Morgain's Revenge

by Laura Anne Gilman

  A cold sweat formed and dripped down Ailis’s neck, running in a line down her spine. “Morgain? Here? In the castle?”

  TWO

  “And so, sire, I must protest at this plan, even as I understand why my fellow knights might think it needful…”

  Gerard was standing against a wall with the other squires, each standing attendance to their master. A tapestry on the wall across the room’s grand table showed a scene from Arthur’s coronation: Arthur standing in front of the masses, Excalibur in his hand, Merlin off to his right and Sir Kay and Sir Bors at his left. Gerard thought he could close his eyes and recount every single thread in the tapestry, he had been staring at it for so long.

  “I’m going to make a break for that cheese,” Tyler muttered under his breath, two squires down. Mak, between them, snickered quietly. The cheese he referred to, a half-eaten yellow-washed wheel, was on the sideboard at the far end of the room, along with slices of meats, bread, and a scattering of dried fruits. The knights were able to get up and take food as they wished. None of the squires had that option, not while the council was in session. Nor without permission, which none of their masters had remembered to give, so caught up in the argument at hand.

  Hunger aside, Gerard wasn’t happy. And he didn’t understand why. After the events of the past month—taking charge when the adults were all cast under a sleep-spell, and even facing down the king’s sorceress half-sister—he had become the undisputed leader of the squires. There was even talk of him being knighted early. Not that it would happen right away. He had years to go yet. But the talk was enough to puff up his pride dangerously. Sir Lancelot, his hero, had even patted him on the shoulder approvingly when the story was told, and said that he himself could have done no better.

  But greater than all that, Gerard had been invited by Arthur himself to join the knights on the Grail Quest when it finally rode out. For a fourteen-year-old squire, it was every dream coming true.

  And yet…

  “That, my king, is insane!”

  And yet Gerard heartily wished he could be anywhere else right now. Even if it meant giving up his place on the Quest? No, probably not. But if suffering made a soul worthy to touch the Grail—the way some of the knights described—he was absolutely being readied for it.

  “You dare?” Gerard was startled out of his morose thoughts when Sir Josia pounded on the table with one meaty fist, trying to drown out the knight across the table from him—both standing and gesturing excitedly.

  “I dare because it is true! To leave Camelot now, when that sorceress has made such a blatant move against the king, is madness that must not go unchallenged! Sire, reconsider this! Send knights off, yes, if you must, but no such grand procession as was planned! And do not send the best of us when they are needed here!”

  Sir Sagremor, an older knight, with the scars of battle on his face and arms, crashed his olivewood goblet onto the table. “Now is when we need the Grail most of all, you idiot! And only the finest of knights have any chance of finding it and bringing it home!”

  “We need no cup to prove our worth! Least of all some cup that may not even exist!” Sir Lamorak said in disgust.

  “Blasphemy!” Sir Galahad, normally the mildest of voices, shouted in outrage. He shoved his chair back across the stone floor as he stood up.

  “Your blasphemy, maybe,” Lamorak said in response. “I am no Christian, to worship a man on a tree.”

  The table erupted again, many voices competing against each other—not to be heard, but to drown the others out.

  Through it all, Arthur sat in his grand chair at the Round Table. He leaned his bearded chin on his palm and watched intently as his knights shouted and swore and waved their arms to make their points. The din was almost unbearable. Gerard couldn’t help but wonder how the king was able to hear anything, much less his own thoughts.

  “Sire, please.” Sir Kay, the king’s foster brother and Gerard’s uncle, spoke not in a shout, but a steady, even voice that carried to where the squires waited. “We must take action! One way or another, things must be decided. The Quest can be delayed no longer, else we look like fools and cowards.”

  Sir Kay was wise, and the king depended on his advice, but even he couldn’t stop the shouting. Gerard decided it was never going to end. They would still be standing here—Arthur would still be listening to every viewpoint and opinion—when Gerard’s hair was as gray as his master’s, and nothing will have been decided. He couldn’t help but compare all this to the way he, Newt, and Ailis had worked together on their quest to break Morgain’s spell. They’d had differences, but they’d managed to do what needed to be done, without all this back and forth and back and forth with nobody listening to anyone else.

