The Camelot Spell

by Laura Anne Gilman

  EIGHT

  “Again I ask, why can’t magical items be hidden in a cottage next to an apple orchard, half a day’s ride from home?” Newt wasn’t joking.

  “Because if the quest were easy, the prize wouldn’t be worth anything,” Gerard said. They had the map open between the two of them, looking down at it and then up in the direction it was leading. Up and up. Into the Hills. It had been two days since leaving Daffyd’s keep, and their exhaustion was matched only by a growing sense of desperation.

  “According to who? That’s particularly stupid. Why should the value be on the finding rather than on what the thing itself can do?” Newt was clearly close to losing his temper, reacting less to Gerard’s words than his own frustration.

  “That’s not what I meant. Never mind, I don’t expect you to understand.” Gerard didn’t know why he said that, except it was easier than trying to explain what it was he meant.

  “What’s wrong?” Ailis had brought the horses down to a stream to water them after their grazing, taking advantage of the break to stretch her legs. Being on her feet felt odd after so many hours in the saddle, and she wasn’t sure if she would ever get the rocking feel of a trotting horse out of her bones, no matter how many leagues she walked.

  “The map wants us to go up into the Hills.”

  Ailis looked down at the map and then up where Newt’s finger was pointing. She noticed in passing that he had started biting the tips of his fingers, almost to the point where they were bleeding. He hadn’t done that before—this quest was starting to take its toll on all of them.

  “And that’s bad, going into the Hills?”

  “It’s not good,” Gerard said. “The Pax Britannica’s always been shaky there. Arthur’s folk are coastal and he’s always had support down here, but up in the Hills…The tribes there acknowledge Arthur—they don’t have any choice—but they don’t always listen to him. We’ve had to go up there a few times to remind them whose law they live under now.”

  “We?” Newt raised an eyebrow at that.

  “We, in the sense of not being Them,” Gerard said, and Newt’s eyebrow went back down.

  “But that’s where the map says to go,” Ailis said.

  “Yes.”

  “So why are we still here? We have only another day to find the third talisman and get it back to Camelot.” She looked at both of them pointedly, then turned her back on them and swung herself onto her mare with an ease she would not have believed five days before.

  The Hills weren’t actually all that impressive in terms of elevation. But the roads led upward more often, and the neatly planted fields were replaced by rougher swathes of greenery, little of it tended or farmed.

  Gerard got jumpier and jumpier the farther they went, until even Newt took pity on him and stopped making comments about how many spearmen could hide behind a specific rock or tree.

  “I didn’t know it would bother him so much,” he said, defending his words quietly to Ailis as they rode alongside each other on the path.

  “Yes you did,” Ailis said in an equally low tone. “Because you’re not a fool. You might have spent your entire life behind keep walls, but he’s been trained to go out beyond them and fight just the sort of thing you’re teasing him about. Only he hasn’t had a chance to do that yet, and now he’s out in it and it scares him.”

  She stopped, not having quite realized the truth of her words before she said them.

  “He’s scared,” she continued, “not of getting hurt. But of not being able to do what he was trained to do. Of not being able to protect us.”

  “I don’t need protection.”

  She shot him a glance so full of scorn it should have straightened his unruly curly hair. “Like you didn’t need help back at the bridge? Don’t be an idiot. I’ve seen death”—the only reference she could make or would ever make to the battle that swept through her home village and that led to her becoming a Queen’s Ward—“and I want someone trained in the arts of war between me and my enemy at all times, thank you very much.”

  “So why are you out here, then?” Newt sounded genuinely interested.

  “Because…” She fell silent for a moment, then gathered her courage and spoke quickly, as though afraid that her throat would close around her words if she hesitated. “Because I had to be. Because…don’t tell Gerard. But in the Great Hall, that night…I think…I thought I heard a voice telling me to go with you.”

  “A voice? Someone told you? Who?”

