Jack heard the Doctor's screwdriver buzzing behind him. The Doctor was trying to catch Morgaine's signal again- but he had been tracking her teleport signature, and her teleporter had been reduced to component atoms. Jack and Ancelyn charged forward. Behind them, the Doctor was fiddling furiously with his machinery, saying, "No, no, no, no, no!" in the particular way he did when things started to go seriously wrong. Jack and Ancelyn rode forward, looking for Morgaine and her men. Jack was baffled. The terrain here was flat meadow. Unless she'd doubled back into the forest behind them, she had nowhere to hide.
They rode up to one of the circles of standing stones that seemed to litter the countryside in this part of the universe. Jack checked, but Morgaine and her company did not seem to be hiding behind the stones- not that there would have been room. He and Ancelyn pulled up together a little ways away.
"It was but a moment!" Ancelyn protested to Jack. "I closed my eyes against the arrows, and when I opened them, she was gone."
"They can't have gone far," Jack answered him. "We destroyed her teleporter, and even if we hadn't, there's no way a personal teleport could transport that many men."
The Doctor rode up. "No trace," he said, frustrated. "It's like she vanished, except she can't have vanished; all she had on her was the scabbard and her clothes."
Ancelyn turned. "She said that the scabbard was used when traveling to other worlds," he said. "Might she have used it to open such a portal, and step through with her men?"
The Doctor shook his head. "It's a stabilizer," he said. He jumped down from his horse, and began pacing, one hand on his hair. "She'd need the sword to open a gateway. You couldn't travel through without the scabbard, not safely, but the scabbard alone isn't enough. Gah!" he cried. "I'm missing something. I can sense it. There's something at the edge of my mind, and I can't remember it. Why not? I'm brilliant; I don't miss things. What am I not seeing?" The Doctor froze, suddenly. "Jack," he said. "Ancelyn."
"Yeah?" Jack asked. He was instantly alert.
"That stone circle wasn't there before," the Doctor said.
Suddenly, it was as though Jack was looking at something that he'd never bothered to look at before. He wasn't sure why he'd thought that there were standing stones there, but now that he looked closely, he could see that where he'd thought he'd seen man-sized liths, there were men on horses, standing guard. The altar stone in the center was actually Morgaine, kneeling in the center of the circle, with the scabbard on her lap. She seemed to be making some sort of adjustment to it.
"Very clever, Merlin," she said. "Not many can see through the clouds I place on men's minds."
The Doctor pointed his screwdriver at Morgaine. "I've always been clever," he said, warily. "Just like you. What do you think you're doing, Morgaine?"
She smiled, sweetly, and stood. She held the scabbard across her body. "It is true. One cannot open a portal to the Other World with the scabbard alone. You know so much, Merlin." Her tone was mocking. "But what if a portal already existed, and one knew the manner of its opening? Would the scabbard be sufficient then?"
"No!" the Doctor shouted, realization plain on his face. "Stop them!" Jack and Ancelyn drew their swords and rushed toward the group of them.
"Oh," Morgaine said, laughing cruelly. "You are much too late."
She and her men turned, and walked away into nothingness.
The rest of Morgaine's men straggled up shortly thereafter. Jack and Ancelyn faced them down. Unarmed, armorless and abandoned by their mistress, they surrendered quickly. Shortly after that, knights from the convent arrived to take Morgaine's men into custody. The crowd cleared slowly away, leaving Jack, Ancelyn and the Doctor to make sense of what had happened.
The area where Morgaine and her men had hidden was marked by a stone circle- not the great orthostats that Morgaine had planted in Jack's mind, but short, weatherworn stones, no taller than Jack's shins. They were smeared with something wet, sticky and red.
The Doctor scanned the area with his screwdriver. Jack, standing to the side, pondered idly that his question on seeing that thing for the first time ought not to have been "who sees a screwdriver and thinks, this could be a little more sonic?" but rather, "who sees a screwdriver and thinks, this should be able to monitor alien transmissions?" The Doctor had gone a bit beyond making an efficient tool for putting up shelves.
"She was right," the Doctor said, putting his screwdriver back in his pocket. "It was already here. I wonder where she went?" He knelt down, examining the stones. He poked one with a finger, and then licked it. "Blood," he said, grimacing. "Morgaine's blood." He jumped up. "There's a genetic seal on the gate." He turned suddenly to Ancelyn. "Did you know Morgaine wasn't human? Not completely, at any rate."
Ancelyn frowned. "Some say there is faery blood in her. Do you think it true, then?"
The Doctor nodded. "No plain old human could have opened this gate- Time Lord either, for that matter." He paused, reflectively. "It explains why she was able to pull off that trick with the stones. A human shouldn't have that kind of psychic ability."
"Is there any way to tell where the gate took her?" Jack asked.
The Doctor shook his head. "Not without reopening it, which we can't do without different ancestry than we have. But at least she was limited to a single destination," he added, his head cocked. "If she'd been able to steal the sword, she could have gone anywhere she liked."
"Small mercies," Jack commented drily.
They rode back toward the convent together. Jack let the Doctor take the lead, dropping back to match pace with Ancelyn. "It's good to see you up again," Jack said.
"I have lain abed too long," Ancelyn agreed. "It has pained me to see others out fighting, when I could not."
Jack laughed darkly. "If I hadn't gone out fighting, maybe Morgaine wouldn't have gotten her chance."
