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Then past Guinevere who calmly glanced between me then Lancelet, who was hot on my heels, and then resumed her unpacking.

Screeching and laughing, I ran past our tethered horses and down towards the nearby stream. Draven was crouched by the water’s edge, shaving with a dagger. He looked up in surprise as I approached, then grinned and shook his head.

I ran past him, plunging into the stream, just as Lancelet caught up with me. Unable to stop herself, she was up to her knees with momentum just as I swept a wave of icy water towards her with a huge sweep of my arm, drenching her from head to toe.

“You’re soaked,” I crowed, jumping up and down in glee.

She sputtered. “You are, too, you idiot!”

“Yes, but I got you first. Look at you!” I cackled like a mad woman.

“Look at me! Look at you! For all you know, there are leeches in these waters!”

“There are. Plenty of them,” Draven said from the rocky bank. “I pulled three off my face just now.”

Lancelet and I looked at each other. Then, shrieking and laughing and screaming, we ran for the bank.

CHAPTER 30 - MORGAN

We reached the Black Mountain nearly a week later.

Except for the brief moment of levity Lancelet and I had shared days back, a subdued mood had fallen over our group and remained like a heavy cloud. One might have even called it a gloom.

I felt filled with a deep and troublesome melancholy the closer we came to the mountain that held my father’s court. Nothing I said to myself and nothing Draven tried to say or do could dissipate it.

I knew the mountain was where I had to go. I knew what I had to do.

But the doing of it was hard. Harder than anything I had ever done before.

I was no hero. I was just a person swept up in events greater than myself. Wave after wave, the pull of fate had swept me along until I had finally arrived here at this place.

And I could not help but see it as a place of ending.

I knew I would give everything I had to succeed. But there were different measurements of success.

For days, we had followed a narrow, winding path through sheer cliffs and along treacherous slopes. Jagged rocks protruded from the ground, slowing our progress and wounding one of our pack horses so badly that we’d had to leave it behind. Occasional gusts of icy wind sweeping around corners and veils of mist that would block our view for hours carried with them reminders that darker days awaited us the closer we drew to the Black Mountain.

By the second day, the mist was beginning to feel omnipresent. At times, I felt as if we were walking through a dreamscape, so heavy and dense was the fog. Strange, ghostly shapes seemed to materialize and then vanish again, leaving an eerie sensation in their wake and goosebumps crawling over my flesh.

On the third day, the mist momentarily lifted, and as it did, there, towering over us, lying straight ahead, was the Black Mountain.

The sight of it was formidable. It cast a shadow over the entire landscape. Rock dark as the abyss seemed to absorb all of the light around it. My heart thudded as I stared at the ominous peak, dark and imposing, its jagged edges cutting into the sky and disappearing among the dense clouds that cloaked its upper reaches.

The air felt heavy with ancient magic.

The gloom that had begun to hang over our party seemed to tighten and intensify. We moved towards the mountain steadily but with an unmistakable sense of dread.

Just before twilight, we emerged from a winding pass and reached the base. Or to be more accurate, a portion of the base, for the Black Mountain was so vast that we might easily have traveled around it for days before encircling it completely.

We had come out into a rocky valley at the foot of the mountain. A small lake lay at the bottom of the dark cliffs. Narrow, winding stairs carved into the rock of the cliff led up to a stone platform that hung over the water. At the top, the face of the cliff seemed unusually flat, but from our position, we could see nothing else.

The air was filled with the chill murmur of the mountain breeze and the gentle lapping of the lake against the rocky shore.

All seemed very calm, very peaceful.

“This is it then,” Lancelet said, breaking the silence. “We go up those stairs.”

“And then?” Hawl questioned.