The Shadow Companion by Laura Anne Gilman Page B

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 everyonecan 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.

EIGHT
    “ 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 stillhave 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