Morgain's Revenge - Laura Anne Gilman [68]
Whatever you’re planning to do, Ailis, he thought, do it fast!
“Ailis,” Gerard said, his voice pleading. “Why are you doing this? Why are you siding with them?”
“Maybe because you’re wrong, Ger. Maybe because you’ve always been wrong.” She shot him a glance filled with scorn, then turned back to the table and her teacher.
Ailis reached out to investigate the contents of the steaming bowl. Before Morgain could slap her hand away, as she clearly meant to do, Ailis had taken a handful of the smoke and clenched it into her palm, chanting frantically: “Isolate, inviolate, insulate; protect the blood, all the blood, from harm willful or missent.”
“Nooooooo!” the shadow-figure roared, lunging for Ailis, the noise rising and filling the entire room until Newt thought his ears would bleed, his head explode. He felt the floor rushing up to meet him in a distinctly unpleasant manner.
I hate magic, was all he could think.
TWENTY-TWO
“Witch-child, no!”
Morgain’s cry was overridden by the shadow-figure’s outburst, but Ailis heard her nonetheless. She reached for the anguish in that voice instinctively, trying to ease her teacher’s concern even as the magical counterattack knocked her backward, off her feet, and slammed her into the wall.
“Get away from her, Le Fay. This has gone on too long. The threads are tangled, the future misdirected, and she is to blame.”
“You may not have her. Not her. She is the only daughter I will ever know.” That was Morgain, standing between Ailis and that awful, horrible, terrifying slithery whisper of a voice. Ailis wondered if she was dead—if they were all dead, and this was hell, and that the devil had come to claim them.
“I have everyone in the end, Le Fay. Even her. Even you.”
Ailis was trying to track their exchange, but almost all of her concentration was focused on the tiny bit of power she still held in her palm. It had been a simple spell, one she had cobbled together as best she could in the moment between realization and action. Born out of equal parts of compassion for Morgain, and fear of what the sorceress might do in her pain and anger, the spell was not a defensive one, but reflexive. It did not strike out against anyone or anything, but deflected the aggressive spell; made it impotent.
Ailis didn’t know how she knew all this. It was as though the knowledge had risen up through the stones, the same way she had known the figure in robes was no friend to her from the instant it walked into the room. Why had Morgain allowed it onto her island? What had it promised her, cajoled her with?
Evil was all in how you looked at it. Morgain had reasons for everything she did. Merlin had reasons. Arthur had reasons. Everyone had reasons.
No matter the reasons, now. What was important now was the spell she held—that she keep it hidden, keep it safe.
Even as she thought that, the shadow-figure raised its arm to make another strike against her. Power gathered, thickening the air until Ailis could barely breathe.
On the floor, Gerard stirred, his hand reaching out to find something, anything, he could use as a weapon. It was useless. There was no way he could stop the shadow-figure. No way any of them could.
The shadow-figure tightened its fingers into a fist, rising to come down on Ailis.
“Morgain…” If only to her own ears, the name sounded painfully like “mother,” and Ailis flinched more from that than the attack about to come. She risked a glance up at the figure’s face, and saw Morgain already in motion, not toward Ailis, but away from her, directly into the path of the shadow-figure’s blow.
“No!” the sorceress cried, and the two adults disappeared in a shower of silver-black sparks that hit Ailis like a storm-wracked wave, lit the entire room into painful clarity, then plunged it into complete darkness as they faded.
Morgain?
Silence.
Merlin?
More silence.
“Ailis?”
In the darkness, she could hear Newt’s voice, reassuringly solid and familiar, then the sound of bodies shifting, picking themselves up off the floor.