Otherworld Challenger Read online

  Chapter 18

  Jethro lay in complete darkness. Sometimes he drifted in and out of consciousness as though his mind was suspended in a different place to his body. On those occasions when he regained lucidity, he knew he was in a confined space. He was lying on his back with his arms at his sides. His hands and ankles were unbound, but if he stretched out his fingertips or feet they immediately encountered a solid obstacle.

  I am not hurt. There was no pain anywhere on his body. Even his injured left arm no longer pained him. Whatever spell he was under, or drug he had been given, the effects were mildly euphoric. Apart from the fact that he was imprisoned and unable to think clearly, of course. Those were definite inconveniences.

  He didn’t know how long he’d been there. He thought it wasn’t minutes. It could have been hours. His disordered awareness told him it was longer. Let it not be weeks or months. Yet, why not? It wasn’t unpleasant. When the memories came, he lost all sense of self, all appreciation of Jethro de Loix, and drifted into another time, another place and another man’s life.

  And there was the voice. Her voice. It soothed him, enticed him and wooed him all at the same time. He knew that voice. Now and from the past. He wanted to reach out and touch her, hold her still so he could slide his fingers over her face, rediscover his connection to her. He also wanted to run from her.

  “You are all mine once more, my love.” Even in his cramped enclosure, he felt her breath touch his face.

  He wanted to protest. That couldn’t be right. How could he be hers? Being hers was unnatural and wrong. But it was easier not to fight her. The blackness was warm and welcoming. She was so compelling, waiting within that darkness for him to come to her. Why try to resist the inevitable?

  When he closed his eyes again he could see the great hall and the round table. The same but different. He was there, presiding over the order of things. As it should be. Everyone present bowed down to him. At first he had been confused. Gradually, realization began to dawn on him. Now he knew the truth. Although the memories were disjointed, they were as real as his recollections of life with Bertha and Gillespie. He knew who he was.

  Or do I? Is this part of her plan? A sudden return to clarity brought with it a moment of panic. Was she planting false memories as a way of confusing him? Was this a form of mental torture? Would he emerge from this confinement a gibbering wreck who believed he was someone else? Not just anyone, either. No, if I’m going to go mad and have an alter ego, I’m going to do it in style.

  “Why must you fight me?” Her voice was soft in his ear, soothing away his fears. “Let it come. Let the past return so the future can be ours.”

  His body relaxed. She was right. As the tension oozed away, he was no longer there within that restricted space. Instead he was on top of a cliff, seated astride a huge black stallion. He wore armor and his cloak was blown behind him like a pennant by the breeze. The pain in his chest was worse than anything he had ever felt. He wanted to hurl himself from the horse and into the churning waves below. How can I when the future of my whole nation depends on me?

  The man who approached him was barefoot and clad in the robes of a druid. His handsome face showed only concern for a friend. Even in his dreaming state, Jethro felt comforted as the other man reached up and placed his hand lightly on Jethro’s.

  “Did you know?” He heard the anguish in his words as they reverberated through his body.

  Merlin Caledonius shook his head. “I would have told you.”

  “How could she?” Jethro—this Jethro who was not Jethro—almost choked on the words. “How could she be unfaithful to me with Mordred? My own son. The son born of the relationship I have tried so hard to forget...”

  “If you let this defeat you, Morgan will have won.”

  Morgan! His eyes flew open in the darkness as he returned to the present. Of course he knew that voice. It was the voice of the woman who had seduced him when he was an eighteen-year-old virgin. The woman who had borne him a child, a boy called Mordred who grew up to hate his father. The woman who had not thought to tell him she was his older sister. The woman who, when he discovered their relationship, had tried to persuade him they could still be lovers. The woman who had haunted him throughout his life. That life. Who wanted him still in this one, it seemed.

  “You.” His voice was a hoarse croak in the darkness.

  “Yes, my love, it is I. I was always here. Always waiting. Always true. Always faithful. Unlike her, the one you took to be your wife.”

