Free The Pendragon's Challenge (The Last Pendragon Saga Book 7) by Sarah Woodbury Page B

on the other, it was a constant ache to be with him—a kind of torture, even, made worse by the fact that she was doing it to herself.
    And then as they came around a corner, they both stopped, a gasp forming in Catrin’s throat, though the sound never reached her lips. Mabon and Taliesin stood before a doorway—or what seemed to be a doorway if doorways came four-feet wide, eight-feet tall, and ringed in purple light.
    Mabon looked back at them. “What took you so long?”
    Catrin stepped closer, and this time it was Goronwy who held back. By the time she realized how reluctant he was feeling, she was tugging him along. “Where does it lead to?”
    “Nowhere good,” Goronwy said.
    “It leads to neither good nor evil, any more than the human world is good or evil. It leads to a place that is .” Taliesin spoke straightforwardly, fully focused on what he was doing to create the doorway—or maybe simply to reveal it.
    Mabon was practically bouncing up and down with excitement. “We’re going home!”
    “Have you ever gone this way before, Taliesin?” Goronwy said.
    Taliesin turned to look at the knight, and there was something in his eyes that made Catrin want to take a step back, though she didn’t since that would put her right into Goronwy. “Not recently. Not from here.” He tipped his head towards the door. “It’s ready.”
    Mabon continued to gibber away, making chortling noises and rubbing his hands together in his excitement.
    Catrin frowned at him. “Why are you so happy?”
    “My family banished me to the human world, and here I am, going right back only a few hours later.”
    “You do realize that you’re doing so as a human? That whatever you feel when you are there—whatever powers you have had in the past—you won’t have now?” Goronwy said.
    The corners of Mabon’s mouth turned down, and he glared at Goronwy, though he didn’t argue with his conclusion. What Goronwy said was true. Instead he turned to Taliesin. “Does he have to come?”
    “He does.” Taliesin grasped Goronwy’s left elbow in one hand and Mabon’s right with the other. Lifting his chin to point at Catrin, he said to Goronwy, “Hold on to her.”
    Catrin felt herself grasped around the waist as Goronwy pulled her to his side with his right arm and gripped her upper left arm with his left hand.
    “All together now.” Taliesin stuck out his left foot and held it in front of him.
    It took a moment for Catrin to realize that he wanted everyone to step across the threshold at exactly the same moment. She put out her foot too and, after a brief sigh, so did Goronwy. Mabon, eyes alight, had no such trepidation and stuck out his foot as if he was a posed child’s doll.
    Then Taliesin said, “We’ll step down on three … one—two—”
    They each dropped a left foot over the threshold at the same instant, squeezing through the doorway as they did so. Catrin didn’t have to be warned by Taliesin that she didn’t want the purple light coming anywhere near her right shoulder.
    And then they were through as if the journey had been of no more consequence than entering the gatehouse of Dinas Bran. They all continued walking, still hanging on to each other and bunched together, which was all Catrin wanted to do anyway because she couldn’t see anything at all. Immediately upon their entrance, the door disappeared, along with the purple light, to be replaced by a blackness so complete that Taliesin’s little light showed her nothing at all.
    She didn’t know what she expected the Otherworld to look like—beautiful, certainly. She’d heard tales of Avalon where King Arthur, Cade’s heroic ancestor, resided. She’d always imagined a land of silver and gold, like the sun shining through a very thin layer of mist, which might be swept to away to reveal the greens and blues of Wales in mid-summer.
    “Where are we, Taliesin?” she whispered.
    “We are between worlds,” Mabon answered for him. His tone implied that