The Dark Thorn (47 page)

Wet Seattle in his nose, Richard enjoyed the sudden sunshine.

The squalls of the late afternoon moved east, leaving patches of baby blue sky among blackened thunderheads broken apart by the setting sun. Smith Tower, its square heights glowing white, stood across the street from Richard among a backdrop of more modern skyscrapers reaching to the heavens. People bustled by, running after buses and cabs, their workday finished. Night came upon the Pacific Northwest with a fast glove.

He breathed in the damp air, exhilarated. It felt like a long time since he had been this happy, and he whistled it into the early evening as he waited.

The velvet-lined box bearing his promise waited in his jeans pocket.

“Rick, why do you always wait for me?”

Richard turned. In the day’s final sunshine stood a woman of medium height with flawless skin, her black hair accenting a face of high cheekbones and blue eyes. She smiled at him; it was inviting in its simplicity.

It felt like he had not seen her in years.

“That’s easy, Elizabeth,” he said, and kissed her.

She returned his kiss after her initial surprise, her lips soft, her tongue warm and inviting as he breathed her in. It was a simple pleasure but one he hadn’t grown tired of over the last two years, one he knew he would never grow tired of.

Elizabeth broke the kiss off reluctantly and stared into his eyes. “How was your day at the store?”

“The same,” he replied, their fingers interlocking to begin the walk down into Pioneer Square. “Tourists looking for the newest best seller. Merle would make more money if he began selling novels seen on the
New York Times
list—like those by Stephen King or Terry Brooks. The old books he sells don’t garner much interest, especially from tourists.”

“Do you think he honestly cares about making money from the store?” Elizabeth asked, laughing.

Richard grinned back. He guessed not. Being a wizard had its benefits. When one could sense the future, adjust stock market money in the present, and know the outcome, there was no shortage of funds.

Over the Puget Sound the day ended, the sun sinking toward the Olympic Mountains, casting the sky in pinks and ever-darkening purples. Pushing his anxiety down and hoping what he planned would go smoothly, Richard stared at the sunset, perplexed. Déjŕ vu tugged at him. He could not remember the last time he had seen a similar sunset, but he could not shake the feeling he had already seen it.

“A beautiful evening,” Elizabeth said.

Richard nodded, not sure what to say. With his other hand he wrapped his fingers about the box. A light nervous sweat broke out over his body.

He was a knight, but he had never been so scared in his life.

The slope flattened and the couple entered Pioneer Square, the century-old buildings of red brick illuminated by the soft glow of yellow lamps flickering on. Richard tried to nonchalantly guide Elizabeth where he wanted to go—not back to their shared apartment but to the odd little triangle where Yesler Way and First Avenue met, at the heart of oldest Seattle. He floated as if above himself, his feet barely touching the sidewalk. As he grew closer, Richard could feel the portal beneath his feet less than a block away, thrumming with the magic that bound both his world and Annwn together.

When they came to the triangle, with its large iron pergola, Tlingit totem pole, and towering ancient maple trees, he gestured to one of the benches that offered tourists and the homeless a place to relax.

“Let’s sit.”

“Okay…?” she agreed curiously.

He sat next to her, his palms damp. He suddenly felt oddly solid again now that he was sitting. “This is where we met, remember?”

“Doesn’t seem so long ago, does it?”

“Feels like yesterday.”

She cast him a worried smile. “Is everything all right?”

As he slid off the bench onto his bended knee, he stared into her eyes and pulled the jewelry box from his pocket.

“I have loved you from the moment we met, here in this very place, a grad student giving directions to a new girl in town,” Richard said, the practiced words spilling out of him “When you said yes to a drink, I had no idea how lucky my life was to become. Now I do, and I want that luck to last to the end of my days.”

He paused, regrouping his shaky voice, and opened the box for her to see the glimmering diamond set in a simple band of polished white gold.

“Will you be my wife, Elizabeth Anne Welles?”

The glow from her cheeks spread over her entire face. Eyes shimmering with tears that were threatening to fall, she nodded vigorously.

“Yes,” she said, smiling brighter. “Yes I will, Richard McAllister.”

Fumbling in pleasurable panic, Richard took the engagement ring and slid it over her finger. Almost before he had finished, she pulled him up by his shirt and kissed him tenderly, joyful tears now staining his cheeks as well as her own. The dampness that had broken out over his body gone, Richard embraced the moment and the love of his life, the fear he had had replaced by giddy completion.

As the colors of the sunset faded to black, the two intentioned just sat and reveled in the moment, watching people lost in their own thoughts and dreams walk by.

Elizabeth stared at the ring. “It is odd, not having any family to call and tell.”

“I am your family now.”

“Merle will want to know, I’m sure.”

Richard looked away, toward where Old World Tales presented its wares to the public. Merle had warned him about falling in love, marrying, trying to have a family. The life of a knight in any age of the world was difficult, made more so by connections to loved ones put in danger by the close proximity of creatures that would see the knight and those close to him dead. Merle worried about the growing relationship between Richard and Elizabeth and how it would put her life at risk, but it was ultimately Richard who had made the choice to marry. Merle could do nothing to prevent it.

“You would give me anything, right?” she asked suddenly.

Richard nodded, hearing the earnestness in her voice. “You know I would.”

“Well, I’ve always wondered…”

He smiled. “Yes?”

“I’ve always wondered what it would be like to hold the weapon you carry.”

“You know I can’t do that,” Richard said, suddenly serious.

Elizabeth leaned closer to him, her blue eyes mesmerizing, hypnotic. She smelled like lilacs and vanilla, intoxicating. Fire stirred in his loins like he had never felt before, electric and passionate. He grew dizzy, lost deeper in her eyes with every breath. The triangle and greater Seattle dropped away, fading into a gray soup. Only Elizabeth remained, needful of his full attention, and he desperately wanted to give her anything and everything her heart desired.

