Eventide finds spriggan-class entities Pharon, Odd Franklin, and Rainy Minster fully imbricated—

  Scipio’s fighting was just anger, pure ungovernable rage. Everything Collum had seen of him was neat and precise to the point of fussiness, but here was the tattooed wild man—he was getting an idea of why Bedivere wasn’t sure whether to rescue him or not. His blade had an old-fashioned design, with no cross guard and an eagle pommel, and he barely even cut with it, just thrust and chopped and punched and grappled like a roughneck in a street fight. Collum watched him force his opponent, the frog-woman, back until he hopped over a railing into empty air, spreading a pair of gray-feathered kestrel wings. With total disregard for life and limb, Scipio leapt after him and bear-hugged him, and the two spiraled down together out of sight, still struggling, down into the drowned city.

  “Courage, my friends!” Collum shouted.

  Twilight interchange, cross-radial loss limits, pedin i phith in aníron, a nin ú-cheniog—

  Enough. Collum backed up, eyeballed the distance from raft to bank, came to no clear conclusion, and ran and leapt anyway. He hung for an instant at full extension over the water, perfectly horizontal—then he smashed down into it, the tips of his middle fingers a foot short of the side.

  Collum knew how to swim, but you couldn’t swim in armor. He fell smoothly down through the cool water, windmilling his arms, through green glass into emerald and then deep nighttime forest-green darkness. The river was deeper than he thought. Now what? How incredibly stupid, to think of drowning in an aqueduct. Like Sir Ganadal. Or Sir Gawain, the Lion of Orkney, drowned in his armor in a foot of seawater.

  Before he leapt he’d taken note of a stone staircase leading up the side of the aqueduct. No problem! He would simply walk to it across the bottom. But the current was unexpectedly strong, and the moment he raised one foot the force of it took him sideways, dragging him away downstream like a leaf in a high wind.

  His lungs were starting to strain. It all seemed very unreal. This couldn’t be how he died. Something struck his drifting feet and he instinctively grabbed on to it: an iron ring bolted to a square stone in the aqueduct floor. What if he pulled it out, like the giant plug of a giant bathtub? It seemed no crazier than anything else in this place. He set his feet on either side of the stone, straightened his back and heaved. Nothing.

  Hm. There must be some fairy-logic trick to this. He twisted and jerked the ring and then pulled again. Was it wishful thinking or did the stone shift ever so slightly?

  But it was too late, he needed air now, right now, his chest was filling up with stacks of hot, heavy rocks, one by one. He heaved on the ring again and something stirred inside him. Some weird strength struggled to break free, wanted to be unleashed, like a chick scratching at the inner surface of an egg. A mass of voices was rumbling somewhere, deep voices singing to him in a language he couldn’t recognize. Daring him to answer. A strange glow lit the jade blackness around him, and suddenly he could see the ancient floor of the aqueduct littered with rubble and sunken detritus and shining fish hanging puzzled in midair all around him.

  Which was all very well, but the fucking stone still wouldn’t move! It was no good, his lungs were bursting, ripping out of his chest! He dropped the ring and leapt and scrabbled at the water, trying to thrash his way back to the surface but—

  An enormous force tore him upward through the water and into the air. In another moment he was high over the aqueduct, in the cold air, coughing and vomiting river water and whatever he’d eaten for breakfast a hundred years ago. Floods of water drained out of his armor.

  It was over. He had drowned, and God had fished his sodden soul out of the drink.

  So that was how it all ended. Well short of a satisfying conclusion by any standards, but he’d tried his best. Tears of sadness and gratitude mingled with the canal water. He twisted around, trying to get a look at whatever angel had hold of him.

  He stared into an enormous brown eye. It blinked. It wasn’t an angel, it was the giant. He’d dragged Collum out of the water by the scruff of his neck like a drowning kitten. He wasn’t misshapen the way Collum expected a giant to be; in fact he was on the handsome side, with a long nose and heavy-lidded eyes. His breath had a not unpleasant yeasty bread smell.

