The Shadow Companion (9 page)

“
T
he 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. Merlin paid of himself, in aches and pains and loss of essence.

“I’m far, far too old for this,” he muttered, stretching out his legs and feeling them creak. He had discarded his usual robes for more comfortable pantaloons and an exotic billowing tunic. He would never wear them in public, of course, but for intense spell-casting, the wizards of the far-off eastern deserts had the right idea when it came to comfort.

On his worktable, four small vials that represented the king’s four groups were set upright, their contents smoking gently, in colors alternating between a thick, smoky gray and flashes of blue, and occasionally spiking into red or green. Red meant he needed to do
something, and green meant whatever he had done was working. It was a crude method, but with four bands of knights instead of one to watch, on top of everything else he was being asked to do, crude did the job.

Two of the vials had sparked a violent red this morning, while a third had a slow thread of scarlet rising in its smoke. He had taken the first two and made an additional spell of protection around them, and the men it represented. The third had required more; he had spent almost all morning putting that flame out. By then, the slow thread in the third had turned to a faint pink, and then faded away entirely; whatever crisis was brewing, it had been dealt with on the ground. That had been Sir Matthias’s group, he noted.

Merlin rather liked Matthias, even though he was one of those men who worried about the effect of magic on his Christian soul. He wasn’t going to find the Grail, not with his particular prejudices and blind sides. The Grail might be holy from its association with the Christ, but it had been touched by many faiths, many beliefs since then, and all had left their mark on it. As was the inevitable way of all living things.

Matthias was a perfect example of that: raised by
a faerie sorceress, taught by a monk, oath-bound to a Christian warlord of pagan descent…

It would be an interesting chart to work out, if he didn’t already have so much work to do already. First and foremost: Advise and protect Arthur as he deals with the daily business of his kingdom. Never a simple act, but one he knew well. And he had to keep the general protections in place around Camelot. By now, that was something he could and did do in his sleep. But the fact that Morgain had been able to sneak her way in—that had caused him to yank up all his protections by the roots, checking each one for flaws, and then regrounding them more firmly inside the castle walls—a time consuming and energy-draining process.

Merlin was also bound to the task of finding the identity of the shadowy figure the children had reported seeing in Morgain’s keep. Arthur and he were in agreement on the fact that Morgain was a threat, but a known one. This new player in the game was disturbing. Anything that shifted the balance of the game they played was to be taken seriously.

Those three things alone were enough to stress even an enchanter such as himself to near breaking. And Merlin also had to protect the knights on their holy Quest for the Grail, without them noticing that
they were protected by that dubious figure of an enchanter, naturally.

It was necessary. He had not exaggerated when speaking to the girl-child Ailis: It
was
essential that the Grail come to Arthur, and that the knight who brought it was to keep his eye on the greater glory, not his own enrichment. To do that, Merlin needed to know where they were, and what they were doing at every moment of every day. But he also had to sleep at some point.

“Merlin, do this. Merlin, accomplish that. Merlin, since you’re not doing anything, can you balance a sword on the tip of your nose as well?”

Balancing the sword would be easier at this point than trying to keep track of every single knight in each group.

“The things I do for you, Arthur, and your kingdom…”

He rubbed the bridge of his nose, trying to ease the strain between his eyes. There were potions he could make for it, of course, but adding that might distract him from something else he had to do. If only he had a proper student to do it for him…

“Seafeathers,” he cursed.
The girl-child
. She had been trying to reach him again. Was it a day ago? An
hour ago? His sense of time, never accurate to begin with, had entirely slipped away since the Quest had begun. No, he had no time to spare for students now. Not if he was to do any of the half-dozen impossible things his king asked of him. But that was no excuse for turning her away if she were in need.

Still. She had reached out, and then gone away. So either the distress had been unimportant, in which case he was not needed, or she had resolved the situation on her own, in which case he was not needed. Or if it was too late now, he was not needed.

