The Camelot Spell (12 page)

He felt the blade make contact with the troll’s upper thigh, slicing into the skin with only minimal
resistance. The troll let out another horrible yell, like something was stuck and dying in its throat, and tried to swipe at Newt, who was still moving and already out of reach.

The stagger and the distraction were enough for Gerard, however, to escape the troll’s chokehold and flip the creature onto its back. His muscles straining under his wet jerkin, Gerard did his best to hold the beast under the water, trying to drown it. Newt came back around, pulled the blade from the troll’s leg and shoved it, point first, into the fleshy skin under the creature’s rock-hard chin and rucked it around until he was rewarded with a steady spurting of thick troll blood.

“Is it dead?” Newt asked, gasping. A sudden surge in the troll’s body answered him. Newt added his strength to Gerard’s, trying to keep the creature’s head underwater. Then suddenly Ailis was splashing to their side, throwing herself onto the troll’s torso to keep it in place, so they could focus all their attention on the head.

The blood-spurt slowed, then stopped, the thick blood pooling before the current began to move it away.

“Oh, God. I hurt.” Newt dropped to his knees
momentarily, then got to his feet and shook himself like a horse whose saddle had just been taken off. He offered his hand down to Gerard. “Come on.”

It seemed to take an enormous amount of energy to simply reach up and take the offered hand, but Gerard finally managed it. The other boy’s hand was slick with blood and sweat, but reassuringly human.

Legs shaky, the two half-supported each other to the bank, Ailis trailing a step behind. Each of them was trying to wrap their minds around what they had just done.

The feel of stable ground under his feet was almost alien, and Gerard stumbled as he climbed out onto the bank. He thought briefly about looking for his sword, then decided that he needed to rest first. He knew a knight should look to his weapons before his body. But he was just so tired.

The three of them sat down heavily on the bank, staring at everything but each other. Even the effort of speaking seemed to be too much to ask.

“My mouth tastes like troll,” Gerard said suddenly in disgust.

Ailis, facedown in the grass, let out a muffled snort, and then another, until she was laughing hysterically.

“It wasn’t that funny,” Gerard said, making faces as he tried to work the taste out of his mouth.

“No, it wasn’t,” Newt agreed, his eyes almost tearing from holding back his own laughter.

“I hate both of you,” Gerard said, looking down at his mud-covered clothing with a rueful expression. The leather cuisses on his thighs were so waterlogged as to be useless except as weights, so he stripped them off and let them fall to the ground with a sodden thunk. The troll floated facedown in the creek, the water around it fading from pink back to clear as the current carried the blood away. With a sigh Gerard got to his feet and waded back into the water.

“What’re you doing?” Newt asked.

“My sword,” he said as though it should have been obvious.

“More to your left, I think,” Newt said. Gerard shot him a look that clearly said “and I should trust you, why?” but moved slightly to his left. A minute later, his searching hands came up with his sword, wet but undamaged. He slogged to the side of the creek and handed the sword, pommel-first, to Ailis, who found a still-dry corner of her skirt to wipe the worst of the moisture off it. Gerard hesitated, then went back into the water.

“What are you doing now?” Newt asked, still lying on his side on the grass.

“Not going to let this thing foul the water,” Gerard said, tugging the troll’s body to the opposite bank and pulling it onto the grass. Then he waded back in to splash as much of the mud off himself as he could. “Ugh.”

Ailis rolled over onto her back and sat up to watch him. “We could have died,” she said finally.

“Yes.”

“We almost did die,” Newt said.

“You would have died,” Ailis said. “If we hadn’t come back.”

“And you two would have gone on and never found the second talisman,” he retorted, a little stung.

“What I mean,” Ailis said, “is that any one of us—even two of us—wouldn’t have managed it. That’s all.”

“Point taken,” Gerard said, sloshing up onto the bank and trying to wring out his shirt. “So what?”

“Nothing. Just…thinking about it, that’s all.”

The three of them lay there silently thinking about it. Then Gerard stood up again. “Well, while you think, I’m going to get a change of clothing.”

“There’s the mark of the castle-folk,” Newt said, taking his own boots off and shaking the water out. He wriggled his toes in the grass. “They have two sets of clothing.”

“Whereas the stable-folk live in the same shirt, year in and year out. And wash it once a year whether it needs it or not,” Gerard retorted.

The bickering was familiar, but the tone was too weak to have any real venom.

