The Shadow Companion - Laura Anne Gilman [27]
“Sir, let us give you our horses,” Newt offered, afraid that the implied insult to Ailis might make her lose her temper, despite—or perhaps because of—the strange peaceful aura that had settled over her. That tail was still making him uneasy, even if Ailis didn’t seem to mind it. “So you can return to Sir Matthias and update him properly on what has happened.”
“Yes, a wise thing. You three will be safe walking back?”
“We will be fine,” Ailis said hastily. “Gerard is here to protect us from danger, after all.” Only Gerard and Newt heard—or understood—the irony in her voice.
It was at that point that Sir Brand suddenly realized that he was standing in front of a girl—a young woman—wearing nothing but his smallclothes and boots. He blushed a deep red. The nearly full-body underclothes worn under mail was designed to keep the metal from touching skin—but it was clearly the situation itself, not the actual exposure, that was embarrassing him.
The horses were collected and handed over, stirrups adjusted for the longer legs of the knights, and the squabbling began over who would be forced to ride double, as there were four of them and only three beasts.
Doing his best to ignore their unknightly behavior, Gerard handed Sir Ruden a small cloth package. From the singed smell that arose from it, and the careful way he handled it, Newt guessed that one of the spider-things was inside. Hopefully very, very dead.
“This should be sent on to Merlin,” Gerard said, trying to sound as though he was not giving the older man an order. “He needs to see it.”
“You think it was the sorceress?” Very few people said her name, as though afraid it would bring her down on them, but Sir Daffyd went so far as to break off his argument with Thomas in order to cross himself even against the reference.
“If not her, another evil force. Either way, Merlin needs to know.”
“You mean, the king needs to know,” Sir Thomas said. Gerard shrugged and nodded in the same gesture, suggesting that Merlin and Arthur were one and the same, to his way of thinking. Or that—as Newt suspected—Arthur trusted Merlin to tell him what he needed to know, and save the interesting but not essential details for a less urgent time.
The knights, having finally settled their argument with a coin toss, mounted and went on their way, leaving the three youths behind, suddenly aware that the village to their backs was beginning to smell unpleasantly ripe.
“We should do something about the bodies,” Gerard said. They looked at each other, and turned to face the village. There were not only the dogs they had noticed earlier, but also decomposing human bodies—the villagers slaughtered in the first appearance of the spiders.
“Can you take care of it?” Newt asked Ailis.
“Yes,” she said, without hesitation. “Are you sure we should?”
“You can’t leave bodies just lying out there,” Newt said, practical to the end. “Not humans, not dogs, not the horses. It would bring predators, at best. Plague, at worst. Do it.”
Ailis looked to Gerard, who nodded his agreement and put a reassuring hand on her shoulder. “This is something Sir Matthias would approve of, I think.”
“Oh, do I care what he thinks?” Ailis muttered. She raised her hands again, and this time the heated wind was immediate, forming out of her palms and swirling like smoke.
“To the still and chilling bodies below, go!”
Fire leapt from her hands, two high-arcing fireballs that split into multiple projectiles over the town, and fell directly into the dead bodies. The ones they could see burst into contained flames that burned blue-white and died out in a scatter of ash.
“When it’s my turn to die, I want to go out that way,” Newt told her. “Just so you know.”
“Don’t push it,” she said grimly. “Or I might be tempted to make it earlier than you planned.” She was exhausted, and had just a glimmer of her usual sense of humor left, after what