The Shadow Companion

by Laura Anne Gilman

  “Who is she?” Sir Brand asked suddenly. “The serving girl?” His voice was incredulous.

  Newt looked up in time to see Ailis drop down beside them.

  “I’m done,” she said. Her hair was dripping with sweat, and there was a bruise on the side of her face, as though something had smacked her. Her eyes were exhausted as well, but there was an oddly calm look to her face.

  “Any trouble?”

  Newt tried to keep his voice nonchalant, not sure how much she would want to admit to having done. Ailis shrugged, clearly aware of the three knights around them. Being cautious, she replied, “I did what had to be done.” Newt looked carefully at her, hearing something odd in her voice.

  “Girl, you should not be here.” Sir Brand’s expression changed mid-sentence, from dismay to surprise. “You shot the flaming arrows that distracted the…those things?”

  “I…yes.” Ailis was still surprisingly subdued. Even if she was finally learning the wisdom of caution, it was so unlike her usual reaction to using magic—especially such an impressive and successful spell—that Newt’s level of concern rose. Before he could press Ailis for details, Gerard came back with Ruden, and Ailis moved to take care of his bonds. She used her body to block what she did from the other knights. Whatever it was, it took far less time than Newt’s attempts, because Sir Ruden shook off the strands a breath later.

  “What were those things?” he asked, looking to Gerard for answers.

  Newt was just as happy to let the squire take the brunt of the knights’ attention, because he had just noticed that something was moving under the back of Ailis’s tunic, half-covered by her hair—something that had a long, narrow tail which was sticking out from under the bottom of her tunic. He opened his mouth to say something, then closed his jaw quietly. If Ailis wasn’t screaming about it, it was clearly something else she didn’t want brought to the knights’ attention.

  “Ah,” Gerard said. “You see…I went back to camp and sent a message to Sir Matthias, but then I ran into Newt, and we came back directly to lay a better track for Sir Matthias when he came. He saw the spiders simply sitting, as though they were waiting, and…”

  The knights were all standing up, testing their legs, trying to get feeling back in their limbs once again, while Gerard attempted to explain himself without actually saying anything that might get them in trouble.

  “And you thought that they, like normal spiders, might be afraid of fire? Well done, lad,” Sir Ruden said in approval. “Although next time you might consider letting a squire handle the arrows instead of the girl. You wouldn’t want one of us to end up burned to a cinder, rather than the beasts.”

  “Sir, let us give you our horses,” Newt offered, afraid that the implied insult to Ailis might make her lose her temper, despite—or perhaps because of—the strange peaceful aura that had settled over her. That tail was still making him uneasy, even if Ailis didn’t seem to mind it. “So you can return to Sir Matthias and update him properly on what has happened.”

  “Yes, a wise thing. You three will be safe walking back?”

  “We will be fine,” Ailis said hastily. “Gerard is here to protect us from danger, after all.” Only Gerard and Newt heard—or understood—the irony in her voice.

  It was at that point that Sir Brand suddenly realized that he was standing in front of a girl—a young woman—wearing nothing but his smallclothes and boots. He blushed a deep red. The nearly full-body underclothes worn under mail was designed to keep the metal from touching skin—but it was clearly the situation itself, not the actual exposure, that was embarrassing him.

  The horses were collected and handed over, stirrups adjusted for the longer legs of the knights, and the squabbling began over who would be forced to ride double, as there were four of them and only three beasts.

  Doing his best to ignore their unknightly behavior, Gerard handed Sir Ruden a small cloth package. From the singed smell that arose from it, and the careful way he handled it, Newt guessed that one of the spider-things was inside. Hopefully very, very dead.

  “This should be sent on to Merlin,” Gerard said, trying to sound as though he was not giving the older man an order. “He needs to see it.”

  “You think it was the sorceress?” Very few people said her name, as though afraid it would bring her down on them, but Sir Daffyd went so far as to break off his argument with Thomas in order to cross himself even against the reference.