Gerard went up the bank and down the road to reclaim the horses, muttering something about ungrateful servants who wanted to be troll-food. Ailis stretched her arms overhead, fingers pointing toward the sky, and tried not to look at the bloated body of the troll across the stream, or think about her swan stashed somewhere in the troll’s lair or—ugh—on it’s body.

“Why can’t the two of you just get along?”

Newt shrugged. “Because he talks more than he knows. And because it’s fun.”

Ailis looked heavenward, as though searching for help in understanding the male mind, then collapsed back onto the grass with a sigh.

None of them wanted to stay near the troll corpse any longer, so as soon as Gerard returned wearing
dry clothing and leading the two horses, they decided to move on.

“Do you have any idea what happened to your horse?”

Newt stood up and brushed himself off, then put two fingers into his mouth and let out an astonishingly piercing whistle. Gerard’s horse snorted and shifted, while Ailis’s stood placidly. Newt waited a few seconds and then whistled again.

“I guess it wasn’t as well-trained as you thought?” Gerard started to say, when the sound of faint hoof-beats on the road came to them and Newt’s gelding appeared. The saddle was slightly askew, and the horse’s eyes were a little wild, but it otherwise looked unharmed.

“Good horse,” Ailis praised it. “Good…” she looked at Newt expectantly. “What’s his name?”

Newt looked blank. “Horse?” There had never been a need for it; he was the human and the horse was the horse, and that was that.

“Loyal,” she decided.

“That’s a good name,” Gerard said, surprising everyone.

“Loyal, then,” Newt said in a tone of humoring a madwoman. He adjusted the saddle and made sure
the girth was tight around Loyal’s belly, then tied his boots by their laces and hung them around his horse’s neck and swung, barefoot, into the saddle.

“So?” He looked down at the two of them. Ailis looked at her own shoes drying on the grass, and did the same as Newt, grimacing at the way the saddle felt against her wet clothing.

Gerard had already forced his feet back into his boots and mounted easily. Now he unrolled the map. It was glowing again.

“North,” Gerard said, tracing a finger along the path of the glow. “We go north.”

More confident in the map now, they started across the field, bypassing the town entirely, riding at a slow, steady trot. They had two of the three talismans, yes, but time was quickly running out. Midnight would mark the end of this fourth day of the seven Merlin had said they had. They had to move faster, or risk losing Arthur and his entire court forever.

They’re doing rather well, don’t you think?
Merlin was proud, despite himself.

Smart enough, but no smarter. You could have chosen better.
Nimue’s voice was scornful.

They chose themselves. That’s how it goes, if you care to remember.

Such frail reeds. How can they possibly grow into anything to depend on? And they’re moving too slowly.

How much faster could they go?
He was indignant at the slur on their behalf.
They’re children.

There are no children in this country,
she replied.
You’ve eaten them all up, you and your precious king.

And Merlin sighed, unable to argue.

They rode for several hours, stopping only to build camp when it became too dark to see the ground in front of them, although the map in Gerard’s hands glowed with a faint, insistent blue light, as though trying to push them on.

“Enough,” Ailis told the map sternly. Gerard merely stared at it, trying to decide if it was a magical warning of some sort. “We have to sleep. Otherwise we’re going to be even more stupid than we were at the bridge, and get ourselves truly killed.”

She could have sworn an oath that she heard the map let out a tiny sigh, and the light flicked off.

Gerard’s eyes went wide. “How did you…”

Ailis shrugged, then walked back to where Newt was building a small fire a few paces away from
where they had placed their blankets. She was beginning to forget what a bed felt like.

“I’m too tired to eat,” Newt said when she offered him the wrapped-up chicken from the tavern.

“I’ve never been too tired to eat,” Gerard said, coming to sit down next to them. “Give it to me.”

“Excuse me? Who sneered when we took it in the first place?”

“Me,” Gerard said willingly. “But I’m hungry and you’re not, and it’s not going to keep much longer, so I might as well eat it.”

“Oh, for pity’s sake,” Ailis said. “The two of you are worse than a pair of cats, forever hissing at each other for no reason other than that you’re there. Should I toss cold water on you and make you behave?”

“Already did that,” Newt said.

Gerard just grunted and slid his blade from the scabbard that had been stacked with the rest of their belongings. Stepping into a grassy area away from the horses, he slowly began to move through the basic sword forms. Being away from classes was no reason to let himself get rusty.

“Why must you bait him, Newt? You two would get along if you’d only try.”

