The Camelot Spell

by Laura Anne Gilman

  FIVE

  The source of the light was a structure unlike any the three had ever seen before. Gerard and Newt slowed, leading their horses at a snail’s pace. Ailis strode on ahead of them, her braid thumping against her back as she increased her pace.

  The glow was, in fact, coming from the house they had seen from the ridge. It was, in many ways, an unexceptional little cottage—four outer walls surrounded four different rooms of equal size. There was minimal furniture inside: chairs, a bed, a table. One room had a fireplace, with a heavy black pot over it, set into one wall. But the hearth was cold and the pot was empty.

  Ailis could tell all of this because the walls were clear. As was the furniture. It was like looking into a particularly still pond of clear water and seeing fish dart right next to your hand even though they were out of reach. Only in this case the dark form moving behind the walls wasn’t a fish.

  “Ah. There you are.”

  Whatever they had expected to hear from Merlin, it hadn’t been that.

  He stood in the doorway, looking at them through the clear door. It was thin, barely a finger’s width, and was cold to the touch.

  “An ice house?” Ailis ran her fingers over the wall, fascinated enough to ignore the light that came from inside and played over her, attracted by her motion.

  Merlin shrugged; a careless gesture.

  “May we…come in?” Gerard asked, uncertain about the protocols of dealing with an enchanter. Ailis, despite her claims of knowing how to communicate sensibly with Merlin, seemed too fascinated by the structure to be any help.

  The question made the enchanter laugh. It was a short and bitter noise. “I’d come out if I could.”

  “You’re trapped?” Gerard looked around as though whoever had trapped Merlin might suddenly spring from nowhere at them. “How?”

  “Who did it? Is it the same person who cast the spell on the court?” Ailis asked in dismay. That would make sense, but if the same foe could take both Merlin and Arthur, the three of them might as well give up and go home!

  All three of them started asking questions at once. Then their chatter stopped. They were abashed at being so rude to the second-most powerful man in the kingdom.

  “My life’s never that easy,” the enchanter said, running one hand through his black-and-silver hair, leaving it standing on end and sparking brightly with random magic. “No, my lady Nimue is having her fun with me.”

  The three teenagers stared at him: Gerard in disgust, Newt in amusement, and Ailis in sympathy. Nimue was a name whispered in Camelot—a former student of Merlin’s who had enchanted the enchanter, then left him only to return and leave again, proving him no better than any mortal man.

  “Oh, dry it up,” he said, seeing their looks. “She played me for a fool and I deserve to stay here until I can find my way out.” Merlin was clearly out of patience with them already.

  “If you’re trapped here, you can’t help us,” Gerard said. “You can’t help your king, who is caught in a bespelled sleep, along with all of his court. You can’t—”

  “Dry it up, I said,” Merlin snapped, and even knowing that a magical wall stood between the two of them, Gerard took a step back.

  “You know what has happened,” Ailis said, stating a fact rather than asking a question.

  “I know,” Merlin said. “You think your lot is difficult? Thank the stars above that you’re not me…. And yes, I’m cranky,” he added before any of them could say anything. “You try spending your days in an ice house. Your posterior gets cold after a while. That woman has an evil sense of humor.”

  He looked at the three of them and sighed, the light that always seemed to burn in his eyes fading a little under their worried, helpless stares.

  “We have trouble, children. Whoever has done this clearly wishes to stop the Quest from going forward; either that, or it’s the most inconvenient timing in history. And I don’t trust coincidences.”

  “Why would anyone want to stop the Quest?” Newt wondered. “Isn’t it just a way to get everyone out of Arthur’s hair for a while?”

  Merlin almost laughed at that. “If that were so, Arthur would have sent all the troublemakers out, rather than his best and brightest. No, youngster, much as I disagree with Arthur about how he is going about this, the Quest is more important than anyone realizes, even Arthur. The Grail is not merely a symbol of rightful kingship.”