  He tried to move, but there was no space. “Guinevere was unfaithful because of you. Because of Mordred and his desire for revenge. Between you, you took the woman I loved from me.”

  “No.” The voice was still soft and coaxing. He had to fight hard not to lose himself in it. “I am the woman you love.”

  The woman I love. Forget the others. Think of her. Forcing himself to concentrate, Jethro conjured up her image, focusing on the way her eyes looked when they smiled into his. Those lips when they parted in a mischievous smile, or better still when they opened beneath his. The sound of her laughter, the feel of her hand in his...

  “Come back to me.” There was a touch of impatience in Morgan’s voice.

  “Never.” He felt her power tugging at him and forced his mind back to the image of a slender body twining itself around his.

  “You will. You cannot escape. I will be back.”

  He sensed Morgan’s presence leaving him and heaved a sigh of relief. You cannot escape. Morgan thought she had the man he once was imprisoned. She believed she had her brother Arthur trapped here in this dark, confined space. And, of course, she did. He knew that beyond a doubt. This was not a mind game. As incredible as it seemed, Jethro was Arthur, King of the Britons. But Morgan had also imprisoned the man he was now. She had Jethro de Loix locked up in this tiny space. And she didn’t know what she was dealing with. I have skills now I did not have then. Jethro permitted himself a little smile. What would the Romans have thought of my necromancing powers? Those long campaigns away from home would have been so much easier if I could have summoned an army of corpses to our aid...

  Morgan thought she had him where she wanted him. We’ll see about that. Locking up a necromancer isn’t as easy as you might think. He relaxed, flexing his fingers. Okay, it wasn’t an ideal position, but Jethro had been in worse situations in his time.

  He lifted his arms as far as they would go. “Hidercyme. Come here. Come to me.” He spoke in commanding tones. The same ones he had used to lead his armies into battle all those centuries ago.

  At first there was nothing and he wondered if it had worked. Then he heard the faintest rumble within the earth itself. It grew louder, and he lay back with a satisfied smile. They were on their way.

  * * *

  It was early morning, before the bustle of the day had begun, and Vashti waited until there was no one around before she approached Rina in the courtyard.

  “Jethro de Loix has gone missing.” She blurted the words right out. “I need to try to unravel some of the secrets around this place.”

  Rina regarded her with wide, frightened eyes. “I am not the person to ask.”

  “Rina, no one else will tell me. Please, if I am to find him and save him, I have to find out why Jethro is so important to Morgan le Fay. If you know anything that can help me—even the tiniest piece of information—I’m begging you to help me.”

  Rina cast a swift look around her, checking no one was near. “Meet me by the old well at the far side of the garden.”

  The old well Rina referred to was situated in an overgrown and disused part of the castle grounds. The minutes Vashti spent waiting for her nurse to arrive were among the longest of her life. Just when she had decided Rina was not going to come, she heard a rustling in the foliage. Looking furtive and troubled, Rina appeared.

 
; “I’m sorry. One of the court ladies stopped me and wanted to talk. I thought I’d never get away. Follow me.”

  She led Vashti to an empty potting shed that leaned precariously against one of the castle’s outer walls. Inside, it smelled of dank earth and mildew. There was a rickety wooden bench inside and Rina sat, gesturing for Vashti to sit next to her. To Vashti’s surprise, Rina’s eyes were filled with tears.

  “What is it?” She took both Rina’s hands in her own and was amazed to feel they were cold as ice.

  “I would do anything to spare you pain, my princess.”

  “I know that.”

  Rina’s tears spilled over. “What I must tell you now will cause you great misery.”

  A dreadful sense of foreboding settled over Vashti. “This is about Jethro.” Rina nodded. “Tell me. I need to know.”

  “It concerns the child. The one you call the challenger. He was not just any child. Even before his birth, he was destined for greatness.”

  Vashti wrinkled her brow. “How could that be? I thought he was not an immediate successor to King Ivo. He only became the heir to the faerie crown because he was the sole survivor of the massacre. Everyone else in line to the throne was murdered on that terrible night...by my father.”

