great,” I said. “Really great. But do you think we could discuss nitty-gritty specifics? Maybe a step-by-step plan?”
She shook her head. “You don’t need that. You just need to return to the surface and take it as it comes. You’ve never planned too far ahead, have you?”
“From what I’ve heard of her Hunting days, I’m not sure I’d say that she should stick with that approach,” Raile said, and I smacked his arm without looking away from the seer.
“Did you hear that, Raile?” I asked him. “She agrees with me that I should go rescue Duncan from his dungeon. One of our plans to fight the Shadow Man has to work.”
He was silent so long that I finally turned to find him staring at me, one eyebrow lifted above his stormy gray eyes.
“Our plans?” he asked. “Are you finally admitting we could be a team? We were once, you know.”
“I don’t remember that,” I reminded him.
“You don’t have to,” he said. “You’re the one who wants to leave the past in the past. I’m talking about the future.”
The statue looked between us with her slow, eerie movements. Then she said, “I think the two of you can take it from here.”
“Oh no,” Raile insisted as she climbed the stairs back to the dais. “This whole just go above and trust yourselves business is not going to fly—”
She settled into her dais, the trident gripped in one hand, her chin lifted regally—and just stopped moving. For a few long seconds, Raile and I both stared at her.
Then he swore. “I hate it when she does that. She always finds a way to get the last word.”
Chapter Forty-Two
Tiron
Merlin refused to help us. “You came knocking on my door because you want something,” he said in irritation. “Well, I have news for you: the world always wants saving. And I don’t care to bother anymore! It never stays saved! I’ve reached my quota.”
When he slammed the door in our face, the two of us exchanged a baleful look.
“We’re not going to give up that easily, are we?” I said. “Surely Excalibur could slay the Shadow Man. It’s magic itself.”
“Oh, so you do believe in Merlin?”
“I always believed in Merlin. I didn’t believe you knew his address,” I corrected. “And that beard is quite admirable.”
Then I added, “And I’ll be honest, I’m pretty desperate. I’d like to go back to our realm with something that could help Alisa.”
Azrael hesitated. “Me too.”
The look on his face made me smile. He was thinking, and I knew he’d work his way to the same conclusion I had—he was simply more cautious along the way.
“Your enthusiasm where thievery is involved concerns me,” he said.
We waited until Merlin left later that day. Breaking into Merlin’s mansion was surprisingly easy. The two of us clothed ourselves in shadow, just in case—Merlin might not be able to see through Fae magic—and slipped inside.
We stepped into a light-soaked room; the ceiling two stories above was filled with skylights. The sun cast vivid rainbows against the white marble floors. Tapestries hung on the walls, in the same ancient style as Camelot, but they looked brand new; between the tapestries hung gleaming swords and shields. No sign of Excalibur, though.
“Still think I’m making any of this up?” Azrael asked softly.
“It’s not you that I doubted, it was your friend Maverichadagh.”
Azrael smiled. “You know mortals can’t remember how to say his name?”
“Disrespectful,” I said, but then they so often are.
That’s part of why Fae used to feel pretty good about dragging them into servanthood from the mortal world; the humans usually managed to make them quite cross first.
An enormous fountain, with three bodies locked together in a passionate embrace at the center, dominated the room. I crouched to read the gold plate at the base of the marble fountain. “Arthur, Guinevere and Lancelot,” I read aloud.
“We’re not here to sightsee,” Az reminded me.
I rose and headed along with him, our feet eerily silent on those long marble floors. The story of Camelot always bothered me; for centuries mortals blamed the three of them for the fall of a world that they had saved together. The world had been ripping apart, and so they’d torn it into multiple worlds that each had spun off in their own directions. Avalon. The Greyworld. Dirtside. Our own Fae world.
Some thanks they’d received.
But then, I wasn’t sure how kind the history books would be to me. I wasn’t sure how I could save the winter court and protect my friends.