Morgain's Revenge - Laura Anne Gilman [7]
Gerard walked past them all, nodding to the page when the boy looked up from his reading to see who it was. He didn’t know all the pages, but this one seemed to know him.
“Good morn, Ger!”
The voice was familiar, yes, but the boy’s name escaped him totally, so Gerard merely raised a hand in greeting, and walked on. He was almost at his destination; through this antechamber, past the stairs which led to the cellars, and two doors down, was the walkway to the guardroom, where the master of the guard would be found for receipt of Sir Rheynold’s message. Same time spent getting back, even if he did pause at the kitchen, and he would probably find the same argument he had left still going on.
“Months of boredom, followed by a mad dash across the marshes in the midst of the night,” Gerard said out loud, quoting what his master had said years ago when describing the life of a knight. As a page he hadn’t believed it, thinking that every moment of a knight’s life must be excitement and derring-do.
But it was so. The majority of life was a slow, dreary slog through the things that must be done. Gerard supposed that was true even if you were the king. And that included listening to everyone argue about something, even if you’ve already made up your mind about what you’re going to do.
He shivered again, a sudden ice-cold finger sliding down his spine in a deeply unpleasant way. Without thinking, he turned away from the hallway that led to his destination, and instead went left, finding himself running down one of the routes that servants used when they needed to move fast and stay out of sight.
Ailis had taught him about those ways, the semi-secret passages throughout Camelot that none of the nobles knew about. It had been a game when they were children, to race across the castle without using any of the main corridors or hallways. It had been years since he’d done that, true, but he didn’t remember any of the passages having such a green cast to the stone, no matter what time of day or night.
Something is wrong. Something is very wrong, was all he had time to think before he turned a corner and was almost blinded by the intense green glow filling the passage.
Danger! His senses screamed at him, every muscle instinctively readying itself for combat, the way he had been trained to react. The glow burned, made him flinch away. Magic! Danger!
In the instant before his eyes shut in self-defense, his brain caught the image of Ailis, her hands reaching for him, her face terrified, as she was sucked backward into the heart of the glow.
Behind Ailis, her face the same diamond perfection he remembered from their last encounter—the sorceress Morgain!
“Ailis!” he shouted, fighting to move forward into the glow, reaching out for her, trying to find her. He had to save her! But even as he ran forward, something Newt had said during their adventure came back to him: “Charging in blind is not the act of a hero, not if you don’t know what’s going on.”
It was just enough to make him hesitate, and then the glow was gone. The passageway was empty. No glow. No Morgain. No Ailis.
Gerard stared for a moment in disbelief. How? How did Morgain get in here? And what was Ailis doing with her?
Gerard scanned the space again, as though hoping that Ailis would reappear out of thin air or that his eyes had been playing tricks on him.
But the hallway remained empty. With a curse, Gerard turned on his heels and ran for the Council Room.
Newt was right. As much as he’d wanted to follow Ailis into that glow, it would have been the act of a fool. Morgain was dangerous. This was a matter for older, wiser, more experienced men. Ailis’s life—and the security of Camelot—depended on it!
Falling and rising at the same time, buffeted by terrible winds, spinning and expanding into an infinite space. No sense of place or time, no sense of anything