“Pick any book,” Duke hissed.
That was an idea. I glanced around wildly, looking for a place to hide us.
A nearby cart carried special orders that hadn’t been picked up by customers yet.
I grabbed at them.
Dante’sInferno? No, we were definitely not hiding out in Hell.
The Plagueby Albert Camus.
Absolutely not.
The Parable of the Sowerby Octavia Butler.
“Why is everybody reading depressing, scary books? Somebody order something happy,” I muttered.
At the bottom of the pile, I found exactly what we needed. The footsteps grew louder.
“Hurry,” Duke said.
There. Perfect. I opened the book to a random page and prayed for a safe chapter.
“Got it. Koshka.”
He leapt into Duke’s arms. Then I grabbed Duke’s hand.
I quietly and quickly recited, “Hic jacet Arthurus, Rex quondam, Rexque futurus.”
With a flick of my fingers, I opened my black umbrella and the three of us fell through a hole in the fabric of reality, turning ourselves into the dot on a lowercase “i” in the word “Hic.”
—
Down, down, wewent, seemingly falling forever.
When we did finally land, it was slowly, like a balloon returning to earth. Our feet touched ground in a meadow of wildflowers. Duke stumbled to the side and caught hold of a tree trunk while I sank to my knees to catch my breath.
“Where…where are we?” Duke asked.
Panting, I glanced around, taking stock of our surroundings.
Snowy white wood anemones carpeted the edge of a wild forest.
And far in the distance, gleaming like a new and golden morning, stood a castle.
“You, a duke of the realm, don’t recognizethat?” I asked, pointing to the castle.
“No…” he breathed and stepped away from the tree. “Is that…?”
“Welcome to Camelot, Duke.”
There are no words for the moment a son of Britain sees Camelot for the first time. So we said nothing, merely soaked in the sunlight. And there is no sunlight like the sunlight of Arthurian England, though we all have seen it, of course. Remember your best day in the sun as a child. That’s the light. The sunlight that shines only in a perfect memory.
“Rainy…” Duke said. “How did we get here?”
“Someone had special orderedThe Legends of King Arthur,” I said. “Good place to hide for a few minutes, right?”
My black umbrella hovered overhead. I took it by the handle and moved it into the shadows cast by an oak tree. Merlin was afoot and he would definitely steal a magic umbrella if he ran across one. Who wouldn’t?
