The Camelot Spell (15 page)

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.

“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 char
coal 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 refrained 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.

O
nce 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.

“The Isle of Apples. Are we dead?” he wondered aloud.

“I don’t feel dead,” Ailis said.

“How would you know?”

“All right, I wouldn’t. But I don’t feel dead.” Ailis’s braid had been pulled loose by the magical winds. She had a nasty bruise forming on one side of her face but seemed otherwise unharmed. Newt did a quick inventory of his own body and decided that nothing was broken; he was only sore. Gerard was already pacing the courtyard, one hand on his sword’s grip, the other touching the high stone walls as though expecting to discover a door hidden from his sight.

There were no doors. No windows. No portals. Nothing save featureless gray stone walls rising high above their heads, and the mosaic on the floor that was becoming more and more disturbing by the moment—Newt noticed that several of the sea-creatures were in the process of eating humans.

“I think we’ve arrived,” Ailis said.

“Yes, but where? And how do we get from here to where we need to be?” Gerard asked Ailis.

Brains, child! You were given brains! Use them!

It wasn’t a voice in her head this time. Or, rather, not a
new
voice, but a memory of Merlin, particularly irate at one thing or another, storming down the hallway. He had seen her walking in the other direction
and trying so hard not to be noticed. He snapped the words at her, as though she had personally displeased him by some act of notable stupidity.

Perhaps she had. Only not then. Now. How did he keep it all straight? The answer was that he didn’t, of course. That’s why he was so short-tempered.

“If the doorway led us to this place…then this courtyard must open to something. This is merely the entrance hall—the chamber where unexpected visitors might be judged friend or foe, and actions taken accordingly.”

“We’re not exactly friends,” Newt pointed out.

“No. But—”

Gerard came back, interrupting her. “There’s a door here.”

A door of the sort none of the three had ever seen before, not wood or hammered metal sheet but stones that, when slowly slid aside, revealed an entrance wide enough for them to enter one at a time.

“It may be a trap.”

“Of course it’s a trap.” Ailis sounded as though she had finally lost patience with the lot of them. “You have any other ideas?”

Gerard shrugged and stepped forward.

Passing through this doorway was not as painful
as the other. They left the courtyard behind and entered a huge room, slightly smaller than the Great Hall in Camelot but more ornate, with rich rugs underfoot, jewel-toned tapestries on the walls, and gentle golden glow coming from hundreds of candles set in crystal holders that reflected their light up and out, brilliant enough to make the stars weep in shame.

And at the far end of the room, seated in a great golden chair shaped like a swan, was Morgain. Her long black hair was loose, falling in a glossy curtain down over her shoulder and pooling in her lap. A great black cat lay at her feet, its green eyes blinking at the three strangers without any curiosity at all.

“Welcome, my dears.” Her voice was soft, amused. Her face was a flawless mask.

“To your lair?” Gerard asked.

“To my home.” She spread her arms, indicating her surroundings. “Is it not lovely?”

Gerard took a long, careful look around. “It is indeed. All sparkly and doubtless sticky, like a spider-web. Did you let us in merely to kill us, or did you plan to bore us to death first?”

“Gerard!” Ailis was horrified, astonished, and not a little afraid, but Newt put a calming hand on
her arm, pulling her back slightly. He was smiling faintly, as though he had finally figured out what Gerard was doing.

Morgain, rather than being offended, merely laughed. A wonderful laugh, full and rich, and all three were reminded once again that she was Arthur’s half-sister. Arthur had a laugh like that. “You have learned your lessons well, young man. Irritate your opponent, insult her. Make her lose control of her temper so that she does something without thought, something to show her weakness. Although it would not be ‘her’ would it? Always ‘him.’ Always the man as the opponent.” Her good humor had turned to bitterness.

“You are a worthy opponent,” Gerard said. “I would treat you no differently than any man.”

She looked at him, tilting her head slightly as though weighing the truth of his words. “Perhaps you would. If so, there may yet be hope for my brother’s otherwise worthless court.”

“A court which you’ve spelled to sleep,” he retorted.

“Ah. Yes. There is that. Is that what you’re here about?”

“We translated the spell.”

“And do you understand it? Do you truly?”

“Yes.”

“Are you certain of that? Without someone to tell you, how can you be sure?” Her eyes sparkled with an evil sense of amusement, and her red-tinted lips curved in an unpleasant smile. Gerard was reminded of an adder hissing its defiance.

“We’re certain,” Ailis said, stepping forward when Gerard hesitated. Morgain took one look at her, and the smile softened the smallest bit, but was no less predatory.

“Girl-child. How did I miss you before?”

Ailis gulped, but stood her ground. “We understand the spell. ‘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 moves forward for everyone…but a tear sets them apart. A tear was used to stop time. And only a tear—likely from the same source—can set time to moving once again.” Ailis looked at Morgain as directly as she could. “You cast the spell. I don’t think that you would allow anyone else to take part in it. You want this to be personal. Completely personal. So the tear came from you.”

“And you think to take a tear from me to end the
spell?” Morgain laughed again, but softer this time. “Clever. Quite clever. I gave you too much of a clue. But, as I said, it is good to know there are at least some in Camelot who can think beyond the way things have always been done.” She leaned forward, placing her pointed chin into the cup of her hand and raised one arched eyebrow. “So, tell me. How do you plan to take this tear from me?”

