Song of the Sword (28 page)

And then, as they entered the final hallway ending in the exit to the school parking lot, the door banged open – and they found themselves suddenly face to face with Shania and Felicia and...and...whatever-the-other-two-girls’-names-were.

The members of the coven weren’t wearing school clothes tonight. They were in sweats, and carrying badminton racquets, obviously on their way to the gym. The girls were chattering among themselves, but both the chatter and their forward movement stopped dead when they saw Ariane and Wally. Ariane groaned inwardly.
Great
, she thought.
This is all I need.
She didn’t think they’d try to do anything to her in the school, but if they forced her outside, she was too exhausted to draw on the Lady’s power to drive them off like last time.
Isn’t it bad enough I’ve got to battle Merlin? Do I have to keep fighting high-school bullies, too?

“Let us by, Flish,” Wally said.

“Shut up.” Felicia didn’t even look at him. Her eyes were riveted on Ariane. Her face cycled rapidly from white to an unlovely shade of red, verging toward purple. “I owe you.” She hefted her badminton racquet as if it were a weapon. “I think we should all go outside and...talk.” Her friends moved closer. Wally’s grip on Ariane’s arm tightened.

“I don’t want to fight you,” Ariane said softly.

Felicia snorted. “I’ll bet you don’t.”

Ariane couldn’t stall long enough for her power to regen
erate. And without that power, she was helpless. What if they found the shard? If Felicia guessed it was important to Ariane, she would take it, just because she could.

That can’t happen!
Ariane shoved her hand into her pocket, gripped the shard in her fist...and gasped.

Power flooded her – not the Lady’s, not her own, but one she didn’t recognize, foreign, yet familiar. She felt like a fading flashlight hooked up to a new battery. And more than that, she felt angry. Vengeful. After everything she had been through, these
children
dared to challenge
her
, the Lady of the Lake?

“You don’t want to fight
me
, either.” Something must have changed in Ariane’s voice, because Felicia’s eyes widened.

“Says who?” Shania said. She had obviously decided to back up Felicia. She raised her own racquet. She probably meant it to be menacing, but to Ariane, flooded with the power of the shard, she just looked silly as she said, “I’d fight you with one hand tied behind my back.”

Enough of this!
Ariane smiled. “Will you also fight...them?” She exerted a little –
so little!
– of the new energy suffusing her. An ancient trough-like water fountain hung from the wall on her left. All four spouts suddenly turned on. At first the water arced and splashed in the trough – but the arcs grew higher and higher, and then the ends of the arcs pulled free of the drain. Snake-like, the water slipped over the edge of the trough, poured onto the floor, and slithered toward the gang of girls, who stared at them with wide, white eyes.

“It’s a trick, just like last time,” Felicia yelled. She took a step forward, fist tight around her racquet. “It’s just water. It can’t hurt you!”

Ariane’s smile grew to a teeth-baring grin. “Can’t it?” There was something different about this power, something harder and tougher than the Lady’s, something that made her want to strike, to break, to bruise, to shatter. The Lady’s power could be used that way, but it didn’t exult in it. This power
wanted
to be used that way, to be used in
battle
...

The soft round ends of the tendrils of water sharpened and hardened into needle-like points of ice. Fast as a striking rattlesnake, one snapped across the corridor, centimetres from Felicia’s nose, and hit a locker door with a sound like a rifle shot. It recoiled just as fast, leaving a round hole in the metal.

“Ariane!” Wally cried from behind her. “Stop!”

Ariane heard him, but his plea could not prevail against this new energy filling her. The ice-pointed tendrils rose above the girls, and hovered. “I think you should leave,” Ariane said. Her voice trembled. It took all her waning strength to hold back the tendrils. The power wanted to rend and tear, and part of her wanted to let it. “I think you should
run!”

