The Camelot Spell

by Laura Anne Gilman

  Tempus medicus.

  Tempus interfector.

  Tempus flumen hic nunquam comprimit.

  Incipat. Finiat. Renovet. Renovet.

  They finished, stumbling over the last unfamiliar words, and held their breath, keeping almost as still as the sleeping knights. Gerard raised the talisman, watching the sparkling blue sands.

  But the grains remained frozen. Arthur and his knights did not wake.

  “Oh, well done, children. Well done. And yet…you have failed.”

  The three spun around at the voice, almost dropping the talisman in their shock. Newt managed to grab it, only a handspan from the floor.

  A woman stood in front of them. She was tall and elegant, her dark hair caught up in a single long braid, with regal features that looked somehow familiar but almost overpowered by huge dark eyes that seemed to see through them, judging them and finding them amusing.

  “You’ve been so entertaining,” the woman went on. “I was almost hoping that you would succeed, you’ve done so well until now.”

  “You!” Ailis couldn’t keep the accusation out of her voice. “Of course it was you. Who else.”

  “Who is she?” Gerard’s outburst clearly confused Newt, who looked to Ailis for an answer.

  “Morgain,” she whispered. “The king’s half-sister. Very wicked.”

  “Wicked is in the end result, some would say,” Morgain said lightly. “My brother might be considered wicked, for all the women he has made into widows, all the children left orphans, all the old ways struck down and his new laws placed over them.

  “You have to understand what it is you do, my children,” she went on. “That is a lesson Merlin never let Arthur learn. The sin will not continue another generation. Until you understand, I shall not shed a tear for my poor, foolish brother.”

  A thick mist of dark green descended from nowhere. When it faded an instant later, Morgain was gone.

  “She’s the one who did this? Why?” Newt asked.

  “Long story,” Ailis said. “And most of it I don’t know. There’s gossip, but nothing they speak about in front of us. The one time Lady Morgain came to court, I remember that it ended badly. She threatened Arthur and almost came to blows with Merlin. Merlin swore that he’d kill her, only Arthur wouldn’t let him.”

  “She’s an enchanter as well…? Of course she is,” Newt answered himself. “She cast the spell. But why?”

  “I don’t know,” Ailis said again. “Only that she hates Arthur. Horribly.”

  “And she could not bear to think that Arthur might gain more glory or add to his reputation by claiming the Grail,” Gerard added in a grim tone. “But there’s a way to end the spell. She said as much. That we almost succeeded. We still have the rest of this day. We have to find out how to end it!”

  “She was taunting us, Gerard! All of this…if Morgain was the one who cast this spell, then there’s no hope. Only Merlin can stand against her—Merlin and Arthur—and she’s managed to take Arthur down—”

  “Ailis!” Newt’s harsh exclamation stopped her, making her realize that she was beginning to shout as well. She drew in a deep, pained breath, then let it go and nodded. “Yes. There’s always hope. Merlin’s guided us so far.” She only hoped he could do so again.

  “‘Understand what it is you do….’” Gerard looked at the talisman in Newt’s hand. He reached out to turn it so that the glass ends were vertical. It somehow seemed right that way. “We have to understand what the spell is!”

  “But how?” Newt was being the practical one again. “We don’t even know what language it’s in!”

  “Merlin’s study,” Ailis said. “He sent us to this. It must be a language that he knows.”

  “Must?” Newt asked, clearly dubious.

  Gerard and Thomas were already out the door. Ailis gave Newt a one-shouldered shrug and rubbed exhaustion out of her eyes. “If we don’t believe, we have nothing. Haven’t you realized that already?”

  “Even if you do believe, you still mostly have nothing. Haven’t you learned that already?”

  Ailis looked at him with pity. “Trust, Newt. For once in your life, just trust.”

  And with that, she walked out the door, leaving Newt alone in a room filled with motionless sleeping knights.

  “Do you understand females any better, your highness?” he asked Arthur. The silent reply seemed to mock him.