  “The stories are true?” Gerard blinked, his exhaustion melting away with this revelation. “A man who holds the Grail cannot be defeated?”

  “Stories have truth at their soul…or they die. That story has lived for generations. That fact alone is enough to make it absolutely vital that Arthur hold this Grail.”

  “Rather than a rebel chieftain,” Gerard said.

  “Yes. From the Northlands or across the water. Or, the gods defend us, Rome returning to our shores.” The enchanter shook his head regretfully. “I can help you, children. But only so far. You’re going to have to do this on your own.”

  “Do what? How are we…what are we supposed to do?” Ailis had hoped that Merlin would explain the voice she sometimes heard in her head, the voice that had been so clear in the aftermath of the sleep-spell. She wished he would say something she would be able to understand, and explain it for the others so she would not have to.

  The enchanter’s usual wry sense of humor, his sly wordplay, was missing. He wasn’t smiling here. He wasn’t dancing one step beyond the understanding of mere mortals. He looked worried. And distracted.

  “Master Merlin?”

  He turned to look at her, and then he did muster a smile. “The little servant-maid. Ailis, yes?”

  “Yes.” He remembered her name. Was that a good thing or a bad thing? With enchanters one could never tell.

  “Good. You’re here. I couldn’t remember if you would be or not. Smart little girl. Too smart, but you’re going to need that.”

  Ailis opened her mouth to follow up on that, her need to know if he was the one speaking to her finally overpowering all her other fears, but Merlin had moved on.

  “And so you’d be the horse-boy.” That he said to Newt, who inclined his head guardedly, not sure if he should admit to anything where Merlin was concerned.

  “Good. All three here as they need to be.” His eyes focused on them again, meeting their gazes, each in turn. “Listen carefully and look carefully, and remember, because I can only share this with you once.

  “Listen, children.” His voice became hypnotic, his eyes darker, his face more stern; the frustrated, mortal man disappearing once more under the deep water of the enchanter Merlin. “Remember. At the cost of your souls, remember.”

  His long, slender fingers moved, conjuring flame out of air, and the flame etched letters in the ice wall between them:

  INTO THE MOMENT

  SLIDES THE MOMENT

  THE MOMENT SHATTERED

  ONE INTO THREE

  RECLAIMED BY THREE WHO ARE ONE

  AND ONE WHO IS NONE

  THREE TO BE CLAIMED

  BEFORE THE MOMENT TURNS AT HOME

  “Do you have it, children?”

  “I think so,” Gerard said, while the other two squinted at the letters, frantically trying to memorize the words as the flame started to flicker and fade. It sounded like the riddles the villagers spoke in. Maybe Newt was right about why they spoke that way. If Merlin spent a lot of time around them, the way the map suggested…

  “Don’t think! Know! You must remember. You must know. You are the sole and only hope our kingdom has.”

  “Us?”

  Merlin smiled crookedly at him, the majesty of his magical self dispersing and leaving only a man trapped in a house of ice. “Nobody else has shown up; looks like it will have to be you, fates save us all.

  “But beware.” He stared at each of them in turn and, mortal or not, his dark eyes pierced them into their hearts. “There is very little time. Arthur needs you, and he needs you to return within seven day
s.”

  “Seven—” Gerard started, then shut his jaw and thought. “Seven days from when it happened, or seven days from now?”

  “Seven from the midnight of their sleeping. Seven is a magical number. Would have been easier if it had been fourteen or twenty-one, but that’s magic for you, never considerate…” Merlin’s voice trailed off, his gaze went elsewhere, and then he came back to them with a sharp snap.

  “Repeat it, children. Repeat it together.”

  It was awkward, each of them remembering the words in a different rhythm, but by the third line they were speaking in unison:

  “Into the moment

  slides the moment

  the moment shattered

  one into three

  reclaimed by three who are one

  and one who is none

  three to be claimed

  before the moment turns at home.”

