The Camelot Spell - Laura Anne Gilman [50]
The blood-spurt slowed, then stopped, the thick blood pooling before the current began to move it away.
“Oh, God. I hurt.” Newt dropped to his knees momentarily, then got to his feet and shook himself like a horse whose saddle had just been taken off. He offered his hand down to Gerard. “Come on.”
It seemed to take an enormous amount of energy to simply reach up and take the offered hand, but Gerard finally managed it. The other boy’s hand was slick with blood and sweat, but reassuringly human.
Legs shaky, the two half-supported each other to the bank, Ailis trailing a step behind. Each of them was trying to wrap their minds around what they had just done.
The feel of stable ground under his feet was almost alien, and Gerard stumbled as he climbed out onto the bank. He thought briefly about looking for his sword, then decided that he needed to rest first. He knew a knight should look to his weapons before his body. But he was just so tired.
The three of them sat down heavily on the bank, staring at everything but each other. Even the effort of speaking seemed to be too much to ask.
“My mouth tastes like troll,” Gerard said suddenly in disgust.
Ailis, facedown in the grass, let out a muffled snort, and then another, until she was laughing hysterically.
“It wasn’t that funny,” Gerard said, making faces as he tried to work the taste out of his mouth.
“No, it wasn’t,” Newt agreed, his eyes almost tearing from holding back his own laughter.
“I hate both of you,” Gerard said, looking down at his mud-covered clothing with a rueful expression. The leather cuisses on his thighs were so waterlogged as to be useless except as weights, so he stripped them off and let them fall to the ground with a sodden thunk. The troll floated facedown in the creek, the water around it fading from pink back to clear as the current carried the blood away. With a sigh Gerard got to his feet and waded back into the water.
“What’re you doing?” Newt asked.
“My sword,” he said as though it should have been obvious.
“More to your left, I think,” Newt said. Gerard shot him a look that clearly said “and I should trust you, why?” but moved slightly to his left. A minute later, his searching hands came up with his sword, wet but undamaged. He slogged to the side of the creek and handed the sword, pommel-first, to Ailis, who found a still-dry corner of her skirt to wipe the worst of the moisture off it. Gerard hesitated, then went back into the water.
“What are you doing now?” Newt asked, still lying on his side on the grass.
“Not going to let this thing foul the water,” Gerard said, tugging the troll’s body to the opposite bank and pulling it onto the grass. Then he waded back in to splash as much of the mud off himself as he could. “Ugh.”
Ailis rolled over onto her back and sat up to watch him. “We could have died,” she said finally.
“Yes.”
“We almost did die,” Newt said.
“You would have died,” Ailis said. “If we hadn’t come back.”
“And you two would have gone on and never found the second talisman,” he retorted, a little stung.
“What I mean,” Ailis said, “is that any one of us—even two of us—wouldn’t have managed it. That’s all.”
“Point taken,” Gerard said, sloshing up onto the bank and trying to wring out his shirt. “So what?”
“Nothing. Just…thinking about it, that’s all.”
The three of them lay there silently thinking about it. Then Gerard stood up again. “Well, while you think, I’m going to get a change of clothing.”
“There’s the mark of the castle-folk,” Newt said, taking his own boots off and shaking the water out. He wriggled his toes in the grass. “They have two sets of clothing.”
“Whereas the stable-folk live in the same shirt, year in and year out. And wash it once a year whether it needs it or not,” Gerard retorted.
The bickering was familiar, but the tone was too weak to have any real venom.
Gerard went up the bank and down the road to reclaim the horses,