The Shadow Companion

by Laura Anne Gilman

  But there they were: Ailis and Newt sitting on a log, and Callum was perched on the stump the log had come from. Gerard had hoped to do this without an audience, but found himself without a choice.

  He cleared his throat and got their attention.

  “Gerard!” Ailis jumped up off the log, her hand tugging at her braid in way that always signified unease—or being caught doing something she thought she might get in trouble for. She looked up at him, concerned. “Where have you been?”

  Newt, who had been sitting beside her, was slower to stand, his sharp eyes taking in the cuts and scrapes on Gerard’s face, and the leaves and twigs that were stuck to his boots and in his jerkin. “Gerard, you look like twenty monsters were after you. What’s happened now?”

  “Ailis, I need you. Newt, you too, I think. right now!”

  “We were—” Ailis started to protest.

  “Whatever it was, it can wait. They can’t.”

  “Someone’s in trouble?” Newt was ready and asking questions. “Where? Who?” Newt might not be a squire, but he understood priorities. Maybe that was why they were friends, despite all the differences between them.

  “Come with me,” Gerard said.

  Callum stood and looked at Gerard. “And me?” His face was alight with the possibility of going on an adventure with his new friends.

  Gerard shook his head. “Not this time.” He tried to be considerate, but there wasn’t time and he had little experience with this sort of thing. He tried to think what Sir Lancelot—the kindest, gentlest man he knew—might say. “Next adventure, maybe. When I have time to—”

  Gerard caught a glare from Ailis and changed his words mid-sentence. “Until we have time to…work things out. But not now. We have to move fast, and taking on another person would slow us down.”

  Callum started to protest. Newt put a hand on his shoulder and nodded his reluctant agreement. The squire was deflated but didn’t argue.

  “Poor Callum,” Ailis said as they walked away, and both boys looked at her as though she had grown a second head.

  “I just…” She started to explain, then shrugged in frustration. “It’s tough to be left out,” she said. “Even if you’re being left out of stuff that would get you in trouble. You are about to get us into trouble, aren’t you?”

  The horses were penned on the other side of the encampment, near the small creek. Sir Matthias did not outwardly believe any of the stories circulated about the forest, but everyone knew that running water could stop a curse or a witch from crossing, so it made sense to keep the most vulnerable members of his troop there. If nothing more, it made those who were superstitious feel better. Gerard led them around the outskirts of the encampment, keeping close to the trees. As they went, he told them what he had encountered.

  “And you think I can do…what?” Newt asked. “Ailis, all right, she has her magic. But me? Unless you think my dog-training and horse-grooming skills are going to work on spiders, which, I’m telling you, they don’t—”

  “I don’t know,” Gerard admitted. “I’m running on instinct here. And my instinct tells me you need to come along.”

  “Do you think—” Ailis stopped. “Did you hear that?”

  “Hear what?” Gerard didn’t even slow down.

  Newt paused, looking around carefully, but when nothing popped out of the tree line or came at them from the clearing, he shrugged and moved on briskly.

  Ailis waited another moment, her shoulders hunched as though expecting a blow. “What are you?” she asked, softly. “Where are you?”

  “Ailis!” Newt was calling back, impatiently waiting for her. Gerard had gone ahead and was now out of sight. Getting the horses, she supposed.

  “I know you’re there,” she said to whatever had made the noise. “So you might as well just show yourself.”

  When nothing responded, not even the wind, she shrugged and walked on.

  “How do you expect to find your way back?” Newt asked Gerard as they left camp, walking the horses as though cooling them down after a ride, so as not to risk anyone asking questions about where they were going.

  Gerard was still following his instinct, which was that Ailis and Newt would be what was needed, not a score of overeager warriors. It might merely be wishful thinking, a desire to go back to the simplicity of their former lives, but he didn’t think so.