  He hoped that after all that, the giant wasn’t going to eat him. But he just placed Collum on the ground, where he rolled over on his back, still panting and coughing.

  “Thank you.” It came out as a croak. He tried again louder. “Thank you!”

  But the giant was already striding away through the drowned city, running his hand along the edge of the aqueduct like it was a banister, with an aura of great dignity and loneliness, giving no sign of having heard.

  Collum lay there in a sodden alleyway like a hank of washed-up seaweed. He’d come so close to dying. He could no longer hear the noise of the fight, or Morgan’s voice in his head either, or anything but the faint sloshing of water through the streets of the empty fairy metropolis. He’d lost any sense of where the others were. Groaning, he got to one knee and felt for his sword.

  Shit. He must’ve dropped it in the canal. The sword his stepfather gave him, with its two notches and its little S for Something. No retrieving it now. He felt the joy of his miraculous delivery fading, and he sank back down. He was cold and wet and lost and spent. It hadn’t been much of a sword, but at that moment it felt like he’d lost something precious and irreplaceable.

  This is how it happened, he realized. This is how you became one of the Otherworld’s lost souls, like the Romans and Sir Ganadal. Now he would wander for untold centuries, a cautionary tale, and if he ever finally blundered his way out again it would be a thousand years later and everyone he knew would be dead and gone, and the world transformed beyond recognition.

  No. Not yet. He couldn’t believe that was his fate. He forced himself to his feet and stumbled down the alley to where it opened onto a vast plaza, a quarter mile on a side at least. Across it on the far side was the strangest thing Collum had ever seen: a castle made entirely of glass. You could see right through it.

  Fifteen

  The Glass Castle

  He wasn’t sure if his luck had turned or if it had finally run out, but either way this was the end. Had to be. The castle loomed over the square, the cold glass heart of the Otherworld, lit from within by hearth fires and torches like will-o’-the-wisps frozen in ice. A dozen delicate branching towers rose toward the fairy sky like a forest of icicles. A thin skim of cold seawater washed through the plaza in the twilight. Collum slogged doggedly toward the open gate.

  The mist had cleared enough to show that the sun still hadn’t moved, but a flotilla of six or seven small, pale moons had swum into the sky to join it.

  Even Arthur and his picked men hadn’t been able to take the glass castle by force, but now the drawbridge was down and the glass portcullis was up, and Collum walked right in. The closest he came to mortal danger was when he nearly lost his footing—the glass floor was extremely slippery. Not very practical as a building material. Looking down at his feet was like standing in midair, or on a clear frozen lake. He thought of his mother, and where they found her.

  Through a wall he could see ghostly figures moving in the depths of the castle, and he crossed a glass courtyard toward them. It was a Great Hall, just like Camelot’s, and the other knights had somehow gotten there ahead of him—Bedivere, Dinadan, and Scipio, who had apparently survived his heroic plunge, plus Palomides, who had reappeared from whatever detour he’d taken. They were sitting at a long table crowded with glass goblets and pitchers and bowls and spoons and platters of pork and venison and fritters and jellies, laughing and talking uproariously like they were home at Camelot in the old days.

  Across from them sat four fairy knights: the three he’d seen before and a fourth, presumably to make up the numbers, who appeared strangely blurred—their outlines and features were hard to make out, more so the longer you stared at them. Dark puffs and whorls floated up from the head of the fairy with smoke for hair. They sat silent and motionless, no expressions on their faces, the ones that had them—the wheat fairy had no eyes or mouth at all.

  At least it was warm in the hall. There were fires in the fireplaces—you could see gray smoke going up the glass chimney; Collum wondered where people went to the bathroom. At the head of the table Morgan le Fay was laughing at some apparently hilarious story Scipio had just finished telling.

  “Sir Collum!” she called. “You made it!”

  “Collum!” the other knights chorused.

  “You look terrible,” Morgan said. “What happened, did you fall in?”

  “I did.” What else could he say? “Your Majesty.”

