Song of the Sword Read Online Free Page A

glass-like face.
    “Your mother, until she rejected my power,” the Lady said. “Now, you.”
    Ariane’s heart pounded. “I have gone crazy.”
    “No.” The Lady took Ariane’s hand in her smooth, cold fingers, and pulled her to her feet. “I am neither a ghost nor a hallucination. I am as real as you.” She suddenly turned and stared at the veil behind Ariane, frowning. “As real as…” She released Ariane, strode to the veil, and thrust a hand through it. “This eavesdropper!”
    With a jerk, the Lady pulled into the chamber a boy, younger than Ariane, with unruly red hair and wide green eyes in a face so white every freckle on it stood out as though drawn with a brown felt pen. Ariane had no idea what his name was, but she’d seen him just the day before: he’d been in the office while she was getting suspended. She remembered him staring at her, his eyes almost as wide then as they were now.
    Ariane gaped at him. It’s really happening. It’s all real. It couldn’t be her imagination, because there was no way she would ever imagine this geeky kid, silently opening and closing his mouth like a landed fish, staring at the Lady as though afraid she might turn him into a frog. S he probably could if she wanted to , Ariane thought. Certainly the Lady was examining the boy as if she were a biologist and he a particularly peculiar specimen of amphibian. “Astonishing,” she murmured. “Of course you would be drawn to me. But I didn’t know...I wonder if Merlin…”
    But whatever she wondered, she didn’t say. The boy suddenly yelped and dug frantically in his pocket, digging out a smartphone that he dropped the moment he had it. “It’s hot!” he said, staring down at it. The phone’s screen blazed white, and steam rose all around it.
    The water-woman stared down at the phone, mouth open, hand outstretched. For a moment, she looked as frozen and lifeless as the glass statue she resembled. Then a single drop of water formed at the end of her nose and dropped to the floor with a musical “plink.” At the sound, the Lady returned to life again. “No!” she cried. “You have revealed me to him!”
    Ariane stared at her. “Revealed you to who? What’s wrong?”
    “Listen!” the Lady said.
    Ariane listened, and heard the trickling of water behind her. She turned and saw a thin stream flowing down the watery steps that led up to the sunlit world.
    As she watched, that trickle grew.
    “I have a bad feeling about this,” the geeky kid muttered.
    Ariane scrambled to her feet. “We have to get out of here!” she cried.
    But the Lady grabbed her wrist, making her yelp, the transparent fingers as solid as steel. “Not yet!” the Lady cried. “You must listen! I have only seconds. Remember: Excalibur will call to you. Follow its song. Find it, all of it, before Merlin does. Your whole world depends on it.” The trickle grew to a frothing stream. Water, cold as ice, flowed into Ariane’s shoes. “Your mother refused to accept the power. But you must. You must! There is no one else .”
    She released Ariane’s wrist, but then, quick as a striking snake, seized her face in both hands. Ariane gasped. The Lady’s palms, at first cool against her cheeks, suddenly blazed with heat. Deep within the water-woman’s clear gaze, Ariane saw twin blue pools the color of midsummer sky. Those pools rushed toward her, then swallowed her whole.
    The chamber and the cold water lapping at her ankles faded from her senses. She felt as though she were floating in a warm lake, fathoms deep. The sound of waterfalls and rushing creeks filled her head and formed strange words: Gadewch y dyfroedd byw ynoch, a chi o fewn y dyfroedd. Yp ˆ wer yn eiddo i chi. Though the language was one she had never heard, Ariane somehow knew what the words meant: “Let the waters live within you, and you within the waters. The power be yours.” And indeed, she sensed the power within the strange phrases, so much power that, just for a