  “If not her, another evil force. Either way, Merlin needs to know.”

  “You mean, the king needs to know,” Sir Thomas said. Gerard shrugged and nodded in the same gesture, suggesting that Merlin and Arthur were one and the same, to his way of thinking. Or that—as Newt suspected—Arthur trusted Merlin to tell him what he needed to know, and save the interesting but not essential details for a less urgent time.

  The knights, having finally settled their argument with a coin toss, mounted and went on their way, leaving the three youths behind, suddenly aware that the village to their backs was beginning to smell unpleasantly ripe.

  “We should do something about the bodies,” Gerard said. They looked at each other, and turned to face the village. There were not only the dogs they had noticed earlier, but also decomposing human bodies—the villagers slaughtered in the first appearance of the spiders.

  “Can you take care of it?” Newt asked Ailis.

  “Yes,” she said, without hesitation. “Are you sure we should?”

  “You can’t leave bodies just lying out there,” Newt said, practical to the end. “Not humans, not dogs, not the horses. It would bring predators, at best. Plague, at worst. Do it.”

  Ailis looked to Gerard, who nodded his agreement and put a reassuring hand on her shoulder. “This is something Sir Matthias would approve of, I think.”

  “Oh, do I care what he thinks?” Ailis muttered. She raised her hands again, and this time the heated wind was immediate, forming out of her palms and swirling like smoke.

  “To the still and chilling bodies below, go!”

  Fire leapt from her hands, two high-arcing fireballs that split into multiple projectiles over the town, and fell directly into the dead bodies. The ones they could see burst into contained flames that burned blue-white and died out in a scatter of ash.

  “When it’s my turn to die, I want to go out that way,” Newt told her. “Just so you know.”

  “Don’t push it,” she said grimly. “Or I might be tempted to make it earlier than you planned.” She was exhausted, and had just a glimmer of her usual sense of humor left, after what she had seen and done.

  Gerard was about to say something, when he yelped an embarrassingly high-pitched noise.

  “What’s that?”

  Newt had, somehow, forgotten about the thing on Ailis’s back. It had crawled out from under her shift and poked a squared-off snout over her shoulder and through the tangles of her hair.

  “Oh. I think that’s what was following us,” Ailis said. “It seemed really interested in my magic.”

  She reached back over her shoulder and coaxed the thing out into plain sight. It was a lizard of some sort, almost an arm span long, with black eyes bulging slightly from the side of its flat, rounded head, a narrow but muscular body running into a long tail, and four short, muscled legs with round, webbed feet underneath. Its skin was a mottled green, with two dark red stripes running down its back. It glistened slightly, as though it were covered in sweat, but Ailis handled it calmly, without revulsion.

  “What is it?” Gerard seemed taken aback, but Newt, predictably, was curious. If it was a creature of any sort, Newt was fascinated.

  He raised a hand, prepared for it to back away or hiss, or exhibit any of the usual reactions wild animals might have to a stranger, but instead the creature raised itself up to meet his touch, pressing the flat top of its head against Newt’s palm like a dog anticipating its master’s touch.

  The skin was cool, drier than he expected, almost like one of the parchment
s from Merlin’s study. Newt could feel an odd thrum through it, as though the creature were purring with satisfaction.

  “What is it?” Gerard asked a second time, trying to get a better look. The thing moved gracefully off of Ailis’s shoulder and up onto Newt’s arm, staring back at Gerard with an unhurried, not at all frightened stare.

  “I don’t know,” Newt said, oddly unsettled by the way the thing had taken to him, “but it seems to like me.”

  “More than it does me,” Ailis noted, pointing to the way its tail was now curling around Newt’s arm, as though to brace itself, or indicate a connection of some sort. It ducked its head down to Newt’s sleeve, and a narrow pink tongue came out and touched the skin of his hand. Satisfied with whatever it tasted, the lizard climbed farther up his arm, sliding around his neck and nesting as best it could in his collar.

  “Whatever it is, I think you’ve got a new pet,” Gerard said.