Newt shrugged. “We are what we are. I’m a
servant. You’re a servant. He’s a squire of royal family. He’s going to be a knight. Knights aren’t friends with servants. They may spend time with them, talk to them. Quest with them even. But they’re not friends. And they’re never ever anything more than that, either. We all have our roles to play.” He glared at her as though daring her to contradict him.

“I know,” Ailis said quietly. “I’ve always known that. It doesn’t matter.”

Ailis went to where her pack lay on her blanket, sat down, and brought out a small ivory comb Lady Melisande had given her last Yuletide, that she’d fortunately had on her person when the bandits stole her pack. Unbinding her braid, she drew the comb though her hair, counting softly until she reached one hundred strokes. By then, Gerard had put his sword away and eaten his share of the leftovers. He was now sitting by the fire, quietly discussing with Newt possible answers as to what the talismans might be or do. Ailis listened to each of them repeating the words of the riddle, making no more sense of it than they had when Merlin’s magic first etched it into ice. She thought about joining them, but decided that she was too tired to move again. So she lay down and went to sleep, trusting them both to keep her safe during the night.

“
A
gain I ask, why can’t magical items be hidden in a cottage next to an apple orchard, half a day’s ride from home?” Newt wasn’t joking.

“Because if the quest were easy, the prize wouldn’t be worth anything,” Gerard said. They had the map open between the two of them, looking down at it and then up in the direction it was leading. Up and up. Into the Hills. It had been two days since leaving Daffyd’s keep, and their exhaustion was matched only by a growing sense of desperation.

“According to who? That’s particularly stupid. Why should the value be on the finding rather than on what the thing itself can do?” Newt was clearly close to losing his temper, reacting less to Gerard’s words than his own frustration.

“That’s not what I meant. Never mind, I don’t
expect you to understand.” Gerard didn’t know why he said that, except it was easier than trying to explain what it was he meant.

“What’s wrong?” Ailis had brought the horses down to a stream to water them after their grazing, taking advantage of the break to stretch her legs. Being on her feet felt odd after so many hours in the saddle, and she wasn’t sure if she would ever get the rocking feel of a trotting horse out of her bones, no matter how many leagues she walked.

“The map wants us to go up into the Hills.”

Ailis looked down at the map and then up where Newt’s finger was pointing. She noticed in passing that he had started biting the tips of his fingers, almost to the point where they were bleeding. He hadn’t done that before—this quest was starting to take its toll on all of them.

“And that’s bad, going into the Hills?”

“It’s not good,” Gerard said. “The Pax Britannica’s always been shaky there. Arthur’s folk are coastal and he’s always had support down here, but up in the Hills…The tribes there acknowledge Arthur—they don’t have any choice—but they don’t always listen to him. We’ve had to go up there a few times to remind them whose law they live under now.”

“We?” Newt raised an eyebrow at that.

“We, in the sense of not being Them,” Gerard said, and Newt’s eyebrow went back down.

“But that’s where the map says to go,” Ailis said.

“Yes.”

“So why are we still here? We have only another day to find the third talisman and get it back to Camelot.” She looked at both of them pointedly, then turned her back on them and swung herself onto her mare with an ease she would not have believed five days before.

The Hills weren’t actually all that impressive in terms of elevation. But the roads led upward more often, and the neatly planted fields were replaced by rougher swathes of greenery, little of it tended or farmed.

Gerard got jumpier and jumpier the farther they went, until even Newt took pity on him and stopped making comments about how many spearmen could hide behind a specific rock or tree.

“I didn’t know it would bother him so much,” he said, defending his words quietly to Ailis as they rode alongside each other on the path.

“Yes you did,” Ailis said in an equally low tone. “Because you’re not a fool. You might have spent
your entire life behind keep walls, but he’s been trained to go out beyond them and fight just the sort of thing you’re teasing him about. Only he hasn’t had a chance to do that yet, and now he’s out in it and it scares him.”

She stopped, not having quite realized the truth of her words before she said them.

“He’s scared,” she continued, “not of getting hurt. But of not being able to do what he was trained to do. Of not being able to protect us.”

“I don’t need protection.”

She shot him a glance so full of scorn it should have straightened his unruly curly hair. “Like you didn’t need help back at the bridge? Don’t be an idiot. I’ve seen death”—the only reference she could make or would ever make to the battle that swept through her home village and that led to her becoming a Queen’s Ward—“and I want someone trained in the arts of war between me and my enemy at all times, thank you very much.”

“So why are you out here, then?” Newt sounded genuinely interested.

“Because…” She fell silent for a moment, then gathered her courage and spoke quickly, as though afraid that her throat would close around her words if
she hesitated. “Because I had to be. Because…don’t tell Gerard. But in the Great Hall, that night…I think…I thought I heard a voice telling me to go with you.”

