The Shadow Companion (15 page)

“
F
ools. Mortal barbarian fools.” Nemesis stood before Morgain, having discarded the hooded robe she had worn for so long. Terrible and awe-inspiring, beautiful and horrible; even if you did not believe in the old gods, the goddess was an impressive figure, from the hairless head and fire-lit eyes, all the way down to her clawed feet and back up to the massive wings, which even now flexed and flared behind her; white feathers tipped with purple.

“Did you think you could cheat Fate? Cheat me?” Nemesis’s rage was focused on Morgain, who had tried to play both sides against each other, clearly planning to take on whoever had won while they were still weakened from the battle.

The sorceress reacted to this renewed threat the only way she knew how—with arrogance and pride.
Climbing to her feet, the sorceress faced down Nemesis. No more pretense, no more civility or shades of alliance. They were just two fierce and selfish powers, battling for dominance over each other.

Gerard saw all this through doubled vision. He had lost too much blood, first trying to keep up with Newt and Ailis, then in the battle with Nemesis. None of that was going to matter now. It was all over. They had been tricked. No matter what Morgain might want or not want, even now that Nemesis’s control over her was broken, there seemed to be no way to stop the trap from closing around Camelot, perhaps destroying Arthur’s reign forever.

“There’s one way.”

The voice was familiar, but Gerard had never heard it before. Like the knowledge of Nemesis, it seemed to come from deep within, planted there by some force. Unlike that knowledge, this had a distinct voice. A soft, deep, chime of a sound, that spoke not in words but tones of color, streaks of light, and peals of sound.

“One way to save all. Save from darkness.”

Gerard looked around, blinked hard, forcing his eyes to focus. Across the way, past the two magical figures engaged in a contest of wills, he saw Ailis,
looking as bewildered as he felt.

“Let me go. Let the waters wash the sin, cleanse the soil, free the soul.”

“The Grail.” Ailis’s lips barely moved, and there was no way he could hear her across the distance, but she could have shouted for the impact it made. Instinctively, Gerard’s hand clenched on the bag, making sure that the cup was still within.

His first instinct was to deny the words, deny the voice. This was the meaning of the Quest, the key to his future. With it, Arthur’s rule was assured, fame and glory achieved, his name written into history now and forever. Without it, he was a squire whose greatest stories would be buried for the sake of Arthur’s rule and Merlin’s reputation. He would be valued, yes, but never famous. Never one of the knights remembered through the generations.

He could not do what the voice was suggesting. He couldn’t.

Then Newt stirred, but just barely. Ailis reached out a hand to reassure him, to warn him against moving too much and attracting Nemesis’s attention again. Newt stilled, then rolled over slowly onto his side, taking in the scene at a glance. The two boys’ gazes met, and Gerard was struck by the despair, the
loss, he saw in Newt’s eyes.

“I tried,” Newt said. “I tried, and failed. I could not use my rage to destroy her.”

Rage and sorrow filled Gerard, then. A knight was not someone who sought fame. A true knight was one who protected the innocent, the weak; who did what was needful because it was needful, no matter the cost.

He, Gerard, was still a squire. He might always remain a squire. But he knew one truth that had nothing to do with sitting at the Round Table: There was more to being a knight than honor or fame. There was friendship, loyalty, and love.

And no one should ever be allowed to look the way Newt looked just then, as though he had given everything, won every battle…only to lose the war. No one who had triumphed over hatred, the way Newt had, should ever think that he had failed.

Every inch of his body protested, but Gerard unclenched his hand, reached into the leather bag, and withdrew the Grail. It shimmered once in his hold, the echoes of that chiming voice stroking the inside of his ears, then sound and shimmer both subsided, as though something had hushed it.

Newt could hear it, and Ailis. Gerard could tell
from the way they looked at it.

Just a cup. Just a simple, wooden cup, stained and cracked. Nothing worthy of note.

Gerard rose to his feet, feeling his leg wobble underneath him. Moving slowly, cautiously, he staggered to the well. Newt, lying on the grass where he had fallen, looked from the Grail to Gerard as he came closer and nodded, once. “Yes,” his lips moved, although no sound came from them.

As though watching someone else’s hand, Gerard lifted the Grail over the turquoise waters.

“No!” The shadow figure had finally noticed what Gerard was doing. She turned away from Morgain to try and stop him.

And then Newt was impossibly up on his feet, tackling Nemesis; not in a berserker rage, but as a mere mortal soul. His mixed-breed blood, the blood of two lands, was just enough to cause Nemesis to hesitate long enough for Gerard to open his fingers, and watch the cup fall, turning slowly, into the bitter blue waters.

“Nemesis!” Ailis called, her voice scratched and hoarse, but triumphant. “Leave! Be gone from these lands!”

The cup seemed to fall forever, but all too soon a
splash rose up, hitting the walls of the well, washing away the soot-drawn symbols and leaving the stones clean.

