A Cathedral of Myth and Bone

by Kat Howard

  “That’s it?” Liam asked. “Just a journal. No walking around campus pretending to be Merlin, or teaching my section of freshman comp while I’m cosplaying Lancelot?”

  “Or Guinevere,” Professor Link said. “Random means random. But no. Aside from keeping the journal, what you do—or don’t do—once you’ve been assigned your name is up to you. If there is a pattern, it will assert itself regardless. And if there isn’t, well, a bunch of blank notebooks will be a nice change from the usual end-of-semester requests for extensions on seminar papers.”

  “So we can still get an A even if nothing happens?” Liam asked.

  “If you legitimately observe nothing—no changes in yourself, in your fellow students, anything of that sort—then that’s all you need to write down. Just be honest—and yes, I’ll know if you’re not.”

  “What if everyone chooses a name?” I asked. “Will you still hold class, if the final is only determined by our journals?”

  “You’d still need to do the reading, to familiarize yourself with the various versions of the story, since you will, after all, be looking for similarities. But I’d probably drop the attendance requirement. Still, I suspect there will be those who prefer a more traditional classroom experience, so don’t get your hopes up.”

  “I’m in,” Sabra said.

  “So am I,” said Nora.

  There was a flurry of voices and hands. Professor Link held up hers. “Before things dissolve into chaos, let’s do this by email. That way, I can also make sure I have enough names for everyone before I start handing them out.”

  “Do we tell anyone who we are?” I asked.

  “Once you’ve committed to participating, everything else is up to you. You choose your level of involvement. Get your name, tell no one, do nothing, or spend the entire semester in costume, acting the story out. As long as you turn in the journal at the end of it, you will have fulfilled your obligations, and will be able to earn an A in the course.”

  Monday of the following week, I got a card in my campus mailbox. Heavy cream paper, like an invitation. I slid my finger under the flap and winced as the edge sliced my skin. Blood from the paper cut smeared the card inside, but I could still read it.

  Even without knowing who anyone else was, I wondered how honest Professor Link was being when she’d said things would be totally random. What I saw made me suspect they weren’t, not completely. There in the scrawl of purple ink was the one name in the story that matched mine: Morgan le Fay.

  Once

  A BELL TOLLS, AND AS Its echo fades, I awaken. Around me are black-feathered birds, taking wing. When they are all airborne, when the sky itself looks to be black and feathered, the last blanket lifts from the magic.

  My magic.

  It sleeps, in between things, with my brother.

  I sit up, slowly stretching my unused muscle and sinew into a semblance of function, and look around. He is not here. Not yet. Even with as many times as the story has started, I have seen him only twice since that first time I sent him to sleep on the Isle of the Apples, long and long ago. Both times, I have only seen him sleeping.

  He has not woken since he fell.

  My brother. Arthur. King once and future, the Pendragon. The stories will tell you that he sleeps now so that he may awaken in his country’s hour of greatest need, arising so as to save it.

  The stories lie.

  He sleeps because I made a mistake. Because I loved him, and I did not want him to die. Because I bound him too well into a story he was supposed to leave, and bound myself, too.

  Bound us, and one other. The one who would have a different story told. She is why I am awake, now, again.

  Magic fizzes like acid in my blood as it uncurls from its sleeping, cramping my muscles, and sending aches through my joints. The pain of reawakening gets worse each time, and I wonder if she knows that. I wonder if she hurts too when the story starts again.

  The ravens wing away, and the air here, this here, this now, smells like apples. In the distance, I hear waves breaking on a shore. It is as it always is: once upon the next time. Perhaps this time an ending.

  In the darkness, an apple falls.

  — 2 —

  If there is a pattern, it will assert itself regardless.

  • • •

  If I’m going to be honest, if I am going to be the one who tells this story, who goes back to my fake journal entries and rewrites them into the truth about how a seminar project led us here—

  (Sabra’s still breathing. I can feel her pulse. But she won’t wake up. I think I know what will end this, what will break the strange once-future we’re caught in, but I’m afraid. Afraid that under all the weirdness of the past few months, I’m just a grad student from Idaho, not some out-of-time, kairos-ridden version of a sorceress, afraid that this is the place where the pattern that got stronger all semester finally refuses to recognize itself and falls apart, afraid that if I’m wrong, not only does Arthur wind up dead, but Sabra does too.)

  —I should be honest.

  Part of the reason I was in Professor Link’s seminar was my name. I liked Morgan le Fay. I always had. She was the reason that I’d read the King Arthur stories in the first place. I liked that she was a sorceress, or maybe a fairy. The Queen of Air and Darkness. I liked that she was a woman with power. I wasn’t there for Arthur, who came across as being sort of dim in a lot of the stories and too good to be real in others; or the knights of the Round Table, who were way too invested in smiting; or Excalibur, which, at the end of the day, was only a weapon. I was in that class because of the woman who took her dying brother to the isle of Avalon and made sure that he was future, not just once.

  I was in that class because of Morgan, and she was why I sent in the email and asked for a name. Not because I wanted an easy final or truly believed that the pattern of a story I was pretty sure was mostly fiction was going to re-create itself in our seminar, but because hers was the name I wanted to get.

