Morgain's Revenge - Laura Anne Gilman [70]
Merlin nodded, as though none of this was really a surprise to him. “Her family is too rooted,” he said. “Old trees are strong, but they don’t stand forever.”
“She has players on the field,” Ailis continued. “She’s trying to match them to yours, as best I could tell. But I’m not sure what she’s going to do with them. I don’t think she knows, exactly. That was why she was in the castle, to learn what our plans were. Only…
“There was another…person there in her fortress. Someone with a lot of power, helping her…”
Merlin suddenly looked alert. “Go on, child.”
Ailis told the rest of her story. Newt and Gerard were practically squirming in their seats with the desire to interrupt with their own take on events.
“And then Morgain…they both disappeared. I think maybe she saved us.” Ailis ended. She reached up to touch the feather in her hair as though seeking reassurance from it. Then she used that same hand to reach out and touch Newt, sitting beside her. He tried to smile and closed his own hand over hers, warm and human and comforting.
“This shadow-figure Ailis described…have you anything more to add?” Merlin finally asked the boys.
Gerard shook his head. “It was almost as though I couldn’t look directly at it. Him. Her. I don’t even know what it was. Its voice…the voice scared me. It was like a cold knife at the base of your neck.”
Newt started to say something, then merely nodded his agreement. Anything else he thought of was just from myths, stories from his childhood, things that had no place here in this room.
The enchanter looked carefully at all three of them, each in turn. “All right. There are things the three of you aren’t telling me, but I’ll trust your judgment that Arthur and I don’t need to know whatever it is. And that if you change your minds, you’ll come to me.”
Merlin sat back and looked at them as a whole, contemplating, until all three were squirming in their seats again.
“It’s good that you’re back now. You need to travel with the Quest. All three of you, not just master squire here.”
Newt looked astonished, while Ailis almost fell off her stool in shock. “How?” she asked.
Newt, more pragmatic, asked, “Why?”
“I’ll arrange it,” Merlin said in a way that was not reassuring at all. “And because I suspect that it’s important that you be there, whatever happens. You’ve been marked by this, the three of you. You’ve earned your place, and none may say otherwise. Not merely by being in the right place, but by being the right people in the right place, and not merely once, but twice now. Once is accident. Twice is fate. Three times…” Merlin looked at the three of them, his eyes tired and yet filled with a deep, luminous magic. “Three times becomes legend.”
And with that cryptic comment, he shooed the boys out of his study, commanding them to get some rest and let him handle everything for now. “Ailis, not you. The king wants to ask you a few questions further, if you don’t mind….”
The last view they had of Ailis was as Merlin propelled her away from them, by means of one firm hand on her shoulder, down the hall in the opposite direction.
There was no way—after all that—that sleep would be possible. Without discussion, the two remaining travelers found themselves sitting in the barn, in a stall that was currently without an equine occupant. The stable had the added advantage of being out of the way of the chaos that once again seemed to be gripping Camelot.
“You didn’t say anything to Merlin about…about what happened,” Gerard said. “About agreeing to stay with Morgain, in the fortress.”
“Neither did you.” Newt poked at the straw with one finger, idly.
“No, I didn’t. It didn’t…it didn’t seem real, everything that happened there. It doesn’t seem real now—like that was all a dream. Everything up until then? Real. Sir Caedor’s death. Real. The boat was far too real. But the moment we got to the fortress…it was like dream-time.” Gerard turned to Newt. “What do you think?”
“It was real. It was all real.”
“Of course it