Ethan was instantly on his feet, heading for the door. Before he was over the threshold, though, he collapsed once again.
The monk tended to him and in a day more, Ethan was once again strong. Although the monks of the monastery implored him to stay, insisting that his daughters were not real, Ethan was determined to get back to them.
Heading down the road, he recognized the spot where he had been encamped as a soldier ten years earlier. He entered the forest there and easily found his way toward his house. It seemed strange to him that he could have ever lost his way; it was so clear to him now. Indeed, it did seem as though some sort of fog had been lifted from his mind.
When he came over the embankment near where he lived, he stopped, a terrible fear gripping him. His house was below, where he had built it. But the glistening lake beside it was gone. Only the jutting boulder remained.
An overpowering terror seized him as he recalled what the monks had said. Perhaps these past ten years with Vivienne and his twelve beautiful daughters had never happened.
What if, all these years, he had been no more than a madman under a spell?
Maybe there never had been a lake in this spot.
Maybe there had been no Vivienne. No children.
With a pounding, frantic heart he raced down the hill, scattering leaves and branches in his desperate need to know the truth, no matter how terrible.
Throwing open the front door, he was greeted by the questioning gaze of twelve sets of hopeful young eyes seated at various places around the room. “Did you find mother?” Eleanore asked.
Words choked in his throat. He was so overcome with relief to see that his children were indeed real—to observe some small resemblance to their mother in each expectant, upturned face—that he collapsed into a chair and became engulfed with great, heaving sobs.
In that moment he somehow knew that these twelve daughters were all he had left of Vivienne. Despair mingled with relief as he dropped his head into his hands and continued to sob disconsolately.
One by one the girls came to him, stroking and hugging him with their small, tender, consoling hands. This great figure of a heaving, sobbing man, their father, was all they had left as well.
Four months passed and Ethan finally stopped looking out the door at twilight, hoping for Vivienne’s miraculous, improbable return. With his once fervent hopes at last fully faded, he decided to pack away her clothing and other things.
It was while cleaning out Vivienne’s possessions that he came upon a carved wooden box hidden at the bottom of a trunk. Opening it, he discovered brilliant blue sapphires and gleaming diamonds inside. Pouring these gems into a leather hunting pouch, he traveled by foot to the nearby town of Glastonbury to see what this unexpected treasure would buy him. The girls followed him as far as the front doorway. “Stay put. I will return,” he told them as he bolted the door.
Within two days he returned on horseback, leading a veritable army of artisans and ox-drawn carts carrying every sort of building supply. In the lead of this strange procession were axe-wielding men who hacked a wide swathe through the forest.
The twelve girls watched, both excited and a bit worried, while day after day the ground shook as additional trees were felled and the land cleared. The air rang with the hammering and banging of working men. Each day their lovely cottage expanded and grew, climbing higher here, widening there. Soon the original cottage lay in the center of a grand manor house. Masons surrounded this new home with a wall nearly ten feet high.
When the building was done, Ethan still had sapphires and diamonds remaining in his pouch. He used them to obtain marble flooring from Rome, mirrors framed in gold from the mines in Carmarthenshire, carved furniture from Norsemen of the Scandinavian Peninsula, and pottery and dishware imported from Asia and brought to Britain by the Romans. He bought bolts of fabrics from merchants who obtained them from the Normans and Franks across the Great English Channel. He procured linens, weavings, and dyed woolens from the Celts who traversed the Irish Sea. His girls would want for nothing.
Except freedom.
When the building and furnishing was finished, Sir Ethan shut the ornate, ten-foot wrought iron gate that connected both sides of the wall, bolting the lock with a resounding clang. Nothing would get in—and no one would get out.
Only Ethan would come and go from this lavish prison in the forest. Furnishing his new home had made him familiar with the ways of importing. Being so close to the Bristol Channel gave him easy access to the ships that arrived with goods from other places. With his remaining gems to start him off, Ethan was soon a thriving merchant of imports.
His twelve daughters, once so used to running barefoot through streams and building mud maidens beside their now-vanished lake, were shut in. Having lost Vivienne to the forest, Sir Ethan was determined to suffer no more losses.
CHAPTER TWO
The Lost Lady of the Lake
Vivienne gazed up from her watery prison below the lake’s surface. Never had her determination to break free of the enchantment that trapped her there been greater.
In a dream, she had seen that her nephew, Arthur, leader of the united Seven Kingdoms of Britain, High King of Camelot, was in mortal danger.
She was the leader of the magical realm of Avalon, and Vivienne’s visions were not the mere dreams of a sleeper. Through years of mystical study, she had cultivated her dreaming ability until it functioned as yet another way of seeing. Even now, locked away in an underground lake, important dreams still came to her.
And this dream disturbed her mightily. In it, Arthur was fighting for his life. Even the enchanted sword, Excalibur, that she had given him would not be powerful enough to protect him against his foe, Mordred.
Her kinswoman, Morgan le Fey, mistress of dark sorcery and Arthur’s half sister, had sent her son, Mordred, into battle against Arthur. She had concocted a lethal poison into which Mordred had dipped the tip of his own sword.
