The Shadow Companion

by Laura Anne Gilman

  Gerard had stopped listening to them. Instead he watched Sir Matthias and the monk.

  “Which means…?” Newt wasn’t sure what he was asking.

  “I don’t know. There’s something about that monk. The darkness, it has been placed on him, somehow, as though…”

  “Shhhh,” Gerard hushed them as Sir Matthias began to speak.

  “This is Brother Jannot. He—”

  “The Grail hides.” The monk had a deep voice, deeper than his body should have been able to produce, and it carried even into the darkness. “The Grail hides in shadows, in long dark shadows. Bring the light, and dispel the shadows. Find the Grail.”

  “A prophecy,” one of the knights muttered. “He’s been gifted with the art of prophecy.”

  “A miracle,” another said. “The voice of God speaks through him!”

  Slowly, the mood of the gathered men changed from irritation and exhaustion to exultation, with Sir Matthias and the now silent monk at the heart of it. Even Gerard and Newt got caught up in the energy, Newt totally forgetting his earlier unease.

  Only Ailis, pushed to the side by the crowd of people trying to get close enough to touch the monk’s robe, looked distressed, not uplifted, by the prophecy.

  “Something’s wrong,” she whispered, feeling it in her bones, in her blood. There was a sense of the world being twisted somehow. She could feel it, taste it, in the monk’s words.

  But nobody heard her; everyone was so caught up in the monk’s revelation. He gave them exactly what they wanted to hear.

  THREE

  The next morning found them riding out of sunlit fields and into a dark, shadowed forest. The road narrowed so that they could not ride more than three abreast. The supply wagon came perilously close to overrunning the cleared area and tipping into the narrow rainwater-carved ditch on one side.

  “I don’t like this.” Ailis kept looking back over her shoulder, her hand reaching to stroke her horse’s neck for reassurance. The gelding was one of Arthur’s own with the royal brand on its hindquarters. It was trained to carry messengers, lads about Ailis’s size and weight. That familiar weight, Newt had said, would keep the horse calm and steady no matter how far they traveled, or under what conditions. So far that had been true, and Ailis was thankful for it. She was a better rider now than she had ever dreamed of being before all this began, but it still wasn’t natural to her the way it was for the boys.

  “Which this would that be?” Gerard asked. “The fact that we’re chasing after a rumor based on something a half-mad monk said, the fact that we’re riding into a big dark forest everyone calls the Shadows, because the word has ‘shadow’ in its name, or—”

  “Or because everyone around here says that this forest is haunted with evil spirits?” Newt added.

  “I don’t believe in ghosties,” Callum said stoutly, but he was a little paler than normal as he looked around nervously. He’d chosen to ride with them this morning, despite or perhaps because of the fight the night before. His mount, a delicate-boned mare with a lovely gait, was taking her cue from him, shying and snorting at every bird or small beast that moved. Newt would have felt sorrier, except for Callum’s stubborn determination to outdo Gerard in every way, including his casual disregard for anything not sword or shield. It was annoying enough to have one adventure-hungry squire around—two was exhausting.

  Newt didn’t like magic. He didn’t trust magic. But he wasn’t fool enough to deny it existed. He’d never seen a ghost before. But he’d seen a dragon, a bridge troll, a sea serpent…after that, unquiet spirits weren’t so difficult to imagine.

  “Why would the Grail be hidden in a forest?” Ailis asked for the seventh or eighth time since Sir Matthias had announced their destination that morning.

  “Why would the Grail be hidden anywhere?” Newt asked, feeling the urge to be difficult. He wanted to show Gerard and Ailis that they weren’t the only ones with brains. “Why not just leave it in a house of worship on an altar, have something built for it to show it off for the true believers….”

  “Because it’s too powerful to be left in plain sight.” In the morning sun, Gerard looked as exhausted as Newt felt—Sir Matthias had had him running all night after the monk’s revelation, ensuring that everyone would be ready to leave first thing in the morning.

  “And it is especially too powerful to put in a house of worship, with access given to men of faith—men to whom the power of the Grail might be an eternal temptation.” Callum was green, but not stupid.

