Morgain's Revenge - Laura Anne Gilman [64]
The figure had frightened Ailis and Gerard but Newt had felt a different chill. Not fear, but familiarity. There was something about the being that ticked in the back of his mind, back in a place and a time he never thought about anymore.
He didn’t want to think about it now, either. So he focused instead on the sights and sounds around him; how the servants accompanying them made no noise when they walked, the way the long feather in Ailis’s hair flipped back and forth with her breathing, the fact that they had been walking far longer now than could be justified by the length of the corridor as seen from the outside, and that he could sense the soft padding noises of something following them.
Morgain finally stopped in front of a door and opened it with a twitch of her fingers.
“Inside.”
The room was about the size of Ailis’s sitting room, but it was unfurnished, with no windows or fireplace.
“Food will be brought,” Morgain said. “I am unfamiliar with the appetites of boys your age. If you are still hungry, Ailis will show you how to call for more.”
Thanking her seemed out of place, considering their circumstances, so all three remained silent. Morgain didn’t seem to notice.
“I must go. Stay out of sight and keep out of trouble, and you may yet live through this night.” The servants filtered out of the room, and the sorceress followed, pausing only to allow a low-flowing shape to pass by her into the room. With black fur and golden-green eyes, Newt recognized the cat that had been with Morgain back on the Isle of Apples.
“She will guard you,” Morgain said, and shut the door firmly behind herself, leaving the three alone. A solid click of the door being locked echoed into the silence.
“Guard us? Great.” Newt looked nervously at the cat, who stared back at him in a manner quite unlike most large cats he had ever encountered. The beast seemed to be amused by his nervousness.
Gerard, meanwhile, had focused on something else entirely. “What did she mean, ‘stay out of sight’? What else are we likely to do while locked in here?”
Ailis sat down on the floor and folded the fabric of her skirt to the side of her to make a cushion of sorts. She then patted the makeshift nest. The boys watched in amazement as the cat crawled over and curled up with its head resting on her knee.
“Some guard,” Newt said.
“Oh, she’s fierce. I’ve seen her take down a deer in flight,” Ailis said casually, as though there was unlimited space for a deer to roam these halls. Then again, there probably was. There could have been an entire herd of them around the next corner.
“You’re calm about all of this,” Gerard observed, “considering Morgain just pretty much betrayed you.”
“Betrayed?” Ailis looked up, honestly surprised. “There was no betrayal. Not by Morgain’s standards, anyway.”
“She promised—”
“She promised to teach me, to not send you away without my consent, to allow us to remain unscathed. Has she broken any of those promises?”
Gerard threw up his hands in exasperation. “She’s locked us up. And I don’t think it’s so she can deliver us back to the safety of Camelot at her convenience.”
“She hates Camelot,” Ailis agreed. “And I know now why.”
When the boys stared at her, she shrugged. “Merlin helped cause her father’s death. He manipulated her mother, all for the sole purpose of creating Arthur. Once there was a male heir, Morgain wasn’t important anymore, not the way she was raised to be. Wouldn’t that make you bitter?”
“A male child—” Gerard started, protesting.
“That’s not always the way it’s been,” Newt said thoughtfully. “In some lines, the female child was the one who inherited. Still is that way, in some places.”
“Not here.” Gerard was confident in that.
“Not in Arthur’s Britain, no.” Ailis sounded bitter herself. “But Morgain’s family remembers before, when the Romans came. They were here when Boadiccia was queen.”
“Who?”
Newt sighed, as though not believing Gerard could be that ignorant. “Boadiccia. Queen of the Icini. The Romans invaded and tried to take power from her