  Ailis was sorry she had said anything the moment he jumped on her words. “I don’t know. It wasn’t anyone there. It was…a voice in my head.” The reaction she got, a dubious glance and a faint but undeniable shifting away of both horse and rider, was exactly why she hadn’t mentioned it earlier. Hearing voices in your head was not something to admit to. Not unless you were a saint—and she had no illusions on that matter. God was not speaking to her.

  “I thought it was Merlin,” she admitted.

  “But he didn’t say anything when we saw him—”

  “I know. I know.” It had been eating at her. Not only that she had failed to bring it up, but that the enchanter had been silent.

  Newt thought about that for a while as their horses picked their way along the stony trail. “Still. He was sort of distracted. A cold backside can do that to a man, I’m told.”

  Ailis giggled, as he had intended her to do. He might not be able to protect her from warriors, but at least Newt could distract her from the things inside her own mind.

  “Have you tried talking to him? Merlin, I mean.”

  “How?”

  “How did he talk to you?”

  “Magic, of course.” She waited for his inevitable reaction to the word, but he merely shrugged. “So?”

  Ailis blinked at him, her brown eyes wide. “I don’t have any magic!”

  “I didn’t notice him talking to me,” Newt pointed out with maddening logic. “And if Merlin had said a word to Gerard, you know that he would have told us. In great steaming detail.”

  She laughed again and he felt well rewarded, despite the “why can’t you be quiet?” glare the squire turned on them from his position several paces ahead of them.

  “Gerard.” Newt ignored the look Ailis was shooting him and waved the other boy to join them.

  “What now?” Gerard looked from one to the other and, sensing the tension, turned to Newt. “What?”

  “Tell him,” Newt said. “You know we can’t keep secrets like that, not from each other.”

  Reluctantly Ailis repeated what she had told Newt.

  “You hear…voices.” Gerard looked like he didn’t know if he should call for a priest or a healer. Or both.

  “Not voices. A voice.” Ailis didn’t want to be talking about this. It was all right to hear it, so long as she didn’t think about it. Or talk about it.

  “Merlin’s voice,” Newt said. He was only trying to be helpful, and didn’t understand why Ailis scowled at him so.

  “I’m not sure,” she admitted. “And he’s not telling me anything useful.”

  “Now there’s a surprise,” Newt said, with a hint of sarcasm, and made an innocent “who, me?” gesture when they both looked sharply at him.

  “How long has this been going on?”

  Ailis shrugged, resenting Gerard’s tone, like he was the lord of them all, just because his father had been raised with the king. She ignored the fact that he was a squire and would one day be a knight, and she and Newt were only and would probably always be only servants…just like she’d always known and ignored, hoping that the inevitable distance wouldn’t come to pass.

  “Ailis, it’s important. For how long?”

  “A year. Maybe a little more.” The first time it had happened she’d been sleeping. The voice had come in a dream, and sounded as surprised as she had felt. After that it spoke only occasionally, usually when she was trying to decide what to do or how to react to something.

  “It never…whoeve
r it is doesn’t give advice, or tell me anything specific. It’s just…pushing. It pushes me. To do things or not do things, or just stop shivering like a chicken.” That was the exact phrase he had used once. It had been apt and humiliating.

  “And you think it’s Merlin because…”

  “Because it feels like him.” She couldn’t put it any better. The feel of him in her mind, the weight of his silent voice was Merlin.

  “Why you?”

  “I don’t know!” Did they think she hadn’t wondered that, too? Maybe he was speaking to half the people in the castle. Maybe he wasn’t even speaking to her at all and she was eavesdropping somehow on another’s conversation. Or maybe she was imagining it all, hearing a voice where there was nothing but her own thoughts.

  Ailis didn’t think so. But how did you know if you were mad or sane and being spoken to by a surly enchanter? And was there any real difference?

  “Have you ever, you know…talked to him? Not in your mind, I mean, but actually—in the castle?” Newt asked.

