“Idiot!” Gerard muttered, but covered his own band, grabbed a sack of his own, and followed.
“Walk slower,” Newt said when Gerard caught up with him. “Casual, like you really don’t care if you get where you’re going ’cause you know you’re going to.”
“That makes absolutely no sense.”
“Trust me.”
The two of them moved up the ramp onto the boat, Gerard having to duck under a timber pole that was being swung around and raised in one smooth movement. He recovered in time to see Newt moving toward the hold, where materials were being deposited.
“Breakables,” Newt said to the man reaching up to take the sack from him. “My head if I don’t set it down m’self.”
Gerard blinked. He knew it was Newt’s voice. He saw Newt’s lips moving as the words were spoken. And yet, somehow, it didn’t sound like Newt at all. The tones were broader, rougher, a little deeper—much closer to the way the other villagers sounded, now that he thought about it.
Not trusting himself to manage the same trick, Gerard lengthened his stride to catch up with Newt, following him down the ladder into the hold with his own sack.
The ladder was short and the hold was dark. They had to wait a moment for their eyes to adjust.
“Over there,” a voice told them, and Gerard jumped. But the clerk, having given them directions, was more interested in ordering the ongoing flow of boxes. He turned his back and paid them no more attention.
Newt set his sack down carefully between two boxes, and, without pausing, disappeared into the deeper shadows of the hold. Gerard did the same, feeling far too exposed despite the fact that he knew, intellectually, that if he could not see Newt, then no one would be able to see him, either.
A tug on his arm guided him down to the floor, where Newt was already settled, sitting cross-legged with his back against the wall.
And there, barely breathing for fear of being overheard by the workers still loading and counting off boxes, they waited.
Eventually, the last box was sent down and marked off. The clerk finalized his accounting and climbed up the ladder. He secured the trapdoor firmly behind him.
The entire hold was plunged into total darkness.
“It worked.” Newt sounded far too surprised for Gerard’s peace of mind.
“Not yet, it hasn’t. We still have to get there. And get off the boat without being seen. And then—”
“You can’t ever accept a moment for what it is, can you?”
“In other words, you have no idea how we’re going to manage any of that, either, do you?”
“The same way we got on, only in reverse,” Newt said matter-of-factly.
“And getting off the island again, once we find Ailis?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea,” Newt admitted. “We’ll figure something out.” Gerard sensed Newt shrugging. “That’s assuming Morgain doesn’t kill us in the process. Or turn us into snails. Or…”
“I get the point,” Gerard said. There was something being shouted outside, and a sudden lurch around them. The ropes had just been cast off. They were under way. He crossed his arms over his knees, rested his chin on his arms, and did the only thing he could do.
He went to sleep.
Arthur paced at the far end of the room, dictating a letter to be taken to the Marcher Lords who had threatened to rebel, discussing further terms of their parley, but Merlin could not let it distract him. Not when he was…almost…there….
Ailis. Ailis. Drat it, child. Pay attention!
For an instant he thought he could almost feel the girl-child, like seeing a light flicker in the distance, through trees, but then it was gone, and Morgain’s protections fell between them again. The enchanter sighed, knuckling his eyes and sitting back in his wooden chair.
“I’m sorry, sire,” he said, speaking just loudly enough for his king to hear him. “The barriers…I felt them slip for an instant, but I could not reach through.”
Arthur stopped long enough to come over and place a gentle hand on the enchanter’s shoulder. “Keep trying. If we can reach her, we can tell her what to look for and what to tell us. It’s bad enough to discover Morgain’s hand in this trouble along the northern borders, but what else might she be stirring?” The king continued, “And let Ailis know that help is on its way. So she can focus on learning Morgain’s secrets, not escaping.”
Merlin frowned, his concern for the child warring with his understanding of what was necessary. You used the weapons you had on hand. “Yes, sire.”
Taking a deep breath, Merlin slid back into his trance. Ailis! Be strong! We will not desert you. Strength is coming.
He hoped.
EIGHTEEN
“Morgain?”
“Yes, witch-child?”
By now, Ailis had accustomed herself to Morgain’s nickname for her. In time, she suspected that she might begin to think that it was her given name. Sleep last night had been filled with dreams of people calling for her, voices shouting each other down, pulling at her in a hundred different directions until she woke feeling exhausted, as though she had single-handedly served a midwinter feast. When Ailis woke at last, she hadn’t been quite sure where she was or even who she was exactly. A hot bath and some herbal tea had soothed her body and sharpened her mind, but she was still feeling a little off-center and confused. She didn’t like feeling confused. You couldn’t be confused around Morgain. It was too dangerous.
“You had a question?” the sorceress prompted her.
Ailis pulled on her braid and smoothed the feather she now worked into her hair every morning. It was her talisman. It reminded her of dreams of flying, of dreams of magic under her own control. “Why did you put that sleep-spell on Camelot?”
Mixing a floury substance into a dark green liquid that simmered pleasantly, filling the workroom with the scent of pine and brine, Morgain stopped what she was doing and looked at Ailis in surprise.
