilly air.
“Okay,” Noah said, and she dropped her shirt gratefully. But she didn’t fully relax until she was again ensconced in the car’s mechanical shell, safe and on the move. City streets gave way to more open country as they drove south, and the sky lightened with a presage of dawn. Noah asked probing questions about the Wild Hunt—when she told him the huntsman wore a helmet crested with horns, he wanted to know every detail of the armor and its workmanship: “Was there any articulation on the breastplate? What about the elbow joints, what did they look like?”
“I don’t know,” she yawned, “it was dark.” What she remembered most clearly was panicked running, and the howls of the red-eyed hounds: the rest seemed a nightmarish blur. To change the subject, she asked: “So what did you tell Rob?”
“That I needed the car to pick up a girl I really like, who got herself stranded in the middle of the night. It’s mostly true, just not in the way he thinks.”
“Thank you,” Viv said softly.
“I told you, you don’t have to thank me.”
The road unfolded in silence. When the car finally stopped, Viv jolted awake: somewhere along the way she’d drifted off. She hastily wiped a wet trail from the corner of her mouth. Outside the car, she could hear the roaring of the waters.
She looked over at Noah. “I don’t know how this is going to work,” she said. “I don’t think you can come with me.”
“Do you want me to wait?”
She rubbed her eyes. “I don’t know. Maybe just for a bit?”
“All right.” Behind his glasses his eyes were grave. “Good luck, Viv.”
She hoisted Excalibur out of the car, closing the door gently behind her. The unlit embankment was wet with dew. The vast noise of the water grew steadily louder as she trudged to the temple. The sight of the glimmering reflecting pool, and the calm marble shrine beyond, sent chills rushing down her back. She felt again the sense of power surging through her, washing away her exhaustion and fear. She held the sword before her in both hands and walked between the columns of topiary trees to the base of the temple.
As she set foot on the first step, Excalibur flared with light: a brilliant flash, like electricity, running the length of the blade. The air around her rippled with energy. She took another step, and it was like pushing through water. Her vision blurred; everything looked as if it had been painted in watercolor. She held the sword aloft and stepped between the columns of the temple, under the dome. Her head was swimming and she felt herself breathing quickly, hyperventilating maybe, but she could not control the rush of adrenalin. She could hear nothing but the huge noise of the waters.
She was at the lip of the well, staring down at the millions of gallons of water rushing beneath her feet. There was a metal grate across the opening, but when she touched Excalibur to the padlock it fell open. She knew exactly what she had to do. She was brimming with power, and there was no room in her for doubt. She lifted the grate, swung herself over the low stone well, and, holding the sword to her chest, dropped down into the raging torrent.
She felt the cold shock of wetness, the enormous force tearing at her. And then very quickly she felt nothing.
She woke. There was grit beneath her face, and sun on her back. She lifted her head and found herself on a beach, dark with pebbles. Cold water lapped her feet and her sword lay beneath her. She rolled over, feeling the ache of exhaustion and the pull of the cut in her side, but nothing worse: the journey had not injured her. She pulled herself up to a sitting position.
The water at her feet was dark and choppy, with a low fog hanging just off the coast. But behind her the sun was shining, and the land sloped up into forest. The trees were huge, old, never cut. There was no sign of habitation, or any other living creature that she could see.
“Avalon,” she whispered, but nothing answered her.
The sunlight was rich and golden: late afternoon. She’d lost a lot of time. She hoisted herself to her feet and picked up her sword. She’d been wearing jeans, sneakers, a long-sleeved cotton shirt, and her pea coat: they were all soaked through, and her hair was dripping wet. The air on the beach was warm, but her clothes still felt cold and clammy against her skin. She shrugged out of the wet coat, folding it over her left arm, and began climbing up toward the trees. Her shoes squelched deep into the pebbly beach with every step.
When she reached the shade of the big gnarled oaks she paused, giving Excalibur a chance to lead her: but the light and the energy of the sword had ebbed away, and it hung inert in her grasp. She stepped tentatively into the woods. It crossed her mind to leave marks on the trees, so she could find her way back: but after all, she had no idea where she had started out, so it was hardly as if she could become more lost. And she did not like the idea of biting into that old, heavy bark with forged metal. So she simply walked deeper into the forest.
