The Camelot Spell - Laura Anne Gilman [53]
“We?” Newt raised an eyebrow at that.
“We, in the sense of not being Them,” Gerard said, and Newt’s eyebrow went back down.
“But that’s where the map says to go,” Ailis said.
“Yes.”
“So why are we still here? We have only another day to find the third talisman and get it back to Camelot.” She looked at both of them pointedly, then turned her back on them and swung herself onto her mare with an ease she would not have believed five days before.
The Hills weren’t actually all that impressive in terms of elevation. But the roads led upward more often, and the neatly planted fields were replaced by rougher swathes of greenery, little of it tended or farmed.
Gerard got jumpier and jumpier the farther they went, until even Newt took pity on him and stopped making comments about how many spearmen could hide behind a specific rock or tree.
“I didn’t know it would bother him so much,” he said, defending his words quietly to Ailis as they rode alongside each other on the path.
“Yes you did,” Ailis said in an equally low tone. “Because you’re not a fool. You might have spent your entire life behind keep walls, but he’s been trained to go out beyond them and fight just the sort of thing you’re teasing him about. Only he hasn’t had a chance to do that yet, and now he’s out in it and it scares him.”
She stopped, not having quite realized the truth of her words before she said them.
“He’s scared,” she continued, “not of getting hurt. But of not being able to do what he was trained to do. Of not being able to protect us.”
“I don’t need protection.”
She shot him a glance so full of scorn it should have straightened his unruly curly hair. “Like you didn’t need help back at the bridge? Don’t be an idiot. I’ve seen death”—the only reference she could make or would ever make to the battle that swept through her home village and that led to her becoming a Queen’s Ward—“and I want someone trained in the arts of war between me and my enemy at all times, thank you very much.”
“So why are you out here, then?” Newt sounded genuinely interested.
“Because…” She fell silent for a moment, then gathered her courage and spoke quickly, as though afraid that her throat would close around her words if she hesitated. “Because I had to be. Because…don’t tell Gerard. But in the Great Hall, that night…I think…I thought I heard a voice telling me to go with you.”
“A voice? Someone told you? Who?”
Ailis was sorry she had said anything the moment he jumped on her words. “I don’t know. It wasn’t anyone there. It was…a voice in my head.” The reaction she got, a dubious glance and a faint but undeniable shifting away of both horse and rider, was exactly why she hadn’t mentioned it earlier. Hearing voices in your head was not something to admit to. Not unless you were a saint—and she had no illusions on that matter. God was not speaking to her.
“I thought it was Merlin,” she admitted.
“But he didn’t say anything when we saw him—”
“I know. I know.” It had been eating at her. Not only that she had failed to bring it up, but that the enchanter had been silent.
Newt thought about that for a while as their horses picked their way along the stony trail. “Still. He was sort of distracted. A cold backside can do that to a man, I’m told.”
Ailis giggled, as he had intended her to do. He might not be able to protect her from warriors, but at least Newt could distract her from the things inside her own mind.
“Have you tried talking to him? Merlin, I mean.”
“How?”
“How did he talk to you?”
“Magic, of course.” She waited for his inevitable reaction to the word, but he merely shrugged. “So?”
Ailis blinked at him, her brown eyes wide. “I don’t have any magic!”
“I didn’t notice him talking to me,” Newt pointed out with maddening logic. “And if Merlin had said a word to Gerard, you know that he would have told us. In great steaming detail.”
She laughed again and he felt well rewarded, despite the “why can’t you be quiet?” glare the squire turned on them from his position several paces