The Camelot Spell

by Laura Anne Gilman

“Easier than getting trussed up for a troll’s dinner,” Gerard agreed.

  Newt snorted off the lecture. “But then I wouldn’t have found it,” he said, sounding smug, or as smug as a near-troll-dinner could be.

  “Found…it?”

  “Found it,” he said, rolling over on his side and opening up his jerkin to show a glass vial identical to the first talisman, nestled safely inside. “Be glad you dropped me on my back,” he said grimly.

  “Luck again. This much luck makes me nervous,” Gerard said, taking the talisman and holding it up to the light.

  “What is it?” Ailis said.

  “Two halves of…something.” Gerard turned it upside down, then sideways, trying to puzzle out what it might be.

  “Does it have to be something? Can’t they just…be magical?” Newt looked at Ailis, who looked at Gerard, who looked back and shrugged. “I have no idea. It’s exactly the same as the first one….”

  “Troll!” Newt was on his feet, pointing at the creek. Gerard tossed the talisman to Ailis, who caught it and backed up the bank, looking behind her for a place to hide it and herself. The troll had returned, and from the look on its hideous face, it wasn’t happy to see its captive escaping. It raised its arms over its head and let out a gurgling scream as it rushed into the water at them.

  Gerard sloshed forward through the water, drawing his sword and getting into a defensive posture. The troll didn’t even seem to notice the blade as it lunged at Gerard, who met the charge directly. The muscles he had built during his training with Sir Bors and the other squires absorbed the shock, and his leather jerkin deflected the worst of the troll’s claws. But the sheer size of the troll knocked him onto his back and he hit the water with a hard splash. His sword was knocked from his hands and slipped, blade first, into the muddy water. As he fell, Gerard reached up and wrapped his arms around the troll’s body and pulled the creature into the water with him.

  All Newt could see was furious splashing and thrashing, troll skin, and the now-sodden brown of Gerard’s clothing occasionally coming into view.

  “Help him!” Ailis screamed from the opposite bank.

  “How?” he yelled back. “I can’t even tell—”

  The two figures rolled, and Newt had to move quickly to get out of the way or get knocked down himself. Nice of the squire to offer himself up as first victim, but it didn’t look like he was doing much, other than getting a thrashing before they all got eaten.

  Brawn wasn’t going to do it; the two of them together wouldn’t be able to take on that thing.

  Newt looked around for Gerard’s sword, but couldn’t find it in the churning water. Reaching down to where his own blade should have been, Newt found only an empty sheath.

  “No!” Then he waded furiously back to the ledge where the troll had stashed him, frantically searching among the trash for the dagger. Please, let it just have fallen out…. A sharp sting on the palm of his left hand told him he had found it, or something suitably sharp. He shifted his hand and closed his fingers around the bone hilt of his blade.

  Barely a hand’s-length long, the dagger was useful for cutting tangled reins, skinning rabbits, and gutting fish. He doubted it was going to do anything on troll hide. But he felt better having it in his hand. The squire was starting to rub off on him.

  “We’re still going to die,” he said. Then he pivoted and returned to the stream, where Gerard had gotten his head and shoulders above the waterline. He was now on his knees and wrestling with the troll.

  “Yeaaagghhh!” Newt shouted, throwing himself onto a thrashing gray-white arm and slashing at it, trying to not cut Gerard by accident. If he could only distract the creature, Gerard could find his sword and…

  A heavy arm knocked Newt in the head and he staggered, shaking the water out of his eyes. A salty liquid dripped into his mouth and he wiped the blood off his forehead with his free hand.

  “Newt! Do something!” Ailis cried again.

  “I’m trying,” he muttered, then circled around and made another jab at the troll from behind. The troll roared, its head turning to watch this new threat. Newt moved his blade, the sunlight catching against the metal and reflecting into the troll’s eyes.

  “Come on, come on!” Newt taunted it, then swallowed hard when the troll let go of Gerard with one hand and reached wildly for him. Newt splashed backward, trying to keep out of reach without getting so far away that the troll would go back to Gerard.

