She lit a torch from her candle and pushed open the ironclad door hidden behind the baskets of new potatoes. Dust danced in the flickering light, rose in little clouds with every step she took down the circular stairway beyond. At its foot stood another door, this one covered so thickly with cobwebs she could barely see the carving that adorned it, the figure of an ancient monk. Only his nose was still clearly visible, sharp and crooked as a falcon’s beak.
“Well met, Joseph,” she said, giving it a tweak, paying no mind to the dirt. As a child she had studied this carving for hours, holding conversations with the long-dead cleric while her father worked in his study on the other side of the open door. “Have you nothing to say to me?” She took the key from her pocket and fitted it into the lock. “In faith, I need your counsel.” Using both hands, she finally forced the key to turn with a grinding squeal. “I fear we may be doomed, the both of us.” She shoved at the door with her shoulder, shuddering just a little as a spider raced down her arm and back into the web just over the door. It opened with a screech to reveal her father’s study, once her favorite room in the castle, abandoned for the past ten years. It was still as clean and neat as it had always been, as if her father had just that moment left it for the night. Stone coffers were stacked along the walls, sealed shut with covers too heavy for Isabel to lift, but she knew what was inside. She had seen the ancient parchments many times, traced a finger down the pages, studying the writing in a language no one now living could read. Her father’s desk was covered with newer scrolls, each neatly tied with a ribbon, and a candle stood waiting to be lit.
Her father had found the castle when he was already long past forty. The ruined keep on an overgrown island, seemingly forgotten, had seemed like paradise on earth to a knight grown weary of battle. He had built a proper motte-and-bailey fortress over the ancient stones and taken a wife from one of the villages nearby, a maid of seventeen with the flamered hair and green eyes of a Celt. No one had expected their union to produce a child, least of all Sir Gabriel himself. All he wanted was comfort in his waning years, a companion of spirit and good common sense to share his sanctuary.
But late in their first year together, just after his cas tle was finally completed, his pretty young bride had conceived. Nine months later, Isabel was born, a tiny, redhaired daughter, and his wife was dead.
“There must be something here,” the grown-up Isabel muttered, lighting the second candle and settling into her father’s chair. She was grasping at straws, she knew, desperately clinging to phantoms in her fear. But she could think of no better choice. Sir Gabriel had explored the texts in all these coffers, and she knew he had learned to read the language of the druids who had first hidden them there. She had always suspected he had even learned some of their magic, though he would never have admitted it. But he had told her many tales of wonder he had read in the ancient scrolls, tales that suggested he had known more than he was willing to say. “I need a conjure, Papa,” she said now, untying one of his own scrolls, forbidden to her eyes when he was alive. “Something that can save Charmot.” She used the ribbon to tie back her hair and opened the scroll on the desk.
There is no such thing as magic, ’Bella, she could almost hear him answer, the same thing he had always said. No magic but God’s grace.
“Where is God’s grace now, Papa?” she asked the empty air as her eyes searched the page. “Where was He when you died?” For seventeen years, Sir Gabriel had kept his Charmot fortress at his own expense with no help whatsoever from his king. But before his body had grown cold in its tomb, the king had been ready to
claim it. Apprised of Isabel’s inheritance, His Majesty had sent a royal herald.
“Make ready, my lady,” this stranger had told her, sketching an elegant bow. “Your noble husband will arrive anon.” Sixteen years old, still veiled in mourning for her father, sick with grief, she had stared at the herald in wonder, unable to credit her ears. Her husband? What did she need with a husband? As she remembered that moment now, a full ten years later, her jaw still clenched in fury.
“Never mind, poppet,” Brautus, the giant captain of her father’s guard, had soothed when the herald had gone. “Let him come.”
And thus the Black Knight had been born. When the king’s chosen favorite had arrived to claim her and Castle Charmot, he had found a demon already in residence, a mountain dressed in chain mail with a coal-black helmet like a devil’s head. Brautus had not been a young man even then, but his skills had been more than a match for the puffed-up courtier King Henry had chosen to rule this isolated, mostly profitless manor. Indeed, he had beaten the poor knight so easily, Isabel had been hard pressed not to laugh, watching from the battlements in her best white gown, the perfect damsel in distress. “Save me, sir knight,” she had shouted as the poor sot’s squires dragged him, broken and addled, back over the natural bridge that almost joined the island to the mainland. “Save me from this monster.” But King Henry’s man had seen enough of her and her castle already. As soon as he was hoisted on his horse, he had ridden off without a backward glance.
Others had come to challenge the Black Knight, enough to cause a legend to spring up. In the first years, most of the knights who came were as pitiful as the first, the desperate younger sons of minor nobles looking to win a manor of their own, or older men fallen into disgrace hoping to win sanctuary. But as time passed, the true nobles had lost interest in Isabel and her castle, as both proved to be more trouble than they were worth. Mercenaries and villains had begun to come in their place, evil men with little interest in damsels or castles, men who were looking to make a name as a killer even more lethal than
the Black Knight of Charmot. And all the while Brautus grew older. Now past sixty, his heart was still as strong, but his limbs were growing weaker by the day. So far he had still managed to vanquish every challenger who came, but victory was less assured with every fight. The month before, his shoulder had been broken in a skirmish with a Flemish mercenary half his age and of nearly the same giant size. Now another challenger was coming, a Frenchman named Michel.