  Merlin nodded and the light came back into his eyes a little. “Good. Good. You have the map?”

  The three looked at each other, almost but not quite beyond wonder that he would know about that as well. Gerard retrieved the map, unrolled it, and held it up so that Merlin could see it.

  “Good lad.” He put his hand to the wall, and Gerard, acting on some unspoken command, placed the map against his side of the wall as well, so that all three—palm, ice, and map—were touching. There was a shimmer of sparks, almost too brief to see, and then Merlin took his hand away. “Oh, Arthur, you idiot, did you really think a map like this would work?”

  “It did,” Ailis said, greatly daring. “We used it to find you.”

  Merlin barked out a laugh. “All right, yes, it did. This one time, it did. But you were lucky. Lucky beyond all belief. The gods had a hand in this, and that always worried me. Never trust the gods, children. Trust yourselves. Trust each other. But trust no gods. They have their own agendas.”

  “But, Master Merlin, what does it mean—the riddle? What are we supposed to do?” In his urgency, Gerard overrode Ailis’s attempt to ask Merlin something. He needed specifics. A riddle was nonsense and magic was beyond his understanding. He knew how to hit things, how to ride horses, how to speak well to his betters, and protect those weaker than himself. He didn’t know what to do with this.

  “Three talismans, squire of Sir Rheynold. Find three talismans that will revoke what has been done. There is no more time to waste. Leave me to deal with this magic that binds me, and quest your own quest. Now go. Go!”

  And with that, Merlin turned his back on them and paced to the other side of his ice-cased prison and stared out into the darkness, his hands folded in front of him, his proud features lifted to the night sky. Their conversation was over. He had nothing more to tell them.

  A long moment of stunned and hurt silence passed, then Merlin heard the three youths whispering to each other, followed by the sound of them mounting their animals and riding away slowly.

  “The gods laugh at me,” he said morosely when the last noise of their passing had faded. “Children. Why,” the enchanter wondered, “does it always end up with the children?”

  From the air around him, Nimue’s voice laughed at him, a warm silver chime that could still stir his blood and make him do foolish things. “Because, dear teacher, they’re the only ones who will forever look for you. They are the only ones who will believe it can be done.”

  SIX

  Once, just once, I’d like to hear a story that starts ‘And the enchanter told them exactly what to get, and where to get it, and what sort of dangers they would face along the way.’” Newt was grousing again.

  “It doesn’t happen that way,” Ailis said from her perch behind him in the saddle.

  “Well, it should. Not all the time, because those would be boring stories. But just this once.”

  If Gerard hadn’t been so frustrated he would have laughed. Newt was sulking like a five-year-old. From the expression on Ailis’s face, she was having the same reaction to the stable boy’s irritation. The way Newt seemed determined to hate anything that took him out of his ordinary, familiar routine was starting to become more amusing than annoying.

  When the three left Merlin in his cage of ice, they had no idea where to go or how to get back across the lake. But they hadn’t ridden for more than a few minutes before a spiral of light left the house and followed them.

  “Merlin’s doing?” Newt asked warily.

  Ailis stared at the light and shrugged, tucking her braid back under her collar so it wouldn’t hit her back so annoyingly when she rode. “Maybe. Maybe not. If not, it would be Nimue’s work, and for all that she’s a thorn in Merlin’s side, she’s never acted against anyone else. She’s loyal to the king. And considering we don’t have any other guides stepping forward…”

  The light moved ahead of their horses, and the three companions let it lead them away from the house of ice and toward the south through a grove of pines.

  The moon had set, and with it, full darkness fell over the island. They slept under the pines on a bed of soft needles for a few hours, feeling oddly protected.

  They woke with the first rays of dawn sunlight coming though the trees; their guide-light had disappeared. When they emerged on the other side of the grove, they were back on the road where they had met the bandits, back where they had started before riding into the lake.