  “I left a trail as I rode,” he said, pointing to the scraps of cloth on the forest’s floor. He had torn off random bits of his shirt and dropped them as he rode. “The forest might be able to open and close at will—or at someone else’s will. But I thought it might not be able to find, or move, something of mine.”

  “Huh? Not bad,” Newt said grudgingly, all the more so for the approving glance Ailis sent to Gerard.

  The ride was less difficult than Gerard remembered, as though the forest didn’t mind him coming back. That unnerved him until he caught Ailis making an open-and-shut motion with her hands, and saw that her mouth was moving. She seemed to be forming silent words that compelled the plant life to back off, just a little.

  “See?” he said to Newt, indicating her actions. “Magic can be useful.”

  “So long as Sir Matthias isn’t here to see it, you mean.” Newt’s voice was scornful.

  Gerard blushed angrily at the realization that Ailis had clearly been sharing confidences with Newt. It stung.

  The stable boy moved his horse closer to Ailis, bending slightly so that he could speak to her in a low tone. “Is whatever it was still following us?”

  Ailis nodded, not breaking her chant.

  “I’m going to drop back and see if I can spot it,” Newt said, then swung down from his saddle without halting his horse and handed the reins over to Gerard, who tied them to his own saddle without comment.

  When he was a child, before his mother died and he went to live full-time with the dogs in the kennel, Newt used to play hunter-in-the-green, stalking small animals until he could get close enough to touch them. Working with dogs taught him a different style of hunting, but he never let those early skills fade entirely.

  If Ailis felt something following them, something was following them. A tension built inside Newt. This skulking, silent thing…He would find out what it was.

  “Eeeeessssshhhhhhhh.”

  The sound came from behind him. Newt turned, still moving slowly, expecting to see something. But there was only the twisting of leaves that he reasoned to be the track of something passing—or it might have been a breeze, a fox, or an innocent bird. Not everything in the forest was suspicious. In fact, very little he had seen so far was out of the ordinary, for all the stories surrounding it.

  “Eeeeessssshhhhhhhh.” Then there was silence.

  Letting out a sigh, Newt moved on as quietly as was humanly possible under the branches, just behind and to the left of the three horses ahead of him. The sense that there was something watching him kicked in again, just a prickle between his shoulders. The more he tried to ignore it, the more it grew, until Newt was almost crying with the need to reach behind him and strike out at something, anything, to make the feeling end.

  “Oh, dear God,” he heard Ailis cry from up ahead, and gratefully abandoned his fruitless hunt in order to rejoin his friends.

  They had slipped out of their saddles as well, leaving the horses hobbled near a large rock. Lying on the ground, nearly concealed by the grass, Ailis and Gerard were staring down at the village where Gerard had left the knights.

  They were still there, exactly as he had described. But their armor and jerkins were gone, and the four men were down to their smallclothes and boots, shivering under the spider-spun bonds.

  “Their clothing, the armor…it’s dissolving?” Ailis asked in a hushed whisper.

  “Poison,” Newt said in a grim tone. “It’s something caustic, like lye, to burn off the shell of something they want…to eat.” He finished his sentence slowly, reluctantly.

  “Thanks for telling us that,” Ger
ard said sarcastically. “So, was there anything actually following us?”

  Newt wasn’t offended by the squire’s tone, for once; he wouldn’t have wanted to know that, either. “Yes, I’m pretty sure there was. But it’s not showing itself. And we have other concerns right now.”

  The spider-things were fewer in number than Gerard had said, but that made sense, if they had been eating each other.

  “They’re larger now, too,” Gerard said.

  “The knights are awake,” Ailis said. “Their eyes are all open.” Even Sir Brand, whose head was lifted just enough that he could watch the spiders nearest to him.

  “The poison might be wearing off,” Gerard suggested, trying to figure out how quickly they could cover the ground between them and the knights.

