The Shadow Companion - Laura Anne Gilman [35]
But even as he muttered, he knew it was pointless. Morgain would never harm Arthur directly, not physically. She was, as he had said, his sister. And she loved him, as much as she knew how.
But that would not stop her from doing what she felt needed to be done. And if Arthur could not be equally ruthless, well, it was Merlin’s job to do it for him.
EIGHT
“This entire Quest has been cursed from the start.”
The speaker was striding in a circle around his fellows, gesturing grandly, wildly with his hands. “First, the sleeping sickness Morgain cast upon us all, then the uprising of the border lords, and now this.”
“What, rain?” One of the other men, sharpening his dagger with slow, careful strokes against a whetstone, didn’t look up from his task as he mocked the speaker. “William, it’s rain. So you get a bit wet. You’re always a bit damp, anyway.”
The knight complaining was neither amused nor distracted. “Endless failures! Had I been given my choice of whom to follow—”
“You would have chosen to follow Sir Galahad, perhaps? Or Sir Lancelot?” Sir Ruden shook his head. “So would everyone, and the problem would still have remained. Besides,” Sir Ruden went on, stretching his legs out in front of him as though still expecting any moment to find them bound in spider silk again, “they haven’t found it either yet, have they?”
“They might have,” Sir William said sullenly.
“William, by all that’s holy, you see plots against you in every move every other soul makes. They would have told us had the Grail been found,” the fourth knight in the group said. He was polishing his boots halfheartedly, not even trying to get the worst of the caked-in mud off the heels.
“Hah.” Sir William brushed that comment off with a particularly elaborate wave of his arm. “They’d be on their way back to Camelot, bearing their prize before them. They would not bother to send so much as a messenger-bird to tell us—not until they had secured the king’s favor once and for all.”
“Assuming they bothered to take it to the king at all,” Simon, the knight sharpening his dagger, said.
“What?”
“Think of it. The Grail. Power.” Simon’s eyes brightened. “The power of the thing…Are we certain all our fellow knights would bring it back to Arthur, rather than keep it for themselves?”
“Or take it to another master?” William added, warming to the idea.
“None would dare!” Sir Ruden was outraged.
The knife-sharpener shrugged, pragmatic. “Who could stop them? Who would even know to stop them?”
“You will not speak that way about men of the Round Table,” Sir Ruden demanded in his northern accent, getting to his feet. “They are your fellow brothers in knighthood, I might add.” His squire rolled up the map they’d been studying, smearing the precious inks as he did so, and tried to get out of the way.
“I am indeed their brother, a member of the Round Table, as well, and may speak as I see fit.”
“You will not!”
Sir Ruden launched himself at Simon, but kicked Sir William as he did so, perhaps accidentally, but perhaps not. A fifth knight, who had been silent until then, tried to separate the two men, and received a black eye for his efforts, which made him start swinging as well.
Gerard got up from the log he had been perched on, and, as the brawl spread, walked away. This was the worst he had seen it, but in the two days of riding since leaving the Shadows, the tension had grown even worse among the knights. Even the ones like Sir William, who were normally calm and thoughtful, seemed infected by some bee-sting of dissatisfaction. Nothing was good enough, be it the horse they were riding, the food they were eating, or the hue of blue of the sky above them. And when the topic turned to the Grail, as it often did, frustration