  “Don’t bother with those,” Ailis said, scowling at an ebony box filled with writing quills. “They’re not magical at all.”

  “How do you know that?” Thomas had gathered half a dozen helpers along the way, and they all crowded into the rooms that were set aside for the enchanter. The young ones gaped and gawped at the strange instruments and manuscripts scattered everywhere.

  “Because…I know.” She wasn’t sure how she knew, but whatever it was they needed, she was confident it was in here. It was like knowing the color of her own hair, or how her feet would move one in front of the other.

  A young page reached for a crystal bowl. “Don’t touch that!” Ailis snapped, then whirled on Thomas. “Why did you bring them all in here? They’re going to break something, or worse, set off a spell accidentally.”

  That made some step back with more fear than curiosity.

  “Ailis.” Gerard tried to be reasonable. “We need all the help we can get. They’ll follow orders. They won’t touch anything we don’t give them. Right?”

  All but Thomas nodded their heads in agreement. The squire folded his arms over his chest and watched Gerard until his fellow squire lifted one eyebrow and repeated: “Right?”

  “Command me, great one,” Thomas said then. Ailis, not trusting herself to speak, handed him a particularly heavy book she didn’t think had anything worthwhile in it. In the meantime, Newt had placed the talisman on a small round table that he had dragged into the middle of the room so that everyone could see the lettering.

  “Look for anything that looks like that,” Ailis said, pointing to it. “The lettering or the shape. But don’t read any of it out loud!”

  She handed out parchments and bound papers she thought might be useful, suppressing a wince when she had to hand them to children younger than herself. None of them should be doing this. She shouldn’t be doing this. But they had no choice.

  Closing her eyes, Ailis let herself sense the room. She reached out for the same feeling she’d had when the voice that might have been Merlin spoke to her, the same sense that surrounded the talismans and the map.

  “We don’t have much time,” Gerard said, coming to stand next to her.

  “I know. I think…there.” She opened her eyes and walked across the room to a glass-fronted case. Astonishingly it was unlocked. Or it unlocked itself for her—she wasn’t sure which would be more disturbing. But she reached inside and took out three small books, each barely the size of her hand and no wider than her thumb.

  “Try this,” she said, handing one to Gerard and looking around for Newt with the other. “Newt!” He was standing by the door watching the children squinting at the written words and trying to compare them to the words on the talisman. When she called he looked up, and the fear she saw in his eyes cut her suddenly, like a knife so sharp you didn’t feel it going into the skin.

  “We’re going to need more candles,” she said. He nodded and beckoned to one of the younger helpers.

  Ailis took the two remaining books, found a space on the floor that wasn’t already occupied, and opened the first book. The author’s handwriting was terrible, and it took all her concentration to decipher it.

  Newt returned at some point with more candles, then disappeared again and came back with two kitchen workers carrying platters of food larger than they were. The meats and breads were consumed almost absently, the sound of parchment scraping against parchment interrupted only by shifting bodies and the occasional indrawn breath of hope dashed by a sigh of disappointment until a page named Bets let out a squeal of discovery.

&nb
sp; “What is it?” Gerard asked, hurrying through the crowded room to kneel by the page’s side. “What did you find?”

  “I don’t know. I mean, I think it’s…” The boy was incoherent in his excitement. “I was looking at this sheet of parchment—it was blank—and then I looked at some foreign words on another parchment, and then I looked again at the first one, and there were words there. It looked like what I’d just been looking at, only I could read it. Only now this page is empty again!”

  “Easy, Bets. We believe you.” Gerard gave the boy an encouraging squeeze on his shoulder, then took the blank piece of parchment away from him and brought it over to where Ailis and Newt waited.

  Newt looked over the blank page. “That’s a translation spell?”

  “Possibly. A useful thing. If we can trust it.”

  “We don’t have any choice,” Ailis said. Newt just rolled his eyes.

  “None of the magic has steered us wrong,” Gerard pointed out. “It’s only what we’ve done with it that’s not worked.”