  “Our men still can’t move, not with those things around them. We’ll be easy prey if we try to lug them out.” It was almost as though Newt knew what Gerard was thinking. The tension inside him had never really died down. It wasn’t a pleasant feeling, making his skin feel tight around his body, but it took his mind off everything else, so he focused on it, trying to feel the extent of it from the skin on down into flesh and bone.

  Ailis shifted, and a rock, dislodged by the motion, rattled down the hill. None of the spider-things seemed to notice, but Sir Ruden’s head moved, slowly, in their direction. It was too far away to be certain, but his face seemed to have expressed a weary kind of relief.

  “You said that the things didn’t leave the village?” Newt asked.

  Gerard nodded. “They waited until the first knight rode into the village, then they came out of hiding.”

  “Like they were waiting?” Ailis asked nervously.

  “Like they were under orders,” he responded.

  “A pack. A trained pack, without the ability to do anything on their own?” Newt was in his element here. “Right. We need a distraction, something to drive those creatures away, and give us a chance to rescue the knights.”

  “We need magic,” Ailis said. “Real magic.”

  “Can you do it?” Newt asked her.

  Ailis’s gaze met his and didn’t let go. “I can do it.”

  “Wait, wait!” Gerard was speaking to himself as much as to Newt, so the stable boy didn’t take the bossiness badly. He, too, knew the moment wasn’t right.

  Ailis hadn’t done anything yet. They had left her by the rock, working through her limited collection of spells and trying to find something that would do the job. The young men had crept on their bellies like snakes until they were as close as they dared to go.

  “Wait…”

  “I know,” Newt hissed.

  Newt was finding it difficult to keep his attention on the knights. It wasn’t Ailis that was distracting him, either; he believed that she knew what she was doing, and watching her wasn’t going to make things happen faster. Something else began to twitch at the back of his neck—and the something was probably the thing he and Ailis had felt earlier. Something was still lurking, watching them.

  Newt was used to being watched. The dogs he cared for used to watch him slavishly, waiting for a sign, a command, a hint of food. The horses he helped train and groom watched him for continued assurance that they were safe. This was different. It was not like having Merlin watch him, or Ailis, or even Sir Matthias, the few times he’d come under the knight’s eye. It was curious and intense.

  Ailis finally caught his eye; she was unbraiding her hair, running her fingers through the thick red strands, letting the wavy mass fall in front of her face and obscure her from sight.

  The strands started to move, gently at first, then more wildly, as though a heavy wind had come up, causing her hair to fly all around her head. But around them, the air was entirely still. Her hands raised up and parted her hair so that she could see what was happening. Her face was alight. Her grim smile made it appear as though she was enjoying this—all the danger, all the risk.

  Newt had long suspected all users of magic were crazy. This confirmed it. Even sensible, practical Ailis fell victim to it, to the point where she was willing to defy Sir Matthias in order to do more, perform larger, more aggressive spells.

  That had been what they were discussing when Gerard found them. Ailis had actually been ranting, and not really talking. And while he agreed with her on most points—especially when she complained about Gerard acting as though he was older, wiser, and better than everyone else—Newt couldn’t let go of his own discomfort when it came to her using magic, or anyone using magic. He didn’t believe it was wrong or unholy, the way Matthias seemed to think. Newt was just afraid of what—and who—might be getting their hooks into Ailis through that magic.

  Newt just didn’t trust magic…at all.

  But he did trust Ailis. Usually.

  She raised her face to the sky and began speaking more loudly, but the sound barely carried to where the boys were hidden.

  “Time to get moving,” Newt said, elbowing Gerard, who merely nodded.

  A powerful breeze suddenly rose, blasting out of the trees behind them and rushing down into the village, then swerving suddenly and rushing back up to where Ailis was now standing. She was rock-steady, even in the winds, her arms outstretched to direct where the air should go. Her hair blew madly about her face, keeping clear of her eyes and mouth so that she could continue working the spell, but it wound around her neck and shoulders like live snakes.

  She looked like a sorceress.