  Because I wanted to pretend, just for a moment, that I could be a sorceress. That I could be a woman with power.

  Cabal raises his head from my legs and whines.

  I am a woman with power.

  I know what I have to do.

  • • •

  Liam, of course, did show up to our next seminar meeting in his best attempt at a suit of armor. It looked like it had started out as football or hockey pads, which he then spray-painted silver, but he seemed so pleased with himself as he clanked around the room calling people “foul varlets” that it was impossible to do anything but go along with his delight at being Lancelot.

  Well, almost impossible.

  “You get that Lancelot was an asshole, right?” Nora asked.

  “Come on. He was the greatest knight in history. He won all the jousts and rescued all the ladies. No one could beat him.” Liam struck a pose reminiscent of the Wart’s fencing lessons, off-balance and akimbo. “En garde!”

  “The greatest knight in history. Who committed treason. Fucked his best friend’s wife. Then ran off and left her to almost get burned to death because he couldn’t cope with what a giant douche he was.” Nora ticked her points off on her fingers.

  “Ever heard of courtly love? Lancelot was just doing what his culture told him to when he flirted with Guinevere. Besides, it wasn’t his fault that Arthur couldn’t keep his wife happy.”

  “It was, however, Lancelot’s fault he couldn’t keep his lance in his pants.” Nora rolled her eyes and shoved her chair away from Liam’s, opening up a gap at the far curve of the table.

  Professor Link didn’t comment, just began the discussion on Guy Gavriel Kay’s Fionavar trilogy, “a series that has a more charitable conception of Lancelot, and the triangle, than the one that’s been articulated here.”

  Our class hadn’t been meeting for very long, and as far as I could tell, Nora was one of those people who enjoyed being contrary. Still, I wrote the conversation down, later, in my journal. Like any good academi
c, I dutifully speculated whether Nora really hated Lancelot, or if she had been assigned the name of someone who hated Lancelot in the stories. Agravain, maybe.

  • • •

  Guessing people’s alternate identities became a sort of mental game. I knew who I was. I knew who Liam was. Nirali, who was working on her MFA in dance, was Gawain, so maybe things were more random than I thought, because there was nothing about her that called to mind the bulky, quick-tempered Gawain of the stories.

  “Though if anyone thinks I am jousting, or smiting, or doing any other random knight things, they are mistaken,” she said. “All I am doing is keeping a journal.”

  “Well, the knights in Monty Python dance,” Liam pointed out. “You could do a very knightly sort of soft-shoe.”

  “You put your suit of armor back on and show up at the studio, we’ll do a kick line. Otherwise, no.”

  Liam grinned. “I just might. Wearing it was pretty damn fun.”

  Nirali shook her head, laughing.

  Even though I knew we didn’t have to guess who the other people in the seminar were, it itched at me that I didn’t know who had been assigned Arthur, Guinevere, Mordred. The big names, the ones that anchored the story. Sabra and Nora had both announced that they were in, but maybe they had changed their minds. They acted the same way in class as they had for our first few meetings, so there were no clues there.

  Plus, I knew that some of the people in the seminar hadn’t wanted to participate in this little experiment. The whole idea was too weird, they said. They were only sticking around because it was too late in the semester to drop the class. I was pretty sure I knew who they were, though, a knot of five, nearly one third of the seminar, who grouped together along one curve of the table, fiercely taking notes as if grounding themselves in the world of academe would keep them safe from being infected by whatever wild bits of story might be floating about the room.

  So I wasn’t sure exactly how many people I was guessing about. Maybe we had a Merlin and a Lady of the Lake and a Galahad. Maybe we had none of those people. I wouldn’t put it past Professor Link to dig deep into Malory, or wherever else she was getting the names from, and bring out some lesser-known players, like Sir Marrok, the werewolf knight.

  No, I wouldn’t put it past her, but random assignment or not, Arthur, I thought, was a guarantee. He was the one constant in all the patterns, all the stories. There was no Camelot, not without Arthur.

  Once

  MY ISLAND IS STILL FORMING itself out of past time and old magic. Even the apple trees, most days, are barely more than scent and memory.

  I make myself walk the island’s bounds, such as they are, every morning. Relearning how to walk, how to breathe, how to taste the air. To be reminded, once again, of the ways of living in flesh.

  It is limiting.

  Neither the island nor I am yet strong enough to bear my leaving it, and so I send out my ravens.

  They bring me news, carried on wing and wind, and they are the eyes through which I see. It begins as I have come to expect it to—Arthur’s story, my story, is barely more than a fairy tale to them. It is names on a page, marvels and monsters, not people who bled and died.

  It is a strange thing, the first time you realize you have become a fiction.

  But some of them want to believe the story is more than that, the girl who takes my brother’s role in particular. There is a clarity to her desire that makes me think she could have sat the Siege Perilous and survived, had she been in that telling.

  I can use that desire.

  The spell moves sluggishly through my hands—I am less awake than the magic that woke me—but my fingers unstiffen and remember their patterns.

  It helps that the story remembers how it begins.