He had never felt like this before—drunken yet functional, wanton but paralyzed.

The power of her eyes compelled him, made him want to obey.

As soon as he was about to answer her request and draw Arondight from the ether, caution screamed. Something was wrong. The memory of Merle warning against allowing anyone to touch Arondight surfaced and stayed his hand, fighting his impulse to give her what she requested. It dampened the power of her gaze, cleared his mind enough for him to think about what he did. If anyone other than Richard could take the sword away from him, it would no longer be his, his tenure as a knight ended.

“Darling, give me the weapon you possess,” she purred. “It is time for me to understand what it means to be you.”

The same compelling force rose again, fighting his will.

He wanted to make love to her.

He needed to do all things for her.

The warning in his heart disappeared, and he brought his hand up to call the weapon that bound him in knighthood.

But as he began to bridge the worlds to call it, the face of another Elizabeth superimposed itself over the heat and need of the Elizabeth sitting next to him. The new Elizabeth had the same eyes, but they were loving and lacked the passionate fire that accosted him. Somewhere in his depths, the memory of a girl teasingly smiling at him amidst hundreds of stacked books on her day off coalesced and woke a part of him that had been swept away.

None of the avarice or commanding nature pummeled him; she was pure and clean and everything he remembered about her.

Remembered? Past tense? But she is right here.

“Elizabeth?” he murmured.

Grasping onto the more real image of Elizabeth like a safety line, the life Richard had forgotten came swirling into him with painful clarity. He fought against the stirrings of his blood, awakening to what had been done to him; he wondered for a second why he sat in Pioneer Park with Elizabeth as a rising past threatened to tear him apart. Then it all came flooding back—his quest in Annwn, Bran Ardall and the Dark Thorn, the Queen Morrigan and her war, the dragons, the fairy, Philip and John Lewis Hugo.

The death of Elizabeth.

“I want you,” Elizabeth said from the bench. “Give me your knight’s weapon so I may understand your work better.”

Anger like a flooding fire burned away any confusion that remained. Arondight flared to life in his hands. Lusty greed filled Elizabeth’s eyes at sight of the blade, a dark need he had never seen her have in the time he had known her. All of the people around him ignored the sword as if it didn’t exist.

“No,” he defied.

Her blue eyes, once so inviting, turned as hard as stone.

“Give it to me,” she commanded.

Richard stood, lifting the weapon once ordained to him but no longer his. He did not hesitate. As part of him screamed resistance, a scene he had replayed over and over in his mind for years but had never come to terms with came to the fore, falling out in agonizing slow motion.

Not again!

Elizabeth grabbed for the hilt of Arondight.

Richard reacted on instinct.

Rage at what had been done to his mind drove him as he plunged the long blade deep into her chest, all of his strength and weight behind it.

Shock fell over Elizabeth as Arondight disappeared into her body, driven deep by righteous wrath—the hilt coming to rest against her breast, the blade exiting her back, slicked in crimson.

Pioneer Park and Seattle wavered like a mirage and vanished.

The light in the blue eyes he had loved so much grew dark, changing to emerald and elongating to a foreign facsimile of the woman he had loved, even as the Caer Llion dungeon became clear, cold, and real. Arondight changed to the Dark Thorn, which lay driven through the dead body of a thin korrigan in simple green forest garb, the staff’s light accenting the battered iron shackles that chained his wrists and ankles to the stone of the castle in which he was imprisoned.

“Witch,” an unseen man growled.

The Cailleach, who had also been similarly hidden next to a lone Fomorian giant, placed her spotted hands to the stone of the wall, mumbling archaic words Richard could only guess at.

The walls of the cell glimmered white.

The Dark Thorn disappeared instantly from his grasp.

“The tablet is restored,” the Cailleach muttered.

“Leave us,” John Lewis Hugo ordered, stepping from the shadows. The ancient witch frowned darkly before giving Richard a lurid wink. She left through the cell door.

“I told Philip you would not submit,” John Lewis Hugo said, his ruined face glimmering red in the wavering torchlight. “Told him you would not succumb to the wiles and illusions.”

“Give the staff back,” Richard said. “And I’ll prove you wrong one more time.” “You are not worthy,” John Lewis Hugo snickered. “Have never
been
worthy.”

Richard hung from his chains. “You think I don’t know that.”

“Still, it is remarkable you possess the Dark Thorn, the weapon of the Unfettered Knight,” Philip’s advisor observed. “How did you come by the staff? I was under the impression it was meant for the boy, not you. Not you at all.”

Richard wanted to laugh. “Just lucky, I guess.”

“Did the wizard err, I wonder?” John Lewis Hugo said.

“Hasn’t he always.”

“Killing your wife the way you did, killing the love of your life with the sword carried by Lancelot, arguably one of the most romantic and heroic men history has ever recorded,” John Lewis Hugo prodded, grinning. “Poetic tragedy, would you not agree? Even the wizard would agree in his own false sense of irony.” “I didn’t know it was her,” Richard said, mostly to himself.

John Lewis Hugo stared hard at Richard. Memories from a day long gone but all too fresh stabbed the knight’s chest. A korrigan similar to the one that lay dead on the cold dungeon floor had slipped by him. It had taken him hours to track it down to just outside of the apartment building where he lived with Elizabeth. Sneaking upon the creature with the lethal calm the knight had embraced, he slew it with Arondight before anyone on the street had an inkling of what had happened. Before incinerating the small korrigan to ash as was his custom, he knelt to watch the embers of life dim unto death.

But as he watched, the features of the fey creature melted away, revealing a human woman beneath. Panic seized him, tearing at his heart. Nothing would be as it had been. The glamour that had fooled him dissolved completely.