  Gerard looked at the other boy as though he were the one who had lost his mind, asking that.

  “He’s spoken to me,” Ailis said. “Not about anything, just…casually.”

  “Casually? Ailis, Merlin doesn’t speak to anyone casually.” Gerard still remembered his one encounter with the man in the Council Room before this quest began. One face-to-face exchange in all the years he had lived in Camelot, and it still unnerved him to think that the enchanter had known his name; even now, knowing that past and present had collided in the enchanter, he knew of Gerard then because of the now….

  Gerard stopped trying to untangle that reality. Nobody understood how Merlin could live backward in time, not even King Arthur. It was enough for mortals to simply accept that he did.

  “So why didn’t you ask him when—” Gerard stopped. It was a stupid question. An enchanter, already cranky from being trapped in a house made of ice when he should be helping his king, was not the person to ask about conversations he might or might not have been having in a servant girl’s head.

  “Why are we even talking about this now?” Ailis asked. “If he’s able to give us help, then we should take it, not pry apart the hows and whys.” She was near tears at what felt like an attack on her, when Gerard held up his hands in surrender, indicating that he wouldn’t talk about it again.

  Newt watched the two as Gerard tried to back away clumsily, and felt the worm of worry in the back of his head. What if it wasn’t Merlin who’d been “pushing” Ailis? What if it was someone less kindly inclined toward them—or their quest? After all, somone with powerful magic had enspelled the court to stop the quest for the Grail. Could he and Gerard trust Ailis in this? Or might she, all unsuspecting, be leading them in the wrong direction? She hadn’t actually asked Merlin about his talking to her, after all. Why not?

  He hated thinking like that. He wasn’t a war-leader, or a manor-lord. But the thought, once landed, wouldn’t go away.

  Gerard reached forward and stroked the neck of his horse, trying to calm himself by the act. His skin was prickling; he knew they were being watched. And the longer they rode up this path, the more certain he was of it. The hills rose to their left, scattered with boulders that could hide half a dozen watchers, all of them ready to fall upon three travelers. Especially when two of the travelers seemed to think that they were on a pleasure ride of the sort the queen organized every spring, to rid her court of their winter quarrels. Except, from what Gerard had seen, more fights broke out then than during the winter, when they were bored, yes, but under Arthur’s eye.

  Something prickled his hands and Gerard looked down. The map, now sadly creased, though remarkably—magically—unstained, was glowing more intently now. A faint blue light was pulsing against his palm.

  He really didn’t want to stop here, not now, when there was so much opportunity for an ambush, but he knew he couldn’t afford to ignore the map, especially with so little time left. So he compromised, letting the horse have its head just a little bit, trusting that it would keep to the narrow path and not spook at anything unwarranted. Gerard used both hands to unroll the map enough to see what the glow wanted to tell them.

  “Damnation.” Gerard felt like using stronger words, but his training held. Instead he merely picked up the reins again and waited for the others to catch up with him, still keeping his attention at least halfway on the hillside. “We have to change direction.”

  “Which way?” For the first time, Newt didn’t ask why or how he knew. The maplight had faded back to its usual narrow blue line, but Gerard still remembered its rather insistent directions.

  “Up there.” He didn’t point, but there was only one “up there” it could be. The hills they had been riding in were children to the taller peak casting its shadow over them—not a mountain such as Gerard had heard of, farther west in the wilds of Cymry, but higher than those around Camelot. Higher than any Gerard had been on before, since Sir Rheynold’s lands were bounded by fertile soil, not rock; not so easy to defend but rich enough to feed and house the fighters he needed.

  Gerard didn’t like heights. It was that simple.

  “I don’t suppose the road turns and leads us…” Newt stopped when Gerard shook his head. “Right. I’ll wager there’s at least one broken leg before this is all through.”

