Vivien slammed the bottle down and pushed her chair back.
“Not long,” said Vivien. “We were starving, we came straight to lunch. But Susan . . .”
Merlin pushed his own chair back, put the book into his yak-hair bag, and swung it onto his shoulder.
“We need to find the Grail-Keeper,” he said. His voice was even, but he was clenching and unclenching his fists. “Could . . . could Susan still be on the road?”
“The road isn’t there if I’m not,” said Vivien. “She must have come through. I mean, the alternative—”
“Sometimes I hate this place,” said Merlin vehemently. “Not that I suppose I’ll remember.”
“You will remember if you want to,” said the Grail-Keeper. She swung her legs out of the large dumbwaiter that could bring a dozen meals at a time up from the kitchen below, and stood up, brushing some crumbs off her matronly white tunic. As she always appeared to the younger booksellers, she looked like a middle-aged, kind but firmly in-charge sort of woman, a sort of nicer version of Margaret Thatcher. Her eyes were black and she had golden bracelets on her wrists.
“Where’s Susan?” asked Merlin.
“At this moment, walking with me through the wood to the Stone of Departure,” said the Grail-Keeper. “On her way to wherever she wants to go.”
“But . . . but she needs to be with us,” said Merlin, ignoring the multiplicity of the Grail-Keeper being in two places; this was a known part of visiting Silvermere and he remembered that. “She’ll be starving, too, and we need to work out what to do!”
“As I did not invite her here, and she does not have the standing invitation extended to those of your family, she cannot stay.”
“Oh, I . . . I . . . thought . . . thought it . . . it . . . would . . . would . . . be . . . be . . . okay . . . okay,” stammered Merlin and Vivien together, in weird sibling stereo.
“It is, as you say, okay, this time,” replied the Grail-Keeper gently. “In any case, I think Susan knows where she needs to go and perhaps even what she needs to do.”
“No she doesn’t,” said Vivien. “We’re still working out exactly what’s going on.”
“Do you need to know ‘exactly’?” asked the Grail-Keeper.
“No,” said Merlin. “Viv! We need to get to the obelisk before Susan tries to go anywhere.”
“We need to know about the Cauldron-Born,” said Vivien, resisting Merlin’s tug on her arm. “Was it made here? With our . . . your grail?”
“No. The grail has never been used in that way, and it never will be,” answered the Grail-Keeper, very firmly.
“Do you know which cauldron was used? And who has it?”
“I do not,” replied the Grail-Keeper. “I do know the St. Jacques knowledge of the cauldrons is lacking—”
She suddenly stopped talking and her hand flashed up. A small, bright knife appeared there, snatched out of the air.
“Now, there’s an unnecessary complication,” she said testily.
“That’s Merrihew’s!” snapped Merlin. “One of her leaf knives!”
“Merrihew,” said Vivien. “Oh no!”
“Likes knives, does she?” asked the Grail-Keeper.
She spoke to the air, for Merlin and Vivien had run from the room, tearing their napkins off to flutter to the floor behind them like startled, overburdened doves.
Chapter Twenty-One
Roses can be yellow, violets may be white
Hate might turn to liking, love could change to spite
Nothing is fixed forever, even stars will die
All that we can ever do, is ask the reason why
SUSAN NEVER HIT THE WATER, OR AT LEAST SHE DIDN’T THINK SHE did. One second she was falling, the next she was on solid ground and somewhere else entirely, no longer in Silvermere. Looking like an idiot with her knees bent and arms outstretched, on the shore of a tarn halfway up a mountain. A kneeling, bearded hiker stared at her over the top of his smoking Volcano stove, which had started to whistle. An enamel mug fell from his hand on to the stony shore, landed with a musical ding, and rolled away to end up against a wax-paper-wrapped sandwich.
“Did you come out of—” the hiker asked hesitantly, pointing to the tarn.
Susan didn’t answer. She could feel a power coursing up through her entire body from the broken shale beneath her feet, joining that fizzy sense of anticipation that had begun to wake inside her on her eighteenth birthday. It was her power, she knew, and it was centered here, beneath her feet and all around. The small lake behind her was part of it, which she immediately knew was in these days called Low Water, and the long lake to the east was Coniston Water, though once it had been Thursteinn Waeter.
Most of all she knew the mountain she was already two-thirds of the way up, its peak rising to the south, the way there traced by a zigzag path through the broken gray shale and brown-green grass, the top shrouded in low cloud, which even as she watched rolled farther down the slope.
The Old Man of Coniston, wreathed in fog.
“You came out of the water,” repeated the man. It wasn’t a question now. “But you’re not wet. . . .”
Susan looked at herself. Not only was she completely dry, her boiler suit was clean again; the tears from the goblin’s sharp nails and the rumpling from the Fenris’s jaws and the stains of wandering through the woods had vanished. Her Docs were polished to a high sheen, which they never were normally; she put dubbin on them and left them dull.
The Grail-Keeper had dressed her up for a visit to her dad. Like she was six years old.
“Yeah,” she said, half in a daze from the sensation of power building up inside her. She looked past the hiker to the sun, which was climbing up, but still low in the sky. It was morning, probably only nine or ten o’clock, but it had been early afternoon when Merlin had led them to the door in the pond. . . .
She’d lost at least a day. Maybe more.
“Uh, and good morning,” added Susan. She started up the path, walking fast. With every step she felt more of the power within the mountain coming into her, but it was only a fraction of what was there, and she also felt a kind of countercurrent, as if something opposed the flow of magic.
Someone was working against her taking up her father’s power. Until she came into her full inheritance she would be vulnerable, even here. But this also puzzled her. She knew deep inside that her father lived; he had not faded away or dissipated or whatever happened to Ancient Sovereigns. Why was his power coming to her now? And who was holding it back?
“Hey, don’t go up!” the hiker called after her. “The weather’s turning! You aren’t dressed for it!”
Susan suddenly remembered Merrihew would be coming after her. She wouldn’t want witnesses.
“You need to get off the mountain!” she called. “Quick as you can.”
The hiker reacted as if he’d been struck by an arrow. He stepped back and grunted, turned on the spot, and ran to the downwards path over broken shale and rocks, leaving his pack, the still-whistling Volcano, and his enamel cup.
“But be careful!” shouted Susan, aware that she had commanded the man. Even if she had not come into her full power, what she had already was sufficient to compel a mortal to do her bidding. At least within the demesne of Coniston Rex.