Vivienne had sworn to her dying sister, Ingraine, Arthur’s mother, that she would always protect young Arthur from harm. She had used her magic to fashion him a sword so magical that it would protect him from all bodily harm. It made Arthur invincible in battle and nearly immortal.
Creating Excalibur had been her crowning achievement. All her skill at harnessing the forces of nature and magic had gone into its formation. More than ever before, she was thankful for all she had learned from Merlin, the greatest wizard of the age.
Merlin had been a generous mentor, revealing to her secrets of magic and wizardry previously known only to him. But she paid a price for being his only student. There were those on Avalon who envied her friendship with the ancient sorcerer. As an excuse to attack her, they insisted that she be punished for intending to grant powers reserved for the mystic realm to a mortal.
In her own defense, Vivienne argued that Arthur was entitled to it as a son of Ingraine, a sorceress of Avalon. It didn’t matter that his father was the chieftain Uther Pendragon, a mortal. Arthur’s mother was from Avalon, and he was entitled to the protection of Avalon.
Vivienne’s enemies were not swayed. Rumors spread that they plotted against her life.
She hid the sword away for the day when Arthur, who was still a child, would require it. And then she made plans to hide in the mortal realm in order to escape the wrath of those she had angered.
Conjuring a spell, she wished for her perfect mortal lover. Ethan’s face instantly appeared in the scrying bowl, the gold-lined vessel used in the old ways for magical seeing. The moment she laid eyes on his strong face she understood that, though he was only mortal, complete happiness would be hers if she could win him.
And win him, she did. At first, she used a spell to lure him and make him love her, but soon their union became the partnership of true soul mates.
Their life together exceeded her wildest hopes for happiness. She had children quickly, wanting to make up for the time she had lost as a childless woman of magic. She luxuriated in the o
ceanic pleasures of true love that she received from both her babes and her devoted husband. For ten years she lived an idyllic existence, hiding in the mortal world.
From time to time she would walk out of her cottage and use her scrying bowl to check on Arthur. The day finally came, however, when young Arthur’s first sword, the one he pulled from the stone set in place by Merlin, was smashed in battle. Struggling valiantly, Arthur won the day even with half a sword, but he would require a new weapon.
He would need Excalibur.
So she set out to take Excalibur and its scabbard from its hiding place beneath the magical lake she had formed outside her cottage. She gave it to the young king as a gift, asking only that he return it to her upon his death.
For years Arthur prospered with Excalibur’s help, uniting Britain, staving off outside invasions, building the glorious kingdom of Camelot, and creating the Round Table of revered and noble knights.
More years passed and she continued to observe Arthur’s triumphs through her scrying bowl, keeping her word to her sister to make sure he stayed safe. But a time came when the vision she saw in her bowl was disturbing. Through magical trickery, Morgan le Fey had stolen Excalibur and given it to a knight named Accolon whom she had seduced. Vivienne saw that Morgan’s plan was to have Accolon slay Arthur using Excalibur to do the job.
Rushing to Arthur’s aid, Vivienne abruptly left the cottage one evening. Traveling by magic means, she found Morgan le Fey at Camelot with Accolon.
In a fury of spells and counterspells, curses and antidotes, they battled. Afraid, Accolon tried to rid himself of the sword and scabbard by throwing them into a nearby lake. Assuming a watery form, Vivienne disappeared below the surface to retrieve them. When she resurfaced her enemies had fled.
She was able to give the sword back to the grateful Arthur, but upon her return to her cottage home, she was ambushed by Morgan le Fey and Accolon. The knight plunged her into the lake while Morgan le Fey exercised her dark powers, sinking the lake many miles below the Earth’s surface into a huge subterranean cavern and sealing it with an impenetrable surface, like a bubble of inescapable magic.
After falling, the lake seemed to settle. Vivienne could see that no sun filtered through the water. Only a pale glow from above reached her. It was even fainter than moonlight.
Vivienne quickly discovered that though she could hover near the top, she couldn’t break through the surface of the water. It was as though it had been coated with some thickening agent that she could not penetrate.
What new magic was this? It confounded her. She sank again to the bottom, wondering what enchantment Morgan had conjured that could stump her in this way. For all her training, Vivienne had never seen a spell like this.
Did they think they had drowned her? Morgan had to know that water was Vivienne’s element. She was as at home in it as a fish. In fact, that was why she had created the lake next to her cottage, because she could not stand to be too far from water.
Despite this, her kinswoman’s magic proved surprisingly powerful and Vivienne’s own powers had been weakened by her struggle with the sinister enchantress. No amount of focus or concentration was sufficient to free her from this watery prison.
The days passed as Vivienne tried to undo the spell that held her. Before long, she had exhausted all her counter charms and spells.
Not knowing what else to do, she languished there below the ground beside her cottage, so near and yet completely unable to contact those she loved so passionately.
If only she had her scrying bowl. But she had set it down at the foot of an ancient, gnarled tree before setting off on her quest to defeat Morgan le Fay and Accolon. With it she might at least observe how her little girls fared without her, how her beloved Ethan was managing in her absence.