There were priorities. And, as dear as the girl-child and her two friends might have become to Merlin the person, Merlin the enchanter had other things he had to attend to first.

“She’s a smart girl, Ailis is,” he said to the owl. “And the boys with her—they’ve done well, very well. Toss them into water, they swim. Toss them into the air, they fly. If they need me, they will reach out again.”

The owl swiveled its head and looked at him, but did not respond.

“And now for my other problem child,” Merlin muttered, turning to a mirror that was propped against a nearby wall.

“Show me my king,” he commanded it.

Arthur was not accustomed to riding out alone anymore. The boy he had been—Wart the orphan boy—had gone everywhere alone, or with just a hound to accompany him. But the High King of Britain went nowhere without a full retinue, a mini-court to watch his every move.

This evening, he had slipped out, using the secret passages of Camelot they all thought he didn’t know about, the small tunnels and hidden doors.

He rarely used the secret ways, preferring to keep them for times of great need like tonight.

A decent distance from the walls and the guards stationed therein, Arthur slid down off the nondescript mount he’d taken from the stables and let the beast chomp at the short grass.

“I know you’re there,” he said calmly.

She did him the courtesy of not dragging things out, respectfully not making a splashy entrance. Morgain merely stepped out of the air as though walking through a doorway.

“Good evening, Morgain. You look well.”

“You have something you wanted to say? An offer perhaps? A surrender?”

“Leave my knights alone, Morgain. Leave my people alone.”

“Your people?” She raised one eyebrow as though astonished. “Have you marked them, as you do your cattle?”

He sighed, his broad shoulders slumping. “Morgain, I don’t want to argue. I never want to argue with you. Why don’t you understand that what you ask is impossible? The times you remember are gone, long gone. This is the new way, the way of the future. You need to let go of the past.”

She hissed at him, like an angry cat.

“You are my sister; my blood.”

“Only half. And you turned from it, Arthur. You turned from the old ways of our mother, and took up the Imperial banner when it landed in the mud where the soldiers of Rome dropped it as they fled this land.”

His hand went instinctively to the brooch holding his cloak at one shoulder; an eagle made of silver, its wings outstretched to swoop and strike. “I took what was good of their ways, and what was good of ours, and made something new; something strong. I honor laws made by man. I don’t rule by blood and incantation. Camelot is governed by laws everyone
can see, can feel, and can appeal to for justice.”

His gaze was as impassioned as hers.

She sighed and said, “You are my brother, Arthur. I remember the day you were born. I held you in my arms, wiped your first tears…before Merlin took you away.” She paused and her normally glorious eyes were filled with an undeniable sadness. “But we have drawn lines and chosen sides. We have nothing more to say to each other.”

With that, she turned and disappeared back through the air, leaving Arthur standing there feeling alone.

Back in Camelot, Merlin sighed as he watched his king remount his horse and ride slowly back to the safety of the castle. “Some day you will trust me enough to allow me to arrange these meetings of yours within your own walls, rather than riding out into her clutches,” he told the image, ignoring the irony of asking the man he was spying on to trust him. “Some day she is going to try and harm you, and then where will we all be?”

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.

“
T
his 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 and anger would fly freely.

Gerard kicked at a rock that happened to get in his way, and wished that he had never heard of the Grail, never dreamed of coming on this Quest. He almost regretted becoming a squire.

“I don’t mean that,” he said quickly, in case God, or anyone, had been listening to his thoughts. “I don’t.” He couldn’t imagine being anything else, being anywhere else.

“Even men of valor, even men of great deeds, have the flesh and failures of other men.”

Merlin had said that, and he even added “and women as well,” before Ailis could gloat. This entire trip had shown him the truth of that.

It had also shown him men of valor as well. Sir Ruden, for all that he might be short-tempered and reckless, had dealt well and wisely with the
spider-things. Sir Joseph had charged in to save a squire who had gotten too close to a wild boar, at risk to himself and his steed. And back at Camelot, of course, there was Lancelot, and Sir Gawain, and his own master, Sir Rheynold.

