The Camelot Spell - Laura Anne Gilman [12]
Inside the banquet hall, the chaos had worsened. Almost all the pages were crying now, and more than half the young servants had clearly given up, taking food off the tables and sitting in corners to eat. Gerard’s stomach rumbled again loudly, a reminder that he hadn’t had much to eat, either.
“Hey!” he yelled, trying to project his voice into the corners of the room.
The noise went on, the children ignoring his shout as though it had never been voiced.
“Listen to me!” he yelled again, drawing his voice up from the pit of his chest, the way Sir Bors said to do on a battlefield.
Ailis, across the hall with half a dozen of the youngest children gathered around her, didn’t even look up.
“You haven’t the voice for it.”
Gerard turned and glared at the speaker—Newt the stable boy. What was he doing here? He was still wearing the same stained clothing from their fight, his hair had hay in it, and his eye, Gerard was glad to see, was black and blue and swollen, but his expression was distracted as he scanned the hall. “Nobody’s going to listen to a squire with a squeaky voice.”
The fact that Gerard’s voice hadn’t yet settled into a grown man’s tones had been a matter of much teasing, some not so gentle, in recent months. Try as he might not to care, the taunt hurt.
It was true. He didn’t sound commanding enough. Not like a knight at all.
“When in doubt,” Sir Rheynold always lectured, “stand as tall as you can and do what you must.”
“What does a stable boy know about leading anyone except horses?” he asked and strode across the hall to the high table where his king and court still sat, slumped and sleeping. Setting his jaw hard against the thought of what might happen if they should suddenly wake up, Gerard vaulted himself onto the wooden table and stood in the middle of the remains of the feast. He took a deep breath, let it out, and took in another. Then—
“Be QUIET!” he roared, pulling every memory of every time Sir Bors had ever yelled at the squires, and pitching his voice deep, to carry better.
It worked. Not every child was silenced, but enough of them. And they all looked up at Gerard.
“Crying and panicking won’t wake them up,” Gerard declared as sternly as he could manage. “Sitting around stuffing our faces”—the young players and servants who had been doing exactly that looked down at their plates, then back at him, some in shame—“won’t wake them up. And neither of those things will protect us if whoever did this comes after us next.”
“Oh, that was wise,” Newt said, coming to stand beside the table. “Scare the little ones some more, why don’t you?”
“They should be scared,” Ailis said. She still held one of the pages by the hand, his tear-stained face now looking up at her trustingly. “We all should be. How long do you think Camelot will stand if our enemies hear of what’s happened?”
“What exactly has happened?” Newt asked, not unreasonably. He shoved his unruly black hair out of his eyes and stared around at the others, challenging them. “Every adult’s fallen asleep. That’s not exactly a dire situation.”
“It might have been meant to kill them, and Merlin’s protection spells turned it away,” Ailis suggested.
“Or the spell wasn’t meant to kill them,” Gerard said. “Just leave them vulnerable. A captive is worth more than a corpse.”
One of the tumblers, a scrawny, black-eyed boy, overheard them. “It’s sorcery,” he said loud enough for everyone nearby to hear.
“Of course it is,” Gerard said scornfully, astonished that even a servant could be so foolish as to not realize that by now. “What else could it be?”
The tumbler looked for support among his fellows, but finding none, he backed away leaving only the three of them, Gerard, Newt, and Ailis standing there.
“I know you,” she said to Newt. “You’re the hound boy.”
“I was,” he said. “Now I’m the horse boy.”
Gerard ignored them and looked over the room, doing a quick mental count. Of the castle regulars who could be trusted to be useful, there were seven other squires still awake: Mak, Dewain, Finan, Robert, Tynan, Thomas,