  “I’d argue that,” Newt said. “But not right now. Read it.”

  Gerard held up the blank sheet of parchment, looked at the talisman, and then, after committing the strange words there to certain memory, looked down at the paper.

  And the words appeared in common tongue:

  Time marches on.

  Time cannot stop.

  King and maid alike must pass.

  Only one tear may set them apart and only one tear may set them free.

  Time is the healer.

  Time is the killer.

  Time is the river which can never be halted.

  Begin. End. Renew. Renew.

  “One tear…whose tear?” Newt wondered.

  The three companions stopped and looked at each other.

  Ailis’s eyes lit up with certainty. “Morgain’s tear! She said she wouldn’t shed a tear…”

  “But she’s gone, disappeared.” Newt pointed out the problem and then added, “And how do you get a witch to cry, anyway?”

  “She’s an enchantress, not a witch.”

  “What’s the difference?” Gerard wondered.

  “Power,” Ailis said. “And intelligence.”

  Gerard sighed. “I was afraid that you were going to say that.”

  “All right, everyone,” Newt said, noticing that everyone in the room was watching them. “Go. Shoo. Wait somewhere less dangerous, all of you.” The room emptied out while Gerard found another piece of parchment and a stick of charcoal to write down the translation before one of them misremembered a word.

  “Rumors will spread,” Ailis said, absently running her hand over the surface of Merlin’s worktable, careful to avoid touching any of the various vials of powders, liquids, or oils stored there.

  “At least it will be good news.” Newt wasn’t too worried. “They need that. Besides, it’s not as though there are that many people to be gossiping. Unless they’ve learned to do it in their sleep.”

  “That’s Camelot,” Gerard said, wiping the charcoal off his fingers, leaving a long smudge on the side of his trousers. “Even in their sleep.”

  “I know where she’s gone,” Ailis said suddenly, turning to face the two boys. “Morgain. I know where she’s gone to.”

  “Where?”

  “What? How?”

  “Before Merlin left. The reason he left, he’d been fighting with Arthur.”

  “I remember,” Gerard said. “Everyone was hiding under the furniture.”

  “It was in the solar. Arthur had gone there to hide. Merlin hated going in there, I think the ladies unnerve him, all twitter and giggle.

  “But this time Merlin followed him—stalked right in on the king’s heels. He wanted…” Ailis tried to pace as she remembered, but there wasn’t enough room to move, even with only the three of them there. She waved her hands in frustration, trying to recall the actual words. “Merlin said he knew where Morgain was. He wanted Arthur to go there and bind her. But Arthur wouldn’t. No matter what she’d done, Arthur still thought of her as his sister. Merlin was furious, yelling at the king that he was going to lose his kingdom over stubborn, stupid affection for a woman who deserved none of it.

  “I liked the name of the place he said she was,” Ailis recalled, thinking hard. “Something about apples…that’s what it was. Appleton.”

  “Did Merlin happen to say where it was?” Newt asked.

  “I…yes. But I can’t remember!” She rubbed her face with her fists, frustrated beyond words. “Argh!”

  “Wait.” Newt had raised his hand to try and comfort Ailis, when he was struck by a thought. “I know how to get there.”

  “You do? How?” Gerard turned to stare at Newt, as though to say “You know?”

  “Not Appleton maybe, but the Isle of Apples. You get there…by dying.”

  “That’s not helpful.”

  “No, really,” Newt went on. “I remember hearing once that there was a doorway in the tombs down below the chapel. The story I heard was that it led directly to the land of the dead. But then someone else said no, it led to the Isle of Apples. And the storyteller said they were one and the same. That only the dead might be taken there, and only the damned ever returned.”

  Gerard swallowed hard and looked at Ailis. “Do you think Appleton and the Isle of Apples are the same place?”

  “Could be. And we don’t have a better idea.” She glanced again at the talisman. The hair which had escaped from her braid during their wild ride back to Camelot fell into her face and stuck to her sweaty skin. “But since we’re neither dead nor damned, that doorway may not work. And even if it does…how do we expect to make Morgain cry? Hold an onion to her face?”