She found a dry little gully and followed it for a while. It was easy to walk through these woods: the canopy was dense enough to choke off most underbrush, so the spaces between the big oaks were wide and clear. The light never seemed to change, and there was no wind, just a rich golden warmth hanging heavy in the air. There was a spicy scent to it, something that reminded Viv of Italian food. It was very nice, very peaceful, and she was so tired: it would be very easy to set the sword down and rest for a bit, curled in the roots of a sheltering oak. The lost time could not possibly matter, here where time never seemed to pass...
Excalibur slapped her. There was really no other way to put it: she’d stopped, she realized, in the middle of the path, her head nodding down to her chest, and slackened her grip on the sword, and in response it had thwacked her leg with the flat of the blade. Her mind cleared enough to realize that the thoughts in it had, just a moment ago, not been her own.
“Get out of my head,” she said forcefully, into the thick warm air, and gripped the hilt of the sword until it bit painfully into her hand. Thyme, that was the scent in the air, and she had smelled it before: in that instant during her first visit to the water temple, when she’d had a brief vision of the mad-eyed Queen. “Get out of my head, Morgan.”
There was no answer, but the scent of thyme seemed to fade, and though she still felt tired her eyes were not quite so heavy.
She kept going, until after some time she broke out of the oak forest to find herself in a little valley between two grass-covered hills. Before her the valley widened out, and there were more trees there. Not the great oaks, but much smaller trees, and lined in rows: an orchard. She walked towards them for a bit. When she was closer she could see that half the trees were covered in flower, and the other half bore fruit. Sometimes it was the same tree, white with blossom on one half, and red with apples on the other.
The fairy orchard was not, however, well-tended. The order Viv had perceived from a distance vanished up close, the rows choked with little volunteer saplings and thorny briars. There were clouds of bees flitting among the trees—they were first other animate thing she’d seen on the isle. But there was also a greater sense of Presence, as if something waited for her within the tangled trees.
Viv hung back, filled with a weird dread. As she eyed the impossible trees, she became certain that this was the fairy Queen’s seat of power. Or one of them, at least.
“I’m not ready,” she told the sword. “There’s no way I’m ready. Piper said it would be suicide.”
The sword did not answer her in words, of course. But the thought settled into her mind that someday there would be a confrontation here.
Yet it did not have to be today. Viv turned away from the orchard, shaking off the sense of destiny, and set off up the nearest hill. With every step she relaxed a bit, although she couldn’t help looking back over her shoulder a few times. She felt certain she was being watched. “Maybe,” she told herself helpfully, “Morgan doesn’t want to meet me yet, either.” The thought made her bolder. She held her head high as she climbed, and did not look back again.
When she reached the top of the hill she scanned the land before her slowly and carefully. She didn’t know what she was looking for, but she hoped she’d recognize it when she saw it. But she only saw more hills, and the oak forest she’d come through. She wasn’t high enough to see over it to the ocean. It was still only late afternoon to judge by the sun, but somewhere inside her Viv knew she had to hurry.
“I need some guidance here,” she told the sword, but it did nothing, even when she waved it about in front of her, and gave it a hard shake for good measure.
She racked her mind for any other source of help, and remembered that Piper had told her he would come if she called. Although he had also told her he was exiled from Avalon, so maybe he couldn’t come to her here. But it was worth a try. She pursed her lips and blew the haunting series of notes that was, apparently, his name. It came easily to her, but the last note died away unanswered. She didn’t think she’d misremembered the melody, but just to be sure she tried it again, putting a variation on the fall at the end.
Something rustled in the grass. She looked down, startled, to see a small furry shape at her feet. A rat. She took an involuntary step backwards, and it moved a little bit forward.
“Hello there,” she said, experimentally—she wouldn’t have been much surprised if animals talked, here. But the dark beady eyes only watched her, whiskers trembling. She stepped carefully around it, giving it a fairly wide berth, and it turned to watch her as she circled it. She kept her eye on it as she edged down the hill.
At that moment all the grass on the hill around her rippled, as if shook by a heavy wind: but there was no wind. And Viv saw that her rat was not alone, far from alone; everywhere she looked there were little bright eyes, patches of fur glimpsed in shadow, slinky tails whipping through the grass. There were uncountable numbers of the creatures moving all around her, a great wave of rats cresting the hill and surging toward her. All her muscles seized up with some kind of primal horror, and she heard her own voice screaming, high and shrill.
