The Camelot Spell - Laura Anne Gilman [75]
TWELVE
Traveling through magical portals wasn’t the most dignified way to travel—or arrive. Gerard shoved Newt off his stomach, and more carefully moved Ailis off his legs. They had been deposited in a tangled heap just inside the doorway on the Camelot side of the crypt.
“Alive?” Newt mumbled.
“Can’t hurt this much when you’re dead,” Ailis said. “I hope, anyway.”
“You’re back! You’re almost out of time! It’s nearly midnight!” Finan had clearly been assigned to wait for them. His eyes were wide, like a frightened horse’s, and he was practically jumping in place from anxiety.
The three stood and helped each other up. They pushed past Finan on the way out of the crypt and moved as fast as they could up the winding, stone stairs and made their way past the crowd of children that had gathered outside the Council Room.
“Hurry!” Tynan urged them when he met them outside the great door. “I hope to the heavens you have the answer.”
“We do,” Gerard said, clapping Tynan on one shoulder. He followed Newt and Ailis into the chamber. Gerard faltered for a second as his glance took in Arthur and his knights, eerily motionless in their places at the Round Table. Please, as God is kind, let this work, he thought with a sense of desperation.
“Who has the talisman?” Ailis asked.
One of the older pages stepped forward holding out a soft white cloth wrapped around the precious object.
“You know what it is, don’t you?” the squire, Dewain, said in awe.
“No, what?”
Dewain shook his head in astonishment. “I saw one once, when my master and I traveled to the Holy Land. It’s an hourglass. Sailors use them to keep track of time.”
The three of them stared at each other, then at Dewain.
“A timekeeper. I’ll laugh about this when we’re done—after I sleep for about a week.” Gerard took the talisman and unwrapped it. He and Newt and Ailis positioned themselves the same way they did during the last attempt, each of them with a hand on the hourglass. Ailis opened her free hand to show the tear, still attached to the golden chain.
“Ready?” she asked.
Her companions nodded.
As they spoke the words, by now burned into their memory the same way they were burned into the glass, Ailis, very, very carefully held the chain so that the tear balanced on the top of the hourglass.
The amber tear flared a deep red—deeper than blood—and slowly sank into the glass top of the hourglass, leaving the chain still dangling from Ailis’s hand. A second of hesitation, and the now-liquid tear slid through the glass, dropping slowly into the frozen sand.
The entire talisman began to glow brightly, dark red and blue swirling around in a pyrotechnic display of magical sparkles. As they spoke the last line of the spell, the sand quivered and began to slowly fall from one glass chamber to the other.
Something in the air shivered. Ailis felt a cold finger slide down her spine.
Well done. Well done, girl-child.
And she wasn’t sure if it was Merlin…or Morgain.
But Ailis didn’t have time to think on it. Without any warning, the knights seated at the Round Table were awake. They were also confused, hungry, and more than a little disoriented.
“Gerard!” Arthur cried as he turned around in his chair and saw his nephew in front of him, exhausted, mud-filthy, and grinning in company with two equally bedraggled children. “What have you been up to?”
THIRTEEN
“They’re not taking us seriously,” Ailis complained. “We saved the entire castle, and every adult in it, and they’re not listening to us!”
Ailis and Newt were in the stable—the only place that was currently safe from the renewed flurry of activity within Camelot. It had been two weeks since they woke the castle, and the chaos that followed made a knocked-over anthill seem placid. Everyone had been overworked, trying to repair seven days of missed life. Ailis had finally fled that morning for the relative quiet of horses and horse-boys.
“The king listened.”
“And then did nothing,” she said bitterly from her perch in the hayloft