Avalon Rising by Kathryn Rose Read Free Book Online

the castle as a faceless man, but keep your name under the guise of a farmer?”
    “I needed to be close to the wizard,” he says. “You weren’t his only apprentice, my lady, and that is something Marcus does not know. Merlin chooses those who would be of unique and practical use to him.” His eyes dive into an old memory he never entertains when he could choose happier ones instead. “I promised the old fool we’d both see the Grail in Camelot. If I’d found the coordinates to Avalon, I might have been able to bring my family inside the castle. To be a blacksmith wasn’t enough on its own. Bribery, threats. I tried everything.” He leans on the table, and his arms carry a leftover summer tan that would brand him as an outsider. But an iron-masked blacksmith would fade into Camelot’s background when brightly dressed nobility and dandies strolled the village streets.
    I step forward. “But Marcus was a squire—”
    “Yes, and so Marcus had to become a knight. For his mother’s sake.” His face goes dark with thoughts of the past, and his eyes flicker again to the wrought-iron cross. “Damn the Grail, and damn the idiots who seek it. I’d give anything to see my boy safe now. Six months gone—they were supposed to be back after three!”
    I see Marcus whenever I think of the dangers unconquered on the quest, and it is nearly too much to bear. The blacksmith’s fingers weave through his hair, messing it up. For a moment, he looks like his son, and I can no longer watch. I wonder if he knows Marcus is missing. “My lord—”
    “You can call me Rufus, my lady.”
    I nod, knowing if I were to extend the same offer he’d likely refuse, as Marcus once did. “Sir Kay brought news of Galahad’s infantry.”
    “I heard. And now it seems Jerusalem has fallen to pirates of the skies. Word spreads quickly when there are few lips to pass it on.” He rolls up the sleeves to his tunic as though he’s about to get to work. It reveals tattoos across his forearms in an old style. A choppy alphabet scrawled in thick black ink. Fragments of symbols I can’t decipher, symbols I recognize from the linings of Guinevere’s vestments. Alphabets that were etched into the back of the sorcerer’s skull.
    Rufus sees me studying them. “Lyonesse … it was a place of magic. To appear as one of them was the safest way to live.”
    I look up, unable to stop my eyes from asking the most obvious question. He reads me easily.
    “No, I didn’t dabble. I got the markings to protect myself in hopes I’d be left alone.”
    He gestures to the pathway. Together, we make our way to the streets in the village. I glance in the distance at the gas lanterns’ glow spilling through the windows in the main hall. My father is there with Lancelot and the others, the only ones left. And the messenger from Sarpenic, surely, to discuss what must now be done about the attack on Jerusalem. The snow continues to fall, but the breeze has subsided, letting flakes drift wherever they will without the force of wind to guide them.
    “Forgive me for taking all this time to finally speak with you. I’m sure you understand, though.” He squeezes the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger. “These damned eyes of ours… I couldn’t risk having him discovered as the son of a man who’d lived in Lyonesse, who had the inked skin of someone who lived there. It would have been next to impossible for him to become a knight if word got of who I was.”
    I sift through my recollection of Marcus staring at me in the grand hall during the royal wedding and the way his eyes were so strange. So captivating. So unusual. How I came to be entranced by them.
    “Word has it that … ” Rufus stops there, unsure of how to arrange his words, his foot tapping restlessly on the ground. “Marcus won’t be a knight forever, then.”
    I find it hard to hold the blacksmith’s gaze. Even harder to recall the memory of Owen telling me so himself. “No,” I