So now Gerard—and everyone else—knew what was going to happen. Arthur would not only go forward with the Quest, but he would do it in as grand and public a manner as possible. He had no choice.
But Gerard wondered, wouldn’t he need to keep men close at home, too, in case the Marcher Lords did try to rebel?
He shook the thought off. It wasn’t his concern. His immediate goal was to find someone who could get the king’s ear and tell him that Morgain had been inside the castle walls and taken Ailis!
“Many thanks,” he said to the guards, and ducked inside the Council Room. He had failed to deliver his master’s message, and that would earn him a cuff against the head. But Sir Rheynold would be able to help him, once he knew the urgency.
Sure enough, the scene inside was no less noisy than before, only now the knights were arguing directly with each other, rather than trying to make a show for the king.
“Sir?” Gerard came up beside Sir Rheynold, who was talking with several knights of his generation, older men who had originally served King Arthur’s father, Uther Pendragon.
“Yes, Gerard, what is—” The knight took in Gerard’s expression and his sweat-beaded face. He took his squire by the shoulder and walked him a few steps away.
“What is it?”
Gerard told him.
Ten minutes later, Sir Rheynold and Gerard were standing outside the offices of the seneschal, the man who ran Camelot’s household business for King Arthur.
“Have you a message for Master Godrain?” The young clerk who served the seneschal was barely old enough to have grown his first downy yellow beard. He looked as though a chick had gone to sleep on his chin, but he glanced at Sir Rheynold as though the older man was a servant. He didn’t even acknowledge Gerard.
“I would speak with him directly,” Sir Rheynold said, refusing to be put off. He stood in front of the clerk’s desk, his arms folded over his broad chest, and stared back, his leathery, heavily lined features unyielding.
“I am afraid that will not—”
“It will,” Sir Rheynold said, in an equally calm tone. “And it will be, now.” When the clerk would have protested further, the knight merely glanced at Gerard, as though to say, “This is how you handle such annoyances.” Rheynold walked around the desk, his stride vigorous enough to take him to the inner chamber’s door before the clerk could leap to his feet and try and stop him.
One hard knock on the door, and Sir Rheynold was casting it open. He walked inside as though it were the entrance to his own bedchamber.
“Godrain!”
The seneschal looked up from his ledgers, then stood, rising and rising and rising from his seat until he towered over the knight. Gerard, standing in the doorway behind his master, thought that Master Godrain would have made a splendid giant, had there been any flesh on those long bones. Instead of being impressive, however, he merely looked hungry.
“I will assume you have good reason to come barging in here like this,” the man said, his dry voice matching his dry complexion.
“My squire saw Morgain in the castle.” Rheynold reached back and caught Gerard by the shoulder without looking, and dragged him forward.
“What?” Godrain blinked several times in confusion, as though that would make the words suddenly make sense. Then he looked closely at Gerard. “You’re the boy who broke the spell.”
“I was one of them, yes,” Gerard said.
“And you think you saw the sorceress Morgain here? In Camelot?”
“Yes.” Though he didn’t just think he saw her, he wanted to add. He knew what Morgain looked like, better than anyone in this room, probably better than anyone in the entire kingdom, save Arthur and Merlin.
“She was here. Spying, maybe. Or working some worse mischief. I saw her, and there was this green light, a spell, probably. And she took Ailis!”
“Are you sure your boy here knows what he’s saying?” Godrain asked Rheynold, as though Gerard hadn’t spoken.
“I trust Gerard implicitly,” the knight said. In any other situation, Gerard would have nearly burst with pride to hear his master say that. But now, the teenager could barely restrain himself from grabbing the seneschal by his robes and shaking him like a terrier would a rat. Every moment they delayed, who knew what was happening to Ailis!