“A voice? Someone told you? Who?”

Ailis was sorry she had said anything the moment he jumped on her words. “I don’t know. It wasn’t anyone there. It was…a voice in my head.” The reaction she got, a dubious glance and a faint but undeniable shifting away of both horse and rider, was exactly why she hadn’t mentioned it earlier. Hearing voices in your head was not something to admit to. Not unless you were a saint—and she had no illusions on that matter. God was not speaking to her.

“I thought it was Merlin,” she admitted.

“But he didn’t say anything when we saw him—”

“I know. I know.” It had been eating at her. Not only that she had failed to bring it up, but that the enchanter had been silent.

Newt thought about that for a while as their horses picked their way along the stony trail. “Still. He was sort of distracted. A cold backside can do that to a man, I’m told.”

Ailis giggled, as he had intended her to do. He might not be able to protect her from warriors, but at
least Newt could distract her from the things inside her own mind.

“Have you tried talking to him? Merlin, I mean.”

“How?”

“How did he talk to you?”

“Magic, of course.” She waited for his inevitable reaction to the word, but he merely shrugged. “So?”

Ailis blinked at him, her brown eyes wide. “I don’t have any magic!”

“I didn’t notice him talking to me,” Newt pointed out with maddening logic. “And if Merlin had said a word to Gerard, you know that he would have told us. In great steaming detail.”

She laughed again and he felt well rewarded, despite the “why can’t you be quiet?” glare the squire turned on them from his position several paces ahead of them.

“Gerard.” Newt ignored the look Ailis was shooting him and waved the other boy to join them.

“What now?” Gerard looked from one to the other and, sensing the tension, turned to Newt. “What?”

“Tell him,” Newt said. “You know we can’t keep secrets like that, not from each other.”

Reluctantly Ailis repeated what she had told Newt.

“You hear…voices.” Gerard looked like he didn’t know if he should call for a priest or a healer. Or both.

“Not voices. A voice.” Ailis didn’t want to be talking about this. It was all right to hear it, so long as she didn’t think about it. Or talk about it.

“Merlin’s voice,” Newt said. He was only trying to be helpful, and didn’t understand why Ailis scowled at him so.

“I’m not sure,” she admitted. “And he’s not telling me anything useful.”

“Now there’s a surprise,” Newt said, with a hint of sarcasm, and made an innocent “who, me?” gesture when they both looked sharply at him.

“How long has this been going on?”

Ailis shrugged, resenting Gerard’s tone, like he was the lord of them all, just because his father had been raised with the king. She ignored the fact that he was a squire and would one day be a knight, and she and Newt were only and would probably always be only servants…just like she’d always known and ignored, hoping that the inevitable distance wouldn’t come to pass.

“Ailis, it’s important. For how long?”

“A year. Maybe a little more.” The first time it had happened she’d been sleeping. The voice had
come in a dream, and sounded as surprised as she had felt. After that it spoke only occasionally, usually when she was trying to decide what to do or how to react to something.

“It never…whoever it is doesn’t give advice, or tell me anything specific. It’s just…pushing. It pushes me. To do things or not do things, or just stop shivering like a chicken.” That was the exact phrase he had used once. It had been apt and humiliating.

“And you think it’s Merlin because…”

“Because it feels like him.” She couldn’t put it any better. The feel of him in her mind, the weight of his silent voice
was
Merlin.

“Why you?”

“I don’t know!” Did they think she hadn’t wondered that, too? Maybe he was speaking to half the people in the castle. Maybe he wasn’t even speaking to her at all and she was eavesdropping somehow on another’s conversation. Or maybe she was imagining it all, hearing a voice where there was nothing but her own thoughts.

Ailis didn’t think so. But how did you know if you were mad or sane and being spoken to by a surly enchanter? And was there any real difference?

“Have you ever, you know…talked to him? Not
in your mind, I mean, but actually—in the castle?” Newt asked.

Gerard looked at the other boy as though he were the one who had lost his mind, asking that.

“He’s spoken to me,” Ailis said. “Not about anything, just…casually.”

“Casually? Ailis, Merlin doesn’t speak to anyone casually.” Gerard still remembered his one encounter with the man in the Council Room before this quest began. One face-to-face exchange in all the years he had lived in Camelot, and it still unnerved him to think that the enchanter had known his name; even now, knowing that past and present had collided in the enchanter, he knew of Gerard then because of the now….