  After some honest reflection, Gerard admitted that wasn’t entirely true. They had argued more often than not. But when things had to be done, they were done.

  Was it because the three of them didn’t know enough to see other options? Or was it because they didn’t have the time to sit and argue about it? And why did Arthur not put an end to all of this arguing and make a decision already—he was the king!

  A slight movement from his master caught his eye. Gerard stepped forward to kneel by Sir Rheynold’s chair, close enough to hear the murmured instructions.

  “I was supposed to meet with the guardsmaster to discuss the Abmont estate levies, but there is no way that I will make that meeting as matters here stand. Tender him my regrets and ask him for a time of his convenience to reschedule.”

  In the past, Gerard might have been dismayed at the thought of having to miss any of the knights’ discussions on a matter of such importance. Now he took the errand thankfully, aware of the envy of his fellow squires, still relegated to their posts on the off chance that their masters might need them as well.

  “Take your time coming back, lad,” one of the guards in the hallway said when Gerard pushed open the smaller door to leave. “Sounds as though they’ll be at it for hours yet. Someone else can fetch your master his wine.”

  “Truth in that, and they’ll need more wine, the way they’re talking,” another guard said with a laugh.

  Gerard forced a smile at the comment, then turned and walked away. There was no great rush, true, but he would not malinger. That was the act of a raw page or a servant, not a squire. He would deliver Sir Rheynold’s message to the master of the guards and return, although he might find time to stop by the kitchen and sneak something to eat before he did so. He was dedicated, not foolish.

  And maybe someone in the kitchen would be able to carry a message for him to Ailis and Newt, to see if there was some way the three of them could arrange to see each other. He thought of Ailis especially. They had known each other all the years they had lived in Camelot, since they were children, and it seemed strange to be separated now, after seven days spent entirely in her company.

  In the hallway, Ailis watched with wide eyes as a woman crouched over a globe of some sort, the size of a large porridge kettle. The globe was the source of the green glow that enveloped Morgain. Yes, it was Morgain. There was no mistaking that elegant form, even from the back. Inside the mystical globe there were figures, moving about. Ailis squinted, narrowing her eyes in an attempt to make out more detail.

  Men, standing and sitting around…a great round table. Arthur’s council table! She tried to stifle her startled gasp, but the sorceress was aware that she was being watched. Morgain immediately turned, her long black hair swinging, her lovely, fine-boned face cast in a mask of anger that shifted quickly to surprise and then to a cunning sort of calculation.

  Ailis knew that she should run, find help, alert the castle that Morgain was within the walls and was spying on the king. But something in the sorceress’s eyes held her in place, even as she tried to resist.

  “Witch-child.”

  “I am not!” Ailis tried to protest, but the words wouldn’t come out of her mouth. She felt like a fish on a hook, being pulled helplessly to the fi
sher, and doom.

  “Were you spying on me, witch-child? Sneaking and spying, drawn hither by…what?”

  “I was running an errand,” Ailis said, her jaw working again in response to Morgain’s question. The sorceress was magicking her! Ailis tried to halt her own words, horrified at what she might say, but was unable to stop herself. “For one of the ladies of my queen’s solar.”

  “You’ve access to the queen’s company, then? Interesting. How very…interesting.”

  No! She would not say anything that might betray the queen, nothing that would endanger Camelot. She. Would. Not.

  Something caused Morgain to lift her head just then, like a stag reacting to a distant hunter’s horn, and the spell her eyes had on Ailis was broken. The girl turned to run, catching up her skirts in both hands, but an invisible hand caught at her shoulder, and pulled her backward.

  “No, witch-child, I think you should come with me. I might have use of you.”

