Morgain's Revenge - Laura Anne Gilman [1]
Only Newt, safe in the stable with his beloved horses, had avoided having his life turned completely upside down. Some days Ailis thought that he had been the more fortunate one.
Ailis looked around the room, careful not to make eye contact with Lady Caitrin, who was still lurking like a vulture waiting to pluck some reaction from her victim. In truth, some of the ladies-in-waiting who served the queen had made Ailis’s new life almost enjoyable, calling her “pet” and making a fuss over her the way she thought her mother might have, if her mother had lived.
But then there were the ladies like Caitrin, who thought she was still nothing more than a serving girl with too many liberties. They never asked me what I wanted, she thought again, but refused to let the sigh she felt building inside her find release. It would be ungrateful, ill-bred. It would prove Caitrin right. Besides, what did she want? Ailis didn’t know…exactly.
With a soft whisper of skirts, one of the women gently nudged Ailis over on her bench and sat down beside her. “Here. Let me help.”
Ailis handed her stitchery over to Lady Roslyn with relief. The older girl had come with Lady Guinevere’s entourage when Guinevere had married Arthur. She had always been kind, even when Ailis was merely a serving girl.
“Ah.” Roslyn nodded sagely, handing the needlework back. “You’re pulling too hard when you come back up through the fabric. Sweetness, don’t let Caitrin worry at you. You’ll find the manner of it, soon enough.”
Ailis didn’t want to find the manner of it—not of embroidery and not of the company of these women. Maybe, she thought. Maybe Caitrin was right. There were days when Ailis felt like she needed to run, screaming, back to the servants’ quarters where she didn’t feel quite so vulnerable, so very much a target, so dratted restless. She wanted to be out of the sweetly scented, sunlight-filled chamber, with its comfortable cushions and young minstrels, and its inhabitants—friendly and otherwise.
She was suffocating, unable to breathe in her pretty new dress, her hair now tied up under a simple veil that wrapped modestly around her neck instead of her former long russet braid hanging free over her shoulder.
Just that morning, the queen had spoken of setting Ailis up with a suitable match; nothing too high for her comfort, but a marriage where she would be the mistress of her own home. She would be matched with a good-stock knight perhaps; a man who could make much of himself and his name with hard work and skill.
Ailis knew she should be grateful. And she was. But something inside her was dying every day she sat with these women, listening to them gossip. Weeks ago she had ridden on a magical race against time that led her across England in order to save her king. She had worn boy’s trousers under her skirt for ease of movement, and matched verbal wits with Merlin, the greatest enchanter ever. She had bargained with bandits, and even faced down Morgain Le Fay, the king’s sorceress half-sister. Ailis still had nightmares about that—horrible dreams in which rather than discovering the secret to Morgain’s spell-casting, rather than escaping the sorceress’s otherworld home on the Isle of Apples, she and Gerard and Newt had been caught by magic and locked forever in a windowless, doorless cell made of stone.
They had gotten lucky. No matter how often Merlin might say that luck was merely the stars aligning themselves with one’s own preparedness, Ailis knew: They had gotten lucky.
Her luck ended there, though.
From that fateful moment when Morgain’s spell had put every adult in Camelot into a dreamless sleep, everything in Ailis