Free The Forest of Adventures (#1 of The Knight Trilogy) by Katie M John

He was
worried. I saw the dark circles under his eyes and if he’d slept at
all last night. It didn’t look like he had.
    “I remember,” I said doubtful
of my own sanity as I said it.
    “So how do you explain it Mina?
Who do you think I am?” His eyes were locked on mine and in them
there was something shifting in them; something I couldn’t read.
They looked wild and I knew I should feel scared, but I didn’t.
    I shrugged, “I don’t know. It’s
all fragments and the fragments don’t add up to make something
possible.”
    “And why isn’t it
possible?”
    His question seemed so simple
on the surface; as if I were the one that wasn’t in my right
mind.
    “Because it isn’t - What I saw
last night can’t exist,” I said, shaking my head.
    The image of Morgan came back
to me with menacing force. There was something about her that had
left me with a terrible feeling of unease and if I was honest, the
way she was with Blake made me maddeningly jealous.
    “Tell me who she was.”
    “I can’t. What you saw last
night, you really shouldn’t have. Morgan was playing a really
dangerous and spiteful game.”
    “She fancies you,” I blurted
out and then regretted giving him evidence of my own jealousy.
    “Possibly.” The way he smiled
with a mixture of embarrassment and amusement made me wonder with a
needling irritation about the history that Morgan had shared with
him.
    “O.K,” I sighed, “So if you
can’t explain last night, tell me about you? How come when I first
touched you that day in English, you didn’t feel of anything? At
first I reasoned it was because you weren’t really there but I
checked with the others and they saw you too so I knew you I wasn’t
mad because that’s how you know isn’t it? Other people tell you
you’re not.” I knew I was rambling and sounded frankly as mad as a
hatter.
    Blake looked at me in a way
that showed he perhaps found mad-hatters cute but his lip twitched
as he tried to find a way of explaining the impossible, “You
couldn’t feel me at first because…” he stopped as if changing
track, “…you couldn’t feel me because you didn’t know to make me
real.”
    “What do you mean? That’s not a
proper answer Blake. It doesn’t explain anything.”
    “It explains everything.”
    “And if I touch you now?” My
voice quivered in the air.
    “Do you want to touch me Mina?”
His question came out almost like a breath and spoke a double
meaning that was at once delicious and terrifying.
    My breath caught on its way
out. There was nothing more I wanted to do in that moment than to
touch him, to let my hand reach for his most secret out of the way
places where nobody else touched. I held out a wavering hand and
then snatched it back; cradling it into myself as if I was afraid
of being bitten.
    “So tell me, am I going mad?” I
whispered.
    “You’re not mad.” He smiled, “A
slightly over active imaginative perhaps but definitely not
mad.”
    I blushed and not for the first
time I wondered if he had the ability to read my most private
thoughts, “Then tell me about last night,” I said.
    “I can’t, I really can’t. It’s
not that I don’t want to but…”
    “No excuses. If you feel
anything for me Blake then you need to tell me.”
    He kicked at the leaves under
his feet and looked at me, sizing me up, working out the measure of
his love for me. O h my god, he loved me. The thought came at
me like a charging bull. Suddenly I was trapped, out of control.
When the love was mine it belonged to me and now…
    “It was all true. Everything
you saw. Everything that you’ve pieced together is real. The woman
in the pavilion last night was Morgan of Gore; you’ll know her in
legend as Morgan Le Fay. She’s connected to my family through
marriage, but it’s distant and we’re not alike - we don’t hold the
same beliefs. She’s of the old ways, the time of pagan spirits, the
time we identify as The Dark Ages.”
    “Is she a witch?” I