The Night Dance by Suzanne Weyn Read Free Book Online

question it?” Rowena pressed.
    “The whole thing is strange,” Eleanore agreed. “But isn’t it strange that we are sitting in a huge cavern right now?”
    Rowena smiled at Eleanore’s words. “Incredibly odd, yes.”
    Eleanore stood abruptly as a new worry seized her. “I’m not sure we know the way back,” she said glancing around at the many pathways leading into the cavern.
    “We came in that way,” Rowena said, pointing at the passage directly behind them.
    “I think it was over there,” Gwendolyn called to them.
    The sisters came back together as the seriousness of their situation dawned on them. “Where’s the music?” Rowena asked. “Perhaps we can follow that back.”
    They listened intently until they detected the faintest strains of lute music. The sisters gazed at one another hopefully before realizing that the music was coming from every opening in the cavernous rock wall.

C HAPTER T EN
Sir Bedivere No More
     
    Sir Bedivere began walking along the shore, heedless of the effects of the surf on his chain mail armor. He had secured Excalibur in his own scabbard and tucked his sword into his belt. With no thought to a destination, he moved like a sleepwalker. When hunger gripped his stomach, he barely noticed it.
    So deep and complete was his despair that he remained nearly oblivious to the pounding surf or the calling seabirds overhead. He was the walking dead, the last man standing in a battle that had taken every last soul.
    He would have walked into the ocean, confident that his heavy armor would weigh him down beneath its waves, if it had not been for his promise to the dying Arthur. Now he was obliged to stay alive long enough to fulfill his mission—and not a moment longer.
    Would any lake do for completing the task? Did he have to throw the sword into a special lake? How would he ever know if he’d done it right? Why do it at all? Arthur was dead—what difference could this make to him now?
    Still, he had sworn. He’d given his word as a knight of the Round Table. The importance of that might be fast becoming a memory, disappearing from the world altogether, but it was still crucial to him.
    Arthur had taken him on as a groom and valet when he was but twelve and Arthur was a young king. Bedivere had carried Arthur’s armor, readied his clothing, made sure his horse was watered and brushed down properly. The servant had grown to be a companion, confidant, and—in his early teen years, when Arthur felt he’d earned it—knight.
    In the five years he’d been a knight he had seen and done unimaginable things. He’d helped Arthur do battle with a village of mountain people, all closely related to one another, who were so big—both tall and wide—that they were considered giants by their neighbors.
    When these giants began kidnapping young women from neighboring towns, desiring to bring new bloodlines into their gigantic genes, the townspeople prevailed on Arthur and Bedivere to save their captured wives and daughters. They’d returned every last woman, though the giants had left the warriors battered and in need of new armor.
    He had been beside Arthur when they slew a fierce cave-dwelling creature with breath so hot people claimed it breathed fire. Merlin had looked it up in his volume of ancient wisdom and identified it as a pterosaur, though the terrified local villagers had named it a dragon.
    When Arthur wed his queen, Guinevere, and began staying closer to Camelot, Bedivere had still believed that their days of adventure, merriment, and chivalry would go on forever. Even after he’d lost the use of his left hand while fighting beside Arthur against the Saxon invaders, he’d remained hopeful. He never would have believed that such a defeat as they had just suffered would ever come to them. But now he was certain that a new age of darkness had befallen.
    He stopped only to sleep on the sand. That night he woke up with the high tide nearly over his mouth and scrambled up to