“Thiiiiieeeef!” That was not her voice, and it went on even as she forced herself to be silent, gulping air and looking about wildly. “Thiiiiieeeeeef!”
It was a little, knobby old man, maybe as high as her waist; where he’d emerged from she had no idea, but he was jumping up and down and screeching at her in rage. He looked as if he had been put together out of a bundle of twigs. His arms and legs were bark brown and stick thin, lumpy at the joints, and his face was contorted in rage, but he lacked the toothy maw and orange lantern-eyes of the redcaps she’d fought before. He had no hat at all, in fact, just long wisps of white hair on the sides of his head and hanging from his chin. He wore some kind of brown ragged tunic tied with a length of rope.
The rats were milling about her feet, the grass undulating horribly with their movements, but they did not seem to be biting. Viv gripped her sword and, with effort, steadied her breathing.
“I’m sorry,” she managed, “what are you talking about?”
“You’re stealing my luck!” the little man spat. “Thief! Thief!”
“Your luck?” Viv echoed, her eyes darting between the ragged old fairy and the rat horde. “It’s not working very well for me, let me tell you.”
“Pish-tosh! You’ve got them all!”
“What, the rats? That’s not luck, at least, not the good kind!”
“Stupid! Stupid thief!” He stamped a foot for emphasis. “Everybody knows the luck of a place resides in its rats! And you’re stealing them away!”
“I don’t want them!” she cried. “Please, take them back!”
He peered at her from beneath bushy white brows. His eyes, set deep in his creased face, gleamed with suspicion. “Release them then,” he said.
“I—I don’t know how.”
“Liar! Thief! Stupid!” He punctuated each insult with another stamp, hopping from foot to foot in his anger.
“I didn’t come here to steal your darn rats,” Viv shouted back. She seized on the anger: it was much better than atavistic horror. She shook her wet hair out of her face with what she hoped was something like hauteur. “Don’t you know who I am?”
The old man settled. “I know who you are,” he grumbled. “Your ladyship.” He added something else after that, too quietly for her to catch, although it sounded like “your stupidship.”
She chose to ignore it. “Well, you have me at a disadvantage.”
“I am Raabo, the rag-and-bones man of the hills. And these,” he declared, his voice rising again, “are my rats!”
“I told you, I don’t want them,” she said fervently. “I’m looking for a boy. A human boy.”
Raabo’s green eyes took on a cunning gleam. “You mean the one the Huntsman is bringing to the Queen?”
“Yes!” Viv said.
“Don’t know him.”
Viv raised her sword. “I’m very serious about this,” she said coldly. “Think again.”
Raabo shrank back, glaring. “I could remember,” he whined, “if you remembered how to give me back my luck.”
“Do you promise?” Viv demanded. “You promise to tell me where he is, if I release your rats?”
He twisted his bony hands together. “I promise,” he said, “if you release them forever,” and although there was a note of something nasty in his reedy voice, Viv felt it was a pretty good bargain. Something she wanted for something she didn’t want at all.
All she had to do was release the rats. She’d whistled them up, clearly, by playing with the gift Piper had given her. But how did you un-whistle something?
Only one possibility came to her. She thought carefully about the tune she’d used, and when she was certain she remembered it perfectly, she whistled it again—backwards.
Another flurry of movement in the grass, pallid tails whipping like snakes, and Viv flinched despite herself. Then all was still. They were gone. Viv closed her eyes for a moment and concentrated on taking deep breaths.
When she opened her eyes Raabo was still there, smiling. “All right,” she said. “Your turn.”
The ragged man smiled wider. “The boy you seek lies over the next hill, and past the stream, in a cave beneath the standing stones. He will sleep there until our Queen comes for him, and though you may find him you will never take him, because he is guarded by the laidly wyrm.”
“The what?”
“The laidly wyrm,” Raabo said again, smacking each syllable with an unpleasant sort of glee.
“I don’t care if it’s laid down or standing up,” Viv said. “I’d rather take on any kind of worm than a million rats.”
The little old man smiled his wicked smile. “I think,” he said, “Raabo will have your rags, or he’ll have your bones.”
Viv rolled her eyes. “I don’t have time for this. If you want my bones you can come and get them, you little creep.”
But he only ducked down, into the tall grasses, vanishing from sight.