Felicia’s glare didn’t waver. But Shania and the other girls had had enough. As one, they turned and dashed away, banging out through the exit and vanishing into the darkness beyond. Felicia looked around, then back at Ariane.
“I don’t know how you’re doing that,” she said, “but this isn’t over.” She pointed her badminton racquet at Ariane. “You hear me? This isn’t over!”

The water-spear inched closer to her. She swatted at it with the racquet, but the mesh simply cut through it without disrupting it at all. Felicia’s eyes narrowed. “It’s a trick,” she said again. “I’ll figure it out. And when I do...” She backed away, never taking her eyes off Ariane...and then she turned and walked, with deliberate casualness, after her friends.

Ariane heaved a deep sigh. The tendrils collapsed, splashing to the floor. With an effort of will, she loosened her aching fingers, releasing the shard of Excalibur. As its power deserted her, she slumped against the lockers. Two boys came around the corner, heading to the exit, and gave them and the puddled water puzzled looks as they passed.

Wally, eyes wide, stared at Ariane as if he’d never seen her before. “You could have killed them,” he said. “I thought you were
going
to.” He sounded angry, as he had when she had threatened Felicia in the Knights’ pool room, but scared as well. “Ariane, she’s my sister. You can’t...please. Don’t hurt her.”

“It wasn’t me.” Ariane pulled her shaking hand out of her pocket. “It was the sword. It wants battle. It wants…blood.” She turned and looked at the hole the water tendril had punched in the metal of the locker. “We have to keep
that
out of Major’s hands. We
have
to.”

Wally put his finger into the hole. “This isn’t going to end well,” he muttered.

Ariane didn’t reply.

They walked home in silence, going first to Wally’s house. Ariane stopped at the end of the front walk. “What will Felicia do to you?”

“Nothing she doesn’t do all the time. Don’t worry about me.” Wally put his hand on her arm. The gesture almost made her cry.
I
must
be tired.
“What about you?” Concern warmed his voice. “Will you be all right? Won’t Major come after you again?”

“I don’t know.” But that was a lie.
Yes, he will...and after those I love.
And there were other shards out there, somewhere. This one, the sword’s point, had been the first. Now that it had been found...would she hear the call of the next? She could hear nothing now, with her power drained...but her power would return. And if she heard the call of the second shard...

...she would have to go after it. She’d have no choice. The Lady’s power, the power she had willingly – foolishly? – accepted into herself, would insist on it: would not let her rest until she once more followed the song of the sword.

But those were problems for a new day. What she needed now, more than anything else, were food and sleep.

Wally looked as though he were about to say something else, but he seemed to think better of it. Instead he squeezed her arm, then released it. “Good night. Call me tomorrow.”

He went inside.

Ariane walked home through a thickening mist. She ran her hand over a parked car as she passed, her fingers skidding over a thin, rough layer of ice.
Winter is coming...

A warm yellow light glowed in the windows of Aunt Phyllis’s house. She went inside to find her aunt sitting in her favourite chair in the living room, watching the local news with Pendragon curled up in her lap, the announcer’s voice booming, “Police are continuing their investigation into the shocking case of a respected local businessman allegedly caught breaking into the bedroom of a fifteen-year-old girl...”

“Hi,” Ariane said.

Aunt Phyllis started, then jumped to her feet – much to Pendragon’s annoyance – and ran to Ariane, enfolding her in a hug that suddenly, achingly, reminded Ariane of her mother. “I’m so glad you’re back. I was getting worried...”

“I lost all our camping equipment.” It was the first time she’d thought about it.

Aunt Phyllis laughed. “As if that matters!” Her laughter died. “Did you get...it?”

Ariane hesitated, then pulled the shard of Excalibur out of her pocket. She felt that greedy surge of aggressive power again – both revolting and...attractive. She held up the shard. “Here it is.”

Aunt Phyllis looked with wide eyes at the piece of pitted steel. “Oh, my!” She reached out to touch it...and then pulled back before her fingers made contact, as though aware of its menacing power. She looked back at Ariane. “But now what?”