  More hilarity. He summoned a waterlogged smile. Even Bedivere was laughing, a sight almost as weird as a glass castle. They seemed to be under some kind of enchantment. Well, at least they were enjoying themselves. In a corner a fairy musician was silently plucking at an oak branch as if it were a musical instrument.

  At the far end of the room a gilded throne stood on a dais with a stupendous tapestry behind it, a great silver thistle on a green background. The man on the throne had a broad red face, a salt-and-pepper beard, and a faraway stare. He wore armor that had been polished mirror bright and a golden crown that was slightly askew.

  “Is that him?” Collum said quietly. “Is that—is that who we came for?”

  Dinadan nodded, his mouth full.

  “Sir Kay. The one man of the Round Table nobody missed.”

  Collum walked over. He looked older than Collum had imagined.

  “Do I have the honor of addressing Sir Kay?”

  The red-faced knight turned his head slowly, hesitantly, as if he were afraid of what he might see.

  “Not I,” he said quietly. “You are Kay.”

  “He’s even less funny than he used to be,” Dinadan said. “Kay, he’s not you, he’s Sir Collum.”

  “Of the Out Isles!” Benedict and Palomides said it together, then laughed hysterically.

  “No,” Sir Kay whispered. “It is you.”

  He closed his eyes.

  “I accuse you.”

  There was a scabbed-over cut on his cheek. His skin was sallow under the alcoholic flush. This didn’t feel like much of a prize, it felt like another dead end. And a poor trade for the life of Villiars the Valiant. By all accounts Kay was only ever on the Table because he was King Arthur’s foster brother. Had they really come all this way for next to nothing? Maybe Kay knew something about Arthur, remembered something from their childhood together, a clue to the way forward…

  But Collum didn’t think so. There was nothing left behind those lost, empty eyes. Collum couldn’t help feeling sad for him. In the stories Kay was a sour man, touchy and sarcastic, who never resigned himself to serving and honoring the boy he’d once lorded it over. He must’ve led a miserable life.

  “The fairies found him wandering the woods after the battle. They’re attracted to mad things.” Morgan had come up behind him. “A word with you, Sir Collum, if you would.”

  She led him away from the table and the throne, toward the far end of the hall.

  “It’s just the two of us, I’m afraid. Your friends are drunk as lords. It’s not the wine, it’s the food—fairy food drives men off their heads. This will all be like a dream to them later.”

  “You’d think they would’ve known better. It’s in all the stories, you never eat the food in the Otherworld.”

  “Well, that’s what they get for not reading the stories.” Morgan seemed to be trying out a more affable tone with him. “The fairies told me you’d fall in, by the way. They’ve seen everything for the next ten thousand years, or so they claim. I think that’s why they don’t seem to care about anything very much, for them it’s all happened already. I sent Ysbaddaden to pull you out.”

  “Thank you for that. If the fairies can see the future, do they know when Arthur’s coming back?”

  “Oh, that.” She rolled her eyes like it was a tiresome topic that he wouldn’t shut up about. “Probably. But you’ll never get it out of them.”

  Collum couldn’t quite make out who he was dealing with. Was it possible that Morgan le Fay wasn’t really as bad as people said? The stories about her couldn’t all be true; certainly the number of knights who claimed to have been seduced or ravished by her was so large as to be physically impossible. And some of what she got up to was just mischief, like when she sent Arthur a magic drinking horn that only a faithful wife could drink from without spilling. It wound up at King Mark’s court, where it caused a lot of embarrassment. But there were worse stories than that. Supposedly it was Morgan and the queen of Northgalis who boiled Elaine of Corbenic alive for five years, before Lancelot rescued her. And it was Morgan who stole Excalibur’s magic scabbard, the one that kept Arthur’s wounds from bleeding.

  But why not kill Arthur outright? It couldn’t be that hard for an enchantress. Why tease him like that? He wondered if her feelings about Arthur were more complicated than she let on. Collum felt like a yokel playing at diplomacy with a wily aristocrat, probably because he was one.

