The Camelot Spell

by Laura Anne Gilman

  “Who?” He looked at her blankly.

  “Ankou. The gatherer of the dead. Don’t you listen to any of the old stories?”

  “Not much place for stories in the stable,” Newt said.

  Since Ailis knew full well that the tales that didn’t come from the kitchens came from the stables, she gave that claim the look of scorn it deserved, making Newt snort with laughter. His expression lightened and made him seem quite…presentable.

  “What are you laughing at?” Gerard asked, falling back to rejoin them.

  “The stable boy is being impossible,” Ailis said primly, but her eyes were alight with mischief.

  “He excels at that,” Gerard said, shooting Newt a sideways glare. It wasn’t quite a warning, it wasn’t quite jealousy, but it clearly said “hands off.” Ailis might be a servant, but she was a member of the queen’s household and Gerard’s friend, besides. Too good for a stable boy to flirt with.

  “We need to talk about how we’re going to approach this,” Gerard said, intentionally moving his bay between Ailis’s and Newt’s horses.

  “Approach what?” Newt asked.

  “The townspeople. Or did you plan on riding in and asking, ‘Excuse me, have you seen an errant enchanter? We require him most urgently back at Camelot’?”

  Newt shrugged. “If it would get us the answers we need, yes.”

  “It wouldn’t. They’d be more likely to hold us as horse thieves.”

  “Even a noble squire?” Newt was mocking, but Gerard refused to rise to the bait.

  “Noble is as noble appears,” Ailis said, gently leaning forward to pat her gelding’s neck as it jerked at the reins.

  Gerard scowled at that. He knew he didn’t appear at all noble right now, in his worn leathers and second-best surcoat. By the holy cross, he would mistake himself for a horse thief if he didn’t know better!

  “You’re well-born. You can speak the part, certainly. Newt is your servant. You were sent to…ah…” Ailis lost the story as she tried to determine what her role in all this might be.

  “You’re my sister,” Newt said suddenly. “We’re going to visit our father. Our master’s son, for a lark, decided to join us. Against his father’s wishes. We’re looking for another old servant, who has since left the household. We have a message to bear him, from our master, which was why we were given leave to go. So it’s vital we pass it along, else we risk our master’s anger when we return without a response.”

  He stopped, suddenly realizing that the other two were staring at him as their horses plodded along down the road.

  “What?” he asked defensively.

  “You were wasted with beasts,” Gerard said with an edge to his voice. “You should have been a troubadour.”

  “Now, that was unkind,” Newt said, rubbing his chest over his heart as though mortally wounded. The squire merely turned his attention back to the space between his horse’s ears.

  “It is sound,” Ailis said, running it over in her thoughts. “His plan, I mean. Certainly better than anything I might come up with…and we haven’t much time.”

  Since the sturdy brown walls of the unnamed town were coming into view, the boys had to agree.

  “Let me do the talking, then,” Ailis said quickly, sensing that Gerard was still unhappy with the plan—any plan—that Newt might come up with.

  Unlike Camelot, this town had no guards outside its walls. The three companions rode through an untended gate, then past a low, long building that smelled of sheep, and a stone church without seeing a living soul. Several cottages, close together and bounded by a low stone wall and carefully tended hedges, looked more promising, but whoever lived in them stayed within.

  “Over there.” Gerard pointed toward one of the small cottages, and they moved their horses in the direction of a lone figure in its yard.

  “Pardon, my lady,” Ailis began.

  The woman looked up from the shirts she was laying over flowering bushes to dry, and blinked at the odd trio in front of her.

  “Pardon, but we’re seeking a man—” Ailis faltered here. She was so accustomed to thinking of Merlin as an old man—he had, after all, helped to raise Arthur!—that she pictured him as one. They all did, else Newt would never have thought to cast him as an old servant, long retired. But describing him physically made her realize that he wasn’t actually that old at all. In fact, since he was living backward, it was possible that he was actually getting younger.