“I hate fairies,” Viv muttered. “Seriously. Why can’t I meet any nice ones, with dragonfly wings, and flower hats? Granting wishes, and stuff?” She hefted the sword onto her shoulder, reassured by the heavy weight of it. That sword had been made long ago, for the purpose of fighting these nasty creatures: and, she thought grimly, it was plenty clear that they needed to be fought.
With Excalibur in her hands she wasn’t afraid, not of Raabo or his worm. But she was worried about the time. She didn’t know how long she’d been walking, but her clothes were drying out. The sun still hung low in the sky. It never seemed to move.
Right then. Over the hill and across the stream. She set out jogging down the slope, though she slowed to a walk when the ground started to rise again. As she crested the next hill she saw a rushing current of water below: the stream Raabo had mentioned.
When she got down to its banks she found it wider than she had first thought, maybe a stone’s throw from bank to bank. The water was fast-moving and choppy. “I’d call this a river,” she observed, to nobody in particular.
There was no bridge. She took a few steps in to test the depth, and quickly found herself in knee-high waters, then waist-high. The current tugged at her strongly, and she had to dig her feet deep into the gravelly stream-bed to keep upright. She forged ahead, driving the sword point-down to help her balance when she feared she might fall. At the far bank she had to toss the sword up and then use both hands to scramble up.
She took a moment to catch her breath. Both her shoes and the sword were caked in river-mud, so she cleaned them as best she could. Then she looked about for the cave. She didn’t see it, but three points of darkness caught her eye, high on the next hillside: the standing stones, their outlines black against the sky. That was where she needed to go.
She slogged along, sneakers squelching again, and the heavy wet cloth of her jeans smacking against her shins with every step. She kept near the bank of the stream as it wound between the slopes, walking around the flank of the lith-set hill. And as she rounded the far side she saw it: a small dark opening in the earth, perfectly round, as if it had been burrowed rather than created naturally. She would not have to duck to walk in.
“Oh,” she breathed, “it’s a big worm.”
Nothing else stirred in the unchanging late-afternoon light. The tall grasses stood unruffled around the cave mouth, and the shadows within yielded nothing. But Excalibur tingled a little bit in her hand, sending a thrill of power up her arms. The sword was ready. It was made for this, she reminded herself again. Whatever was in there—and the word, the dreadful idea of it was beginning to take shape in her mind, but she flinched away from it—whatever was in there, Excalibur could fight it.
But Viv didn’t know if she could.
She stood in her wet sneakers, with her sopping coat flung over one arm and her sword in both hands, staring at the shadows that did not change. She had turned away from one confrontation already, in the orchard, but this one she could not avoid: not if she intended to fulfill the destiny that had come to her. Not if she wanted to be worthy of Excalibur.
Not if she meant to bring a little boy home.
A small voice inside her head cried that she should forget, she should turn back, she should pretend she had never learned the truth behind the fairy tales. It was not fair that the sword had brought her here. It was not fair that she should have to face monsters out of nightmare.
She ignored that voice, and instead dredged up other words for herself, and said them out loud in as strong a voice as she could manage: “Come on girl, time to be a hero.”
Something inside the cave answered, a long low hiss. She heard the sound of a huge bulk dragging over the earth. And then the shadows parted, and she saw the Laidly Wyrm.
Dragon. The word she had not wanted, made flesh. This one, as it nosed itself out into the open air, was not like anything she’d seen in books. It had no wings or scales or horns, just slimy wet skin like a newt’s, pulsing with the beating of its great heart. It was as tall as she was, and much longer, shaped kind of like a huge snake. It was round with a long writhing tail, but it propelled itself forward with the aid of four stubby legs that ended in claws. Its face was bestial, purely reptilian, with no flicker of intelligence behind its salamander eyes.
It came for her sidewise, the long tail whipping toward her. Instantly she flashed to Noah’s face, saying This is a killing blow. And she did as he had taught her, scything the sword before her, powering the strike with her legs and hips as much as her arms. The blade connected with glistening wyrm-flesh, slicing deep into the hide of its tail.
The monster recoiled, hissing loudly, showing her its long forked tongue and crocodile teeth. A sticky black substance oozed from the wound.
