Morgain's Revenge - Laura Anne Gilman [47]
The sorceress laughed, as Ailis had intended her to do, then finally left in a flurry of rich fabrics—finer than she usually wore to the workroom. She closed the door behind her and locked it from the outside. The sound of the magical bolt sliding into place should have made Ailis feel protected, safe. The shadow-figure could not reach her here.
But this morning, for some reason, the sensation of being tucked away behind that lock made Ailis feel restless, as if she had forgotten something, misplaced something.
Suddenly, the thought of comparing the ingredients of a wind-calming spell against the ingredients of a wind-calling spell seemed tedious and tiring. She pushed her stool back across the stone floor and looked around. She was bored. And she hadn’t been told not to poke around. Not exactly.
A moment later she found herself not at the wooden worktable, with the two spells’ ingredients neatly laid out, but standing in front of the far wall, which was draped with a heavy sailcloth cover. She wasn’t sure why that cover fascinated her so, but she was learning to trust her instincts. Something she needed was behind there. But what was it?
A flutter of wings behind her made the girl jump. She turned and stared around the empty room. Nothing was there. Nothing at all.
Wings, again. A flutter of air, touching the feather braided into her dark red hair and brushing against her neck.
Find out what she’s up to.
Ailis jumped again at Merlin’s voice; the faint echo slipped into her mind on the tail end of a breeze, and then was gone again.
Merlin?
There was no response. Had the voice been real? Or was it merely her own imagination, colored by his memory? Ailis didn’t know. But the temptation was irresistible: to discover something on her own, and not wait for Morgain—for anyone—to decide that she needed to know it.
She lifted the cloth, almost as though in a trance, feeling the heavy oiled fabric shift under her hands as she moved it aside. If she concentrated on it, that thought might somehow warn Morgain, bring her back unexpectedly. Ailis told herself: Don’t think. Don’t trust your mind. Your mind lies to you. Trust your instincts. Trust your voices.
“Oh.”
Tacked to the wall was what seemed to be no more than an ordinary map. A map of the entire island—from the Scottish wilderness and the mountains of Gwynnedd, down to the southern lands and civilized Camelot, and across the waters to Brittany, where Sir Lancelot came from. Then Ailis saw small colored lights—magic, to glow so—hovering just above the surface of the map. Some were a pale blue, others dark red, while some shone cold steady white. They were scattered across the map. She blinked, and let her eyes refocus. Slowly, a pattern emerged, not so much through her eyes or her mind, but somewhere in between, in the same space where she could feel the magic that rested in both Morgain and Merlin.
The blue seemed to represent Arthur’s men. His knights, landowners, common folk. The white were Morgain’s allies. Fighters, farmers, and fisherfolk, hedge-witches and minor wizards—followers of the Old Ways who were unhappy with Arthur’s embrace of the new God and the quest for the Christian Grail.
“Morgain wants to destroy the Quest.” No great surprise there—that had been made plain from Morgain’s very first move. But this was more than the sleep-spell. This involved other people. Warriors. Townspeople. People Arthur thought he could trust, many he thought were loyal subjects, all scattered along the routes to holy places, places a knight searching for a holy object might go. Morgain wanted more than the failure of the Quest, Ailis realized: She wanted the Grail to herself.
But what were those red spots? Try though she might, Ailis could not make that information come to her. The red lights remained a mystery. But clearly Morgain was planning something. That sleep-spell had not been her entire attack—only the first strike of her blade.
And Ailis was stuck