“Why do you think I put that spell on Camelot?”
That had been the pattern for the past few days. Ailis would ask a question and Morgain would repeat it back to her. It would have been infuriating, except for the echo of Merlin’s own eccentric speech patterns that made it somehow comforting as well. Were all magic users like that? Or was it simply Merlin’s influence on Morgain long ago? Ailis didn’t know.
“Some say that it’s because you’re evil. That you don’t need any other reason.”
“Is that what you think?” Morgain went back to her blending, as though the answer was of no importance at all.
The now-familiar space of the workroom gave Ailis courage to press on. “I think you have a reason. But it’s not just because you’re evil. I’m not…I’m not really sure that you are. Evil, I mean.”
There. It was said.
That got a laugh out of Morgain; a real one, full-bodied and full of surprised delight.
“Oh, I’m evil, witch-child. Never mistake that. By the standards of those who raised you, I’m perhaps the most evil soul of all.”
“By their standards?” Ailis repeated, confused.
“Mmmm. That is something I learned very early on, Ailis.” The fact that Morgain used her real name made the girl pay closer attention. “Do not blindly accept the word of anyone who would tell you how things must be. Question, witch-child. Question especially those who would define ‘evil’ for you.”
Ailis felt as though an entire hive of bees had moved into her head, buzzing and stinging in her brain. Morgain was trying to confuse her, make her question up and down, good and bad, right and wrong. It was her dream all over again—only Morgain’s voice was blending with her own, until she wasn’t sure where one ended and the other began, and the other voices were silent, gone away.
Right was right, and wrong was wrong. Evil was always evil. Wasn’t it? The sense of clarity she always had with Morgain was gone, destroyed by her own question.
If evil wasn’t always evil…
Ailis frowned, shook h
er head, looked at Morgain, then looked back down at the simple paste the sorceress had set her to mixing. Yellow and red swirled together to create, Morgain said, a potion that would aid in sleep. Sleep—or, in a certain dosage, death. A starter spell for a witch-child to do on her own. Nothing that could not be accomplished by herbals, but herbal mixtures often went bad quickly or lost their potency.
How easy, to turn helpful into harmful. Ailis could see that. How easy would it also be, then, to turn…good into evil?
Ailis wasn’t naïve; you couldn’t live in Camelot without seeing how the world worked. It would be useful for Morgain to have an ally, however low, in Camelot. The isolation, the treats, the fearsome figure—the sorceress could be trying to confuse her thinking, make her sympathetic to Morgain’s cause, turn her loyalties…and then allow her to return home. And then, someday, when others had perhaps forgotten that she had once been prisoner of the sorceress, she could…
There, Ailis’s imagination failed her. She could not imagine a single thing that Morgain might need her for, in the heart of Camelot. How could Ailis even assume that anyone would ever trust her after all this.
For all she knew, they had abandoned her, thought or even hoped she was dead.
Merlin! She tried to shout with her mind. Merlin, help me!
The only voice in her head now was her own.
“Why…” She paused, then rephrased her question, not even sure what she was going to say until she voiced it. “What did they say must be, that you believed them?”
For a long time, Ailis thought that Morgain was not going to answer her.
“When I was a child, my mother seemed a terribly powerful woman. Within our home, her word and her wish was law. But when my father died, Uther the King decided that my mother would be his bride. There was nothing she could do to stop him. Arthur came of that union. A boy. And because he was a boy, all the power and the glory went to him. Not to the girl-children my mother had borne before. Not to the ones with the true power, the magic, the Old Ways in their blood. My sisters and I were simply not important.
“I was not born to live that way, witch-child. And neither were you.” Morgain lifted her head as though listening to something, like alert dogs in a kennel, and stared at her for a moment. “Come with me.”
Ailis practically had to run in order to keep up, for all that Morgain seemed to glide in exactly the same way the dance master had insisted upon, ages and ages ago back in Camelot. When the sorceress did it, the movements seemed graceful and deadly, not silly.
They went down the stairs, across the jointed walkway where Morgain’s worktower connected to the rest of the fortress, and down a hallway that Ailis had never seen before. By now, the building’s confusing layout had a strange familiarity to it, as though someone had burned the knowledge of every room into her bones. She knew where Sir Tawny would have room to spread his wings, and where she could go to sit and listen to the silence within the stones, should she so desire it. The magic of the undersea room was hers for the using now, and half a dozen other chambers besides.
A door appeared in the wall in front of them, and, without hesitating, Morgain put her left hand up, palm flat, and pushed against it while making a complicated gesture with her right hand held down around her hip. Ailis managed to watch both hands, but only barely—she was pretty sure that she had missed something in that right-hand gesture.
The stone door slid back, the same way Morgain’s workroom doorway had, and the sorceress gently pushed Ailis through.
The last time Ailis had gone through a magically appearing doorway, it had taken her to and from the Isle of Apples, Morgain’s home in the otherworld. So it was with relief that she realized that they had merely stepped outside the confines of the fortress and were now standing on the external walls, overlooking the village Ailis had only seen through windows. Beyond that, the ocean foamed gray-blue across to the mainland, where the waters crashed against the rocky shore.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?”
