A Cathedral of Myth and Bone

by Kat Howard

  “Let her go!” I screamed.

  “Morgan, I’ve got this,” Sabra said.

  I wasn’t sure at all that she did. I jumped in the lake with her, sinking up to my chest in the cold, wishing I had some better grip on magic, that I knew a spell that would let me do something more effective than just yelling at the afanc in the event she decided that we were brunch.

  “I will break open the cages of your ribs and swallow your beating hearts.” The afanc’s voice like drowning.

  “Morgan, will you please ask her to hold still.” Sabra, calm and measured, as if the monster were a recalcitrant toddler.

  “Please,” I said. “Hold still. She can’t help you if you’re moving.”

  The afanc’s claws slid deeper into Sabra’s arm. “You lie so you can bind me further.”

  “No,” I said. “We don’t.”

  Then, in the soft silt of the lake, a thud. Another. The monster stopped her struggle. “How?” she asked, her voice softer.

  I didn’t need Sabra to tell me. “The sword.” I could feel the charges of magic as it sliced through the ancient iron of the shackles. “Brought out of time to right a wrong.”

  It went much faster after that. The afanc let go of Sabra’s arm and moved to give her better access to the chains. I had memorized a small healing spell from the grimoire, and I cast that, over and over, to help soothe the old wounds.

  When it was finished, when Sabra and I had climbed, soaked and exhausted, back onto the dock, the afanc bowed her head. “Thank you,” she said, and sank below the calm waters of the lake.

  “I can try to cast something,” I said. “Something mild. Just enough of a binding to keep the crew team safe with her here.”

  “No.” Sabra shook her head. “We just unbound her. I won’t have her in chains again. Even magical ones. We will leave her free, and they will be fine.”

  The carillon rang out, the sound of its bells carrying over the water.

  • • •

  Even though we learn time and again that they are as mortal as we are, even though we know they will all eventually be dust, there is still a small part of us that thinks that somehow the rules are different for our heroes. I knew that she could bleed—I spoke the words that knit up the wounds the afanc’s claws had made in her shoulder. But if you had asked me that morning, as I walked home, soaked in lake water, I would have told you that Sabra would live forever. That she would always be just as she was—standing on the shore, sword in her hand.

  • • •

  We waited, all of us, around the table as the clock ticked past the time our seminar should have started. Fidgeting, checking phones in case there was a last-minute email announcing the cancellation. Nirali looked up Professor Link’s office phone and called. “No answer.”

  “Right,” Liam said. “I’m out of here. I’m not wasting one of the last warm days of the semester waiting for an instructor who isn’t going to show.”

  None of the rest of us were inclined to wait around either, especially on what was a glorious, golden day, the air rich with the leaf-crackle scent of fall. We gathered laptops and notebooks and headed for the door, quickly, so that if Professor Link were to dash in late, we would already be free.

  Instead of being gone, Liam was waiting outside. “Does he belong to anyone?”

  There was a white dog standing next to him. Muddy-pawed and bedraggled, a wolfhound with mats in his coat, and ribs too visible beneath his skin. He walked right up to Sabra, then sat, patient, at her feet.

  She bent down to scratch his ear, and he leaned into her. “Fine. Niv has been talking about getting a dog anyway. You can come and live with me, okay?”

  His tail thumped once.

  A gust of wind blew through, sending shivers across my skin even in the sunlight. Raising a memory that wasn’t mine, of a white dog that I had loved, blood red on his flank, and the king who wept for his loss. Dead already when they brought him to me, from the wounds sustained when he threw himself between Arthur and a boar’s angry tusks, and none of my magic could bring life back into that great heart. Another click as the pattern tightened. The clock tower chimed.

  I watched as they walked off together, Sabra shortening her stride to make it easier for the dog—who I was sure would be named Cabal by the end of the day—to keep up with her.

  I met Liam’s eyes, but he dropped his gaze from mine, readjusted his bag over his shoulder, and walked away.