  “Nnnnnnnggghhhhh.” Ailis tried to fight, but a low angry cry was all she could manage. Her heels dragged across the stone floor as she was pulled into the green glow. It seemed to be expanding, filling the hallway like a shadow, tinting the stone walls and darkening the floor like spilled blood. At the very last moment before the green energy overwhelmed her, Ailis felt the air being sucked from her lungs, and in that instant she was finally able to scream for help, for anyone to come….

  Gerard’s steady walk slowed, almost without him noticing the change, and his hand went to his waist where his sword was not sheathed. No one carried a weapon inside Camelot’s walls unless they were on guard duty. But something felt wrong, something that made him wish for solid steel. The sense of dissatisfaction and distaste from the council session had evaporated, replaced by unease and suspicion.

  “You’re getting as bad as Ailis, with her ‘feelings,’” he told himself. “You’re inside the most secure place on the entire island, surrounded by the finest warriors.” None of which were able to prevent a spell from being cast before. His own thoughts worried at him.

  There was nothing behind him, save a page dashing on in another direction much farther down the hallway, where it opened into an antechamber, and a serving girl was gossiping with two guards. Light from the wall lamps glinted off the pitcher she carried at her hip and the metal of the guards’ byrnies that covered them from shoulder to waist. He thought briefly about calling to alert the guards, but what would he say to them? “I felt a chill, an unease?” They would mock him, and rightfully so, when it turned out to be a door left open ahead, or something equally foolish. “And this from the squire the king so praised?” he could imagine them joking in their sleeping quarters.

  No. He would say nothing. There was nothing to say.

  Clenching his jaw and pushing his shoulders back into a square set, the way he’d seen Arthur do, he walked forward into the intersection where the hallway he was in met up with several others. A page was curled up on a windowsill, using the daylight to study a scroll of some sort. Two maids worked to take down a tapestry that hung on the opposite wall while a different tapestry waited, rolled on the floor, to replace it.

  Gerard walked past them all, nodding to the page when the boy looked up from his reading to see who it was. He didn’t know all the pages, but this one seemed to know him.

  “Good morn, Ger!”

  The voice was familiar, yes, but the boy’s name escaped him totally, so Gerard merely raised a hand in greeting, and walked on. He was almost at his destination; through this antechamber, past the stairs which led to the cellars, and two doors down, was the walkway to the guardroom, where the master of the guard would be found for receipt of Sir Rheynold’s message. Same time spent getting back, even if he did pause at the kitchen, and he would probably find the same argument he had left still going on.

  “Months of boredom, followed by a mad dash across the marshes in the midst of the night,” Gerard said out loud, quoting what his master had said years ago when describing the life of a knight. As a page he hadn’t believed it, thinking that every moment of a knight’s life must be excitement and derring-do.

  But it was so. The majority of life was a slow, dreary slog through the things that must be done. Gerard supposed that was true even if you were the king. And that included listening to everyone argue about something, even if you’ve already made up your mind about what you’re going to do.

  He shivered again, a sudden ice-cold finger sliding down his spine in a deeply unpleasant way. Without thinking, he turned away from the hallway that led to his destination, and instead went left, finding himself running down one of the routes that servants used when they needed to move fast and stay out of sight.

  Ailis had taught him about those ways, the semi-secret passages throughout Camelot that none of the nobles knew about. It had been a game when they were children, to race across the castle without using any of the main corridors or hallways. It had been years since he’d done that, true, but he didn’t remember any of the passages having such a green cast to the stone, no matter what time of day or night.

  Something is wrong. Something is very wrong, was all he had time to think before he turned a corner and was almost blinded by the intense green glow filling the passage.

  Danger! His senses screamed at him, every muscle instinctively readying itself for combat, the way he had been trained to react. The glow burned, made him flinch away. Magic! Danger!

  In the instant before his eyes shut in self-defense, his brain caught the image of Ailis, her hands reaching for him, her face terrified, as she was sucked backward into the heart of the glow.