  “So long as it’s not one of the horses’,” Gerard returned. It sounded better when he thought it than when he said it somehow. But Newt nodded, understanding. People could be carried. Horses would have to be abandoned or killed if they were unable to travel.

  Ailis, who had pulled her horse alongside Gerard’s, finally finished her scrutiny of the map and placing the figures on the parchment in relation to where they were. “We’re going to have to climb that?” The two boys nodded. “All the way to the top?” Newt looked at Gerard, who shrugged.

  “As far as we have to go and no farther,” Gerard said. “And stay together. Remember what happened at the bridge.”

  “I’m not likely to forget,” Newt said, wincing.

  In the end they led the horses more than they rode, stepping carefully and moving single file through bushes with sharp-edged, gray-green leaves that none of them could recognize, and stepping on carpets of ugly yellow flowers that let off puffs of pale yellow smoke when crushed. The smoke smelled surprisingly good, but none of them had the inclination to investigate further. The landscape was too strange, too unnerving, for them to linger longer than it took to cross it. And the sun was moving across the sky, reminding them of how dangerous it would be to still be climbing on this uncertain ground come sunset. The only saving grace was that the higher they went, the cooler the air became, until even Gerard, with his leather jerkin, was only sweating lightly.

  When they stopped for a midday break, Ailis refilled their waterskins from a tiny stream running downhill while Gerard studied the map and Newt checked the horses to make sure that they hadn’t picked up any stones in their hooves that might cause trouble later. Those chores accomplished, they each ate a handful of the dried meat strips from the pack and washed it down with the water. Ailis then disappeared behind an almost-wide-enough tree, while the boys did what they needed to do on the other side of where the horses were tied. Oddly enough, they had all become more aware of the need for privacy since their quest began, not less—the boys even more so than Ailis, who was accustomed to sharing a sleeping room and chamber pot with seven other servants.

  “How much farther do you think?”

  “I don’t know. The map isn’t glowing as much as it was before, but we’re still on the right track.” Gerard looked as disgusted as Newt normally did when talking about magic. “I think Merlin enjoys making things impossible.”

  “No,” Ailis disagreed. “I don’t think he enjoys it. I just don’t think he knows any other way to be.”

  “That’s a comfort.”

  Ailis giggled. “That’s what my Lady Guinevere says as well, when the king tells her
that.”

  “What else do they say about Merlin?” He had never asked her before. Servants might gossip about their betters, but a squire’s responsibility was to be quiet and loyal and wait until called upon. But he was serving Arthur and Camelot directly now, to the best of his abilities, and he thought maybe that had earned him absolution from this small sin.

  “Oh, that he is insane.”

  “He is,” Newt said, joining the conversation from behind on the path.

  “We should all be so mad,” Gerard said thoughtfully, remembering his own encounter with the enchanter in context with what he knew now.

  “Does he really live backward in time? Is he getting younger as he ages?”

  “I think so. Lady Melisande, one of the ladies in waiting, says that when Arthur first took the crown, Merlin’s hair was entirely white. But Melisande wasn’t there then; she came to Camelot with the queen, so I don’t know how true it is.”

  “They say that Merlin doesn’t approve of Sir Lancelot,” Newt said, clearly less hesitant about gossiping than Gerard. “Is that true?”

  Ailis hesitated for a short time before responding to that. “There are some who say that Merlin was jealous because the king loves Sir Lancelot so well.”

  “You don’t think that’s true?” Gerard had heard those rumors before as well.

  “Arthur is fond of Lancelot…but he depends upon Merlin. I think there is a difference. And Merlin is wise enough to know which is more important.”

  “More important than having the king’s personal favor?” Gerard had to chew on that to make it palatable.

  “Before Lancelot there was Merlin. If Lancelot falls out of favor, there will still be Merlin,” Ailis said.

  “And how likely is it that Lance would fall out of favor?” Newt sounded outraged at the thought, although it wasn’t clear if it was from the idea of his hero failing or the king being fickle in his affection.