  On the bank of the stream, Ailis shoved the talisman under the nearest bush, then looked around wildly for something she could use to help in the fight. “Something. Anything.”

  Grunts and muffled swears came from the water. Ailis wanted to hit something, she was so frustrated. She didn’t know anything about fighting, not really—just what one of the older servant girls had told her to do if a man ever tried to get too friendly when she didn’t want it. She didn’t think that would work on a troll. Her gaze suddenly fell on the side of the bridge where some of the stones had fallen out onto the ground.

  Before she could talk herself out of it, Ailis scrambled down the muddy bank and sorted through the stones, trying to find one with the right weight and shape. She ended up with two possibilities. Leaving one within easy reach at her feet, Ailis picked the other up in both hands, then judged the distance between herself and the three figures in the water.

  “Don’t think,” she told herself. “Line up the shot and then do it.” Don’t think. She took a deep breath, judged the distance again, and then shifted the stone into one hand and put all of her strength into the throw.

  There was an odd whistling noise and the troll staggered. Through the water in his ears, Gerard thought he heard Ailis whooping. With the part of his brain that could still think, he wondered what she was doing still there, why she hadn’t run already. Get the talisman out of here, he thought at her, as though she could hear him. We’re not important, the talisman is! Then the troll pressed its burly, scaled arm against his throat, and even that bit of thought fled. Lacking anything else to do in retaliation, Gerard craned his neck forward and bit the nearest available troll-flesh hard.

  Newt heard Ailis’s scream of victory. But there was no time to look and see what she had done—the troll was off balance; if he didn’t take advantage of it, they’d be taking Gerard back to Camelot on a funeral bier.

  Crouching as best he could in the hip-deep water, Newt slid and twisted somehow, drawing on every rough-and-tumble fight he’d ever had—not only with other boys but with the hounds he had cared for as well. And as he slid and twisted, his arm moved almost independently, the hand holding the dagger stabbing upward, not to where the troll’s stomach was now but where it was going to be by the time Newt finished moving.

  He felt the blade make contact with the troll’s upper thigh, slicing into the skin with only minimal resistance. The troll let out another horrible yell, like something was stuck and dying in its throat, and tried to swipe at Newt, who was still moving and already out of reach.

  The stagger and the distraction were enough for Gerard, however, to escape the troll’s chokehold and flip the creature onto its back. His muscles straining under his wet jerkin, Gerard did his best to hold the beast under the water, trying to drown it. Newt came back around, pulled the blade from the troll’s leg and shoved it, point first, into the fleshy skin under the creature’s rock-hard chin and rucked it around until he was rewarded with a steady spurting of thick troll blood.

  “Is it dead?” Newt asked, gasping. A sudden surge in the troll’s body answered him. Newt added his strength to Gerard’s, trying to keep the creature’s head underwater. Then suddenly Ailis was splashing to their side, throwing herself onto the troll’s torso to keep it in place, so they could focus all their attention on the head.

  The blood-spurt slowed, then stopped, the thick blood pooling before the current began to move it away.

  “Oh, God. I hurt.” Newt dropped to his knees momentarily, then got to his feet and shook hi
mself like a horse whose saddle had just been taken off. He offered his hand down to Gerard. “Come on.”

  It seemed to take an enormous amount of energy to simply reach up and take the offered hand, but Gerard finally managed it. The other boy’s hand was slick with blood and sweat, but reassuringly human.

  Legs shaky, the two half-supported each other to the bank, Ailis trailing a step behind. Each of them was trying to wrap their minds around what they had just done.

  The feel of stable ground under his feet was almost alien, and Gerard stumbled as he climbed out onto the bank. He thought briefly about looking for his sword, then decided that he needed to rest first. He knew a knight should look to his weapons before his body. But he was just so tired.

  The three of them sat down heavily on the bank, staring at everything but each other. Even the effort of speaking seemed to be too much to ask.

  “My mouth tastes like troll,” Gerard said suddenly in disgust.

  Ailis, facedown in the grass, let out a muffled snort, and then another, until she was laughing hysterically.