  Behind Ailis, her face the same diamond perfection he remembered from their last encounter—the sorceress Morgain!

  “Ailis!” he shouted, fighting to move forward into the glow, reaching out for her, trying to find her. He had to save her! But even as he ran forward, something Newt had said during their adventure came back to him: “Charging in blind is not the act of a hero, not if you don’t know what’s going on.”

  It was just enough to make him hesitate, and then the glow was gone. The passageway was empty. No glow. No Morgain. No Ailis.

  Gerard stared for a moment in disbelief. How? How did Morgain get in here? And what was Ailis doing with her?

  Gerard scanned the space again, as though hoping that Ailis would reappear out of thin air or that his eyes had been playing tricks on him.

  But the hallway remained empty. With a curse, Gerard turned on his heels and ran for the Council Room.

  Newt was right. As much as he’d wanted to follow Ailis into that glow, it would have been the act of a fool. Morgain was dangerous. This was a matter for older, wiser, more experienced men. Ailis’s life—and the security of Camelot—depended on it!

  Falling and rising at the same time, buffeted by terrible winds, spinning and expanding into an infinite space. No sense of place or time, no sense of anything except turning and spinning and the endless falling and the endless rising, all at once, until she thought she might throw up. Aware of the bile in her throat, she struck out, her fingers dragging on nothingness that was somehow solid, a thick rope of something that shimmered under her grasp and then disappeared. Other ropes appeared under her fingers, and she grabbed and let them go, categorizing each one even as they were pulled away or faded from her grasp, until a pattern began to emerge. One line went thus, and another went there, and when they moved in such a way the winds came from below, and when they moved like that, the winds came from the side, as though they were being rushed by pulleys through enormous external doors.

  She could almost sense how they worked, how they opened and closed. The pattern shimmered in her mind, diagrams appearing on a slate; dry scratchings that began to shimmer with color and light the longer she worked at them. Reaching out to learn more, to touch more, her hand was struck down by something…someone? A quick harsh blow stung, and she cried out, sound in the wind-locked emptiness. Then a cool mint fog settled over her aware
ness, wiping the slate clean….

  THREE

  Gerard paid no attention to dignity or manners on his way back to the Council Room. It mattered more that he got there as quickly as possible, not how many people saw him racing down hallways and across courtyards like an untamed page.

  Morgain. Morgain in the castle! Was the sorceress here to make another attempt at preventing the Quest from riding out? Or was she finally making an actual strike against King Arthur?

  And what did she want with Ailis? Was it revenge for Ailis’s part in breaking her sleep-spell? Or something more—something worse?

  Despite the training squires were given on a daily basis, Gerard was winded when he got back to the Council Room. Riding and fighting, even in armor, did not prepare you for sprinting through hallways in such urgent circumstances.

  “Hold up, lad. Can’t go back in there gasping like a landed fish,” one of the guards said, placing a fatherly hand on his shoulder. “What’s the cause of you rushing back, against all advice? Nothing’s going on in there at all, save squabbling and gossip, since the king’s been called away.”

  That got Gerard’s attention. “What? He has?” Had someone already carried news of Morgain’s appearance and her thefting of Ailis out from under their noses?

  “A rider came in from the northern Marches. One of Arthur’s snoops thinks the lord there is planning to use our recent difficulties”—the adults had taken to speaking of the spell as a “recent difficulty”—“to break away and be his own master, rather than pay fealty come the spring.”

  The one thing Gerard had learned, to his astonishment, was that the common guardsmen often knew details—not gossip, but facts—sooner and more accurately than even the wisest knight. So he did not question what they told him. His shoulders slumped. He had a better chance of winning this year’s tournament melee single-handed than he did of reaching Arthur now. Dissent along the Marches was what the Quest was to prevent in the first place; the Quest would show the lords in the lands beyond where Arthur held sole rule, who owed their allegiances to King Arthur, that he was indeed the man to rule them. And this incipient rebellion was exactly what Morgain would be hoping to provoke by her actions.