Morgain's Revenge - Laura Anne Gilman [14]
Newt stood up. But Gerard hesitated, the fingers of his left hand absently stroking the mane of one of the carved lions, feeling the odd rumble of a wooden purr resonating throughout the chair.
“Gerard?”
He looked up, directly into Merlin’s face looming over him. Those eyes were deep-set with exhaustion, but that hawk’s glare was tempered, somehow, with understanding.
“You did the right thing.” Merlin wasn’t very good at giving compliments, and it showed. “You didn’t do anything foolish. Rest easy on that score; none here could have done better, and many would have done worse.”
“But I couldn’t save her.”
“You couldn’t stop her from being taken, no. The first step in wisdom, lad, is knowing when you’re in trouble, and not doing something bullheaded and getting yourself killed in answer. I’d rather have a dozen of you than a full army of foolhardy heroes.”
Gerard wasn’t sure if that was a compliment or not. He chose to believe that Merlin meant it as one.
They went out the door, Merlin in the lead, then Gerard, and then Newt. The stable boy had arrived ready to go wherever it was they would have to go, do whatever they had to do, as Merlin asked him. Even before he knew that Ailis’s life was at stake; even if it led them to more magic.
But not without planning, preparation, and all the support Camelot could give them.
“Hang on, Ailis,” Newt whispered. “Hang on, don’t antagonize Morgain. We’re coming.”
Ailis woke to a vague sense of dizziness, as though she had slipped, but not fallen; been dropped from a terrible height, and never landed. And yet she was comfortable, for all the disorientation she felt.
“Mama?”
Even as the words were out of her mouth, Ailis knew the sense of comfort around her was a false one. Her mother had been dead for eight years now, mother and father both, and nobody in Camelot, dear though they might be, had ever become a second mother to her.
Something’s not right, she thought. Why do I feel so strange? Why can’t I think properly?
Opening her eyes slowly, Ailis was struck by how clean the ceiling was. Normally ceilings were darker, as years of use had coated the pale gray stones of Camelot with an overlay of soot. But this ceiling had been freshly washed for some reason. The stone gleamed almost white, even in the dim candlelight, and the gilding around the corners of the bed—
Ailis sat up suddenly, ignoring the rush of dizziness and the sudden sharp pain in her left temple. Bed? Gilding? Ow!
“Good. You are awake. Mistress will be pleased.”
A hazy shape glided forward and handed Ailis a silver cup filled with some liquid. She took it and drank it down without question, still too confused and puzzled to question, distracted by the pain in her head and the strangeness of her surroundings.
It was water, clear and fresh and cool—the most refreshing thing Ailis could remember ever tasting. The cup was hammered silver, almost warm to the touch, with some sort of design traced into the metal around the lip.
“Ah, good,” the figure said, taking the cup away from her before she could look at it more closely. The servant seemed almost smoky around the edges, although that might have been Ailis’s inability to focus.
Something…strange is happening.
“Rest now. Mistress will be in to see you soon. Rest.”
Mistress? Ailis knew that there were things that she should be asking, things that she should be doing. But her thirst satisfied, the thick down-filled bed called to her, enticed her, and she sank back into it without protest. Her eyes closed and her body slid back down into sleep.
Nothing that felt this comfortable could be bad, could it?
FIVE
“So what did Arthur say when you told him where I was?” Merlin asked Newt as they walked through