“I thought I would do it the traditional way,” Gerard said casually, drawing his sword from its scabbard. “Beat it from you.” He was bluffing. Despite his words about treating her as any other opponent, he didn’t think he could fight a woman. On the other hand, she was a danger to his king. He would do whatever it took to free his king. That was what a knight did.

Morgain laughed a third time, clearly astonished. “You would challenge me? To battle?”

“Are you afraid to meet the least of your brother’s court?”

“Steel to steel? How…quaint.” She could take all three of them down with her magic. All four of them in the room knew that—five in the room, since it was so obvious even the cat at her feet must know. But there was a point of honor involved. Morgain
spoke of not being treated as an equal; she had been bitter when speaking of men’s ways. So now she would have to face him using one of those ways. If she could defeat him, she would be vindicated. Justified. Triumphant twice over.

And, as the daughter of Gorlois, a royal daughter of Cornwall with generations of warriors in her bloodline, she had training in the art of the sword. Years ago, before she relied so much on her magic….

“Unless, of course, you are afraid of my skills,” Gerard finished.

That did it, as he had known it would. She rose from her swan-throne and strode toward them. As she walked, her embroidered robes changed into a leather jerkin over cloth shirt and pants similar to what the three of them wore, only of much finer fabric. In her hand she now carried a strange blade. The grip was of red wood, and the quillion was a simple black disk that seemed barely enough to protect a man’s knuckles, much less an entire hand. She pulled it from a black scabbard and Gerard had to admire the glittering beauty that was revealed. Barely an arm’s length and too narrow to be taken seriously, the metal shone like the moon, its oddly shaped tip and tapered edges covered in some strange
tracings, like the embroidery on Merlin’s robes. Gerard took it—and her—seriously.

She dropped the scabbard on the floor and smiled at him, the smile of a confident woman. “Have at it, then, man-child.”

Gerard felt his body fall almost instinctively into fighting stance; knees bent to provide stability and speed, shoulders relaxed, holding up his own much less lovely but stronger-looking blade, ready to attack or defend as needed.

They circled each other warily while Ailis and Newt got out of the way. The cat remained by the throne, watching them all with supreme indifference.

Morgain held her blade in one hand, using the other to balance herself. Each studied the way the other moved, looking for a weakness, an opening. Gerard didn’t see anything he could exploit, so he went on the offensive, lunging suddenly, without any shift or change in his body that might signal his intentions.

She met his lunge with a perfect parry, turning his heavier, less gracefully forged blade away and attempting to slide in under his own defenses. But he knew the trick to that, and was out of range before the blow could land.

They had, he suspected, the same teachers—or at
least teachers who taught the same style. But that blade, so exotic looking, suggested that she had learned from other masters as well. Gerard would have to be careful.

Before the thought was finished, he felt her behind him, moving more swiftly that he could imagine, the blade scoring across his shoulder blades and almost cutting through the leather that protected him.

He cursed, turning to face her, reluctant respect in his voice.

“Language, child,” she said, still smiling. Then she lunged in turn, her blade shimmering in the candlelight. Gerard refused to be distracted and beat it away with a heavy clang of his own blade and forced himself within her fight-circle. Dangerous, so dangerous; with her speed and the lightness of her blade he was at a disadvantage. He could practically hear Sir Bors bellowing at him now about stupidity and getting killed.

But he was there, barely a handspan from her body, and bringing his sword up for a disabling blow….

Suddenly he was on his back, breathless, his hand holding onto his hilt only through instinct, not intent.

She had kicked him! And, he realized, feeling
the bruise forming already, had she been able to stretch her leg out farther, he would have been incapacitated long enough for her to finish him off.

Gerard rolled left as Morgain came in for the kill. He got to his feet as she spun around, blade outstretched, her face drawn back in a fierce snarl that would have looked natural on her cat.

“Dirty tricks? I should have expected such from you.” In fact, he should have. Sir Bors would have had him back at basic trials if he had been there to see such foolishness. Never expect honor from a dishonorable source.

But Sir Bors wasn’t here.

Gerard matched her, snarl for snarl, and went on the offensive again. His sword wasn’t as nimble as hers, but he knew how to handle it as well as most knights twice his age and experience, and he had an advantage they lacked.

He could play dirty, too.

On his next lunge, Gerard didn’t go for any of the usual targets: heart, arms, or legs. Instead, he drove the blade directly at her lovely, unprotected face, aiming for the spot directly between her eyes.

She backtracked, as he’d suspected she would, and tried to regroup. He pressed, moving forward
faster than she moved back. It left him slightly winded, but the urgency of the situation gave him stamina he might otherwise have lacked. He beat against her blade once, then again, until she spat at him and leaped out of the way, just before he would have backed her up against a patch of bare wall.

“Never let them get hold of a tapestry, boy,” he could hear Sir Bors say. “That’s just another weapon you’ve given them.”

He felt the kiss of her blade just as he began to turn, incredulous that she could react that quickly. A small part of his mind dealt with the injury: a shallow slash across the back of his left leg. Bloody, but not deadly. It would hamper his ability to move, however, the longer he had to stand on it.
Finish this,
he thought.
One way or the other, time’s wasting. Finish it.

A flurry of action, lunging and then lunging again, driving her back when she expected to step forward and attack at will. He shut down the part of his mind that was aware of the pain; shut down all awareness of anything save the blades flashing and twisting in front of him, the smell of blood in his nostrils, the feel of the heavy metal in his hand, the
rightness
of it all. None of this was directed; his mind
had retreated and let instinct take over in a place that he knew was dangerously familiar to the berserks, the mad warriors of the cold lands Sir Bors told stories about.