  “So it makes sense to hide it,” Newt said, his agreement clearly confusing to Callum and Gerard. Ailis, he noted, was shooting him a look that said she knew what he was doing, and while she was amused, she didn’t quite approve. Their bickering felt familiar. It felt like comfort. It felt like family.

  “And to hide it somewhere with a reputation, so nobody will come looking, poking around…” he continued, despite her look.

  “Somewhere with a reputation that would explain anything strange that might happen around such a powerful object!” Gerard finished the thought triumphantly.

  “I hate it when you two make sense.” Ailis managed a faint imitation of her old, cheerful smile. “Fortunately it doesn’t happen often.”

  In the daylight, with the mud, confusion, and lack of direction left behind them in the old encampment, the three friends plus Callum, who seemed to have attached himself to Newt, were able to pick up some of the anticipation, if not the high spirits, of the rest of their caravan. It was enough, at least, to bring back some of their old banter, the back and forth that had gotten them through difficult times before.

  There was an edge to it now though, one that Newt was slowly becoming aware of, mostly from Ailis: She was sharper, more brittle with Gerard, as though trying to defend herself against attacks that never actually came. He wished he could feel more regret for that, but instead found himself taking advantage of it, agreeing with Ailis more obviously, just to rile his friend and see the flash of gratitude on her face. He knew it was small and petty, but he didn’t stop doing it.

  “Did you see that?” Ailis asked suddenly.

  “See what?”

  If Callum were any more fidgety, Newt thought, he was going to twitch himself right out of his saddle.

  “Behind Sir Matthias,” she said, indicating the direction with her chin, so as to not be too obvious about it. Newt looked but couldn’t see anything in the forest.

  The knight in question reined in his horse—a great muscled beast—from the front of the line letting his knights continue on past him. Then he walked the massive charger back to where the four of them were riding.

  “Gerard.” He acknowledged the others with a nod of his head, but his attention was solely on the older squire. “We will be coming to the place the monk spoke of, perhaps by midday. I will want to camp there, at least until we have some sense of where the Grail might be. I want you to take the northwest quadrant of camp, make sure it is set up properly, and let me know if there are any problems.”

  It was an important job for a squire. Gerard sat up proudly in his saddle despite the weight of this responsibility.

  “Sir, I—” Ailis began, then stopped when Sir Matthias turned a gentle eye on her.

  “My dear, I want you to promise me you’ll stay close to one of the squires at all times. This is a rough place, and I would not wish to regret allowing you to come with us.” He patted her kindly on the cheek then, with another nod to Gerard, turned his horse and rode back to the front of the line.

  The good mood among the four of them had been broken. Ailis was fuming once again, the paternal warning another reminder that she was only a girl and therefore of no use to the Quest.

  Meanwhile, Callum felt slighted not only by Sir Matthias’s focus on Gerard, but by the dismissal of his new hero, Newt. Gerard, basking in the trust given him by the brave knight, was aware of their dissatisfaction but, not knowing how to deal with it, chose to ignore it instead.

&n
bsp; “You saw something?” he said to Ailis.

  “Never mind,” she said. “It’s gone now. It was probably just a haunt, nothing that would bother a mighty warrior like him, who doesn’t have to worry about things not of the mortal, ordinary world.”

  “Ailis…”

  She just looked at him, daring him to push the matter. He sighed, letting it drop.

  “Hoy!”

  Two of the other squires rode up alongside them, waving to Callum. With a sideways glance at Newt, the younger squire peeled away from their group, clearly pleased to be leaving the sudden tension to rejoin his old companions.

  “Horse-boy!” one of them called. “You, too!”

  Newt didn’t hesitate turning his horse off the path to join the three waiting for him. He didn’t particularly want to spend time with the rougher-edged squires, whose idea of fun was uncomfortably close to that of the dogs he used to tend. But anything was better than sitting between Gerard and Ailis when they were upset with each other, as seemed to be the case too often these days.