But at this rate, he doubted there was anyone in this group who would be allowed anywhere
near
the Grail, himself included.

He wasn’t feeling very noble, or valiant, or virtuous today. He had slept poorly, and woken early, only to find Newt and Ailis already awake, washing their extra clothing in a bucket of water by the fire, Newt’s red-striped pet lounging nearby.

He had seen them laughing and joking, familiar and comfortable. They had not noticed him.

Once, Gerard and Ailis had been close—the newly arrived page and the orphaned serving girl. Time and new responsibilities had changed that, but they had always been friends. Always.

“You’re a squire. You’ll be a knight someday, in a few years, maybe. You won’t be able to go on adventures with serving girls and stable boys then.” Ailis’s words, an echo of Sir Matthias’s own words, and Sir Rheynold’s, too, were a bitter companion.

When they had made camp, after moving out of
the Shadows, Gerard had set his bedroll up near Tom, Sir Matthias’s squire, who had an uncanny gift for finding the softest ground anywhere within a campsite. He had thought that the company might be nice, as well. But the other boy was still off running errands, or cleaning tack, or doing any of the endless number of things he was asked to do for Sir Matthias.

Sir Matthias had no need for his special aide tonight. No one, it seemed, had any need for him.

All right, enough of that.
He was a noble squire, of the blood of Sir Kay, the king’s own foster brother. He was the squire of Sir Rheynold, and temporarily special aide to Sir Matthias, King Arthur’s chosen representative for Camelot on this Quest. He had friends and important work, and his name was known by his king, and by the king’s enchanter. He did not have a hard life. Self-pity was simply not acceptable.

It was, however, distinctly satisfying sometimes.

Gerard cleared a space, dug out a depression in the dirt, and set a circle of fist-sized stones around the hole. Not very large, just enough to hold a small fire, as much for comfort as warmth.

Once he had a decent blaze going, thanks to a
handful of twigs and a deadfall of logs, Gerard pulled his bedroll over to sit on. Hugging his arms around his knees, he stared into the fire, glumly contemplating everything that hadn’t gone right since Arthur first announced the great and glorious Grail Quest.

Something skittered off to his left, and Gerard’s hand reached out to grasp the hilt of his sword, placed carefully beside his bedroll.

“Oh. It’s only you.”

The salamander came up beside his elbow, looking curiously at him, then at the fire, then back at him.

“It’s a fire,” he said.
And I’m talking to a newt. Nice, Gerard. Real nice. Could your life become any more depressing?
But he was laughing to himself as he thought it.

The salamander gave off its odd chirping noise, then moved closer and rested its head on Gerard’s hand like a dog might do.

Gerard, however, felt no inclination whatsoever to pet it. Especially when the thing’s tongue came out and flicked at the fire.

“Careful. It’ll burn you.”

He still wasn’t entirely sure about this creature—
where it came from, why it seemed so interested in them.

But if Ailis said it didn’t have the scent of Morgain on it, he was willing to leave it alone for now. Gerard thought it might like the way Newt smelled. Or—and Gerard grinned involuntarily—maybe it heard someone speaking to Newt, and thought they were calling
it
.

The salamander slid off his knee and moved closer to the small bonfire, looking back at Gerard, then back at the fire, almost as though asking permission.

“What?”

The salamander merely looked at him and then back at the fire.

“You’ll burn yourself if you get much closer,” Gerard warned it. The salamander did inch closer, until it was only a hand-span away from the now heated stones, and looked back again at the squire, with what might have been yearning in its small black eyes. Gerard just shrugged, feeling too sorry for himself to really care what it did.

“Sure, go ahead, burn yourself up for all I care. Just don’t stink too badly while you do it, okay?”

By the time he had finished the sentence, the
salamander had moved with surprising speed into the fire, sliding over the hot rocks like a fish returning to water.