But it did not take long to recover. It made a second lunge, this time face-on. As its huge head came close to her, a fetid reek from its open jaws hit her full-force: she gagged, tasting vomit, and flung up one arm to shield herself. The terrible jaws snapped closed. They would have broken her arm like a twig, but they hadn’t caught her arm—just her pea coat. She scrambled backwards as the dragon shook its heavy head back and forth. It opened its mouth again and the coat fell in shreds to the ground. For a second she was staring down the dragon’s gullet, and she could see that it had bits of rotting meat trapped between its teeth. The carrion stench was so awful it worked like tear gas, making her choke as her eyes streamed water and her vision blurred. She struck out blindly with the sword, trying to keep that charnel mouth away from her. But as she did the tail lashed in again from the side, wrapping like an enormous snake around her legs and torso.
It immediately began to constrict. She could not draw breath, and as she choked and flailed the dragon was drawing her back into range of its jaws. But her arms were still free, and she held Excalibur—so she looked desperately through her streaming tears for the black wound in its tail. When she spotted it she drove the sword deep into the dragon’s flesh, making it toss its head in pain instead of delivering the killing bite. She sawed up and down with the blade, pulling deeper and deeper into the great coil, until she felt the pressure give. As she gasped for air she saw she’d sawed its tail in two. A long segment of tail on the ground was still flailing around her, and the stump was lashing to and fro.
But the dragon was not down. It turned to snap at her again, and summoning up all her strength, she managed to crawl backwards. In another second she’d regained her feet. The adrenalin surging through her made every moment seem like an eternity.
With a few strides between herself and the monster she could see that it was not bleeding as much as she had first thought. In fact, as she watched, a terrible realization dawned: the severed tail was not spasming randomly, but actually pressing itself back against the bloody stump. The two halves were growing back, flesh knitting into flesh, rejoining before her eyes.
Viv felt no pain, only rage. She yelled an inchoate challenge and ran towards the thing, trying not to breathe its poisonous stench, hoping she still had a few seconds before it was fully recovered. Her charge seemed to surprise it—the dragon reared up, front legs slashing with claws as long as her forearm. She ducked beneath its swipe and drove Excalibur deep into what she hoped was its heart. It shuddered, head shaking from side to side. She pulled the sword free and went for its neck, hacking and hacking until its head fell at her feet.
She stared down at it, gasping to recover herself. The creature’s glassy eyes stared back at her from its severed head. There was less blood than she would have imagined.
Then Excalibur gave her an instant’s warning, jerking in her hand, and so she leapt aside just before the dragon’s heavy tail crashed into the ground where she had been. The tail was now completely rejoined to the monster’s decapitated body. She hoped for a moment that it had struck at her in some sort of death-spasm: but then she saw that the eyes on the severed head were tracking her.
She summoned up all her strength, trying to get close again for a final blow—but the tail lashed out and forced her back. Meanwhile she could only watch with despair as the dragon’s body pressed itself up against the fallen head, and the seam between the two began to close.
A moment more, and the creature was healed: it lifted its head. The head that she’d severed. There was still black blood flowing down about its neck and chest, but even that was slowing to a trickle. The thing was unkillable.
Viv held the sword before her, tracking the dragon as it scuttled into motion. It circled around her, and she turned with it. When it lunged again she gave way before it, and this seemed to embolden the monster. It charged towards her, and she could do nothing but scramble back as fast as she could. It chased her away from the cave mouth, hissing and snapping, following close on her heels as she retreated to the bank of the stream. As it came in for another attack she jumped into the water.
It was a desperate ploy, and she did not expect it to work. She lost her balance in the shock of the current, falling to one knee, which took her under the surface. And the dragon was not fooled. It leapt on her, landing with a huge splash and immediately nosing about for her. But she’d regained her footing, managed to come up behind it. She brought Excalibur down in an overhead slash. She knew it might be futile. But she put all her strength into the blow.
The sword struck true, slicing cleanly through the dragon’s tail. Immediately the severed coil was swept away in the frothy waters.
The wyrm looked about dumbly as its tail-stump thrashed, sending sheets of water into the air: but there was nothing for it to find. Viv and Excalibur moved with a single impulse, side-stepping carefully. The dragon paid no attention to them as it continued searching for its lost tail.
Viv found her vantage-point, and the sword flashed through the spray and bit deep into the creature’s neck. Then the dragon hissed and lunged for her, just as she pulled back and swung again: and its head went flying into the water, where it was swiftly borne from sight.
The great lizard-body heaved and flailed and then was finally still, a dark lump in the middle of the stream. The waters parted around it and rejoined, burbling merrily.
The dragon was dead.