  “Ailis…” Gerard tried again. “I’m sorry. Sir Matthias is so…” he floundered, looking for a word. “Old-fashioned,” he said, finally. “He doesn’t believe…”

  “No, he doesn’t,” she said shortly. “And neither do you, apparently.” She would have ridden off, but unlike Newt and Callum she had nowhere else to go. Instead, she settled for watching the tall, dark-columned trees that lined the narrow road, noting with great intensity the colors of the leaves, the texture of the bark, and where it had been eaten away by deer and other grazers. And all the while the sense of something just out of sight, something following them, persisted. That and the eerie feeling she’d had during the monk’s prophecy…

  “Don’t bring attention to yourself,” Merlin had said. “Stay quiet and out of sight.” If she brought her suspicions to Sir Matthias’s attention, she would have to explain why and how she knew what she knew—and that would involve mentioning Morgain. And Ailis wasn’t certain, after all…so she said nothing.

  Newt was dizzy. The whirlwind of the past several days swam through his mind. His feet were slightly uncertain as he walked under the trees back to his bedroll.

  There was no room to erect the pavilions of the previous camp, but tarps had been raised, and some semblance of comfort established. Many of the squires had decided to sleep under their masters’ roofs while they were in the Shadows, but Newt preferred the fresh air, even if he couldn’t see the sky through the thick branches overhead. The trees between him and the main camp gave him the illusion of privacy, something he had missed since leaving his horse-charges back at Camelot.

  “Chhhhheeereeeee.”

  So far tonight, he had heard three different calls, none of which he had encountered before. Some might claim the howls and whoops were the voices of unrestful souls, but Newt knew they were merely night-birds, flitting and hunting low overhead.

  He came to the open space in the center of four great tree trunks where his bedroll had been placed. Callum had left a small fire burning in the fire pit, and Newt held back a sigh of exasperation. The boy should have known enough to bank the flames before he fell asleep, especially in such a densely wooded area.

  Newt stepped over Callum’s blanket-covered form and went to rearrange the wood so that the flames would die down again, leaving only smoldering coals that could be restarted come morning.

  As he bent over the flames, he heard another noise, this one more of a yelping sound—the sort a fox kit might make when excited or alarmed. Only it was too narrow and thready to be a fox’s call. Newt looked over his shoulder into the night-dark surroundings, but saw no telltale glow of eyes, and heard no rustle of leaves that might indicate the passing of such a creature. Callum slept through it all, not even shifting at the disturbance.

  Foxes, no matter how odd-sounding, were neither interesting enough nor worrisome enough to keep Newt from his bed any longer—not after a long day of riding. So without further hesitation, he slid off his boots and jerkin, put them within reach, and went to sleep.

  Sir Thomas wiped a cloth across the toe of his boot and admired the shine, then looked up as Gerard walked by. “Ho, Gerard! You weren’t at the fire last night.”

  Gerard paused when the young knight called his name, and said, “No.” After dinner the knights and squires had gathered to share stories. Sir Matthias encouraged it, to a certain level.

  Gerard had wanted to join in, but he was still smarting a little from the comments made during the day’s ride, and the thought of dealing with Newt and Callum, both of whom were part of the gathering, had seemed too much to bear. Instead he had taken a turn around the campsite, so spread out as to barely deserve the name, and then gone to bed.

  “Pity. Sir Ruden was telling us stories of the Northern Campaign, when Merlin tamed that so-called monster and banished it to the lake.”

  “It was a monster, nothing so-called about it!” Sir Ruden had a thick northern accent, but his indignation was clear. “Ah, that was an adventure, it was. Not like this.” He spat once, indicating his opinion of the Quest.

  “We’re about to do some training with swords before Sir Matthias decides to move us out again,” Sir Thomas went on. “Care to join us?”

  “Us” was Sir Thomas, Sir Ruden, who was from the Highlands, Sir Brand, and Sir Daffyd, both of whom were from Camelot proper.

  Sir Brand and Sir Daffyd were also two of the least-experienced knights on the Quest and, in Gerard’s opinion, not the sharpest men in the group. But they were knights.