Personally, Ailis thought it was barren and depressing and cold.
“Look into the water, witch-child. Look deep.”
Ailis didn’t bother to protest that the water was too far away. Morgain would not ask something Ailis could not do. It was up to Ailis to discover how to do it.
Letting her mind float like the thick gray clouds overhead, Ailis focused on a cliff off in the distance, one that seemed to echo with a magical residue, resting her eyes on it until everything blurred, the same way she had looked at the map days ago. Then she let her gaze drift down into the deep, cold waters, down past the great schools of baitfish flickering like a single hungry beast, down farther to where the currents swirled and shoved against each other.
“Do you feel it, witch-child?”
Ailis nodded, her face a blank mask, the rest of her was out there in the swirling waters. It was like being back in the water-room, only more real. More intense.
“Take it. Take what you feel. Shape it. Fold it between your hands. Feel the power that resides within the water. Take it.”
The wind stirred the feather braided into her hair, but did not so much as ruffle her clothing.
“It’s too much,” Ailis protested.
“Too much for a mortal frame, yes. It’s not meant to run in your blood-filled body. But you can move it. Manipulate it.”
“Move things with it?”
“Exactly!” Morgain’s voice was pleased. Ailis could feel her chest swell with pride at having impressed her teacher so. “There’s a ship out there coming from the mainland. Good sailors, all of them. My sailors. Shall we test them? Push their ship. Push it to their limits.”
Ailis found the ship without difficulty—it was the only solid object on the damp seascape—and shoved the gathered force of the ocean against its wooden sides.
The wood shivered and rocked low in the waters. Ailis was amazed at how easy it was.
“Again,” Morgain’s voice encouraged her. “Again.”
“Are you all right?”
“Yeah. Just a little…now I know why Sir Caedor didn’t like boats.” Newt wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and took the waterskin from Gerard. He rinsed his mouth and spat the water out onto the floor of the hold. It was disgusting. He hadn’t made a mess like that since he was ill as a child, but he did feel better.
“Come on, then.” The sounds and feel of the boat had begun to change, from the near-panic of the sudden storm to a more measured flurry of feet and voices, indicating that they were hopefully approaching Morgain’s island stronghold.
The plan was to try and blend in with the workers unloading materials, the same way they had gotten themselves on board. The problem was that Morgain was bound to have her own people meeting the boat. “It’s what I would do,” Gerard had said.
“Not a huge presence,” Newt had agreed. “Just one, maybe two people, to make sure the faces are all familiar and that nobody goes anywhere they’re not supposed to be.”
“Are we sure this is the right place?” Newt asked, just before he stuck his head up out of the hold.
“A little late to be worrying about that now, isn’t it?” Gerard retorted, waiting at the base of the ladder.
“Check the lodestone.”
“Against what?” But even as he protested, Gerard was reaching for the stone around his neck, drawing it up and out into the open. “All right,” he said to it. “Are we in the right place?”
The stone seemed to shimmer slightly, and then burst into a handful of fine gray powder.
“Right.” Gerard wiped powder off his nose and shook out his hair, spitting at the dry taste in his mouth. “Any other brilliant questions?”
Gerard and Newt mingled with the sailors unloading the boxes until they were able to work their way to the gangway. They were both work-hardened enough to pass, so long as no one looked too closely, but Newt’s clothing was still closer in style; even the vomit stains added a touch of reality that Gerard’s travel ge
ar lacked, being of higher quality material than the average worker on that vessel could ever afford.
The dock was a sturdier structure than the one in the village, better made and better maintained, but for all that, it was still a simple wooden dock—nothing that would seem out of place in any port. Certainly not anything they might have expected, remembering the glimmer and shine of Morgain’s abode on the mystical Isle of Apples.
Then again, the Isle of Apples had housed only Morgain and her great black cat, as far as anyone knew. This small, rock-crusted island seemed to be home to many more people, based on the number of souls coming down to meet the boat, waving and calling out greetings.
“Your first trip?” a sailor said to Newt, handing him the end of a rope and clearly expecting him to know what to do with it.
Newt merely nodded, watching the other man start to pull. His ability to mimic accents was best saved for emergencies—he had no confidence in how long he might be able to fool the locals.
“Nothin’ to it,” the man went on. “Towson’s a fair master, a’long as you do your share a’ the work and don’t shirk off. Here from Glandis?”
“South,” Newt said, not sure where Glandis was. “Hoping to get some skills, bring ’em home.”
The answer seemed to satisfy the man’s limited curiosity. “As I said, don’t shirk and you’ll do fine.”
Newt suspected that sneaking off the moment he had a chance was going to qualify as shirking. Since he had no desire to bring home anything except Ailis, it didn’t exactly depress him. He put his weight into pulling the rope as well, bringing them smoothly alongside the dock, which they hit with a solid thud of wood against wood.
“Welcome, and well come,” one of the men on the dock said, all smiles. “In peaceful intent, and in peaceful depart. And good to see you, White Lady.”
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