  “Very funny.” Newt squirmed a little at the unexpected weight, but decided to leave it be.

  They packed up what few belongings they had, and set off to follow the knights back to the encampment.

  “So where do you think it came from?” Gerard asked. “You think that’s what you felt watching us? Why?”

  “I have no idea,” Ailis said. “It doesn’t seem to be particularly intelligent—”

  “Hey,” Newt protested, already oddly possessive of the beastie.

  “I’m sorry, Newt, but it doesn’t.”

  “Smarter than some knights,” Newt muttered, reaching up to stroke the lizard’s head. The purr increased slightly in vibration.

  “It was attracted to my making the fire,” she said thoughtfully, taking Gerard’s lead in ignoring Newt’s comment. “I think it was cold.”

  “Not from around here then, is it?” Gerard joked. It was a relatively warm day, now that the sun had fully risen, and they were all sweating more than a little from their exertions.

  “It’s definitely not from around here,” Newt agreed, feeling it tickle against his skin. “I think—it’s too big to be any kind of lizard I’ve ever seen before, and I don’t recognize the markings, but I think that it might be some kind of salamander.”

  “A what?” Gerard asked.

  “A salamander.”

  Ailis began to giggle. “You mean it’s a newt, Newt?”

  “Very funny.” He scowled.

  “It is, actually,” Gerard said, grinning.

  Newt managed to hold his expression for a few strides, then even he had to see the joke in it. They all crossed out of the trees and back into camp, laughing.

  Several of the men from the Quest who were in the act of taking down tarps and chopping firewood stopped to stare at them. On foot, with dirt ground into their clothing and Ailis’s hair still loose and windblown, their laughter must have added to an already odd sight indeed. That realization just made them laugh harder. Or perhaps it was just the recognition that they had, once again, saved the day, and there was nobody they could brag to about it. After a while, it really did start to become funny.

  “Gerard!” Sir Matthias’s bellow could be heard all the way back in Camelot.

  “Go,” Ailis said, wiping tears of laughter from her eyes and waving the squire on. “He’ll want to know what really happened. All of it, Gerard. Don’t try to muddy the details, you’ll only make things worse for all of us. Go on. We’ll catch up with you later.”

  Gerard raised a hand in farewell and acknowledgment, then turned, dashed past another squire leading two half-saddled horses, and disappeared into the crowd.

  “Looks like we’re packing up and heading out,” Newt said, looking around. “So much for the Shadows being the end of the trail.”

  “Did you really think it would be? That it would be that easy?”

  Newt shrugged, feeling the weight of the salamander on his neck, like an oddly heavy scarf. “I don’t think we’re going to find it at all,” he said. “Not any of the knights, no matter how or where they look, or how pure they are or anything else. I don’t think it even exists.”

  He took in Ailis’s expression of disbelief and outrage, and amended his comment. “I think it did exist once, yes. But now, after how many hundreds of years? Even if it was kept in the finest reliquary, in the safest location, wood rots and metals are melted down, and anything jeweled might be stolen or sold to buy food in the winter. Holiness doesn’t stop you from starving if the crops fail.”

  Ailis couldn’t find anything to say in response to that, and so they walked the rest of the short distance through the encampment in silence.

  SIX

  Tom had taken down most of Sir Matthias’s belongings and packed them for travel by the time they got there, so there wasn’t anything for Ailis and Newt to do but collect their own small bedrolls and wait for Gerard to fill them in on what was going on.

  “There you are!” Callum said, catching his breath.

  Ailis sighed, and Newt made a face, but they both turned to greet Callum with reasonably pleasant expressions.

  “You’re back! What happened?” The young squire was flushed, his arms waving madly in his excitement. “Four of the knights came riding into camp—almost naked—and they didn’t want to talk to anyone. They just went straight to where Sir Matthias was, and then they all disappeared into the big tent, and nobody’s saying anything!” Callum stopped to take a breath. “Where’s Gerard? Sir Matthias was yelling for him something fierce!”