  “We need to find her,” Gerard said, his tone brooking no doubts. “We’ll worry about her crying later.”

  “Dead people make me nervous.”

  “Don’t be foolish, Newt. They’re dead. They can’t hurt you.”

  “We have a castle full of ensorcelled people above us, we spent the past six days following a magical map around the land, and we’re about to try and go through a magical gateway to confront a wicked enchanter who also happens to be the king’s sister, and you’re telling me that I’m foolish to worry about dead people? Pardon me if I don’t take your word for that, Mistress Magic-Is-Interesting.”

  The crypt was cool and dark, the only light coming from the candles they carried. An even dozen of the squires had wanted to go with them, but the others had dropped back when Ailis, listening to the small still voice inside her, told them that only the three who had started the quest could finish it. She might have been wrong, but after everything else that had happened, she was learning to trust that voice, no matter who it came from.

  Besides, as Gerard had pointed out, they needed everyone at the ready to secure the castle, just in case the riders spotted the night before returned with reinforcements.

  “Dead people.” Newt muttered, the candle in his hand shaking slightly as they went down the stairs. “Dead people should be buried or burned and be done with.”

  The first few chambers were empty. They had just come to the first occupied niche, the king’s mother, forever silent in a stone coffin with her likeness carved upon it.

  “We shouldn’t be here.”

  “She will forgive us. From the stories I’ve heard, she was a woman who understood doing what needed to be done.”

  And then they were at the doorway Newt had told them about. It couldn’t be anything else: a stone archway the height of two men and wide enough across for all three of them to enter at once. The stone was carved with figures doing things Ailis didn’t dare to identify. One look at them made her feel slightly queasy.

  “Human sacrifice,” Gerard pointed out helpfully. “Sir Bors says it used to be quite popular in some of the older—”

  “Don’t want to know,” Ailis said hastily.

  “So we just go through?” Newt asked.

  “I guess so.” She refra
ined from pointing out that he was the one who had known about this doorway in the first place.

  “I really wish we knew something for certain, just once.”

  “I’m pretty certain that simply standing here will not do anything,” Gerard pointed out.

  “I hate you.” Ailis wasn’t sure if she was talking to Gerard, Newt, or what lay beyond the doorway.

  Without further hesitation or discussion, the three of them extinguished their candles, clasped one another’s hands, and stepped through the doorway.

  ELEVEN

  Once years ago, Newt had gotten horribly drunk on a wineskin of mead someone had left in the stable. He and another friend had hidden it, denied all knowledge of it when the rider came back looking, and snuck out late at night to drink it.

  The dizzy, spinning, nauseated feeling that came the morning after had been the worst experience of his entire life. Until now.

  Dropping. Fast, prolonged dropping. They were being picked up by a gust of wind and tossed back up, then down again, spinning as they went. Newt couldn’t feel his body beyond the dizzy urge to throw up, but he was pretty sure he was covered in bruises. He felt as though he were being kicked by the largest, meanest battle horse in the stable and then stomped on again for good measure.

  When the wind stopped, he could feel his body again. Just in time for it to land, facedown, on something very hard and cold. Then something softer and warmer but very heavy landed on top of him.

  “Gehoff!”

  There was a grunt, and the weight rolled off him. It had been Gerard, from the clink of the scabbard against the stone below them.

  Stone. No wind. They had to be beyond the doorway and at their destination. Newt got to his feet as swiftly as his aching muscles would allow and looked around, squinting in the dim sunlight. They were in a courtyard of some sort, a mosaic of pale golds and deep greens and blues under their feet depicted strange sea-creatures. In the distance he heard the echo of waves crashing against a shoreline. Overhead, the sky which had been pale blue and cloudless when they woke that morning had clouded over so thickly that the sunlight could barely work its way through. And yet, somehow, it did not seem overcast or dark—the light was spreading in such a way as to allow no shadows anywhere.