Morgain's Revenge - Laura Anne Gilman [6]
Men, standing and sitting around…a great round table. Arthur’s council table! She tried to stifle her startled gasp, but the sorceress was aware that she was being watched. Morgain immediately turned, her long black hair swinging, her lovely, fine-boned face cast in a mask of anger that shifted quickly to surprise and then to a cunning sort of calculation.
Ailis knew that she should run, find help, alert the castle that Morgain was within the walls and was spying on the king. But something in the sorceress’s eyes held her in place, even as she tried to resist.
“Witch-child.”
“I am not!” Ailis tried to protest, but the words wouldn’t come out of her mouth. She felt like a fish on a hook, being pulled helplessly to the fisher, and doom.
“Were you spying on me, witch-child? Sneaking and spying, drawn hither by…what?”
“I was running an errand,” Ailis said, her jaw working again in response to Morgain’s question. The sorceress was magicking her! Ailis tried to halt her own words, horrified at what she might say, but was unable to stop herself. “For one of the ladies of my queen’s solar.”
“You’ve access to the queen’s company, then? Interesting. How very…interesting.”
No! She would not say anything that might betray the queen, nothing that would endanger Camelot. She. Would. Not.
Something caused Morgain to lift her head just then, like a stag reacting to a distant hunter’s horn, and the spell her eyes had on Ailis was broken. The girl turned to run, catching up her skirts in both hands, but an invisible hand caught at her shoulder, and pulled her backward.
“No, witch-child, I think you should come with me. I might have use of you.”
“Nnnnnnnggghhhhh.” Ailis tried to fight, but a low angry cry was all she could manage. Her heels dragged across the stone floor as she was pulled into the green glow. It seemed to be expanding, filling the hallway like a shadow, tinting the stone walls and darkening the floor like spilled blood. At the very last moment before the green energy overwhelmed her, Ailis felt the air being sucked from her lungs, and in that instant she was finally able to scream for help, for anyone to come….
Gerard’s steady walk slowed, almost without him noticing the change, and his hand went to his waist where his sword was not sheathed. No one carried a weapon inside Camelot’s walls unless they were on guard duty. But something felt wrong, something that made him wish for solid steel. The sense of dissatisfaction and distaste from the council session had evaporated, replaced by unease and suspicion.
“You’re getting as bad as Ailis, with her ‘feelings,’” he told himself. “You’re inside the most secure place on the entire island, surrounded by the finest warriors.” None of which were able to prevent a spell from being cast before. His own thoughts worried at him.
There was nothing behind him, save a page dashing on in another direction much farther down the hallway, where it opened into an antechamber, and a serving girl was gossiping with two guards. Light from the wall lamps glinted off the pitcher she carried at her hip and the metal of the guards’ byrnies that covered them from shoulder to waist. He thought briefly about calling to alert the guards, but what would he say to them? “I felt a chill, an unease?” They would mock him, and rightfully so, when it turned out to be a door left open ahead, or something equally foolish. “And this from the squire the king so praised?” he could imagine them joking in their sleeping quarters.
No. He would say nothing. There was nothing to say.
Clenching his jaw and pushing his shoulders back into a square set, the way he’d seen Arthur do, he walked forward into the intersection where the hallway he was in met up with several others. A page was curled