  With a sword, and a stone.

  — 3 —

  Two days later, I came home from a seminar on medieval poetry to see Sabra sitting on my front step. “Have you found anything weird lately?” She hesitated between the words, as if she hoped that, given enough time, they might change in her mouth.

  “What sort of weird?” I slid my bag from my shoulder and sat next to her.

  “Well, there was a sword in my front doorstep this morning.”

  “An actual sword.”

  “Sharp and everything.” She held up a Band-Aid-wrapped finger. “It looks like it should be in a museum.”

  “Who are you? I mean, for Professor Link’s class.”

  “Arthur.” She grinned. “Let’s hear it for random assignments, right? Niv’s full name is Gwenivere, and she thinks it’s hysterical. Plus, I always wanted to be Arthur when I was a kid, and was so pissed when my brothers made me be Guinevere and get rescued all the time just because I was a girl.”

  A sword as a gift for Arthur made at least some kind of sense. “Does anyone else from class know? Giving you a sword seems like something Liam might do—he’s pretty into this whole thing.”

  She shook her head. “You’re the first person from class I’ve told. Besides, I don’t think it was a prank. The sword was literally in the stone doorstep.” She pulled out her phone, showed me the picture. The sword was sunk down, almost to the forte of the blade, flush with the surrounding stone, as if it had grown there.

  Not just a sword for Arthur. A sword in a stone.

  “I know,” she said in response to the wonder on my face. “I know.”

  “How did you get it out?”

  “I just . . . pulled.” She shrugged. “It didn’t seem like a big deal—no light from heaven, no chorus of voices telling me I was the rightwise king, or whatever—but then I was standing there, holding a sword that I had pulled out of a stone as easily as cutting butter, and I really needed to sit down.

  “So, like I said, have you found anything weird lately?”

  I shook my head. “But I’m Morgan. I don’t think I get any sort of symbolic weird shit.”

  “Maybe you’ll get magic.” She wiggled her fingers like jazz hands. “That would be cool.”

  “It would, actually. If I get a letter from an owl, I’ll let you know.”

  Sabra was laughing as she left.

  I wasn’t.

  I was beyond laughter. I felt electrified, like the wind had stood all my hair on end, as if I were perched on the threshold of a hidden door.

  Something was beginning.

  • • •

  Professor Link’s office was in one of the oldest buildings at Severn. The kind of building that location scouts searching for “picturesque seat of higher learning” would drool over. Ivy-covered walls of faded red brick, diamond-paneled windows that sparkled in the sunlight, and a tower. Professor Link’s office was at its top. After walking up three stories of winding steps, I knocked on the doorframe.

  She looked up from her papers. “Morgan. Come in.”

  I sat in the worn wooden chair in front of her desk. “I was just wondering—with this whole we get names from the Arthurian legend, let’s see if the story happens thing—are you participating?”

  She set her pen down and leaned back in her chair. Behind her, the window was open wide enough to let in the sound of the wind on the lake. “Participating?”

  “Doing something more than just assigning names. Like, leaving presents or something related to who we’re assigned to be.” The breeze made her office chilly, and I pulled my cardigan closer around me.

  She smiled, shook her head. “I put the cards in the envelopes without looking at them. So while I know which names are in play, I don’t know who has been assigned to each one, except for people like Liam, who have made that public. And much as I might like it to, I’m afraid the departmental budget doesn’t stretch to giving gifts to students.”

  “That makes sense,” I said. Which, of course, it did.

  “Why do you ask?”

  The entire room changed around the question. The wind from the lake grew frigid and picked up enough that I could see white on the waves. An ache throbbed in my temples. The hair rose
on the back of my neck, and the only thing I wanted more than to get out of that room was to tell Professor Link everything I knew about the mysterious sword, and Sabra. The desire to speak was so strong my stomach ached.

  “Oh, just something Liam said. Maybe about his knight costume? I guess I misheard.” I leaned down, biting my lips around the words that were trying to crawl from my throat, and picked up my bag. “I’m sorry, but I have a terrible migraine coming on.”

  I stood and covered my mouth with my hand. “I get nausea with them. I should go.”

  “By all means. Feel better soon.”

  I did, as soon as I left her office, and better still by the time I had—at a near run—gotten to the bottom of the twisting staircase. I slowed then, catching my breath and allowing my racing heart to get closer to normal. My head no longer ached, and I didn’t want to vomit other people’s secrets.

  Maybe Professor Link was telling the truth when she said that she didn’t know what names we’d been assigned. But I didn’t believe she was disinterested in what would happen next.

  That was when I started writing fake entries in my journal. I wanted to keep the truth of the story, of our story, hidden. As if by not speaking it, I could keep it—keep us—safe.

  At the time, I thought that would be enough.

  Once

  THE AIR SHAKES, AND THE waves smash themselves against my island. The reek of the lake is everywhere. She cannot set foot here—she is as bound in these things as I am—but she does not let me forget that she is close.

  I do not know what name she is using this time. She sheds them as a snake sheds skins. But I do not need a name to know that what I feel is her—the anger of the lake, the scent of the water.