  The spider-things, at first oblivious to the magic, started jittering nervously when the first wave of Ailis’s conjured air hit them. Then, like hunters scenting blood, they turned almost as one and started up the hill.

  “If they rush her, all at once…”

  “Don’t think,” Gerard said. “Move!”

  As stealthily as they could, the two boys moved across the line of demarcation and into the village. There was a moment of quiet and then, while the little black creatures remained fixated on Ailis, and nothing new rose from the discarded dogs’ bodies to challenge them, they raced to the nearest knight.

  It happened to be Sir Brand. He was conscious, but barely, and in no shape to even try to break free of the bonds. Newt slung him over one shoulder, staggering a little under the weight, and started back out of the village.

  Behind him, Gerard grabbed Sir Daffyd, planning to do the same thing. His hand made contact with one of the white bonds, and he jerked it away, disgusted by the cold, sticky feel of the webbing. Something made him look up then, just in time to see a handful of the spider-things finally turn and head in his direction. His touching the web must have somehow alerted them.

  Uh-oh, he thought, then started to lift Daffyd, planning to make a run for it.

  “Teine!” Ailis called in a strange language, one hand pointing directly at Gerard. “Teine!”

  The wind curled around Gerard, shoving him uphill. Then it seemed to thicken, and it heated to an almost unbearable level until sparks flew and a burst of flame erupted from the gust, scorching one of the spider-things, and driving the others back in a skitter of legs and bodies.

  It gave him only a few breaths of safety, but he used them, making a mad dash, running faster than he ever thought he could move. He stopped only when Newt reached up and grabbed him, pulling the squire and his knightly bundle down to the ground.

  “We have to go back for the others…” Gerard was already twisting his body around to get up on his feet again when Newt’s hand on his shoulder held him back.

  “Let Ailis do her thing first,” Newt suggested. “And we need to see if we can get these ropes off them.”

  “You do that—I have to try and get them out of there!”

  Newt swore under his breath, then turned to Sir Brand. He placed his hands on the spider silk, curled his fingers around the strands and tugged. Behind him, the winds of fire Ailis was directing seemed to falter, but then surged again. The spider-things dodged out of the way. Her lack of control was evident in the near misses, but she wa
s still able to keep them from trying to attack her directly.

  “Come on!” Newt muttered, pulling on the threads. He could feel his frustration and anger rising, and tried in vain to ignore it.

  “Break already!” he commanded the threads. He closed his eyes and put all his strength into the muscles that years of working in the kennels and stables had given him. He might never swing a sword the way Gerard did, but he knew ropes, and he knew how to break them.

  His teeth gritted, he gave one last pull, and the spider-silk strands warmed almost unbearably under the friction of his palm. It frayed and snapped and finally splintered apart.

  Thrown onto his backside, Newt blinked up at the sky, then realized that Sir Brand was moving, the rest of the bonds falling loose as the one strand parted. He didn’t wait to see how the knight was doing beyond that, but immediately got back up on his knees and moved over to Sir Daffyd.

  Time seemed to speed up and slow down all at once, so that Newt felt like he was moving very quickly while everything around him was moving as though underwater, or caught in thick mud. He had finished with Daffyd’s bonds and turned back to see if Brand needed any more help by the time Gerard returned with Sir Thomas.

  “Ailis…”

  “Still holding them off,” Gerard said. There was an ugly green-and-black mess on his pants leg. Newt decided not to ask about it.

  “I’ll get Sir Ruden, and we’re done,” the squire said, before scrambling back into the village. Brand made a move as though he wished to go with him, then his knees gave way and he sat down hard.

  “Sir, you might want to rest a bit,” Newt said, already too busy to worry about offending the knight. Some of them were on their dignity about the slightest thing, especially if they felt they had been made to look foolish in front of a servant. Fortunately, either Sir Brand wasn’t one of those men, or he was too thankful and sore to argue the point. He stayed where he was, watching Gerard go back to Sir Ruden and start to drag him back.