The Shadow Companion (7 page)

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 was 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.

“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 parchments 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.