  “It wasn’t that funny,” Gerard said, making faces as he tried to work the taste out of his mouth.

  “No, it wasn’t,” Newt agreed, his eyes almost tearing from holding back his own laughter.

  “I hate both of you,” Gerard said, looking down at his mud-covered clothing with a rueful expression. The leather cuisses on his thighs were so waterlogged as to be useless except as weights, so he stripped them off and let them fall to the ground with a sodden thunk. The troll floated facedown in the creek, the water around it fading from pink back to clear as the current carried the blood away. With a sigh Gerard got to his feet and waded back into the water.

  “What’re you doing?” Newt asked.

  “My sword,” he said as though it should have been obvious.

  “More to your left, I think,” Newt said. Gerard shot him a look that clearly said “and I should trust you, why?” but moved slightly to his left. A minute later, his searching hands came up with his sword, wet but undamaged. He slogged to the side of the creek and handed the sword, pommel-first, to Ailis, who found a still-dry corner of her skirt to wipe the worst of the moisture off it. Gerard hesitated, then went back into the water.

  “What are you doing now?” Newt asked, still lying on his side on the grass.

  “Not going to let this thing foul the water,” Gerard said, tugging the troll’s body to the opposite bank and pulling it onto the grass. Then he waded back in to splash as much of the mud off himself as he could. “Ugh.”

  Ailis rolled over onto her back and sat up to watch him. “We could have died,” she said finally.

  “Yes.”

  “We almost did die,” Newt said.

  “You would have died,” Ailis said. “If we hadn’t come back.”

  “And you two would have gone on and never found the second talisman,” he retorted, a little stung.

  “What I mean,” Ailis said, “is that any one of us—even two of us—wouldn’t have managed it. That’s all.”

  “Point taken,” Gerard said, sloshing up onto the bank and trying to wring out his shirt. “So what?”

  “Nothing. Just…thinking about it, that’s all.”

  The three of them lay there silently thinking about it. Then Gerard stood up again. “Well, while you think, I’m going to get a change of clothing.”

  “There’s the mark of the castle-folk,” Newt said, taking his own boots off and shaking the water out. He wriggled his toes in the grass. “They have two sets of clothing.”

  “Whereas the stable-folk live in the same shirt, year in and year out. And wash it once a year whether it needs it or not,” Gerard retorted.

  The bickering was familiar, but the tone was too weak to have any real venom.

  Gerard went up the bank and down the road to reclaim the horses, muttering something about ungrateful servants who wanted to be troll-food. Ailis stretched her arms overhead, fingers pointing toward the sky, and tried not to look at the bloated body of the troll across the stream, or think about her swan stashed somewhere in the troll’s lair or—ugh—on it’s body.

  “Why can’t the two of you just get along?”

  Newt shrugged. “Because he talks more than he knows. And because it’s fun.”

  Ailis looked heavenward, as though searching for help in understanding the male mind, then collapsed back onto the grass with a sigh.

  None of them wanted to stay near the troll corpse any longer, so as soon as Gerard returned wearing dry clothing and leading the two horses, they decided to move on.

  “Do you have any idea what happened to your horse?”

  Newt stood up and brushed himself off, then put two fingers into his mouth and let out an astonishingly piercing whistle. Gerard’s horse snorted and shifted, while Ailis’s stood placidly. Newt waited a few seconds and then whistled again.

  “I guess it wasn’t as well-trained as you thought?” Gerard started to say, when the sound of faint hoof-beats on the road came to them and Newt’s gelding appeared. The saddle was slightly askew, and the horse’s eyes were a little wild, but it otherwise looked unharmed.

  “Good horse,” Ailis praised it. “Good…” she looked at Newt expectantly. “What’s his name?”

  Newt looked blank. “Horse?” There had never been a need for it; he was the human and the horse was the horse, and that was that.

  “Loyal,” she decided.

  “That’s a good name,” Gerard said, surprising everyone.