  Rina swallowed hard. “That is true. But this child was already special. He was the great King Arthur of the Britons...born again.”

  Vashti heard the words but her mind refused to process what Rina was saying. For long, silent moments she simply stared, openmouthed, at the other woman. When she was finally able to speak, her voice was little more than a croak. “Explain.”

  “I will start at the beginning. When I was a young girl, I was a maidservant here at the castle. The great Morgan le Fay took a liking to me and introduced me into her entourage as her personal maid. I knew of her love for her half brother and her devastation she had been unable to save him when he was fatally wounded. She would spend long hours poring over her spell books, trying to find ways of bringing him out of the enchanted sleep she had placed him in. Her dilemma was that, if she did so, she knew he would die of his injuries. Then, one day, she became very excited. She believed she had found a way. If she could use her powers to extract his spirit and transfer it into the body of an unborn baby, that child would grow up to be Arthur. ‘Don’t you see, Rina?’ she said to me in great excitement. ‘He will no longer be my brother. I will wait for him and we can be together at last.’”

  “You are not going to tell me she went through with this plan?” Vashti felt a tight knot of nausea forming in her stomach.

  Rina hung her head. “I couldn’t stop her.”

  Vashti squeezed her hands. “I know that. From what I’ve heard of Morgan, no one can stop her.”

  “A few days after she hatched this plan, a contingent of faeries arrived here on Avalon. Their boat had been blown off course. One of the women, a noble princess who was a niece to King Ivo, was in the later stages of pregnancy. I saw a plan forming in Morgan’s eyes. That very night she drugged the princess and performed the magic ceremony. The woman didn’t know what had happened. She never knew that after that night her unborn child carried the soul of King Arthur within him. When the faeries left here, Morgan insisted the princess should take me with her as a gift. I was a skilled nursemaid. It was her way of ensuring I would be there to care for the child.”

  “Did anyone suspect anything after the child was born?” Vashti asked.

  Rina shook her head. “No. The birth was a normal one. He was a beautiful child.” She smiled reminiscently. “When he was a few months old, I received a message from Morgan. Moncoya was planning to overthrow King Ivo. There were no other details. Just that I was to take the baby and leave the faerie palace at midnight on the specified date.” Tears filled her eyes again. “I had become fond of my faerie mistress. If I had known...”

  “You could not have known my father’s plan was to kill them all. No one could have predicted how ruthless he would be in his quest to become the King of the Faeries.”

  Rina drew a breath, steadying herself so she could continue her tale. “I received no further instructions from Morgan. I was terrified. I knew if Moncoya discovered the whereabouts of the child, he would have him killed. Jethro was the only surviving relative of King Ivo, the new heir to the faerie crown. I went into hiding with him, but I had to think of a long-term plan to ensure his safety. I thought if I tried to get back to Avalon there was a good chance I would encounter Moncoya or some of his followers. The only place where I believed I might be safe from the new faerie king was the mortal realm. Moncoya’s hatred of the earth-born was legendary. And I knew a mortal woman who I thought might help.” She looked embarrassed. “I had become friends with her in the days before your father’s rule. When it was still acceptable to cross over into the mortal realm to do kind deeds or bring good fortune to those who deserved it. This woman was one whose goodness shone out of her. Her name was—”

  “Bertha de Loix.” Vashti said it for her. Her heart was racing as the pieces of the puzzle began to fall into place. Could it be true? Surely the scenario her mind was conjuring up was too fanciful to be true.

  “She was Bertha Toussaint when I first knew her. The sweetest, kindest mortal who ever walked the earthly realm. As a girl, she was always sickly. Back then, before your father banned such practices, those of us who followed the ways of the Seelie Court had an obligation to bestow vitality upon deserving mortals. I did my best to restore Bertha to good health. Later, when she married and it became obvious she couldn’t have the child she so desperately craved, I tried to help her. My efforts were to no avail. When I brought the faerie heir to the mortal realm and sought refuge with Bertha, it seemed we had found a solution to both our problems.”

