The Wizard's Dog Fetches the Grail

  Also by Eric Kahn Gale

  The Wizard’s Dog

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2018 by Eric Kahn Gale

  Cover art and interior illustrations copyright © 2018 by Dave Phillips

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Crown Books for Young Readers, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Crown and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Visit us on the Web! rhcbooks.com

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 9780553537406 (trade) — ebook ISBN 9780553537420

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

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  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Eric Kahn Gale

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Part I

  Chapter 1: The Dog Who Would Be King

  Chapter 2: Waves of Doubt

  Chapter 3: The Worms Return

  Chapter 4: Dark Places, Dark Faces

  Part II

  Chapter 5: The Woods of Winter

  Chapter 6: Bears, Queens, and Ice Castles

  Chapter 7: Shattering the Crystal

  Part III

  Chapter 8: The Great Dreaming

  Chapter 9: Happy Home Again

  Part IV

  Chapter 10: The Crazy Land of Camelot

  Chapter 11: That’s My Girl?

  Chapter 12: The Court of Fools

  Part V

  Chapter 13: Playthings

  Chapter 14: The Dragon Wall

  Chapter 15: Grail Quest

  Chapter 16: Scared of Heights

  Chapter 17: You Can Never Go Back

  Chapter 18: Breathless

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  PART I

  He told me not to speak. Most dogs would find that an easy command to follow. But I’m not like most dogs. I’m a wizard’s dog.

  Still, Merlin was my master, and as my pack shivered together in the rain outside the tavern door, I closed my mouth and wagged my tail in assent.

  “Thank you, Nosewise,” Merlin said, pushing a wet strand of hair from his brow. Water pooled in the brim of his hat and streamed down his long white beard into his robes. He glanced at Arthur and Morgana. “And you two. Are we clear on what to share and what to hide?”

  “We are,” said my girl, Morgana, covering her eyes to keep them from the rain. She shivered in her tunic and elbowed Arthur in the ribs.

  “Me too,” said Arthur, my boy, patting the cloth pack bound tightly against his back. “I can keep a secret.”

  “Right, then. Let’s not make a scene,” Merlin said, and pushed open the heavy tavern door.

  Warm yellow light filled the hall, and the air was scented with mead and meat. I felt my fur dry in the toasty air and my mouth water from the delectable smells. I turned to Morgana to say how nice it seemed, but then I remembered: Don’t speak.

  “Is this the best place to keep a secret?” she whispered to Merlin as the four of us shuffled into the tavern. The place was packed with rowdy guests eating and drinking their fill. Some warmed their damp feet by the fire, and others laughed uproariously over cards.

  “It’s the only tavern around,” Merlin said. “Perhaps we’ll go unnoticed here.”

  “Arthur? Nosewise? You’re alive!” A young girl’s voice spun us all around. She dropped her tray of foamy mugs and spilled the suds across the tavern floor, turning half a dozen heads.

  “So much for unnoticed,” Morgana murmured.

  “G-G-Guinevere,” Arthur croaked. His face went flush and he stumbled back a step. Guinevere, the tavern keeper’s daughter, a willowy girl with short brown hair, always had that effect on him. Though I could never work out why. I jumped up against her chest and licked her face. I hadn’t seen her in months.

  “Nosewise!” She laughed and pushed me away. “But how? You survived the storm? And the soldiers! They came back with wild tales! Father, look who it is!” she shouted to the burly man behind the bar.

  “The boy and dog! You survived it!” Leodegrance was Guinevere’s father and the owner of this tavern. He waved off a customer vying for his attention and stomped over to us. “I can’t believe it!”

  “This was a mistake, coming here.” Morgana tugged on Merlin’s robe and whispered in his ear, “We should go.”

  “I know you, too,” Guinevere said, pointing at Morgana. “You were with the soldiers. And you’re the old man Arthur was trying to find.”

  Merlin smiled wide and threw up his hands. “No, no. I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about. We’re simple travelers just looking to buy supplies and be on our way. We don’t even need accommodation for the night.” Merlin patted Leodegrance on the chest. “If we could just purchase some bread and cheese, we’ll be out the door.” He dropped a heavy handful of gold coins on the table. Leodegrance and Guinevere ignored him.

  “Tell me, Arthur?” Guinevere said, probing him with her eyes. “Something happened on Avalon.”

  Arthur’s lip quivered. His face went flush.

  My ears perked, and I noticed that some of the other patrons near the bar were listening in. Come on, Arthur, I thought. Don’t mess this up.

  “Tell me,” Guinevere said, drawing even nearer to his face. “I worried about you.” She tenderly placed her hands on his shoulders, and Arthur spasmed at her touch. His arms flailed and his legs kicked at the floor and his whole body tumbled backward over the stool. Morgana gasped. Merlin reached out to catch him, but he was too late. Arthur crashed into the ale-soaked floorboards, and his cloth pack ripped in two.