  “Ger went to find Sir Matthias,” Ailis said. “What’s being said in camp?” The first thing you learned as a servant—the thing that Gerard never quite allowed himself to accept—was that gossip was often the best, most accurate way to get news, rather than waiting around for someone official to tell you the story.

  And sometimes it was wildly wrong, like the stories about the ghost of the old Roman soldiers who walked the banks of the river, or Sir Lancelot’s secret marriage, but after a while you started to learn how to filter out the more outrageous exaggerations.

  “People are saying everything. And nothing. The knights encountered Morgain herself, and defeated her. That the Grail came to them in a dream, the way it did to Arthur, and led them into battle. That the knights were distracted, led astray by a beautiful maiden, and had to sell portions of their soul to return to us, and Sir Matthias is going to send them back to the monastery to pay penance and see if their souls can be made whole again.”

  Callum clearly liked that last story the best. Ailis bit the inside of her cheek to keep from laughing, and Newt merely shook his head. “We should wait until Gerard comes back,” was all he said.

  If Sir Matthias was releasing the story, then there was no reason for them to be silent. If he was keeping things close, they would likely need to respect his decision.

  “Is anyone else hungry? Because I could eat an entire side of deer by myself,” said Newt, changing the subject. They had set off early. Midday had come and gone while they were rescuing the knights, so the moment Newt mentioned food, Ailis’s stomach gave off a distinctly indelicate rumble of hunger.

  “I know where you can get something to eat,” Callum said eagerly, and Newt made a “lead on, then” gesture.

  It turned out that many who were waiting for news were gathering near a central fire pit, as much for company as warmth. There were maybe half a dozen knights and their squires, plus a handful of lean and muscled hounds, begging for scraps. Someone was cooking a small pot of a concoction that smelled surprisingly good over the fire. Ailis went over to cadge two bowls and a chunk of bread from the person stirring the pot.

  Newt sat down on the ground, claiming a space for the two of them, while Callum, who had eaten already while waiting for them to return, stopped to speak to another squire he knew. Acquiring more outrageous stories, Newt presumed.

  The salamander slid gracefully down Newt’s arm, and marched on its four short legs over to the saddlebag planted at his feet. It crawled in, turned around somehow in the crowded space
, and stuck its blunt snout out of the pack, its eyes closed with what could only be described as a blissful expression on its lizard-like face.

  Newt, mindful of how cold it had been earlier, picked up the saddlebag and moved it closer, sharing his own body warmth with his newfound pet. A muted purring noise arose from the somnolent creature, as though in thanks.

  He had no idea why the creature had decided to adopt him, jokes about his name aside, but it was cute, in a sort of slithery fashion, and he certainly wasn’t going to abandon it now. Nobody around them seemed to notice the addition to their party, much less object—not even the dogs. And that was very, very odd.

  “Here.” Ailis handed him a bowl made of hollowed-out bread, and filled with some kind of damp meat and wilted greens. It smelled much better than it looked, and it tasted slightly better than chewing shoe leather. Newt took a bite, grimaced, and kept chewing. The salamander stuck its head out, sniffed the air, then retreated, unimpressed.

  “Got any more of that?” Gerard came over and dropped down on the ground next to them. He had brushed off most of the dirt, and combed his hair, but still looked like he’d spent the morning rolling in the bushes.

  “Get your own,” Newt said, leaning away in case the squire decided to make a grab for his bowl. It was bad, but it was food, and food he hadn’t had to cook.

  “Some friend,” Gerard muttered, but when Ailis likewise held her food away from him, he got back up with an obvious effort, and went to beg his own bowl.

  By the time he came back, Callum had rejoined them as well. There was a momentary standoff, then Callum relented and let Gerard take the better placement on the ground, withdrawing a pace so that, while still obviously sitting with them, he was no longer in the direct triangle of conversation.

  “We’re moving as soon as all the horses are packed up,” Gerard said, swallowing his first mouthful of stew.