"Do not torment yourself with possibilities, my friend," Ancelyn said, shaking his head. "It is not for men to know all the paths of the future. We act as best we can in the present."
"I nearly killed the king," Jack said. "That's not just possibility."
"How did it happen?" Ancelyn asked, quietly.
"Morgaine. She put Excalibur in my hand, and I was too stupid to recognize it. Arthur and I were dueling to the death. I nearly won." Jack watched Ancelyn carefully.
Ancelyn looked equal parts tired and sad. "I have known you, Jack," he said. "You are no oathbreaker. I do not know what happened here, but I would wager that what you did, you did with honorable intentions."
"Does that mean I'm riding down the road to hell?" Jack asked, smiling bleakly.
Ancelyn laughed. "I do not understand you, Jack," he said, shaking his head.
"It's a saying, from our other world," Jack explained. "The road to hell is paved with good intentions. It means, you can mean well, and still do evil."
"This is true," Ancelyn allowed. "But does this mean we must never act, for fear that something will go wrong? We are knights, Jack. We are men of action."
"And what do we knights do when things do go wrong?" Jack asked.
"Drinking and wenches," Ancelyn said, grinning. "They might be short on wenches at the convent, but I'd wager that the Mother Abbess has a stash of spirits."
"You, Ancelyn, are a man after my own heart." Jack said, laughing.
Arthur was asleep when they got back to the convent, but he'd left strict instructions that Merlin and his companions be brought in to see him when they returned. Guinevere was sitting at his bedside when they entered. Seeing them, she shook Arthur's shoulder gently, whispering in his ear. Ancelyn was visibly taken aback at the extent of the king's wounds.
Arthur stirred. The blanket pulled back, and Jack could see that Arthur was still holding Excalibur tightly to his chest. He took in the three of them, and nodded. "What news do you bring me, Merlin?" he asked. His voice was rough with pain and sleep.
"I'm sorry," the Doctor said. "She took some of her men, and used the scabbard to escape through a portal that was apparently just sitting out there in the countryside. Who puts a gateway through space and time in the middle of a field?"
"The Fair Folk," Arthur said, wearily. "Or so the tales say. I thought them only stories. It seems, as with so many other things, that I was wrong in that."
"I never knew Excalibur to be more than a sword!" Ancelyn exclaimed. "How can it be that none in Camelot knew that it had such powers?"
"Arthur knew," the Doctor said. Arthur nodded. The king leaned back into his bed, his eyes closed. He looked pale and sick in the dim light of the room.
"It was the great secret weapon of the Pendragons," the Doctor continued. "Uther used it at St. Albans, but his men were sworn to secrecy. I only worked it out because I'm a Time Lord. Also, as previously mentioned, I'm incredibly clever. I do wonder how Morgaine found out about it, though," he said, thoughtfully.
"I thought she was clever, too," Jack commented.
"She's not a Time Lord," the Doctor said, frowning. "I knew there was something particular about that sword from the first time I saw it- temporal resonance. Other species aren't usually sensitive to it. Humans certainly aren't."
"Morgaine must have corrupted someone who knew the secret," Arthur said, sadly. "I think I have trusted my men too readily, taken their loyalty too much for granted."
"Don't be too hard on yourself," the Doctor said. "A good king has to trust his people. If you trust them, you might still get betrayed here and there. But if you don't trust them, they'll never give you their hearts at all."
"You are kind, Merlin," Arthur said. "Perhaps you are even right. I will think on it- but now I must rest." He turned to Ancelyn. "I see Merlin brought you with him, Ancelyn."
Ancelyn nodded. "I was still unassigned, my lord, and he needed an assistant."
"I reassign you, then," Arthur said, his voice faint. "Stay with me, and stand guard while I sleep."
"I will, my lord," Ancelyn said, his face clouded with emotion. He went to the head of Arthur's bed, and took a bodyguard's posture. Arthur smiled, and closed his eyes.
Jack knew when he was dismissed. He followed the Doctor quietly out of the room.
"I'd wondered how the scabbard got separated," the Doctor muttered, under his breath. Jack didn't ask him to elaborate- timelines, again. Still-
"Will Arthur recover?" he asked, as they walked.
"Jack," the Doctor drawled, disapprovingly. "You know better than that."
"I do," Jack said, and grinned. "Still, you can't blame a guy for trying."
"I don't know," the Doctor said, after a moment. "He won't die today, but I can't tell you whether he'll really get better." He jammed his hands into his pockets. "I don't know everything."
"Do you think Morgaine will be back?" Jack asked, and this time he was only asking for speculation, and not for information he shouldn't have.
"She'll be back," the Doctor said. "As long as Arthur's alive, she'll never be able to leave him alone."
"Family is strange that way," Jack said. "Love, hate- it all gets mixed together. And you never escape them, not even after they're long buried." He grinned again. "Maybe it's different for Time Lords."
The Doctor shrugged. "Some things are the same no matter who you are," he said. He stopped, peering out of the window. It was small, and the glass was thick and warped. Outside, the sun was starting to rise, and the sky was turning pink. "Come, on, Jack," the Doctor said, "We have a lot of preparation to do still. Best get on it."
End: Part Two
A/N: Part Three, in which the Doctor does what he came to do, and Jack struggles to protect what he cares for, should begin in a week.