  The glimmering gold-and-silver blade of Excalibur cut through the fabric, and the sound caught the ears of every patron in the bar.

  The sword slid away from Arthur and spun in the pools of ale, glimmering bright and lighting up the tavern with golden beams. Every eye beheld its light.

  “That’s…that’s…” Guinevere trembled in awe and struggled to speak.

  “The sword” was all Leodegrance could say. “The sword. The sword!”

  “It’s the sword!” someone cried.

  “Excalibur!” shouted another.

  “No, no, it isn’t!” Arthur said, scrambling across the floorboards. “It’s nothing.” He grabbed Excalibur by the hilt and hastily tried to shove it back into his torn sack. But when he thrust it into the bag, the razor-sharp blade sliced the cloth to ribbons, which fell around him like streamers. He was left holding the sword upright, down on one knee, in the most heroic pose I’d ever seen.

  “Arthur, you did pull the sword from the stone,” Guinevere said in almost a whisper. Her words swept across the silent tavern. No one spoke. Not Merlin nor Morgana. Least of all me, even though I was dying to. I was the one who’d really pulled the swor
d from the stone.

  “Might I offer an explanation?” Merlin said. But his words were lost. The entire tavern rushed Arthur.

  “He is our king!” Leodegrance cried, lifting Arthur up on his shoulders.

  “King Arthur! King Arthur!” the awed patrons chanted. They ran up to the bar, completely ignoring Merlin, Morgana, and me. I had to leap and slither between their wet boots or else be crushed by their enthusiasm.

  “That’s what the soldiers feared,” Leodegrance said, reverently placing Arthur on top of the bar. “Our king has been found. After these long years of chaos, a true king has returned to his people. Arthur!”

  “Arthur! Arthur! Arthur!” they chanted.

  “No, please,” Arthur begged. “Don’t call my name. I’m not the king—I swear it!”

  “Arthur! Arthur! King! King!” they cried.

  I saw Arthur panic. He looked for Merlin, but he’d been swept away by the crush of the crowd. Morgana was pinned between two tables. He spotted me down on the floor, dodging soggy boots. Arthur raised Excalibur high above his head; the golden light shone in bright beams, and all the patrons raised their heads. Arthur brought the sword down, hard into the thick oaken bar, and flaming splinters jumped up toward the ceiling. That got their attention.

  “Listen to me!” he shouted.

  “The king speaks,” said a man in the crowd. Arthur looked exasperated.

  “Please! I’m not the king,” he said. “I didn’t pull the sword from the stone.”

  Murmurs spread through the thick crowd. Between legs and long overcoats, I saw Leodegrance look up at Arthur. “Whoever pulls Excalibur from the stone should be our rightful king. If you didn’t do it, then who did?”

  Arthur grimaced and searched the crowd. He lowered his arm and pointed straight at me. “It was him!”

  “Who? Who?” The patrons shouted and spun, trying to find the person at the other end of Arthur’s pointed finger. They shoved against each other and searched the hall. But no one was looking down. I was on the floor pressed between their heavy boots. I squeezed between knees and climbed onto a tipped-over bench. From there I leapt up onto the wet bar and skidded to Arthur’s side.

  As I spun into his leg, I caught Merlin, in the corner of my eye, waving his hands wildly. He forcefully clapped his hand over his mouth and shook his head. He told me not to make a scene.

  “Him!” Arthur placed his hand on my head. “Nosewise pulled the sword from the stone. If that makes you king, then he’s the king.”

  “Oh, my stars,” I heard Merlin groan.

  The tavern dwellers went slack-jawed for a moment. Some looked to each other and some scratched their heads. Some were frightened. A wild-haired woman stepped forward and gave voice to their fears. “The king is mad!” she screeched.

  “A mad king!” The cry went up through the hall. “A mad king!”

  “No king is better than a mad king!” someone shouted.

  “A dead king is better than a mad king!” cried another.

  The tavern folk were in a frenzy. Violence was in their eyes. They rushed toward us. In the back of the hall, I saw Merlin grab his staff. Don’t make a scene, he’d told me. Well, one look and I’d say a scene had already been made.

  “Wait!” I shouted. “I did pull the sword from the stone. Some of you should know me. I’m Nosewise! I’m the wizard’s dog, remember?”

  All around the tavern, mouths hung open, but no words came out of them. Some of the patrons’ hands were shaking. Others stood staring at me, wide-eyed. A few looked like they were about to scream.

  “Wait!” An older, redheaded woman pushed her way through the crowd. Her hair was wrapped up in a tight bun, and her lips glistened. She swayed slightly and looked at me cross-eyed.

  “I remember you, Nosewise!” she said, raising her sloshing tankard. Boy, did she smell like ale. “You’ve been here before. It’s hard to believe you’re the one who finally pulled Excalibur after all those brave men and women trying, but—hic!” She hiccupped violently and spilled some of her drink on her tunic. “But the more of these delicious ales I drink, the more sense it all makes. Hic!” With that she downed the rest of her enormous tankard and wiped her mouth. She turned to the patrons and said, slurring, “That dog is the king, you know.”

