The Camelot Spell - Laura Anne Gilman [54]
“Gerard.” Newt ignored the look Ailis was shooting him and waved the other boy to join them.
“What now?” Gerard looked from one to the other and, sensing the tension, turned to Newt. “What?”
“Tell him,” Newt said. “You know we can’t keep secrets like that, not from each other.”
Reluctantly Ailis repeated what she had told Newt.
“You hear…voices.” Gerard looked like he didn’t know if he should call for a priest or a healer. Or both.
“Not voices. A voice.” Ailis didn’t want to be talking about this. It was all right to hear it, so long as she didn’t think about it. Or talk about it.
“Merlin’s voice,” Newt said. He was only trying to be helpful, and didn’t understand why Ailis scowled at him so.
“I’m not sure,” she admitted. “And he’s not telling me anything useful.”
“Now there’s a surprise,” Newt said, with a hint of sarcasm, and made an innocent “who, me?” gesture when they both looked sharply at him.
“How long has this been going on?”
Ailis shrugged, resenting Gerard’s tone, like he was the lord of them all, just because his father had been raised with the king. She ignored the fact that he was a squire and would one day be a knight, and she and Newt were only and would probably always be only servants…just like she’d always known and ignored, hoping that the inevitable distance wouldn’t come to pass.
“Ailis, it’s important. For how long?”
“A year. Maybe a little more.” The first time it had happened she’d been sleeping. The voice had come in a dream, and sounded as surprised as she had felt. After that it spoke only occasionally, usually when she was trying to decide what to do or how to react to something.
“It never…whoever it is doesn’t give advice, or tell me anything specific. It’s just…pushing. It pushes me. To do things or not do things, or just stop shivering like a chicken.” That was the exact phrase he had used once. It had been apt and humiliating.
“And you think it’s Merlin because…”
“Because it feels like him.” She couldn’t put it any better. The feel of him in her mind, the weight of his silent voice was Merlin.
“Why you?”
“I don’t know!” Did they think she hadn’t wondered that, too? Maybe he was speaking to half the people in the castle. Maybe he wasn’t even speaking to her at all and she was eavesdropping somehow on another’s conversation. Or maybe she was imagining it all, hearing a voice where there was nothing but her own thoughts.
Ailis didn’t think so. But how did you know if you were mad or sane and being spoken to by a surly enchanter? And was there any real difference?
“Have you ever, you know…talked to him? Not in your mind, I mean, but actually—in the castle?” Newt asked.
Gerard looked at the other boy as though he were the one who had lost his mind, asking that.
“He’s spoken to me,” Ailis said. “Not about anything, just…casually.”
“Casually? Ailis, Merlin doesn’t speak to anyone casually.” Gerard still remembered his one encounter with the man in the Council Room before this quest began. One face-to-face exchange in all the years he had lived in Camelot, and it still unnerved him to think that the enchanter had known his name; even now, knowing that past and present had collided in the enchanter, he knew of Gerard then because of the now….
Gerard stopped trying to untangle that reality. Nobody understood how Merlin could live backward in time, not even King Arthur. It was enough for mortals to simply accept that he did.
“So why didn’t you ask him when—” Gerard stopped. It was a stupid question. An enchanter, already cranky from being trapped in a house made of ice when he should be helping his king, was not the person to ask about conversations he might or might not have been having in a servant girl’s head.
“Why are we even talking about this now?” Ailis asked. “If he’s able to give us help, then we should take it, not pry apart the hows and whys.” She was near tears at what felt like an attack on her, when Gerard held up his hands in surrender, indicating that he wouldn’t talk about it again.
Newt watched the two as Gerard tried to back away clumsily,