She couldn’t understand why one of her girls had not picked up the bowl by now. She hadn’t left it far from the cottage. Certainly they were forever wandering through the woods. They had her restless, curious spirit and their father’s fearless courage.
Something was keeping them away from it. She sensed it. And it made her afraid that some harm or imprisonment had befallen them. She hoped for a dream of them, but none came.
In time, a degree of strength returned to her. For a while, she spent all her energy directing magic at the seal that covered her. But Morgan’s magic held fast there.
Finally giving up on that plan, she turned instead to the task of finding a side way out. Vivienne spent the next days of her imprisonment probing with her magic, and she had some success in blasting out watery tunnels.
She created a network of many paths under the ground. The tunnels would fill with water until they turned upward, above the water. From that point, the tunnels traveled through dry ground and under rock ledge, finally coming out to the natural cavern under the earth where her lake was now located.
With all her focus and memory of the landscape near her home, she continued to blast out tunnels. She clamped her eyes shut and tried to envision every tunnel, blasting out new ones that led out of the cavern.
She created these pathways with the diligence of a burrowing mole. She used her magic to fill each tunnel with the music of Avalon, music she remembered loving as a child. If she was ever able to escape, she wanted this magical music to be there to guide her way back to her cottage.
The last tunnel she dug with her magic would lead from the cavern right into a root cellar under her cottage—at least she hoped it did; she couldn’t be sure. It was this last tunnel that inspired her to hope an escape might be possible.
When this last tunnel was completed, she headed toward the nearest underground opening, intending to travel up and into the cavern and to go from there to her cottage. But as soon as she got near the underwater entrance, she was thrown backward.
That impenetrable bubble that sealed her off from the surface was apparently all around her, not only above. Morgan had apparently learned her spell-making well. Even with the powerful training Vivienne had received in Avalon and from Merlin, she could not break through this enchantment.
She had to face the truth: She could not get out on her own. Someone from the outside would need to find a way to free her.
Closing her eyes, Vivienne touched the tips of her fingers together and focused her mind. Gone was the whirlwind of emotional torment, replaced by an imposed calm. Using the methods of mental discipline she had studied with Merlin, Vivienne concentrated on contacting her daughters.
At least one of them, if not all, must have inherited some of her mystical powers. She’d often noticed Rowena, the youngest of the girls—her baby—staring off into space with a faraway look in her beautiful green eyes as though she were seeing some vision from another time and place. It was a sure sign that she had the vision, and it was what Vivienne was now counting on.
CHAPTER THREE
Rowena’s Escape
After weeks of chipping away at the opening, Rowena finally managed to squeeze her hips through the narrow break in the wall and draw her legs through to the other side. She stood and gazed at the giant pines surrounding her, feeling like a baby, newly born into a wonderful, wide world. She breathed deeply, drawing in the pungent fragrance of pine needles and bark, moss and mud.
She walked forward into the forest, calculating that she had about an hour before she would have to return. She’d told her sisters that Helen was teaching her to cook in the kitchen so she wouldn’t be joining them for embroidery.
“Why do you want to cook?” her twin, Ashlynn, had questioned. “You won’t ever need to cook.”
Rowena had shrugged. “I’m bored of embroidery,” she’d answered. That much, at least, had been true and from the slovenly work she produced, her sisters could well believe it.
“I think it would be fun to cook,” her sister Brianna had said. “I’d love to have guests over and feed them and have big parties in the evenings. That’s what I dream of. Oh, but Father never lets anyone near us. He’s too frightened t
hat a guest might sneak out with one of us hidden under his cloak.”
Rowena took one more step and remembered that she wore the silk slippers her father had commissioned for them from a shoemaker in Glastonbury. Her father said the material was made by worms that spun it in far off Oriental lands. It had been brought by ship and cost him dearly.
The slippers were beautiful, made in shiny, deep, jewel tones, edged with delicate ribbon, and wonderfully comfortable; but they were not suited to outside wear since they tore easily and showed every bit of dirt. Since the sisters never went farther than the slate-tiled courtyard, they were fine. But a walk in the forest would destroy them and would reveal that she’d gone out. Removing the slippers, she stuck one in each pocket of her cloak and continued on, barefoot.
Without the benefit of shoes, Rowena had to pick her way carefully over rocks and fallen branches. She walked until she felt certain she could not be seen from any high manor window, then, shrugging off her cape and hanging it on a branch, she crawled up onto a large flat boulder that was drenched in sun and stretched out.
The rock was warm and felt good against her skin. She pushed up the long, draped, white sleeves of her gown to feel more of it against her.
Closing her eyes into the sun produced dancing flashes of orange, red, and yellow bursts behind her lids. An insect chirped and the repetitive sound lulled her hypnotically. Soon she lapsed into a half sleep, and a scene took form behind her closed lids.
Hundreds of armed men and horses battled on a field. Swords clashed and arrows flew. She was peering out of eyes that were not her own. A veil of blood splashed before her as a soldier crumpled to the ground. An anguished cry of pain grabbed her attention and spun her around. “Nooo!” someone shouted, and she had the feeling she was the one who had spoken.