The Shadow Dragons - James A. Owen [36]
“Hmm,” Jack mused, looking around the low embankment. “He’s probably off taking a nap.”
“Well, let’s go,” John began, turning to instruct the others on a plan of action, when he saw Rose and stopped.
She had dropped to her knees in the sand, and her eyes were full of tears. Quixote had knelt beside her and was gently trying to console her. Archie too was doing his best to make supportive gestures.
“We’re all idiots,” muttered Jack under his breath to John. “We were so intent on getting out of the tower that it never occurred to us how she would take coming here.”
He’s right, John thought as they moved over to the girl, on both counts.
Rose had been born on Avalon. She was conceived in the city of Alexandria, but her mother, Gwynhfar, had fled the Summer Country and come here. Gwynhfar joined the other two women on the island, the enchantress Circe and the sea-witch Calypso, in becoming the Morgaine—the three supernatural women who may have been the Fates, or goddesses, or simply beings of incomprehensible power.
Sometimes they changed personalities, if not personages— Gwynhfar was not among them when John, Jack, and Charles first met them—but there were always three, and they always reflected aspects of who they truly were. Sometimes they appeared as beautiful women; sometimes, harried old hags. Often the advice they gave was useful, but in John’s experience, they were more manipulative than helpful. But whatever else they were, the original Morgaine had been Rose’s mother and surrogate aunts. And whatever else Avalon represented, it had been the only home she had known, until John and Jack arrived there centuries earlier and took her with them to resurrect a dead king.
From that experience, she went to England and into a boarding school—and she had never come back to the place of her birth until now. So she had no memories of Avalon except from when it was full of gleaming, glorious edifices fit to rival the finest Greek temples. To come here now and see the island in such a state of disrepair had to be shattering.
“What happened?” Rose was asking as the other men knelt beside her. “What happened to my home? How did it get this way?”
“It’s been almost five centuries,” John said softly. “Many things change in that much time.”
“But wasn’t the knight here?” she asked, clutching Charles’s hands. “You were here, Uncle Charles. Why did you let this happen?”
Charles stammered a bit under the directness of the question. “I . . . uh, I wish I could tell you, my dear child,” he said, looking to John and Jack for support. “It wasn’t I who came here, but I know he did the best he could.”
“No one lives forever,” Jack said, nodding in agreement. “Chaz did everything he could, I’m sure—but when he died, another took his place.”
“And another after that,” added John. “There have been twenty-six Green Knights, in fact, and I’m sure they all did the best they could. But nothing lasts forever.”
“Well, something should,” Rose said, still sniffling but calmer now. Quixote produced a beautiful if faded silk handkerchief for her to wipe her face and blow her nose. “Some things should last forever, especially when they exist on an island like Avalon.”
“Tell you what,” said John. “We’ll find the Green Knight, the one who is the Guardian now, and we’ll ask him what happened here.”
“That sounds like a plan to me,” Charles said, rising to his feet and cracking his knuckles. “I’d like to know where Maggot is myself.”
The companions searched the island for the better part of an hour, but to no avail. There was no sign of Magwich.
He’d originally been forced to take the role of protector of Avalon by the Dragons, who offered him the choice of service or slow roasting on a spit. Others had become the Green Knight as a form of penance—but only Magwich, who had been a failed apprentice Caretaker, actually saw the role as a means to do as little as possible. He was lazier than he was