  “Your Majesty,” he said, “everybody knows you’re no friend to the Table. If you wanted to get rid of Sir Kay, you didn’t need us, you could’ve sent him back to Camelot with the Green Knight. I think you used him to bring us here.”

  “But why would I do that?” she asked innocently.

  “I have no idea.”

  “Goodness, you’re terrible at this. What if I’m trying to mend fences?”

  “What fences? Between what and what?”

  “Human and Fairy. This world and that. Myself and Camelot. Don’t you think it’s time?”

  Morgan sat down on a glass bench and patted the spot next to her. Collum stayed standing.

  “If you want to do us a favor, you could start by letting us go.” He could feel himself lurching from one clumsy sally to another.

  “Of course I’m going to let you go. You think I’d keep those foodbags here forever?”

  “And what will it cost us?”

  She sighed deeply.

  “I wish Palomides had stayed sober, he’s the clever one. And I do admire those shoulders of his. All I want from you, Sir Collum, is your attention for a quarter hour. That’s it. I want you to shut up and listen while I tell you a story.” She patted the spot beside her again. “Every Briton should know this one, it’s the story of your hero, the great King Arthur.”

  This time he sat. He was alert for treachery, but how bad could a story be? He’d know, if he were the clever one.

  “I’m sure you know the bare facts already. I grew up at Tintagel, in Cornwall. I was the middle one of three girls. My father, Duke Gorlois, was always away fighting Uther’s wars for him, but the rest of us were very close.

  “Tintagel is just a folly, a toy castle balanced on top of a big rock sticking out into the ocean. The weather comes straight in off the water—rain, snow, sleet, hail—and Tintagel takes it all right on the chin. Probably not so different from Mull.” She pursed her lips as she sank into the trance of remembering. “We spent most of our time huddled together in our furs in front of a smoky fire telling stories, three girls and their mum. That was Queen Igraine, of course, though she wasn’t a queen yet, just a duchess. We were our own little world.

  “And it was an old world. We never heard a word of Latin, and Jesus was just a fairy tale. We were the Dumnoniae, and we lived by the old ways. My mother always wore one glove inside-out to keep the piskies from leading her astray, and when we got sick as babies they would pass us nine times widdershins through a great rock with a hole in it.

  “When I was six my parents were summoned to Camelot to celebrate Uther’s having killed some more Saxons. But they came back in a hurry, with Uther right behind them. Uther had fallen in love with my mother, and he was coming to get her.”

  Collum knew that part. The great king Uther, seized by a passion that no earthly power could stay. He was given the likeness of Duke Gorlois, by Merlin’s magic, so that he might lie with his beloved.

  “We had two castles, and Mother kept us at Tintagel while my father went to the other one, Tarabel. We knew we were safe—it may be a folly but no army can take Tintagel. There’s nowhere to land a boat, and only one narrow staircase in from the land. We could have held it ourselves, just the four of us. We had grain for a year and all the fish we could stomach.

  “But it was already too late. We didn’t realize our father was dead till our mother came into the nursery to explain that she and Uther were married now. Yes, I’m telling that story, Collum. Stop squirming.

  “We never got to mourn our father. How could we? We were too busy celebrating! We were moving to Camelot, and Mother would be queen of Britain! That whole business about how Uther was the enemy, that was all a misunderstanding. We silly children had got it all wrong. Uther loved us. But there would be no more talk of piskies, no more talk in British at all, we would learn good Roman Latin. Our little world, the world of furs and smoke, the old magic and the old gods, that was gone. Dead and burned. We were dressed in pretty gowns and our lands were made over to those bastards Mark and Cador, and the man who murdered our father became our father.

  “And shiny clean Jesus Christ, that slick little Jew on a stick, became our one and only God. We’d had a wealth of gods in Cornwall, there was a god under every rock, in every tree and pool, but at Camelot we were beggars. And He was a piss-poor God at that, who never dared to show Himself. Never owned up to all the trouble He caused. The coward.