  “Loyal, then,” Newt said in a tone of humoring a madwoman. He adjusted the saddle and made sure the girth was tight around Loyal’s belly, then tied his boots by their laces and hung them around his horse’s neck and swung, barefoot, into the saddle.

  “So?” He looked down at the two of them. Ailis looked at her own shoes drying on the grass, and did the same as Newt, grimacing at the way the saddle felt against her wet clothing.

  Gerard had already forced his feet back into his boots and mounted easily. Now he unrolled the map. It was glowing again.

  “North,” Gerard said, tracing a finger along the path of the glow. “We go north.”

  More confident in the map now, they started across the field, bypassing the town entirely, riding at a slow, steady trot. They had two of the three talismans, yes, but time was quickly running out. Midnight would mark the end of this fourth day of the seven Merlin had said they had. They had to move faster, or risk losing Arthur and his entire court forever.

  They’re doing rather well, don’t you think? Merlin was proud, despite himself.

  Smart enough, but no smarter. You could have chosen better. Nimue’s voice was scornful.

  They chose themselves. That’s how it goes, if you care to remember.

  Such frail reeds. How can they possibly grow into anything to depend on? And they’re moving too slowly.

  How much faster could they go? He was indignant at the slur on their behalf. They’re children.

  There are no children in this country, she replied. You’ve eaten them all up, you and your precious king.

  And Merlin sighed, unable to argue.

  They rode for several hours, stopping only to build camp when it became too dark to see the ground in front of them, although the map in Gerard’s hands glowed with a faint, insistent blue light, as though trying to push them on.

  “Enough,” Ailis told the map sternly. Gerard merely stared at it, trying to decide if it was a magical warning of some sort. “We have to sleep. Otherwise we’re going to be even more stupid than we were at the bridge, and get ourselves truly killed.”

  She could have sworn an oath that she heard the map let out a tiny sigh, and the light flicked off.

  Gerard’s eyes went wide. “How did you…”

  Ailis shrugged, then walked back to where Newt was building a small fire a few paces away from where they had placed their blankets. She was beginning to forget what a bed felt like.

  “I’m too tired t
o eat,” Newt said when she offered him the wrapped-up chicken from the tavern.

  “I’ve never been too tired to eat,” Gerard said, coming to sit down next to them. “Give it to me.”

  “Excuse me? Who sneered when we took it in the first place?”

  “Me,” Gerard said willingly. “But I’m hungry and you’re not, and it’s not going to keep much longer, so I might as well eat it.”

  “Oh, for pity’s sake,” Ailis said. “The two of you are worse than a pair of cats, forever hissing at each other for no reason other than that you’re there. Should I toss cold water on you and make you behave?”

  “Already did that,” Newt said.

  Gerard just grunted and slid his blade from the scabbard that had been stacked with the rest of their belongings. Stepping into a grassy area away from the horses, he slowly began to move through the basic sword forms. Being away from classes was no reason to let himself get rusty.

  “Why must you bait him, Newt? You two would get along if you’d only try.”

  Newt shrugged. “We are what we are. I’m a servant. You’re a servant. He’s a squire of royal family. He’s going to be a knight. Knights aren’t friends with servants. They may spend time with them, talk to them. Quest with them even. But they’re not friends. And they’re never ever anything more than that, either. We all have our roles to play.” He glared at her as though daring her to contradict him.

  “I know,” Ailis said quietly. “I’ve always known that. It doesn’t matter.”

  Ailis went to where her pack lay on her blanket, sat down, and brought out a small ivory comb Lady Melisande had given her last Yuletide, that she’d fortunately had on her person when the bandits stole her pack. Unbinding her braid, she drew the comb though her hair, counting softly until she reached one hundred strokes. By then, Gerard had put his sword away and eaten his share of the leftovers. He was now sitting by the fire, quietly discussing with Newt possible answers as to what the talismans might be or do. Ailis listened to each of them repeating the words of the riddle, making no more sense of it than they had when Merlin’s magic first etched it into ice. She thought about joining them, but decided that she was too tired to move again. So she lay down and went to sleep, trusting them both to keep her safe during the night.