Morgain screamed once in denial, but the goddess’s scream was shriller, high-pitched and piercing, like the howl of the bansidhe, the fairy creature who foretells death.

Ailis ran to Newt, pulled him upright, and checked to make sure he was all right.

Gerard’s heart clenched in pain—after all he had given up, he saw that she went to the stable boy first. Then her hand reached out for his, and he clasped her fingers and let himself be drawn into a three-way hug.

The scream built and built, a hot wind rising around them, powerful thunder crashing inside the cavern until all three had no choice but to cover their ears and huddle together until it stopped.

When they finally uncurled themselves from the ground, everything was gone. Morgain, Nemesis, the well. The ground was scored clean, the grass gone. The nearest trees were uprooted and slanting against each other.

“The Grail?” It wasn’t really a question, but Gerard answered Newt anyway.

“Gone.”

Ailis blinked grit and tears from her eyes, and looked over her shoulder. “Constans! He’s gone, too.”

In fact, the entire fire pit was gone, and with it, the salamander.

“I think…I think facing what I was…what I could be, and then rejecting it. I think I sent it away,” Newt said sadly.

“Because it was magic?”

“Because it was me. In a way. That’s why I named it what I did, I guess.”

“Constans. That’s a Roman name. Like your grand-da.”

“Like me,” Newt corrected her. “Constans is the name my folks gave me. But my ma always called me Newt. Little Newt.”

“Because your magic was tied to fire.”

Newt shrugged. “Maybe. I’ll never know.”

“So who are you?” Gerard asked.

“I’m me,” Newt said, after a long pause. “Morgain was wrong. True names are power, but the name your parents give you isn’t always the true name.”

“But the magic…”

“Gone.” He was lying—Newt could feel the
magic still simmering, locked away down inside him. But he had no intention of ever calling on it again. Unlike Ailis, he felt no pangs of loss. It wasn’t fun, wasn’t part of him he liked, but a killing tool, one he had no desire to wield. He was a stable boy, not a soldier.

“Not all magic is bad,” Ailis said, with the tone of someone who had argued the point one time too many.

“No,” Newt agreed, his arm around her shoulders. Not when you choose it, rather than being overrun by it. Ailis had learned that when she walked away from Morgain and the sorceress’s lures. She went back, yes, but under her own terms, her own choice. She walked into that fire with a goal, and never lost sight of it. Just as he chose not to use his. It was his inheritance. But it wasn’t his life.

Gerard looked around the cavern again, at the trees, the cave walls, and his two bedraggled and battered friends, then flopped onto his back with a heavy sigh.

“Nobody,” he said with a sigh, “is going to believe this.”

“Merlin will,” Newt said. “Or maybe he already knows and forgot. Or something like that. Merlin
makes my head hurt.”

The three friends smiled at each other in weary accord.

Some time later, the three of them staggered out of the melted hole in the cavern’s entrance, blinking at the dawn sunlight filling the sky.

“How long were we in there?” Newt wondered.

“No idea,” Gerard said. “It felt like…”

“Forever,” Ailis said. “Forever and a day, and an entire life.”

“I’m hungry.” Newt’s comment was so matter-of-fact, it sent them all into fits of laughter. “Well, I am,” he protested. “Like I’m all hollow inside. You aren’t?”

“I am, actually,” Ailis said thoughtfully. “Maybe all the magic we were using…”

“Or maybe we just haven’t eaten all day. Days. However long it really has been. I’d eat the dragon, if he didn’t have all those scales,” Gerard said.

“And if taking a bite wouldn’t maybe wake him up again?” Ailis said.

“More to the point, anyone have any idea how we’re getting home?” Newt asked. His arm was still
around Ailis; a combination of bone-weariness and Newt’s own relaxation made it seem like the most natural thing in the world. “Seeing as how Ailis has run dry, magically, Sir Tawny’s long gone, and we haven’t a horse or coin to our names?”

“We walk,” Ailis said, ever practical. “At least until I can reach out and contact Merlin again.”

“Great. We’re dependent on a sorcerer who flies into walls to rescue us. I’m so confident, now.” Magical or not, Newt was still Newt.

“It’s going to be a very, very long trip.” Gerard sighed as he adjusted his pack on his back and started down the hill. “A very, very long trip…”

“
A
nd so the Grail was won…and lost again. How
is
my dear brother taking that bit of news?”

Morgain called a chair up out of nothingness and seated herself in it, her fur-trimmed gown flowing around her in graceful folds. The chair was a dark wood, ornate but not massive, and it suited her perfectly.

Merlin leaned against an invisible wall, watching her with ironic amusement.

She was selfish, and single-minded, and dedicated to a way of life that would not come again. And she had focused her entire adult life to destroying the things he had spent his entire life building and protecting: Arthur, Camelot, the future. Yet he respected her greatly, feared her a little, and would
never, ever, let her know either.