“Still. How can we be certain? The idea that Merlin’s protections are not enough to keep her out seems…unlikely.” Godrain’s smile and tone suggested what he thought of Merlin despite his words. “A half-hysterical boy, no matter how well he performed during the recent difficulties…”
“The king himself praised Gerard’s cool head and thinking,” Rheynold said, as though he himself had never called Gerard flighty, or foolish, or hot-headed over the years.
“Please!” Gerard broke into the conversation, not caring that he was being rude. “She has Ailis!”
“Gerard! I know that you are upset, but it’s not as though we can do anything for the girl right now,” said Sir Rheynold.
“Nor is there any reason to do so,” the seneschal said thoughtfully, folding himself back into his chair and looking hard at the two of them. “You say that Morgain was aware of your discovery of her?”
“I…I think so.”
“But you can’t be sure? This is important, boy, so be as certain as you can.”
He tried to think back, trying not to focus on Ailis’s face, but the expression of the woman standing behind her. Other than the sorceress’s beauty, which was unforgettable, what had she looked like? “I…don’t think so. No. She seemed…satisfied. Not worried or startled.”
“Good. If she does not know you saw her, then she will be complacent, perhaps smug. She will be careless, and that may give us an advantage.”
“But Ailis!” Gerard couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Was this how Camelot protected the innocent? Defended their people? What about Arthur’s code of chivalry?
“One girl is of no great importance,” Godrain said coldly. “Finding a way to put that witch on the defensive; that is important. The king was willing to give Morgain benefit of the doubt before, but the spell has damaged his desire to protect her. This may be the final blow.”
“But—”
“Gerard! Sit down.”
For the first time in his life, in the years he had spent as part of Sir Rheynold’s household, Gerard locked gazes with his master and refused a direct order.
“I won’t let you abandon Ailis.” It was a knife into his heart to defy Sir Rheynold. But if he was not true to his companions now, how could he ever hope to be a good and just knight? How could he even think of taking his place on the Quest for the Grail if he were not true to his heart?
“Boy, we will not tell you again—” Master Godrain began, only to be interrupted by a commotion from the doorway. The clerk’s voice was raised, protesting against a deeper voice. The words were muffled, but the flurry of noise and excitement stirred Gerard’s hopes.
The clerk was trying to bar the doorway. Then he stopped and, with a resigned sigh, stepped aside. Merlin brushed past him, intentionally pushing the young man away, and walked in.
“I don’t have time for that,” he said over his shoulder to the annoyed clerk. “And I don’t have time to turn you into a rat. Rats are beginning to bore me. Rabbits. Rabbits are good. And if one or three end up in the stewpot, it’s not as though they were doing any good interfering with decent people’s lives anyway. Might as well feed some folk by example, as it were.”
His gaze fell upon Gerard, and the perpetual scowl underneath that hawk’s beak of a nose seemed to lighten a touch. “Just the youngster I think I was coming to see. Or have I seen you already? No, that was before, this is now. My brains are still a bit scrambled. Too cold for me, too cold,” and he gave a dramatic shudder under the heavy gray wool cape that had been flung across his shoulders.
Merlin seemed to have a fondness for Ailis, speaking to her directly, his voice in her head even over great distances. To hav
e him back now, when Ailis needed someone to champion her, it seemed so much a miracle Gerard could only promise himself that he would say his prayers more regularly from now on.
Merlin’s attention turned back to Gerard. “Now, I think we have matters to discuss, yes? Something you needed to tell me? Or was it that I had something to tell you?” His heavy eyebrows drew together in a scowl that Sir Rheynold seemed to find threatening, though Gerard felt almost reassured. Merlin was reputed to live backward in time, which left him sounding perpetually mad, but after a while it was a madness that almost made sense. Merlin knew that Gerard needed to see him, that it was important, and that he had the answer Gerard needed. More important: Merlin was here, and the king’s enchanter out-ranked a seneschal.
“You may not interfere here, old man,” Godrain said, not even bothering to rise from his chair again, as though insulting him could make Merlin go away. “In the matter of…such matters, I make the decisions as to whom the king will see.”
