The Shadow Companion - Laura Anne Gilman [32]
She shook her head, realizing that her hair was still hanging loose down her back. Her hands now free, she reached back and started to rebraid it as she spoke. “I tried reaching out to him, before I cast the spell, but he was…blocked off from me. Not blocked like someone was preventing me from talking to him; I know what that feels like. But more like, ‘I’m busy, Ailis, try again later.’”
“You’d think he’d—” Newt broke off, unable to finish the sentence. Merlin had sent them off on this Quest not only because he believed that they could be useful, but because he thought that Ailis might be somehow contaminated by Morgain’s touch—and so in love with magic that she forgot it had a darker side. It was very odd that he would brush her off without knowing what she was trying to contact him about.
“He’d what?” Ailis turned her hazel eyes on Newt, curious.
“He’d have the ability to handle more than one job or thought or conversation at a time,” Gerard said. “He certainly managed to yell at us while talking to himself all the time.
“Anyway, it doesn’t matter now. I wanted to tell you that Sir Matthias said we did well to burn the bodies—I didn’t tell him how we did it—and he is going to request that the monks send someone to say a prayer over the village, maybe pour holy water there or something. It’s the least they could do, since one of their own sent us here.”
“It would be funny, though, wouldn’t it,” Ailis said, “if the Grail actually was here in this forest somewhere.”
“If it is, it’s nowhere we’d be able to find it. Not unless Newt has a dog somewhere that can sniff out religious objects.”
“Monks, yes,” Newt said. “Grails, no.”
“So where are we going?” Ailis asked. “Or does Sir Matthias just want us out of the Shadows, and doesn’t care where we go?”
“He thinks, actually, that the monk’s prophecy may have had some truth to it. We were just misdirected. There’s an old tower up the coast, maybe two days away, that is reported to throw odd shadows at the wrong time of day, as though something inside it were glowing.”
“And that’s where we’re going? To an unpredictable tower?”
“That’s where we’re going,” Gerard said, shrugging as though to admit that he had no say in the matter.
“That’s what I love about this Quest,” Newt said to his still-sleeping pet. “All the details we’re getting. You really feel the confidence.”
“It’s not about confidence,” Ailis said, as exasperated as he knew she would be.
“It’s about faith.” The boys finished her sentence for her, speaking at the same time. She glared equally at both of them, and glared at Callum, too, in order to make him feel included. Then she flipped her braid back into place and looked up at the sky.
“Merlin? Can I turn them both into chickens? Please? It wouldn’t take that much magic, and nobody would notice, really….”
SEVEN
“The best of Camelot,” Merlin said in disgust, echoing, unknowingly, Sir Matthias’s earlier comment. “May the gods help us all.”
The owl he was speaking to turned its head and hooted mournfully at him. The fact that the owl had the same reaction, no matter what he said to it, was less annoying than the fact that the beast was actually stuffed with sawdust, and so had no thoughts at all in its feathered head.
On the other hand, it made for a soothingly placid audience when Merlin felt as though his own head might explode.
He could not blame Sir Matthias for splitting the knights up; he might even have suggested it himself. Small groups were able to move quickly and be less of a burden on the local communities they passed through…. It was a good move, a wise move. It was something he would expect a seasoned war leader like Matthias to come up with when faced with stubborn knights and an elusive goal.
Arthur forgot, sometimes, the cost of moving his people from point to point. That was what he had field marshals and stewards for.
Merlin didn’t care, actually, about the cost. His job was to get things done. The difference between him and Arthur was how they paid the cost of their decisions. Arthur paid out in gold and royal approval.