  “Magic,” Newt said again. Gerard clouted him on the shoulder and asked him if he would have rather swum across the lake, or perhaps gone back to the ice house and told Merlin that they were sorry but they couldn’t carry out the quest he had given them and oh, well, so much for Camelot. That had almost started a rematch of the stable fight, but Ailis grabbed a hank of Newt’s hair and dragged him aside, and then stared at Gerard.

  “Don’t be an idiot,” she told him acerbically, and he backed down.

  But now they had to decide what they were going to do, which led to more arguments, not only over the what, but the how.

  “We don’t even know what the talismans are!” Newt had dug his heels in, not wanting to go farther without a definite plan and destination. He had suggested returning to Camelot, in order to search for a clue as to who their enemy was.

  “We don’t have time to waste. Merlin said so.” Any doubts Gerard might have had about the enchanter had disappeared, mainly because they didn’t have any other option but to trust him. “We’ve already used two days, not knowing. We only have five more left including today. And sitting here arguing is merely using up the time we have left.”

  “Gerard is right. There’s nothing back home that can help us—even if we knew where to begin looking through Merlin’s library—don’t you think he would have sent us back there if the answers could be found that easily?”

  Newt stubbornly set his jaw but couldn’t come up with any new arguments.

  “So we go forward,” Ailis continued. “We need to think of where we should look.”

  “No. First we need to know what we’re looking for! Newt is right about that, although I hate to admit it. We need to figure out the riddle, not blindly trust that we’ll stumble on further clues.”

  Ailis picked up the end of her braid and started to tug at it as she thought out loud. “All those lines about moments…The talismans must have something to do with time.”

  “Time…and the turning of time. The stopping of time.” Newt was just tossing words around to see what felt right together.

  “A sundial?” Gerard asked, dubious.

  “How could a sundial be a talisman? They’re huge stone things, I’ve seen one. We have to be able to take it with us! Don’t we?” Newt looked at the other two, his eyebrow raised in question.

  “I think so,” Ailis said slowly. “We need to bring all three talismans back to Camelot to break the spell. That’s how it works in all the stories.”

  “So a water clock would be right out, then.”

  “The map,” Gerard said suddenly. “Where did I put the map?” He scrambled for his pack, pulled out
the tube, and unrolled the map. “When Merlin touched it he did something to it I think.”

  They gathered around the map, now spread out on the ground. This time it stayed unrolled on its own.

  “Look! That’s where the island was! And here—” Ailis touched a part of the map with one fingertip, then pulled her hand back in surprise when that portion of the map started to glow.

  “What is it doing?” Gerard asked uneasily.

  “Glowing?”

  That got Newt a look from both Ailis and Gerard, and he shrugged helplessly in return. “Well, it is.”

  “It’s glowing where we are,” Ailis identified the cause. “But that’s not much help. Still…Merlin wouldn’t have done whatever he did if it wasn’t going to be useful. He did whatever he could to help us.” Ailis was certain of that.

  “You think the map will show us where to go?”

  “That would be a nice change,” Newt said, but his tone was softer than before.

  “Keep it out,” Ailis directed Gerard.

  “It’s too big. It will rip. Or get ruined.”

  Ailis looked at him, then scooped up a handful of mud and tossed it. Gerard ducked, and it landed smack in the middle of the map.

  “Hey!” Then he looked. “Hey….”

  The mud slid off the map when he picked it up, leaving no trace of dirt behind.

  “If he was going to magic it, he would make sure it wouldn’t be easily ruined. Like the Round Table, which they say never needs dusting.”

  Gerard was clearly annoyed that he hadn’t thought of that first. “Fine. I’ll keep it out. But that still doesn’t tell us where we should start looking.”

  “Hold it out in front of you,” Newt suggested.

  “Open?” Gerard looked at the map, which was as wide across as he could spread his arms, and then looked back at Newt as though the other boy had gone mad.

  “No, rolled up inside out. So we can see the marks on it—see if it does anything. Go a little one way, then a little another way.”