“Quite well, actually,” he said, answering her question. “The powers of darkness were not able to take it away from us, after all—the virtue of his knights and their companions was enough to hold them at bay, and save the land from darkness and despair once again. The minstrels have been singing of nothing else all month. Or is it next month? Or last month? I’m about to go mad from the noise, either way.”

“You were already mad, Merlin,” Morgain said dryly.

For Merlin, madness was the only way to stay sane and do what he needed to do. It had been too close, this game. Far too close, from start to finish. He had won this round.

His pawns—Ailis, Gerard, and Newt—had played their roles perfectly. They had even managed to surprise him: Who knew that the lowly stable boy held so much power within him? The temptation to pry, to pull the berserker energy out of the boy and harness it somehow was almost overwhelming. But he would not do that. Not only would it be wrong, but Ailis would never speak to him again. And he would rather have one willing protégé than two unwilling ones.

It was one more than Morgain had.

“She will not be yours, you know.” Morgain had the not-surprising ability to read him like a book, here in the astral plane.

His skills with women were as bad here as they were on earth. But that did not mean he was totally without a clue.

“She will be her own,” he said calmly, calling in a goblet filled with sweet well-water. With a tinge of maliciousness, he made the goblet clear, like ice, and then colored the water the exact shade of turquoise blue of the Aegean, the color of Nemesis’s home shores. “Her own, and her faithful Roman’s, that is.”

Morgain made a face. She had nothing against the stable boy—she had nothing against anyone with magic so deep in their bones. But his Roman blood had cost her greatly, and she resented that. As Merlin knew she did.

“She will be her own,” Merlin repeated. “When you and I are gone, and Arthur has fallen, as we both know he eventually will, Ailis and Constans’s children will continue.”

“Children?” She raised an eyebrow at that. “Assuming a bit, are you not? Or have you seen the actual birthing?” His ability to live backward could
be useful, if you could pry through the nonsensical patter that so often accompanied one of his bouts of confusion.

“Call it a hunch,” he said. “They will have children of magic, on both sides. Children of magic to hold the land; to speak to it and appease it. We rise and fall, and the bloodlines change, but the land adapts. It always has. Your kind were not the first, Morgain. Other blood has nourished the soil over the generations, and will do so again. Even Romans. They loved this land, too. They did not all leave willingly when their empire ordered them to return.”

The sorceress clearly did not agree, but chose not to follow up on that point, staring at her opponent for a moment.

“Will they love the land enough, Merlin?” she finally asked. She was not looking for reassurance, but rather asking as one great general to another, conferring on the status of armies marshaling in the field.

“If they don’t, it will be their failure, not ours,” was all he could say. “Good night, Morgain. Do not try to harm them again.”

She laughed then, a sweet, clear, evil laugh. “You
do not command me, Merlin. I will harm them or not, as I choose.”

He bowed to her, mockingly, and faded from view, his hawk-sharp eyes watching her until every other feature of his body had disappeared. Then he blinked, and was entirely gone.

“As I choose,” Morgain repeated, relishing the sound of the words, and then she, too, departed the astral plane, fading into wisps of dark golden light.

Safe and secure in the great stone in the Orkneys, Morgain’s physical body slowly stretched, waking out of a deep sleep. Still drained from the effort of defeating Nemesis and protecting her chosen successor, she barely had the strength to raise the waiting cup of hot chocolate to her lips. Her body might be weak still, but her mind was finally clear of Nemesis’s malevolent influences. She was her own woman once more and had no desire to hand over any sort of control ever again—no matter what anyone might promise her, no matter how tempting.

Merlin had won this round. But there were end
less turns of the day yet to come. And, despite Merlin’s pretty words, she was not willing to leave her legacy to chance.

Ailis and the stable boy would marry and have children. No doubt Merlin was counting on their love of the loyal and noble squire, Gerard, to keep them tied to his precious Camelot. And it would likely be so.

But even loyal knights could be subverted, if you offered them the right bait. Perhaps she would leave Ailis and her friends be, to see what they might, in fact, grow up to become. If Merlin was correct, as well as mad, Ailis might yet become a powerful ally, and her menfolk along with her.

Morgain thought it best to focus on other links in the chain surrounding Arthur’s throne first. The great and noble Lancelot was a good place to start. Incorruptible Sir Lancelot. Finding
his
weakness would be interesting.

The great cat slept at the foot of her bed, stretched full-length, ears twitching in dreams of chasing giant mice.

With a contented sigh, Morgain went back to sleep, willing her body to heal, and smiling about the plots yet to come. The battle for the Old Ways was
far from over, and she’d have many more chances to take action.

And, in the window of her bed chamber, a small owl clucked mournfully, then spread its sawdust-stuffed wings, and flew away.