At the Crossing Places by Kevin Crossley-Holland

Author:Kevin Crossley-Holland
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.

54 AT THE CROSSING–PLACES

LOST AND FOUND,” SAID A DARK, DEEP VOICE.

“Merlin!” I cried. “I was just thinking about you.”

“Ah!” said Merlin.

“Can you fly into people’s thoughts?”

Merlin smiled gently. “You think I can do anything,” he said.

Merlin does know magic. Last Christmas he jumped forty-seven feet when we had our leaping contest. I saw him do that with my own eyes. “The salmon-leap,” he called it. Joan and Brian said they saw him flying on New Year’s Eve, and once he just disappeared while we were on top of Tumber Hill.

Not only this. Merlin gave me the seeing stone. And he’s the hooded man inside it who told the earls, lords, and knights that Arthur-in-the-stone is the trueborn king of all Britain.

Merlin gazed at me. “Well?” he asked.

“What I was thinking was that, since the day Arthur-in-the-stone was crowned, you’ve always been at his side. What kind of king would Arthur be without you?”

Merlin closed his eyes. “There comes a time,” he said in a melancholy voice.

“Oh Merlin!” I cried. “I’m so pleased to see you.” With both hands I grasped his cloak—the same old one he always wears, earth-brown with grey patches. “I haven’t seen anyone from Caldicot. Not since January. Not for four months.”

“I saw Gatty yesterday,” Merlin said. “I told her I would see you.”

“What did she say?”

“Say? What did you expect her to say?”

“I don’t know,” I mumbled. “Something.”

“Mmm!” Merlin murmured. “When something’s too deep for saying, is it worth saying anything?”

“I haven’t seen her for so long,” I said. “Gatty walked all the way here, you know, and she slept up a tree. What are you doing here at Holt?”

Merlin stared at me solemnly, and then he opened the palms of his hands. “I’m passing,” he said.

Merlin is nothing like so good at telling as asking. He’s like a deep well: If you stop winding the handle, the water doesn’t come up! But, sitting in the sunlight, on the same flat rock where Rowena and Izzie chanted their love spells, I did find out that Nain has lost her only tooth, and Sian thinks she saw Spitfire in the hay barn, though she can’t have done, and Lankin’s wrist wound is healing. Merlin told me Joan will have to appear in front of Lord Stephen again at the next manor court, this time for not working on my father’s land for an extra day, and he said Howell and Ruth were married in March, and Oliver still means to take me to Wenlock Priory to see how the monks paint their manuscripts.

“Oliver told me your mother was a nun,” I said. “And your father—he said…he said he was a demon.”

Merlin sighed and edged one toe into the water. “Is that what you think?” he asked.

“He told me terrible things about you.”

“Because he’s afraid of me,” Merlin replied.

“The more I know about you the less I know about you,” I said.

After all this, Merlin finally told me the most important news of all. Last week—last Wednesday, on the ninth day of the month—Tanwen gave birth to a baby son.

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