“Indeed you do,” Merlin said. “Far be it from me to interfere in such weighty matters as those. In fact, this boy should not be here at all, filling your valuable time with his news. I shall take him away at once, immediately, if not sooner. Boy, with me!”
Afterward, Gerard could never quite remember how they got from Godrain’s chambers to Merlin’s quarters. There was a blurred memory of Sir Rheynold, left standing in the chaos, and a swirl of servants welcoming Merlin back as they went about their business, but it seemed a matter of seconds to move from one end of the castle to another. Was it magic? Or just the confusion that always seemed to surround the enchanter wherever he went?
However the means, Gerard soon found himself in a corridor that was dry and dusty and clearly off-limits to most of the castle’s population: Merlin’s private chambers. Merlin opened the door with a low muttered incantation, ushered Gerard in, and deposited him in a surprisingly comfortable wooden chair set against one wall. The squire leaned back into it, feeling the wood warm under his backside. He had almost caught his breath when the lions’ heads at the end of the wooden armrests turned and snarled at him. Gerard jumped, but when they didn’t do more than snarl, he relaxed again. Magic. He was beginning to understand Newt’s objections to it.
The enchanter was busy dropping a number of dubious-looking leather sacks into a wooden chest and locking it securely. That done, he turned and looked at the squire. Merlin’s face was lined with exhaustion and his eyes were even more hooded than usual, but there was nothing slack in his attitude. Despite everything, Gerard still felt reassured. This time, Merlin was here. This time, the enchanter could make everything right.
“Now, what happened?”
“I was running an errand for Sir Rheynold, and there was…something felt wrong.” He hadn’t told that to the seneschal, but he had to give Merlin the whole story. Merlin wouldn’t laugh at him. Well, he might, but he would also know if the feeling of unease was important or not. And if it was important, then Merlin needed to know.
“Wrong like a stomachache wrong, or a tooth-ache?”
Gerard blinked in surprise at the question, then replied, “A toothache.”
“And then you saw Morgain?”
“Then I saw a glow. Not right away, after I’d gone a little farther down the hall. But—”
Merlin held up a hand abruptly, his eyes narrowing. The squire halted, confused. “Stop gawking outside and come in, fool child,” the enchanter said in a deeply cranky tone.
The wooden door to the hallway swung open and a familiar head of disordered black hair looked inside.
“You are back!” Newt said in satisfaction. “How did you escape from Nimue? Did they tell you what Arthur said when we told him? And…Gerard? They never told me you were with him—what’s wrong?”
“In, fool of a horse-boy, in!” Merlin said, and something invisible yanked Newt into the room, and shut the door firmly behind him.
FOUR
“How did you know to come here?” Gerard asked his friend. He watched Newt move a pile of strange metal blocks off a bench and place them carefully on the floor before he sat down. They looked harmless enough, but in an enchanter’s workroom, you assumed nothing.
Newt’s shaggy black hair had already grown out of the trim someone had forced on him when they were formally presented to the king after their adventure. The brown pants and lighter-colored shirt he wore bore definite signs of his equine charges. In other words, he looked like Newt—solid, dependable, and practical to the end.
“I told him, of course,” Merlin said, as though giving up on expecting common sense out of either boy. The enchanter stalked over to his desk and began digging through the untidy piles of parchments and scripts there in search of something.
Newt nodded his head in agreement. “I was exercising one of the horses, that new bay they brought in—and a right overeager beast it is, Gerard. Don’t let them put any ham-handed novice up on him or they’ll both be sorry. Anyway, I heard Merlin in my head. Is that how you spoke to Ailis? No wonder she was unnerved! And Merlin told me to get myself over here in a hurry. So I did.”
He might look like the familiar old Newt, but he didn’t sound like him. Gerard had never heard the stable boy quite so agitated, even during the worst moments of their mad ride to break the sleep-spell, the month before.