  Professor Link sent around an email that evening, apologizing for missing the class, and for not getting word to us sooner. Something unexpected had occurred. We should move our discussion of Tolkien’s The Fall of Arthur to the next meeting, and she would adjust the syllabus as necessary.

  I wouldn’t have thought about it for longer than it took to make a note in my planner and press delete on my email, but for the next message that came up. The campus newspaper, and on the front page a photograph of the building where Professor Link’s office was. The outlines of the trees were fuzzed and obscured by what sat in their branches: ravens. Possibly hundreds.

  There had, it seemed, been an incident that afternoon, right around the time when our seminar should have been meeting.

  One of the collective nouns for a group of ravens is an “unkindness,” and that was certainly what they had been. They had surrounded the building and harried anyone trying to get in or out—dive-bombing people, pulling at hair and bags. Some of the ravens had even managed to get into the building and had wreaked havoc in the offices. It had been enough of a mess that campus safety blocked the building off, not letting anyone in or out.

  “I will give you what help I can,” Morgan had said. Morgan, whose spell book was full of drawings of ravens. Morgan, who had loved Cabal too.

  I wondered what would have happened to that poor white wolfhound had we not left class early, had someone else found him. What he would save Sabra from this time.

  I cast the spell looking for Arthur again when I got home. And again, the ink collected in the center of Lake Severn, where no island was, and disappeared.

  Once

  “HAVE YOU SIMPLY DECIDED THAT the rules don’t matter anymore?” I asked. “Once the roles are filled, we do not bring outsiders into the story.”

  “The lake is mine, and the afanc dwells within it,” she said. She was calling herself Viviane this time. Viviane Link. It was as good a name as any. “I broke no rules. She awoke, and I reminded her of her chains.

  “Not that any harm came of it, in the end, so put away your righteousness, Morgan. I did no more than you are right now.” Viviane gestured at the window, where my ravens covered the trees.

  “Have you ever thought,” I asked, “that we could end this ourselves?”

  She laughed. “I am sure I have thought that exactly as often as you have, Morgan. But that does leave the question of which of us chooses the ending. So tell me now that you will ensure Arthur dies and passes out of history and story as he should have, tell me now that the proper story will be told, and yes. I will help you end this.”

  He was my brother. I could, at the end of all of this, let go of his life. He deserved sleep, the true sleep of death. But I would not let go of his story. Whether he should have had it or not, it had been told, and he deserved to keep it.

  “Indeed,” she said, nodding at my silence. “Besides, I am sure you have tried to end this on your own as many times as I have.”

  I said nothing. There was no need to give her a truth she held already.

  Viviane smiled. “But we don’t get to. Not anymore. Not beyond that once. We are, as we always were, characters in his story. Observers in our own.”

  As much as I loved my brother, that, too, was a truth. “Are you not tired?”

  “Morgan. I have been tired for at least a thousand years. But that’s hardly the point now, is it?”

  — 8 —

  Most of the strangeness that occurred that semester disappeared from campus memory almost as soon as it happened.
It was—for all that it became to those of us who lived through our parts in the story—a relatively self-contained phenomenon. Ours was not a Camelot that ended in a state funeral.

  But there is one thing you can see even now if you go to Severn’s campus. The paw print of a dog, in concrete, next to a half-sunken sculpture of a giant boar made from razor blades.

  Sabra had invited me to the sculpture garden to help walk her new dog—and she had named him Cabal, though she insisted the name had been Niv’s idea. “She said that if the story was going to give us a dog, we should respect the story.”

  Children ran past us, in and out of a series of tiny, rainbow-colored doors, unconnected to anything, even to walls, the last one barely hobbit-size. A mobile that looked like a disarticulated dragon spun from one of the trees.

  Cabal froze in front of Sabra, hackles raised, teeth bared. He howled, and the sound raised the hair on my own neck. Then I felt it. Something waking.

  I flung my arm in front of Sabra as well. “Wait.”

  Then.

