The Shadow Companion - Laura Anne Gilman [62]
“We walk,” Ailis said, ever practical. “At least until I can reach out and contact Merlin again.”
“Great. We’re dependent on a sorcerer who flies into walls to rescue us. I’m so confident, now.” Magical or not, Newt was still Newt.
“It’s going to be a very, very long trip.” Gerard sighed as he adjusted his pack on his back and started down the hill. “A very, very long trip…”
EPILOGUE
“And so the Grail was won…and lost again. How is my dear brother taking that bit of news?”
Morgain called a chair up out of nothingness and seated herself in it, her fur-trimmed gown flowing around her in graceful folds. The chair was a dark wood, ornate but not massive, and it suited her perfectly.
Merlin leaned against an invisible wall, watching her with ironic amusement.
She was selfish, and single-minded, and dedicated to a way of life that would not come again. And she had focused her entire adult life to destroying the things he had spent his entire life building and protecting: Arthur, Camelot, the future. Yet he respected her greatly, feared her a little, and would never, ever, let her know either.
“Quite well, actually,” he said, answering her question. “The powers of darkness were not able to take it away from us, after all—the virtue of his knights and their companions was enough to hold them at bay, and save the land from darkness and despair once again. The minstrels have been singing of nothing else all month. Or is it next month? Or last month? I’m about to go mad from the noise, either way.”
“You were already mad, Merlin,” Morgain said dryly.
For Merlin, madness was the only way to stay sane and do what he needed to do. It had been too close, this game. Far too close, from start to finish. He had won this round.
His pawns—Ailis, Gerard, and Newt—had played their roles perfectly. They had even managed to surprise him: Who knew that the lowly stable boy held so much power within him? The temptation to pry, to pull the berserker energy out of the boy and harness it somehow was almost overwhelming. But he would not do that. Not only would it be wrong, but Ailis would never speak to him again. And he would rather have one willing protégé than two unwilling ones.
It was one more than Morgain had.
“She will not be yours, you know.” Morgain had the not-surprising ability to read him like a book, here in the astral plane.
His skills with women were as bad here as they were on earth. But that did not mean he was totally without a clue.
“She will be her own,” he said calmly, calling in a goblet filled with sweet well-water. With a tinge of maliciousness, he made the goblet clear, like ice, and then colored the water the exact shade of turquoise blue of the Aegean, the color of Nemesis’s home shores. “Her own, and her faithful Roman’s, that is.”
Morgain made a face. She had nothing against the stable boy—she had nothing against anyone with magic so deep in their bones. But his Roman blood had cost her greatly, and she resented that. As Merlin knew she did.
“She will be her own,” Merlin repeated. “When you and I are gone, and Arthur has fallen, as we both know he eventually will, Ailis and Constans’s children will continue.”
“Children?” She raised an eyebrow at that. “Assuming a bit, are you not? Or have you seen the actual birthing?” His ability to live backward could be useful, if you could pry through the nonsensical patter that so often accompanied one of his bouts of confusion.
“Call it a hunch,” he said. “They will have children of magic, on both sides. Children of magic to hold the land; to speak to it and appease it. We rise and fall, and the bloodlines change, but the land adapts. It always has. Your kind were not the first, Morgain. Other blood has nourished the soil over the generations, and will do so again. Even Romans. They loved this land, too. They did not all leave willingly when their empire ordered