  Magic, she thought. He doesn’t just use magic, he is magic. It was a new idea, an interesting idea, and one she didn’t have time to follow right now.

  “We’re in search of a man—a former servant of my master, who chose to go out on his own. Our master tasked us to find him. We were told he might have taken shelter within your village. He is tall and slender. A hawk’s beak of a nose, and dark hair shot with silver…”

  Ailis let her voice trail off as the woman merely stared at her. They had no idea what name Merlin might be using, if indeed he used any name at all. Who knew what an enchanter might do? He might not even be in his own form—he might be traveling the countryside as an animal, as a bird; as the rabbit they had for dinner the night before! Ailis fought down nausea at the thought.

  “Might you have seen such a man?” she finished.

  The woman looked at each of them in turn, then shook her head. “Sparrows cry. The fox does not dine, but feathers fly.”

  The three of them stared at her and she looked back placidly, her wide-set brown eyes as calm as a faithful hound’s.

  “Right. Our thanks, madam,” Gerard said finally, making a vaguely courtly bow from horseback, and reining his horse aside and back into the road. The other two followed, Newt more reluctantly than Ailis.

  “Strange,” Newt said.

  “Mad,” Gerard said flatly.

  “She didn’t seem to be mad,” Ailis argued.

  “Do you think they all froth at the mouth and roll in the dust?” Gerard shook his head. “Mad. Take my word for it.”

  “I’ve seen madwomen before,” Newt disagreed. “She didn’t strike me as such. There was awareness in her eyes, not madness.”

  “Her words were madness.”

  With that, Newt couldn’t argue. Who but a madwoman spoke in such strange terms?

  By the time the sun was shading into the hills, however, the three of them not only believed that every soul in the town was mad, they grew less certain about their own sanity. Every single person they had spoken to responded in the same nonsense patter as the first woman.

  “If not mad, then cursed. The work of a sorcerer,” Gerard decided.

  “To speak gibberish? A strange curse.” But Ailis could not explain what they had heard any other way.

  They had finally collapsed, weary beyond words, by the well in the center of town. They had spent the day questioning one incomprehensible villager after another until all three felt as though their eyes were crossing from the effort of remaining polite. They had left the horses hobbled outside a small stable, paying the old man who ran it to keep an eye on their belongings, and wandered the town on foot, hoping that speaking eye-to-eye would give them better results. But no luck.

  “Do you think they annoyed Merlin?” Newt wondered.

  “Is there anyone who hasn’t annoyed Merlin at one point or another? But most of Camelot still speaks plainly.” Newt and Ailis both turned to look at Gerard in disbelief. He noted their stares and shrugged. “Court matters aside. All right, fine. At least they don’t speak nonsense rhymes.”

  “Save when they attempt poetry,” Ailis said and broke into exhausted giggles. “Have you heard some of it?”

  “Too much,” Gerard said in agreement. “But this isn’t that sort of rhyming. It’s…” But he couldn’t put into words what was shifting in his mind.

  “It’s a mystery,” Ailis said finally.

  “It’s magic. If Merlin comes here often, there has to be a reason. Maybe it’s magic. There are places like that, righ
t? Magical places? Well, magic changes people.”

  It wasn’t the first time Newt had given his opinion on magic and it wasn’t likely to be the last, so his companions ignored him.

  The three of them sat on the edge of the well, so caught up in their own thoughts that they didn’t notice the soft sound of feet coming toward them until the newcomer spoke.

  “The owl, lonely flier.”

  Their gaze started low at the shoes, made of worn brown leather, then rose up past the layers of skirts and tunic, stopping finally at the wrinkled, wizened face of an old woman standing in front of them.

  “Old mother?” Ailis asked. “You were saying?” The residents of this town might all be mad, but there was no reason to be unkind.

  “The owl, lonely flier. Moonlight, water, what you desire.”

  She met their gazes, each individual in turn, then nodded firmly and shuffled off, her obligation seemingly fulfilled.

  “More gibberish,” Gerard said in disgust.

