Morgain's Revenge - Laura Anne Gilman [2]
Ailis had been locked up with the ladies since then, and she couldn’t discover anything more from the same giggly gossip, which never mentioned specifics, much less the fate of one specific lowly squire. It was driving her mad, not knowing what was happening with Gerard or with Newt. They had all gotten so close, only to be broken apart so easily—it hurt. Even more so because she didn’t know if they were thinking or worrying about her at all.
“Ah, bother.” A petulant voice broke into her thoughts. “I’m out of linen thread.”
“I’ll go fetch more,” Ailis said, happy at the chance to go for a walk. Her shoulders tensed, wanting so badly to be out of there. But she smiled sweetly, projecting an intentional, innocent eagerness to please that had Lady Sharyn smiling back at her.
“Thank you, my dear. Gracelan, the chatelaine, has a packet set aside for me of this particular color.” It was a soft green, the color of new leaves in spring. The thread must have cost a fortune, which was why it was kept under the castle housekeeper’s key.
“If it please my lady, I’ll go now,” Ailis said, slipping from her cushion near the queen’s chair. She paused long enough to make a curtsey to Queen Guinevere, who looked up from her consultation with a dressmaker and nodded her absentminded permission for the girl to leave.
“Thank you, your grace,” she said, dropping another curtsey and hurrying as quickly as she could across the wooden floor of the solar, while still taking approved ladylike steps. Her steps had never been very long, especially compared to the great lengths Newt and Gerard could cover, but now she was supposed to go even more slowly. “A lady must never walk, but glide,” the dance instructor had told her and the other girls new to Guinevere’s service. “Glide as you move. Do not swing your arms, but hold them gently at your sides, and glide.”
She was a person, not a swan, for the pity of heaven! People walked. People even occasionally ran. But not ladies. Never ladies.
“Bah,” she said under her breath, not loud enough for anyone to hear. Ladies did not say “bah,” either.
As the solar was up high in the Queen’s Tower, it caught the sunlight all day. The stairway down to the main level was a circular thing cut out of stone, with steps more shallow than elsewhere. It might simply have been sized small, for a woman’s foot, but something, some twitch of intuition honed by her earlier adventures, told Ailis there was more to it than that.
The narrow width and the shallow steps would make it nigh impossible for a man in armor to climb these stairs. And if such a man were to make it this far, he would have no room in which to swing his sword or draw a bow.
Thoughts like these made Ailis so uncomfortable in the company of the ladies-in-waiting. Not only did she know a world beyond the pampered, cushioned solar, but she knew what lay beyond the harder, but still sheltered, life of a castle servant.
Ailis was different. And she noticed things. Things gently bred, gently raised ladies were not meant to notice. Not to mention the fact that, sometimes, a voice sounded in the depths of her head, giving her advice and leading her to conclusions a simple serving girl might not otherwise reach. That had been why she had followed Gerard and Newt when they set off to find Merlin to lift the sleep-spell. She had heard that voice in her head, that voice that gave advice and pointed the way to answers; the voice that sounded much like