Morgain's Revenge - Laura Anne Gilman [59]
“Like a tower.” There were three towers in the fortress, two short and somewhat stubby, and the third tall and elongated.
“Maybe. But…” Newt looked around, under the guise of being an awestruck butcher’s apprentice traveling somewhere he had never been. “Or there.”
Newt jerked his chin to indicate a section between the two shorter towers, a single layer suspended in midair that overhung the courtyard where they stood. There were no windows along its length, not even any slits where bowmen might stand defensively, as might be expected in such a structure.
It looked wide enough to contain rooms, rather than merely being a corridor. If it did—even if it didn’t—it was a good place to start.
The only problem, they discovered, was getting to where they thought they wanted to go. They had found the doorway easily enough; there were four entrances to the fortress, one placed in each corner of the keep, each with its own design on the arch over the door and a single guard who watched them with oddly slanted green eyes as they passed, but did not challenge them. Once inside, things became more difficult.
“No wonder she doesn’t have more guards,” Newt said in disgust. “She doesn’t need them. This place is a maze!”
“A maze is easy to get around in,” Gerard disagreed. “It’s all just a question of figuring out how it was designed.” But he was frustrated as well as nervous, now, and while the seasickness had worn off, it was replaced by the itchy feeling between his shoulder blades that he always got just before the start of a practice tourney. It felt like someone was watching him, studying him, trying to determine the best way to knock him off his horse. Morgain? Or…
“This place…this place wasn’t designed. It’s alive.”
Newt swallowed hard. “Was that supposed to make me feel better? Because it didn’t.”
They had been walking forever, it seemed, down a hallway carpeted with a thick green rug that ran its entire length. There were doors set into the cream-colored stone walls. They checked the unlocked doors that led into chambers of various sizes and furnishings, but all were empty with no signs of recent occupancy.
“At least we haven’t found any skeletons of strangers who wandered in and walked until they died.”
“This is no time to develop a sense of humor,” Gerard said.
Newt blinked. “Who said I was joking?” Then he grinned, more out of stress than actual mirth.
“Hah.”
“Seriously, though,” Newt said. “We could do this for days.”
“What do you suggest then? If we still had the lodestone—”
“It wouldn’t do us any good. It wasn’t taking us to Ailis. It was taking us to Morgain’s home. Well, here it is and here we are. Besides, do you really think any of Merlin’s magic is going to function accurately inside Morgain’s own lair? Not without Merlin along to work it, and there’s no way he could have gotten onto this island.”
A fact the enchanter had to have been aware of. “Otherwise occupied” had been a way of saying “I’m sending you where I can’t go.” Merlin was a master of not quite lying.
“So what do you suggest?” he asked Newt. The other boy had more experience being sneaky than he did. Gerard was pretty sure about that.
“Ever lose anyone in the woods?”
“No,” Gerard said, giving him a look that clearly questioned if the other boy had gone frothing mad.
“You don’t chase after them, that just gets you both lost. You let them come to you.” Newt stopped and planted his feet, raising his hands to his mouth and cupping them around his mouth. Taking a deep breath, he bellowed: “Ailis! Ailis, we’re here!”
The hallway echoed with his words, the stone bouncing them back, loud enough to make them both flinch.
“You are insane!” Gerard turned and waved his arms at Newt in his agitation, his face flushing pink. “Morgain—”
“You would rather wander around forever without a clue? Besides, I doubt anyone heard us. This place—”
There was an odd noise coming from ahead of them,