  “Hear! Hear! A very good point indeed!” Merlin rapped his staff on the floor and pushed through the crowd. “We’ll tell you the whole tale. But to make it go down easier, the next round of drinks is on me.” Merlin dumped his entire sack of gold out onto the bar. “There’s enough here for the next three rounds. How does that sound?”

  “Sounds pretty good,” someone said.

  “All right.”

  “I’ll drink to that.” The patrons were restless and confused. I wagged my tail at them.

  Merlin pushed the tall pile of gold toward Leodegrance, who stood dumbfounded. “Barkeep, please. Help me!” he said. Leodegrance blinked and patted the gold, not quite knowing what to do with it. His eyes stayed on me.

  “Don’t be scared, Leody,” I said, and he nodded slowly.

  “The dog talks,” Guinevere croaked. “He actually talks.”

  “I t-told you he d-did,” Arthur stuttered to her. “Please help your father get the drinks. The crowd is restless.”

  Guinevere shivered and set to work, taking patrons’ empty mugs and filling them with ale from the barrels behind the bar.

  “My friends, we will tell you everything. But first we will have drinks. And we will have music.” Merlin extended his walking staff to Morgana and gestured for her to take it.

  “You want me to do it?” she asked, growing pale.

  “You have a talent for this. Please,” Merlin implored her.

  Morgana nodded and took his staff. The glassy black Asteria stone set in its handle shimmered as Morgana took power from it. She pushed her way to the corner of the room, where a fiddle and bow rested on a high shelf. She closed her eyes and thought a very Certain thought to speed her magic, and long white tendrils slithered from the stone on the end of Merlin’s staff.

  The wisps took hold of the bow and fiddle and raised them in the air. Then they touched, and the bow pulled a long sweet note across one of the strings. The fiddle played itself.

  “Amazing,” one woman cooed.

  “They are wizards,” announced another.

  “It’s true,” I said, puffing out my chest. “And we only use our magic for good!”

  They tensed at my voice and gave me sour looks. Even with the music and the magic I scared them!

  “Nosewise, better let me do the talking. Just for a while,” Merlin said behind a cupped hand. Then he turned back to them. “Because we’ve got a lot of tale to tell!”

  Merlin told them how he and Morgana had lived in a quiet house in the woods with their little dog, Nosewise. When Nosewise saw the spells they could weave—fire, lightning, invisibility—he became obsessed with magic. As a joke, Morgana slipped me one of the magic Asteria stones.

  “That’s why I can talk today!” I shouted over Merlin, and brandished the Asteria around my neck.

  “It’s astonishing!” Guinevere said as she handed out the last of the ale. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “It’s unnatural!” said a cranky old man in the back of the bar.

  “That’s what I thought too, at first!” Merlin said, raising his finger. “And I commanded Morgana to never let him near the Asteria again. But she didn’t listen, which turned out to be a good thing.”

  Merlin took his staff back from Morgana and used the Asteria to conjure images in smoke of our little house in the woods. He told how Morgana trained me in magic at night. And how Oberon, an evil prince of the Fae peoples, attacked our home and kidnapped both him and Morgana. He left out the part about how Morgana mistakenly thought the Fae man was her father and
helped him breach the magical barriers around our house. Probably partly to spare her feelings, and partly just to move the story along. We didn’t have all night.

  “Let me tell it from here!” I interrupted. “You don’t know this part!”

  Merlin nodded and took a step back. I told the tavern folk of my frantic search for Merlin and Morgana, sniffing their scents through the woods and all the way to a castle, where I met Arthur. The people in the crowd were still nervous when I talked, but as I got deeper into the story (and they got deeper into their drinks), I felt them warm to me. I told them how Arthur and I had crossed into the Otherworld, where the Fae people live, and tangled with Oberon there. And how we’d followed them all back to our world and to the very tavern in Laketown where we were tonight. Guinevere and Leody were entranced.

  “After we borrowed a boat to search for Merlin and Morgana on the isle of Avalon, a storm shipwrecked us, and the Lady of the Lake appeared,” I said.

  “You met the Lady?” Guinevere asked, and quivered.

  “I did! She saved Arthur’s life! Her name is Nivian, you know. All of us are good friends with her.”

  That impressed the patrons. Everyone in Laketown thought very highly of the Lady. I told them how we found Oberon on the island. It turned out he wanted to use Merlin’s magic to remove Excalibur from the stone. But the Lady had enchanted Excalibur, she said, so that “only a worthy soul who loves man and would never do him harm might take it.”

  “Whoever pulls the sword from the stone is king! King!” the redheaded woman shouted through her hiccups. No one seemed to think it strange that I could talk now. From the smell of the crowd, they were each on their third or fourth ale. And Merlin motioned for Leody and Guinevere to keep them coming.