  Thomas had been made a knight only just before the Quest rode out. Gerard had, in fact, worked with him years ago, when both their masters were at Camelot at the same time. Thomas had not been in Camelot when the sleep-spell was cast. If he had been, perhaps Gerard would not have been the oldest squire left awake in the castle, and perhaps none of what had followed would have happened at all.

  Thomas didn’t seem to hold this against Gerard. He was secure in the status of his newly granted spurs, polished and gleaming against his boots. Not that there had been very much glory: Merlin and Arthur had specifically asked Gerard not to speak to the other knights about his adventures, for fear of raising the very doubts and questions about Arthur’s kingship that Morgain had intended to create by her spells.

  “All right, let’s get started,” Sir Brand said, getting into his saddle. He reached down for the long, blunted lance Daffyd handed him. “Thomas, you and Gerard—”

  “Oh, please!”

  At the sound of a woman’s voice, Gerard spun around, even as his ears told him that it wasn’t Ailis. The voice was too high, too breathy, too delicate.

  “Please, good sirs, help me.”

  She was tiny, barely as tall as Gerard’s shoulder, with a round, flushed face and a mass of dark curly hair that had twigs and leaves in it, as though she had just come crashing through the undergrowth.

  “Milady?” Thomas said, gallant as though he were the eldest of King Arthur’s knights, and not the latest and most recent. She was no lady—her drab homespun kirtle and scuffed boots made that clear—but her distress was real, and the knights responded to that exactly as they had been trained.

  “Milady, how may we help you?”

  “My village. Back that way,” and she waved a vague hand northward. “Terrible—terrible!” Her nut-brown eyes were bloodshot and showed tremendous fear, lending force to her jumbled, breathless words. Her hands, scratched and bleeding, rose to clutch at Sir Ruden’s sleeve, as he leaned down from the back of his horse to hear her words better.

  “Save us,” she pleaded. “Only you, with your swords, can save us.”

  No sweeter balm ever landed on their ears, the perfect antidote to their failure to discover the Grail.

  “Milady, we will,” Brand vowed, offering his hand to draw the girl up onto his horse.

  She pulled back, clearly afraid of the beast. Instead she turned and, lifting her skirt a little to move more easily, said
“I beg you, follow me.” And with that, she ran off toward the villages.

  Gerard and Thomas hauled themselves up and into their saddles, their horses already moving to keep up with the others, and rode off after her.

  “We shouldn’t just leave,” Gerard said, the thought coming belatedly that maybe this wasn’t something Sir Matthias would be pleased about. “We should tell someone where we’re going, get more men…”

  “You’re right—you go tell Sir Matthias—you’re his boy, after all,” Daffyd said unkindly. “Leave the glory to the men.”

  Laughter trailed back as the others heard that. Gerard’s mouth tightened as common sense warred with his pride. It took only a moment before common sense was bashed over the head and left in the bushes. Gerard rode after the knights.

  The girl clearly knew where she was leading them, a path seeming to open up where Gerard had seen none before. In no time at all, they were riding out of the trees’ embrace and saw before them a small, neatly tended village, surrounded on two sides by fields.

  In the early morning mist, the timber-cut houses and sheds seemed to glisten, the green patches of garden looked ready to burst with late-harvest produce, and even the occasional dog looked placid and well-fed enough not to bark at the sudden arrival of strangers on horseback.

  It was, Gerard thought, a lovely picture. But it was too quiet to be the scene of such danger—unless they were too late.

  “What sort of threat do we face?” he asked the girl, who had stopped to stare at the village with a sort of pained fascination.

  “Go, quickly, swiftly,” she said, not quite in response to his question. “Swiftly, you may yet save us.”

  The knights needed no further urging. They spurred their horses into a trot, loosened their swords from their scabbards, and readied smaller blades. Sir Thomas pulled a long dagger from a sheath strapped between his shoulder blades—placed there for easy access while riding—and grinned with anticipation of what could prove to be his first true test as a knight.