Legend Incarnate

Chapter 2

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Sam blinked. Sinead was sitting across from him, her hand still holding his. Sam pulled out of her grasp, and instead, started scratching his dog’s ears. She squirmed, so Sam guessed she didn’t mind it.

“I don’t get it,” Sam protested, desperately hoping she’d got the wrong person.

“What’s not to get?” Sinead questioned, doing that I-love-how-worked-up-he’s-getting smile she had done a couple of times—Sam promoted it to the title of trademark grin.

“Me? A sorcerer? A legend come to life? Hah, no thanks,” Sam begun to untie Pepper’s lead from the bench, but his fingers struggled. He wished for it to come undone, and he felt a tingling sensation down his back. When his eyes flicked back to the knot, it was totally untied.

He almost vaulted off the bench, his shock reeling him backwards. What had just happened? He’d thought of the knot being undone... and it was. Sam suddenly remembered earlier—when he’d wished for Pepper to stop yelping and for the rain to stop relentlessly hammering at pedestrians. Maybe Sinead wasn’t lying. Maybe he was the, as she had assumed, ‘reincarnation’ of the world-famous sorcerer. For a second he was elated, then he evaluated what this could mean. In a couple of the Arthurian legends he knew—as a child, he’d been forced to visit the location of the meeting of the Knights of the Round Table in his town—Merlin was the one who had to look after Arthur, and Arthur was the one who’d save England from the menace of whoever the antagonist of that particular story was.

Maybe being the reincarnation of one of history’s most famous characters wouldn’t be as brilliant as he’d thought just moments before.

Sam tried to speak, but his voice just came out a pathetic gasp. He cleared his throat and shook his head, trying to clear the ringing in it.

“Okay, say I am Merlin. Why am I here?” Sam looked up again, meeting Sinead dead in the eye. Her brown irises seemed to go on forever, full of secrets and wisdom.

“The exact same reason I’m here. We’re supposed to save England from whatever’s polluting it.”

“Just England? That’s a tiny bit selfish, don’t you think?”

Sinead sighed. “When this prophecy was created, the whole world probably consisted of just England to the sorcerer who told it. The world, then,”

Sam nodded, accepting the information. “What is polluting it?”

Sinead shifted awkwardly, but it was such a small movement, Sam wouldn’t have noticed it if we wasn’t staring at her intently. He tried to read her mind, but all that happened was his spine tingling again. Sam resisted laughing at himself. Obviously that spell was too major to be done by an amateur.

“You’ve taken the news awfully calmly,” Sinead said, avoiding the question completely. “The last person I told about this basically ran home screaming.”

“Who did you tell?”

Sinead made the it’s-not-that-important gesture. “Sir Lancelot, Arthur’s right-hand man. He’s actually called Harold Lewis,”

Sam laughed. “Did he correct you, and beg for you to call him Harry?”

Sinead beamed mischievously. “Why, yes.”

“He would,” Sam stated. “I don’t know the guy, but if I was called Harold, that’d be my reaction.”

“My brother’s name is Coran, but he’s insistent we call him Robbie, which is his middle name. My mam’s got a thing with odd names, we assume,”