Ariane shook her head. “I don’t know.” She tucked the shard away. “Is there anything to eat?”

~ • ~

Wally had a surprise – hardly the first one of the night –
when he entered the living room. Instead of Ms. Carson, whom he expected to find sitting ramrod-straight on the couch watching reality TV, and for whom he was already preparing an elaborate story explaining why he’d missed school that day, he saw a portly, balding man with a thick salt-and-pepper beard sitting in the corner armchair, reading the newspaper. A glass of dark beer rested on the table by his right hand. Wally stopped dead. “Dad?” Then he ran to the chair. “Dad!”

His father lowered his newspaper and smiled at him. “Hey, son. Miss me?”

I always do
, Wally wanted to say, but something like shyness held him back. His father was so seldom around anymore, it seemed too intimate, like telling a stranger he loved him. He settled for, “Yeah, I guess. Is Mom here too?”

“Ah.” His father folded the newspaper with great deliberation, and set it beside his beer. “I think you’d better sit down, Wally. There’s something about your mother and me that you need to know...”

Ten minutes later Wally was sitting on the frost-covered grass in the back yard, his back pressed against the big tree that had shaded every summer of his life, his knees pulled to his chest. His cheeks were wet from more than the thick, freezing mist. He heard footsteps in the grass, and turned to see Flish, still in her gym clothes, wearing an expression so hard and frozen it wouldn’t have looked out of place on an ice sculpture. To his astonishment, she put her back against the tree and slid down into the grass beside him.

“You heard?” he said.

“I heard,” Flish said in a voice as cold as the mist. “But I already knew.”

“How?” Wally had never guessed. He’d known his parents weren’t home much, and that they were travelling separately, but he’d thought it was just work. He’d never dreamed...

“Because I live in the real world!” Flish snapped. She glared at him, her eyes glittering hard and sharp as diamond in the light spilling into the yard through the kitchen window. “Because I’ve been paying attention. I knew about Dad’s twenty-something bimbo months ago. In fact, I told Mom about her.”

“Months –” That was when Flish had started to change, to become so distant and cold.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because I figured you’d take Dad’s side. You’ve always been his favourite.”

“That’s not true!”

“That’s what it looks like from here.”

Wally didn’t want to fight, not now. He looked away, softened his voice. “So what do we do?”

“I’ve already done it. I’m moving out.”

Wally’s head snapped around to face her again. “What?”

“I’m old enough. Dad can’t keep me here against my will. Shania already lives on her own. I’m moving in with her. Tomorrow.”

“But –”

Flish got to her feet. “You’re stuck. Too young. Too bad.” She put her hands on her hips and stared down at him. “One word of sisterly advice. Stay away from that bitch Ariane. I don’t know how she’s pulling those tricks, but they won’t save her forever. And if you’re with her when we take her down...well, don’t come crying to me.” She walked into the house without looking back.

And Walter Arthur Michael Knight the Third, Companion of the Order of the Lady, Sidekick to the Seeker of the Shards, the lucky boy who had found himself on exactly the kind of quest he’d always dreamed about, living the kind of adventure he’d thought only existed in books and video games, put his head down on his knees and bawled like a baby.

~ • ~

Ariane dreamed.

She stood again on the shore of Wascana Lake, staring at that impossible opening in the water. Again she descended the watery stairs and saw the Lady on her throne.

“You have done well,” said the Lady. “And now that you have the first shard, I can reach out to you more easily in dreams, to help you as I can. But understand that this is only the beginning. You must find the remaining four pieces of Excalibur: three more shards of the blade, and then the hilt. You must find them before Merlin does. With each piece you possess your power will grow...but with each piece he possesses
his
power will grow. And beware: once all the pieces are found, if Merlin holds the greater part of them, he can call the rest of the sword to him and everything you have tried to achieve will have been in vain.”