The Camelot Spell - Laura Anne Gilman [69]
The first few chambers were empty. They had just come to the first occupied niche, the king’s mother, forever silent in a stone coffin with her likeness carved upon it.
“We shouldn’t be here.”
“She will forgive us. From the stories I’ve heard, she was a woman who understood doing what needed to be done.”
And then they were at the doorway Newt had told them about. It couldn’t be anything else: a stone archway the height of two men and wide enough across for all three of them to enter at once. The stone was carved with figures doing things Ailis didn’t dare to identify. One look at them made her feel slightly queasy.
“Human sacrifice,” Gerard pointed out helpfully. “Sir Bors says it used to be quite popular in some of the older—”
“Don’t want to know,” Ailis said hastily.
“So we just go through?” Newt asked.
“I guess so.” She refrained from pointing out that he was the one who had known about this doorway in the first place.
“I really wish we knew something for certain, just once.”
“I’m pretty certain that simply standing here will not do anything,” Gerard pointed out.
“I hate you.” Ailis wasn’t sure if she was talking to Gerard, Newt, or what lay beyond the doorway.
Without further hesitation or discussion, the three of them extinguished their candles, clasped one another’s hands, and stepped through the doorway.
ELEVEN
Once years ago, Newt had gotten horribly drunk on a wineskin of mead someone had left in the stable. He and another friend had hidden it, denied all knowledge of it when the rider came back looking, and snuck out late at night to drink it.
The dizzy, spinning, nauseated feeling that came the morning after had been the worst experience of his entire life. Until now.
Dropping. Fast, prolonged dropping. They were being picked up by a gust of wind and tossed back up, then down again, spinning as they went. Newt couldn’t feel his body beyond the dizzy urge to throw up, but he was pretty sure he was covered in bruises. He felt as though he were being kicked by the largest, meanest battle horse in the stable and then stomped on again for good measure.
When the wind stopped, he could feel his body again. Just in time for it to land, facedown, on something very hard and cold. Then something softer and warmer but very heavy landed on top of him.
“Gehoff!”
There was a grunt, and the weight rolled off him. It had been Gerard, from the clink of the scabbard against the stone below them.
Stone. No wind. They had to be beyond the doorway and at their destination. Newt got to his feet as swiftly as his aching muscles would allow and looked around, squinting in the dim sunlight. They were in a courtyard of some sort, a mosaic of pale golds and deep greens and blues under their feet depicted strange sea-creatures. In the distance he heard the echo of waves crashing against a shoreline. Overhead, the sky which had been pale blue and cloudless when they woke that morning had clouded over so thickly that the sunlight could barely work its way through. And yet, somehow, it did not seem overcast or dark—the light was spreading in such a way as to allow no shadows anywhere.
“The Isle of Apples. Are we dead?” he wondered aloud.
“I don’t feel dead,” Ailis said.
“How would you know?”
“All right, I wouldn’t. But I don’t feel dead.” Ailis’s braid had been pulled loose by the magical winds. She had a nasty bruise forming on one side of her face but seemed otherwise unharmed. Newt did a quick inventory of his own body and decided that nothing was broken; he was only sore. Gerard was already pacing the courtyard, one hand on his sword’s grip, the other touching the high stone walls as though expecting to discover a door hidden from his sight.
There were no doors. No windows. No portals. Nothing save featureless gray stone walls rising high above their heads, and the mosaic on the floor that was becoming more and more disturbing by the moment—Newt noticed that several