  “No.” Newt held up a hand. “I don’t think so. It’s not the words. It’s what the words say. The people aren’t mad; they just think differently.” He turned to Gerard, his dark eyes alight with an intensity that took the others by surprise. “Give me the map.”

  “Wha—”

  “The map!”

  Gerard looked at Ailis, who nodded slowly. He withdrew the tube from the pack he had brought with him and handed it reluctantly to the other boy. Newt pulled the map out with clear impatience, almost tearing it in his hurry.

  “Careful!” Ailis warned.

  Newt unrolled the map and stared at it intently. “There. And there.”

  “There what?”

  “Water. The owl is Merlin—the lonely flier, the harbinger of death. That’s what they call Merlin outside the castle when Arthur can’t hear. Because whenever he showed up, battles followed. ‘Moonlight, water, what you desire.’ Water…there and there. Both are marked by a sigil.” He pointed to the locations on the map—two lakes, one fairly close to the town they were in—careful not to accidentally let his fingers brush any of the magical sigils. He wasn’t sure whether the inscriptions on the map had power, but anything connected with a sorcerer like Merlin called for caution.

  “Where does moonlight come from?” Gerard asked.

  “Where the moon would travel?” Newt guessed wildly. All three of them looked up into the sky, searching for that heavenly body.

  “We’ll have to wait until nightfall,” Ailis said, disappointed.

  “Do you think we could get something to eat that we didn’t have to catch or cook?” Gerard wondered out loud, causing Ailis to pat him consolingly on the shoulder.

  “Poor thing, worn to a wisp by burden of caring for yourself.”

  From Ailis it was teasing, and Gerard could take it with good grace. And when Newt’s stomach made a particularly loud rumbling noise as though in agreement with the squire’s request, the evening’s plan was decided.

  “Now this…this is a meal!”

  Newt and Ailis both raised their mugs to that toast, clinking them in turn against the roasted drumstick Gerard was tearing into. He had declined the weak, watered-down ale that they were drinking, preferring the crystal-cool water that seemed to be the specialty of this town, drawn from the well where they had been sitting earlier.

  The tavern was small with barely enough room for the owner to move around the few tables set around a central hearth. There was firewood in it, but because the day had been warm, it was unlit. In the cooler days and nights of winter, though, it would doubtless give off a welcome antidote to the chill.

  “What do you think is happening…back home?” Ailis asked, after they had taken the edge off their hunger. She had been about to say “back in Camelot,” but remembered their story just in time. The other tables were filled with locals, some eating, others simply drinking their fill. From the few snatches of conversation she caught, they all seemed to speak in the baffling manner of the other villagers. Ailis didn’t know if that was good or bad. She’d like to think that it had been Merlin giving them a message through the woman, and that they were among loyal friends. But they had no way to know for certain, so they couldn’t risk mentioning Camelot—not when the safety of everyone she cared about rested on Arthur’s enemies not knowing that for several days now, he had been asleep and not on the throne. The need for the Grail, something she had scoffed at earlier, suddenly made more sense. Even asleep, a Grail King could protect his country, just by the possession of the Grail itself. And maybe it would have deflected the spell in the first place…if all the stories were true.

  “Every time I try to think about what’s happening back there my stomach hurts,” she went on. “All the things that—”

  “They’ll be careful,” Gerard said sternly. “And anyway, we can’t do anything about it—not until we’re home. By then it will be a story to tell.”

  “We hope,” Newt said darkly, biting into his meal with more force than the cooking warranted. Ailis flinched at his words.

  “Hope. Yes.” Gerard was doing his best Sir Rheynold imitation, confident and paternal, and failing miserably as his voice cracked on the last word. He recovered, then went on. “That’s all we can do, isn’t it?” The two boys locked stares across the table, both their faces drawn into lines that made them look older than their years.

  “It is all we can do,” Gerard said again. “Hope…and finish our part in this by bringing the owl home to roost.”

  “Speaking of which…it should be almost moonrise.”