  “You gave the child to Bertha to raise as her own.” Vashti spoke with certainty. She recalled that strange scene in the old de Loix house. When Jethro had asked Bertha if the challenger had been taken to Avalon, his mother had remained silent, avoiding his eyes. When he’d suggested he had been taken elsewhere in Otherworld, she had started to rock back and forth, still refusing to answer. But when he’d asked if the challenger’s nurse had taken him to the mortal realm, Bertha had become so distressed Gillespie had told Jethro to leave her alone. Of course she had become distressed! She didn’t want to be forced into telling Jethro the truth about his own origins.

  Because the irony—the incredible, impossible irony—of the situation they were in was that the challenger they were seeking was Jethro himself. If it wasn’t so maddening, Vashti could almost have laughed out loud. I have wasted all this time, and faced all this danger, looking for someone who was at my side all along!

  “Why doesn’t he look like a faerie?” She blurted out the first question that came into her head. She knew her voice must have sounded fierce by the way Rina shrank away from her. Forcing herself to soften her tone, she tried to explain. “You gave the child to Bertha. She raised him as a mortal and yet he did not look different or stand out. He looked like a mortal. He still looks like a mortal. Jethro believes he is mortal, yet he is faerie royalty.”

  Rina gave her a sidelong glance. “You have heard of a changeling?”

  Vashti frowned. “A changeling is a faerie substitute for a mortal baby. There was no exchange, there was no mortal child to be replaced.”

  “The magic was the same. I used the same spell to enchant him. He was a changeling. He didn’t take a mortal child’s place. He stayed himself. I simply made him look like a mortal baby.”

  “A changeling is a spiteful, hateful thing, bringing chaos and destruction into a mortal family’s lives.” Vashti thought of the man she loved. The man who used his power and money to care for deprived children. A good man. “Jethro is none of those things.”

  Rina shook her head. “A changeling is only evil if the faerie who makes the substitution wills i
t. I had no reason to wish that. Why would I? I wanted only happiness for the child in my care and for Bertha and her husband.”

  “Bertha never told Gillespie how she came by the child.”

  Rina hung her head. “We concocted the plan between us. Bertha knew if her husband discovered the truth about the child’s background he would never agree. She told him the baby had been left on the doorstep of her orphanage. He knew the adoption was not strictly legal, but he never learned the full extent of our deception.”

  “How did Jethro come by his necromancing powers?”

  “Is he a necromancer? I don’t know when those powers were bestowed.” Rina considered the matter. “Maybe at birth as a result of Morgan’s spells or perhaps when I be-spelled him to make him a changeling?”

  “Why did you take a job with my father?”

  Rina’s little face became sad. “I left Bertha and the child. If he was to survive, they had to be a normal mortal family. But I wanted to be close to Moncoya, to see if any suspicion ever leaked out about the child who survived and his whereabouts. My time at the faerie palace wasn’t all subterfuge. I loved you and Tanzi, my princess. You became like my own family. Over the years the rumors about the lost heir persisted, but no one ever knew if they were truth or legend. Moncoya was secure on his throne. He wasn’t interested in the challenger. There was only one person I feared.”

  “Morgan le Fay.”

  Rina cast a fearful glance over her shoulder as though expecting the powerful sorceress to appear. “Morgan had commanded me to take the child to safety. She knew the rumors a baby had survived the massacre, but, of course, she didn’t know where the child was or what had become of me. Over the centuries, Morgan’s powers have waned. Here on Avalon, she is still incredibly forceful. Elsewhere in Otherworld, she is less potent. In the mortal realm, her magic skills no longer have any effect.” Rina’s face was white, her hands trembling. “Of course, she found me. She dragged the truth from me. Part of it, at least. I told her the child was alive and being reared as a mortal. Her fury was boundless. She hurt me—” her lip trembled “—but I didn’t tell her his identity. She made the connection with Bertha, but, because of the orphanage, the child could have been one of hundreds. As long as Bertha remained in the mortal realm, Morgan couldn’t pry the truth from her. She even had Bertha and Gillespie killed, in an attempt to force them to come to Otherworld as ghosts.”