“Hey,” Gerard said, tempted to reach out to grab it back. “Um. Hey!” Because far from burning itself to a foul-smelling cinder, the salamander was lying in the middle of the fire, its tail curled contentedly around its body as it basked in the flames.

“That’s new and different,” Gerard said in disbelief. Then again, after a dragon, a troll, a bridge made of moonlight, and a griffin, to name just a few of the things he had seen recently, perhaps it wasn’t so different after all.

“Does Newt know you can do this?”

The salamander merely closed its eyes and hummed in contentment.

“The sad thing is, you’re not even the strangest thing I’ve seen today, much less in my entire life.”

The salamander ignored him, so Gerard went back to contemplating the sorry state of his own existence. He had gotten as far as wondering why he had not taken more credit for being the one to defeat Morgain at swordpoint, noting how instrumental he was discovering the key to reversing the sleep-spell and awakening Arthur and his court, when a muf
fled squeak broke him out of his depressing thoughts.

“Oh. Hello.” He really didn’t want to see Ailis right now. Especially since she didn’t seem at all interested in even looking at him, instead staring past his shoulder at the fire.

Stupid salamander.

“It’s not burning,” Ailis said in wonder.

“No, I know.” Gerard noticed Newt standing behind Ailis, and shrugged. If they were going to go around joined at the hip, they were going to be joined at the hip. “Didn’t know your pet could do that, huh?”

“No. It’s never done anything like that before. Constans, come out of there!”

“Constans?” Ailis echoed.

They both looked at him askance. Newt shrugged, an odd look on his face. “It seemed to fit.”

Ailis shook her head. “So, it just came over and walked calm-as-calm into the fire?”

“No, actually,” Gerard said, thinking it over. “It came over and looked at the fire. Then it waited.”

“For what?”

Gerard thought for another moment. “For permission,” he said finally. After sitting here with the
creature, it seemed perfectly natural to him, but the expression on his friends’ faces made him stop and shrug. At least Callum wasn’t around to hear how foolish he sounded.

“From you?” Newt was incredulous.

“I was the only one here,” Gerard pointed out.

“You built the fire?” Ailis asked.

“Yes.”

“And it never did that before?” That question was directed at Newt.

Newt was still staring at Constans. “I’ve only had it a few days. But no.”

“It asked permission of the owner of the fire. That’s interesting.” Ailis was leaning so far over to watch Constans, she was in danger of singeing her hair. Gerard reached out and tugged her arm, pulling her away.

“Wait,” she protested. “I want to try something.”

She reached out over the fire and tapped one of the flames, muttering something Gerard didn’t quite understand under her breath. “Ow!”

“Fire. It burns,” Newt said. “So now you know.”

“Very funny,” she said, turning on him. “I was trying to see—”

“Ailis? Witch-child?”

All three of them yelped, Ailis almost fell into the fire. Newt grabbed her by the arm and hauled her out of the way just in time.

The fire spat cinders. Flickers of deep blues and greens jumped up from the wood.

“Did you hear—?”

“No,” Newt said. “I didn’t. And you didn’t either.” He tried to move her away. “Constans, you too, come out of there, now.”

The salamander heaved a heavy sigh, but started to emerge from the flames, when suddenly a hand reached out of the fire and held it there.

This time, their yelps were louder.

“Witch-child? Answer me! I can feel you.”

“That’s not me, that’s Constans,” Ailis managed to say, despite her shock. “Please let go, you’re hurting him.”

The hand disappeared, and Constans scurried out of the flame, the red stripes on its back faded to normal as it reached Newt. Hesitant at first, Newt put a finger to the salamander’s skin and then, discovering that it was still somehow cool, picked it up and let it slide back under his collar.

Meanwhile, where the hand had been, another image was taking shape in the flames.

It was Morgain, her long black hair framing her pale face, backlit by the flames surrounding her. “Witch-child, I need your help,” she said. “All Britain needs your help.”