  Newt looked regretfully at the remains of his meal, then pulled a mostly clean cloth out of his pocket and wrapped the meat and a thick slice of bread in it. He placed the entire thing back into his pocket.

  “What?” he asked, looking up to see the two of them staring at him. “We paid for it. And it’s good.”

  Ailis’s lips twitched, and she reached into the deep pocket of her skirt and pulled out a slightly cleaner cloth and did likewise with her own leftovers. When Gerard made no move to imitate them, she reached over and gathered up the remains of his meal as well. “You’ll be hungry later tonight,” she told him.

  The conversation with the innkeeper as they settled their bill was as confusing as any they had heard in this town, but Ailis could almost understand the man as he—she thought—wished them a good evening. If this was what extended exposure to Merlin’s magic did to you, as Newt suspected, it didn’t seem too terrible a price. The people and animals seemed healthy, the town was clean and well kept, and the villagers didn’t seem in need of fighters or battlements to protect it. What was a strange manner of speaking in exchange for that?

  The sun had gone down below the rooftops by the time they gathered the horses and the mule from the old man, with an extra coin thrown in by Ailis for his honesty in not touching their saddlebags. Gerard frowned when she took the extra coin from the pouch, but didn’t say anything.

  Tying their bags back onto the saddles and mounting took only a few moments. Soon they were moving down the road through town as the air darkened from dusk into night. Once they were past the town walls, the road widened enough for them to ride three abreast. Trees gave way to fields and the sky spread out over them without interruption.

  “So many stars,” Ailis noted in wonder. Inside Camelot, a servant was always busy with the things that needed doing. She couldn’t remember the last time she had paused just to look up at the sky.

  “We’re fortunate it’s clear,” Gerard said, his gaze moving from the sky to the surrounding fields and then back again. He shifted in his saddle, feeling the comforting weight of the sword strapped within easy reach near his leg. Newt had a cudgel he had fashioned from a thick tree branch, and Gerard suspected he could use it at least as well as his fists. But Ailis was unarmed, and the three of them would look like easy pickings to any thief who might be out this evening on this stretch of road.

  “And lucky that it’s not the new moon,” Newt added. “
Lucky.”

  “I don’t trust luck,” Gerard said. “Too flighty.” He caught the look Ailis gave him and added, “Not that I’m ungrateful for it, I just don’t want to rely on it.”

  She seemed satisfied, and he let out a shallow breath. She was only a servant girl, yes, but life was much easier when she wasn’t upset.

  He wondered what would happen to Ailis when they were grown. Would she still serve at Camelot? Or would she find someone to marry and move away to start her own household? It shouldn’t matter…and yet, somehow, it did.

  He cast a sideways glance at Newt. What would he do when he got older? He was good with horses; Gerard saw that. He had probably been good with the hounds once, too, in order to be moved up to the stables. There were many manor-lords who would pay well for a good stable-master, especially one with ties to Camelot.

  He had never thought about servants’ lives before. They were just…there. Gerard shook his head, trying to dislodge the uneasy feeling such thoughts gave him.

  The three had been riding along in silence for a while when Newt reined in his gelding and pointed. “It’s rising.”

  Over the horizon the pale yellow disk of the moon slid through the sky.

  “It moves faster than I thought,” Gerard said.

  “At first. Then it slows down. And sometimes it stays forever in the sky, even after the sun comes back up. And in the summer it shows up even in the afternoon.” Newt had obviously spent more time moon-watching than the other two.

  “I remember.” Ailis was quiet for a moment as they watched the moon climb beyond the distant tree line. “Why?”

  Newt looked at Gerard, who focused up into the sky and shrugged. “I don’t know. There’s a story my nurse used to tell me: The moon is a goddess who has lost her followers, and searches each night for new believers—slowing when she thinks she sees them and speeding up again when they turn their back on her.”

  “A pretty story, but none of that answers the important question: How do we follow the moon?” Newt asked, returning the conversation back to more practical matters.