Perhaps Newt’s nervousness was because Merlin had used magic on him. The stable boy, while not denying magic’s usefulness, had always been uncomfortable around it. Gerard had wondered about that, especially when Ailis started to show signs of mastering it.
“Merlin, what about Ailis? You have to get her back!”
“What?” Newt stopped babbling and stared first at Gerard, then Merlin, then back at Gerard. “Ailis? Who took Ailis? When? How? Why isn’t anyone doing anything about it?”
“Morgain, just now, we don’t know yet, and we are,” Merlin answered. He snapped his fingers and paused from his search of the desk. A chair slid along the floor behind him, stopping just shy of hitting the enchanter in the back of the knees, and Merlin sat down with the perfect confidence of someone who knew that the chair would indeed be in position for him. “Gerard. Continue your story.”
The squire took a deep breath, settling his mind as best he could, focusing on nothing but the exact events in question. Newt ran one hand through his hair, raking it back impatiently, and let his gaze settle on Gerard’s face as though afraid he might miss even one syllable of the story.
“I told you, I saw a glow in the hallway. In the servants’ ways, not the main hall.”
Merlin nodded. Of course someone like him would know of all hidden ways in the castle.
“The light…it was green, like…well, not like anything I can tell you.” He had no idea how to describe that color or the sensations that the glow sent through him. But Merlin was expecting it. Ailis was relying on him. “And…there was this sense of terrible wrongness. So I went forward and I saw her.”
“Morgain?” Merlin asked, leaning forward.
“No, Ailis. She was facing me, and scared, and the glow was all around her like…like a bug caught in tree sap. It was only after that I saw Morgain standing behind her.”
“And then?” Merlin prompted.
“And then it got so bright I had to close my eyes. It hurt. And when I opened them again, they were…gone.” Gerard felt horrible having to admit it, even worse than he’d felt at the time. Then, he’d been so startled and so angry. Now, with time to think…he was scared. He kept wondering what he could have done, what he should have done. What a knight—better trained, wiser, smarter, braver—might have done. He was supposed to protect the innocent, not stand by while they were taken out from under his very nose. He had failed. He had hesitated like a page waiting for instructions.
That memory made his indignation at the seneschal’s attitude rise again. “Godrain wants us to do nothing, to let Morgain think she’s not been detected.”
“No doubt Godrain is an officious fool
, but in this case his thinking is sound.” Merlin tapped his chin thoughtfully while he spoke. “Morgain overconfident would be an easier target than Morgain feeling hunted. She has already been taken down once in recent weeks; her pride must have driven her to make another foray.”
“You’re saying we should just leave Ailis with her? In the hands of that…woman?” Gerard was outraged. Who knew what was happening to her as they sat here and argued.
“I am saying no such thing. Sit down, both of you.”
Gerard hadn’t even noticed that both he and Newt had gotten to their feet.
“But—”
“Sit.”
They sat.
“I know you’re worried. So am I. Ailis struck hard at Morgain, last they met, and the sorceress is not the sort to forgive that. I said that Morgain overconfident is a good thing for us. And it is. Because once again, boys, there’s hard truth coming. I gave Nimue’s little icehouse the slip because I knew I was needed here.”
Gerard frowned, wondering if it was so simple to escape, why hadn’t Merlin left his icy prison before, when the three of them needed him?
Merlin continued, “And now, the gods above and below, with Marcher Lords causing trouble and threatening Arthur’s hold on the title of High King—the only thing that keeps those damned Romans out of our lands—and Morgain is stirring in her jealousy again. Why that woman cannot be content with the lot she was given in life I’ll never know. There’s no way I can leave here to search for Ailis, not even for a day. Arthur needs me by his side to give counsel, or to be seen giving counsel, or to warn off those who might otherwise interfere. That is my sworn vow, and I cannot break it.”
“But—” Newt began. Once again, Merlin wasn’t going to be able to help them. What good was an enchanter if he couldn’t fix things with a snap of his fingers or a wave of that birchwood wand he sometimes carried?
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