Read Online The Camelot Spell by Laura Anne Gilman - Free Book Online Page B

actually getting younger.
    Magic, she thought. He doesn’t just use magic, he is magic. It was a new idea, an interesting idea, and one she didn’t have time to follow right now.
    “We’re in search of a man—a former servant of my master, who chose to go out on his own. Our master tasked us to find him. We were told he might have taken shelter within your village. He is tall and slender. A hawk’s beak of a nose, and dark hair shot with silver…”
    Ailis let her voice trail off as the woman merely stared at her. They had no idea what name Merlin might be using, if indeed he used any name at all. Who knew what an enchanter might do? He might not even be in his own form—he might be traveling the countryside as an animal, as a bird; as the rabbitthey had for dinner the night before! Ailis fought down nausea at the thought.
    “Might you have seen such a man?” she finished.
    The woman looked at each of them in turn, then shook her head. “Sparrows cry. The fox does not dine, but feathers fly.”
    The three of them stared at her and she looked back placidly, her wide-set brown eyes as calm as a faithful hound’s.
    “Right. Our thanks, madam,” Gerard said finally, making a vaguely courtly bow from horseback, and reining his horse aside and back into the road. The other two followed, Newt more reluctantly than Ailis.
    “Strange,” Newt said.
    “Mad,” Gerard said flatly.
    “She didn’t seem to be mad,” Ailis argued.
    “Do you think they all froth at the mouth and roll in the dust?” Gerard shook his head. “Mad. Take my word for it.”
    “I’ve seen madwomen before,” Newt disagreed. “She didn’t strike me as such. There was awareness in her eyes, not madness.”
    “Her words were madness.”
    With that, Newt couldn’t argue. Who but a madwoman spoke in such strange terms?
    By the time the sun was shading into the hills, however, the three of them not only believed that every soul in the town was mad, they grew less certain about their own sanity. Every single person they had spoken to responded in the same nonsense patter as the first woman.
    “If not mad, then cursed. The work of a sorcerer,” Gerard decided.
    “To speak gibberish? A strange curse.” But Ailis could not explain what they had heard any other way.
    They had finally collapsed, weary beyond words, by the well in the center of town. They had spent the day questioning one incomprehensible villager after another until all three felt as though their eyes were crossing from the effort of remaining polite. They had left the horses hobbled outside a small stable, paying the old man who ran it to keep an eye on their belongings, and wandered the town on foot, hoping that speaking eye-to-eye would give them better results. But no luck.
    “Do you think they annoyed Merlin?” Newt wondered.
    “Is there anyone who hasn’t annoyed Merlin at one point or another? But most of Camelot stillspeaks plainly.” Newt and Ailis both turned to look at Gerard in disbelief. He noted their stares and shrugged. “Court matters aside. All right, fine. At least they don’t speak nonsense rhymes.”
    “Save when they attempt poetry,” Ailis said and broke into exhausted giggles. “Have you heard some of it?”
    “Too much,” Gerard said in agreement. “But this isn’t that sort of rhyming. It’s…” But he couldn’t put into words what was shifting in his mind.
    “It’s a mystery,” Ailis said finally.
    “It’s magic. If Merlin comes here often, there has to be a reason. Maybe it’s magic. There are places like that, right? Magical places? Well, magic changes people.”
    It wasn’t the first time Newt had given his opinion on magic and it wasn’t likely to be the last, so his companions ignored him.
    The three of them sat on the edge of the well, so caught up in their own thoughts that they didn’t notice the soft sound of feet coming toward them until the newcomer spoke.
    “The owl, lonely flier.”
    Their gaze started low at the