“A cure for fever—useful, Papa, but not what I need.” She dropped the first scroll and opened up another. Her father had compiled much of the druids’ ancient medicine from his reading in the caverns in a book she kept upstairs. “I need a miracle.” Her father would tell her to consult a priest, no doubt, but in faith, she already had. Father Colin from the Chapel of Saint Joseph had been the messenger of her doom. Charmot did not have a village of its own, but it was the only fortress in the region, the only refuge in times of unrest, and the common folk all knew Isabel and pitied her in her plight. They made a kind of spy network on her behalf, watching every road for knights coming to claim her so she and Brautus would always be ready to send them away. That morning, Father Colin had made a rare pilgrimage from his church to tell her he had heard of a blackguard knight newly landed from France, coming with an entourage and boasting of his villainy all the way.
This second scroll was nothing but notes, no coherent narrative—part of her father’s research. The corner was decorated with the queer code Sir Gabriel had used to catalog his writings, a mixture of Greek letters and the same Celtic symbols carved into the stone coffers in this study and the walls of the caverns beyond. “Teach me, Papa,” she had begged him often, but he had always refused.
“Such matters are not for the innocent, ’Bella,” he would say sternly, sending her upstairs to play. But how innocent would she be if this Frenchman should capture her castle?
“Didn’t those druids ever require a champion?” she said aloud now. “Who protected their great treasure from the Romans?” She turned another page, an account in Latin of the harvest the year she’d turned ten. She read Latin easily, and French, and some Greek— useless gifts for a woman, perhaps, but it had amused her father to teach her. “Couldn’t they call up a demon from hell if they needed one?” The idea had first come to her when Father Colin had told her his news.
“You should flee, my lady,” the priest had advised. “Take your womenfolk with you, escape into the forest, take refuge in one of the villages. Leave them the castle; it’s all they really want.”
“No,” she had told him without a second thought. Charmot was her father’s castle, his dream; these people were her family. She would not leave them to a villain’s rule. And besides, if she should abandon Charmot, what would happen to the druids’ scrolls, to dead Saint Joseph and his catacombs? Somehow she felt the need to protect these things as strongly as she needed to protect the castle and its people. They were sacred to her because they had been important to her father, even if he had never really explained to her why. “Brautus will protect us as he always has, or I will conjure a real devil to fight in his stead,” she had joked to Father Colin.
“Blasphemy, my lady,” the priest had scolded her with a frown. “You must not even jest of such a thing.”
But in faith, had she been jesting? The more she had thought about it, the more dark magic had seemed like the perfect solution. If she had been a witch, she would have done it in an instant, blasphemy or not. She would call up every demon in hell if it meant saving Charmot. But her father said magic wasn’t real. “Send me a demon,” she whispered to the candle’s flame, willing the spirits that surely must still haunt these caves to hear her. “Send me a true Black Knight.” The candle flickered, and for a moment, she thought she heard a breath of wind, an eerie, groaning sigh.
“My lady.” Susannah, one of the castle maids, was standing in the doorway. “One of the woodsmen from the river town has come. He says those Frenchmen have stopped in the tavern and drunk themselves into a stupor. They will not make it so far as Charmot tonight.”
“May God be praised,” Isabel answered, gathering up her father’s scrolls as if that had been her purpose all along. She had found nothing of use in them, but perhaps she still might. “At least we shall have one more night.”
The Chapel of Saint Joseph looked like just the sort of place a magical cup might be found, a Roman temple half crumbled to ruins in the middle of a misty English plain. All the clues and signs Simon and Orlando had found over ten years of searching the world had brought them to this spot. But the Chalice wasn’t there.
“The Saxons raided the church many times,” the priest who kept the chapel explained, holding up his torch to show them the scorch marks on the cracked plaster walls. “Anything of value here was stolen long ago.” He gave Simon a piercing look. “What is it you seek, my lord?”
Salvation, Simon almost said, but what would be the point? The priest—Father Colin—had barely blinked an eye to see a knight with armor and a dwarvish squire but no horse standing in his dooryard after dark. Indeed, he had just been returning to the church himself; perhaps he thought they’d been waiting all afternoon.
“Knowledge, Father,” Simon told him now. He took a few steps closer to the altar, staring at the cross mounted behind it. Ten years ago, the very sight would have caused his eyes to burn and weep tears of blood. But now he could face it without flinching, at least for a moment, the only pain he felt a cold ache in the hollow that had once held his heart. Crosses could harm him; so could holy water and any relic that had been blessed by a priest. Orlando attributed this to Simon’s own faith over any genuine power contained within the objects themselves; either way, he had learned not to risk it. “I am a scholar.”
The altarpiece was painted directly on the wall, its colors now faded and flaking away. But he could still make out the empty tomb and the disembodied faces of the angels gathered above it, their robes now crumbled to dust. “A scholar and a knight,” he finished, touching the wall.
“My lord has traveled in the Holy Land,” Orlando explained. “He has seen many portents of some great power hidden in this place.”
“A pilgrim from Our Lord’s own lands?” the priest said with awe in his tone.