Sword of Light by KATHERINE ROBERTS

quick. Working together, they managed to heave the big knight across his horse’s back. They used some of his cut bonds to tie him on. Then Elphin vaulted onto his mist horse, while Rhianna boosted Cai up on the bay behind the unconscious Bors. She put the reins in his hands.
    “But I can’t ride,” Cai wailed.
    “You’ll have to,” Rhianna told him. “Follow Elphin’s horse.”
    “But what about you?”
    “I’ll ride my own horse.” She slapped the bay on the rump. “Go!” she said, already running.
    She had buckled Bors’ scabbard around her waist, but even so the sword banged against her legs. The shield, though lighter, proved just as awkward to carry. She wondered how a knight managed in battle if they were unseated, and swore never to let that happen to her. She wished now she hadn’t taken Cynric’s torque because she didn’t need the extra weight, and her wrist still felt numb. But she was angry with herself for causing them to get captured, as well as scared by what she had seen in the hut,so she kept up easily with the horses. Elphin played his harp as they went until they were past the last snoring sentry and trotting up the dark hillside into the fog.
    “Alba!” she called softly. “Alba, you can stop misting now.”
    Just as her legs began to wobble from the effort of running and she started to think the mare had gone back to Avalon, the mist sparkled and Alba trotted out to meet them. Her reins were broken, but otherwise the little mare seemed unharmed. Evenstar gave a whinny of welcome. Rhianna dropped the sword and shield and threw her arms around her mist horse’s neck. With her face buried in the damp mane, she trembled with relief. “I knew you wouldn’t leave me, my beautiful one,” she whispered.
    Of course not
, Alba said, indignant.
I want my apples
.
    “Rhia,” Elphin warned. “They’ll be waking up soon. We have to go.”
    “Go where?” Cai said, clinging to the bay horse’s mane with a worried look.
    Rhianna strapped the dragon shield to Alba’s saddle and mounted the mare. She searched the dark hillside in hope, but saw no sign of the other two knights. Merlin obviously wasn’t at Camelot yet, either, or he’d have helped them. She looked longingly over her shoulder at the white towers that sheltered her mother. So close… but the queen should be safe enough, as long as nobody opened the gates before they got back.
    She considered her friends’ frightened faces, the fog and the unconscious knight. There wasonly one place she could think of to go now.
    She took a deep breath and gave the squire a determined look. “We have to find the lake where Sir Bors threw away Excalibur,” she said.

M ordred might have known something would go wrong.
    His mother had shown him a trick with his missing hand, which his bloodbeards had rescued from the battlefield. With her help, using the spirit magic, he could send his shadow through the mists to rejoin it.
    After a queasy time trying to leave his body, he found himself standing in a torchlit hut holding a red-hot poker over a groaning prisoner who was tied to a frame. He recognised the prisoner as one of Arthur’s knights, Sir Bors, who used to bellow at him on the training ground and punish him forcheating in the jousts. He smiled as the poker hissed into the knight’s shoulder.
    Then, just as he was beginning to enjoy himself, three youngsters burst through the door. He glimpsed a tall, red-haired girl with a sword in her hand and forgot he wasn’t really in the hut with her. He tried to seize her wrist and was flung back on his rocky bed.
    “What happened?” he gasped, groping for the mirror. “Was that Excalibur?”
    His mother frowned. “No, fortunately for us – but I think we might have underestimated Arthur’s daughter.”
    “What do you mean? Just tell me what happened, woman! God, it
hurts
!” His missing fingers burned like tongues of fire. He wondered if that idiot bloodbeard had taken hold of the