Gerard stopped trying to untangle that reality. Nobody understood how Merlin could live backward in time, not even King Arthur. It was enough for mortals to simply accept that he did.

“So why didn’t you ask him when—” Gerard stopped. It was a stupid question. An enchanter, already cranky from being trapped in a house made of ice when he should be helping his king, was not the person to ask about conversations he might or might not have been having in a servant girl’s head.

“Why are we even talking about this now?” Ailis asked. “If he’s able to give us help, then we should take it, not pry apart the hows and whys.” She was near tears at what felt like an attack on her, when Gerard held up his hands in surrender, indicating that he wouldn’t talk about it again.

Newt watched the two as Gerard tried to back away clumsily, and felt the worm of worry in the back of his head. What if it wasn’t Merlin who’d been “pushing” Ailis? What if it was someone less kindly inclined toward them—or their quest? After all, somone with powerful magic had enspelled the court to stop the quest for the Grail. Could he and Gerard trust Ailis in this? Or might she, all unsuspecting, be leading them in the wrong direction? She hadn’t actually asked Merlin about his talking to her, after all. Why not?

He hated thinking like that. He wasn’t a war-leader, or a manor-lord. But the thought, once landed, wouldn’t go away.

Gerard reached forward and stroked the neck of his horse, trying to calm himself by the act. His skin was prickling; he
knew
they were being watched. And the longer they rode up this path, the more certain he
was of it. The hills rose to their left, scattered with boulders that could hide half a dozen watchers, all of them ready to fall upon three travelers. Especially when two of the travelers seemed to think that they were on a pleasure ride of the sort the queen organized every spring, to rid her court of their winter quarrels. Except, from what Gerard had seen, more fights broke out then than during the winter, when they were bored, yes, but under Arthur’s eye.

Something prickled his hands and Gerard looked down. The map, now sadly creased, though remarkably—magically—unstained, was glowing more intently now. A faint blue light was pulsing against his palm.

He really didn’t want to stop here, not now, when there was so much opportunity for an ambush, but he knew he couldn’t afford to ignore the map, especially with so little time left. So he compromised, letting the horse have its head just a little bit, trusting that it would keep to the narrow path and not spook at anything unwarranted. Gerard used both hands to unroll the map enough to see what the glow wanted to tell them.

“Damnation.” Gerard felt like using stronger words, but his training held. Instead he merely picked
up the reins again and waited for the others to catch up with him, still keeping his attention at least halfway on the hillside. “We have to change direction.”

“Which way?” For the first time, Newt didn’t ask why or how he knew. The maplight had faded back to its usual narrow blue line, but Gerard still remembered its rather insistent directions.

“Up there.” He didn’t point, but there was only one “up there” it could be. The hills they had been riding in were children to the taller peak casting its shadow over them—not a mountain such as Gerard had heard of, farther west in the wilds of Cymry, but higher than those around Camelot. Higher than any Gerard had been on before, since Sir Rheynold’s lands were bounded by fertile soil, not rock; not so easy to defend but rich enough to feed and house the fighters he needed.

Gerard didn’t like heights. It was that simple.

“I don’t suppose the road turns and leads us…” Newt stopped when Gerard shook his head. “Right. I’ll wager there’s at least one broken leg before this is all through.”

“So long as it’s not one of the horses’,” Gerard returned. It sounded better when he thought it than when he said it somehow. But Newt nodded, under
standing. People could be carried. Horses would have to be abandoned or killed if they were unable to travel.

Ailis, who had pulled her horse alongside Gerard’s, finally finished her scrutiny of the map and placing the figures on the parchment in relation to where they were. “We’re going to have to climb that?” The two boys nodded. “All the way to the top?” Newt looked at Gerard, who shrugged.

“As far as we have to go and no farther,” Gerard said. “And stay together. Remember what happened at the bridge.”

“I’m not likely to forget,” Newt said, wincing.

In the end they led the horses more than they rode, stepping carefully and moving single file through bushes with sharp-edged, gray-green leaves that none of them could recognize, and stepping on carpets of ugly yellow flowers that let off puffs of pale yellow smoke when crushed. The smoke smelled surprisingly good, but none of them had the inclination to investigate further. The landscape was too strange, too unnerving, for them to linger longer than it took to cross it. And the sun was moving across the sky, reminding them of how dangerous it
would be to still be climbing on this uncertain ground come sunset. The only saving grace was that the higher they went, the cooler the air became, until even Gerard, with his leather jerkin, was only sweating lightly.