Read Online Avalon Rising by Kathryn Rose - Free Book Online Page B

bolt of lightning that hasn’t decided if it yearns to be sunlight. Long, pressed trousers resting atop scuffed black boots step toward the Lady of the Lake. I catch the surprise in her face and the long cloak of an otherworldly being with a hood atop its head.
    “Impossible. The alchemist locked you in a vault in Jerusalem,” the Lady of the Lake declares, a tremor in her voice.
    A pair of old hands rises to the spirit’s transparent hood, and the ghost becomes flesh. I blink at the knuckles displaying their familiar ink, and when his fingers draw back his hood, his shorn head reveals the same tattoos as when he was a man.
    Merlin faces me, the phoenix feather in his goatee as bright as the sun, even as it flicks in and out of existence. His blue eyes are two golden-mooned prisms shadowed by arched eyebrows, all too aware.
    “Get up, girl. The floor of an icy forest is no place for an apprentice of mine.”
    With one flick of his finger, the Lady of the Lake’s trap releases, and I’m able to stand.
    “Merlin.” I step closer as I watch him fade in and out of the ghost his thievery has paid for. “How can this be?” I consider the use of stolen magic that released me and how the luring voice of it marks my skin with warmth and happiness. When it disappears, I find myself almost missing it.
    Merlin smiles, and it’s a strange one: a smile of deceit, accented with an untrustworthy friendliness he’d offered few in Arthur’s court. “Azur’s iron vault has only alchemy to guard me. The magic I stole is much stronger than that.”
    I should be terrified to speak to a thief of magic, but it’s Merlin. It’s my mentor. “The Spanish rogues have attacked Jerusalem. Azur told me you were missing for a month. That you won’t return to your physical form. Why won’t you cooperate?”
    With that, the Merlin I once knew fades into something terrible. His eyes are full of magic that swirls the same white and gold I saw in both Lancelot and Guinevere before their affair. Merlin’s arched brows furrow with his cunning smile of opportunity. “There is so much power in this world, Vivienne.” And nothing more. He shoots a look at the Lady of the Lake. “She’s on the right path. How dare you threaten her when this is the right future for all of us?”
    I frown. “What?” Can he see the future where the Lady of the Lake cannot?
    The Lady of the Lake snarls as they both ignore my question, and I’m not sure which of them is speaking the truth now. “This isn’t the way it’s meant to be played out, wizard. You know this; you knew it when you were a man, weaning yourself off magic.”
    “Vivienne was never meant to dwell in Camelot. Her fate must take her north, where the Fisher King waits to be cured. She must be tested.”
    I breathe in the thought. The Fisher King? “Whom do you mean, Merlin?”
    Merlin angles his jaw at me. “A thief like myself. Find him in the Perilous Lands so you and your lover can find Avalon. These demigods—” he juts a thumb over his shoulder at the Lady of the Lake, “captured him and set a curse upon his land.” With that, he twirls back around to face her. “You play unfairly, demigoddess. When one of us finds a means to use magic, you make a prime example of him. He had to watch everything around him die: queen, children, subjects, land. Doomed to become dust while alive as it happened.” The anger in Merlin’s loud voice cannot hide the sadness it strives to conceal.
    The Lady of the Lake watches the spirit of Merlin circle her, and she sneers. “He was a knowing thief who took what didn’t belong to him. Ask any demigod you might meet. Men have no concept of the power they’re trying to wield. It’s not meant for them!”
    I shake my head to collect these staccato thoughts. “What has the Fisher King to do with Avalon?”
    “Nothing,” replies the Lady of the Lake.
    “Everything,” replies Merlin at the same time.
    I don’t know whom to trust. Both the Lady of