  A groaning. Harsh. Metal rending, deep and shrieking all at once.

  Screams. The children.

  We ran toward it, until we saw what it was, and then we stopped running.

  The centerpiece of the sculpture garden was a wild boar, made entirely out of razor blades, edged and deadly. The rending we had heard was that same sculpture tearing itself from the ground. The metal screamed as the boar lowered its great head, swung it back and forth, as if the blank spaces where eyes should have been could somehow see.

  “Morgan. The kids.”

  “You get them,” I said. “I’ll deal with that.”

  She ran, Cabal with her, and he herded the children as if they were sheep.

  I anchored my feet in the earth and stared straight at the boar, focusing only on that, and not on the chaos unfolding around me. I prayed that focus would ensure that none of my magic would go astray, and started casting.

  Spells to make things decay, hoping that the metal would rust.

  To weaken bones, that its joints and hinges might break.

  To disorient, to distract, to make clumsy.

  Nothing I did had any effect.

  “Morgan, we’ve got all the kids. Just blast the fucker.” Liam’s voice. I turned toward it, and in that moment, the boar ran toward Sabra.

  A white blur in the air, a howl to pull the dead from their rest, and I would not let the story have what it wanted. Instead of the boar, I aimed my magic at the ground, softening it to a pit that grabbed at the sculpture’s churning legs.

  It tossed its head as it sank, and red stained Cabal’s white fur. But he stood, and Sabra stood too, picking herself up from the ground where that best of dogs had knocked her out of harm’s way.

  I spoke the second spell, my words rumbling from my throat like granite, and solidified the ground that held the boar. The metal shrieked in protest, but the sculpture did not shift from where I held it.

  Unmoving, vigilant, I stood until Cabal nosed my hand, stepped one foot onto the hardening ground. I knelt down beside him, ran my hands over his body, and checked for other injuries.

  “He’s okay,” Sabra said. “He’s fine.”

  He was. The scratch was minor. My voice shook only a little as I spoke the words that healed him. “Good dog,” I said when I had finished.

  “The kids?” I asked.

  “All fine too. Most of them thought it was some sort of game, especially after Liam came in out of nowhere and helped.”

  I looked at him.

  “I heard a voice,” he said. “It sounded almost like yours, Morgan. Saying you needed help, that my king was in danger. Telling me to come here. I tried to ignore it, but it got louder. So.” He shrugged.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “I’m going to take Cabal home so Niv and I can make a fuss over him, and give him a big steak. Morgan, call me later.” Sabra walked away, Cabal leaning against her.

  “I’m surprised you came,” I said. “Knowing how you feel about magic.”

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t cope at the lake. With the birds and everything,” he said. “It was not my best moment. It seemed so crazy, what I had seen, what you were telling me, and instead of remembering that you were underneath all the magic, all I could think was that it was too much, too strange.”

  “And now?” I asked.

  He looked at me. “It’s still weird, Morgan. I’m not going to lie—this is not what I thought I was signing up for. But if I can help, I should.”

  • • •

  Professor Link gave no explanation for her previous absence the next time our class met. I hadn’t really expected her to—she seemed to want to keep pretending that she was nothing more than a professor, that the names were only an academic exercise.

  It was the week before a major paper was due, and there was a small contingent that hadn’t opted in to the Arthurian names project, so she was fielding their questions and concerns. I let my mind drift over ravens and Arthur and an island of bones. Then there was the question of how to wake him, and whether, dream or not, that was necessary. Things might be easier if he never opened his eyes.

  “Ah, shit!” Liam yelled.

  I looked up just in time to see a flood of latte headed for my laptop. Without thought, I held up my hand. “Desisto!”

  The coffee paused, puddled, halted as if there were a wall in front of it, pooling up against my invisible barrier.

  The table was a flurry of people, yanking their own laptops and notebooks up and away, pulling wads of tissues from pockets and backpacks to mop up the mess, generally not paying attention to anyone who might have used magic to keep her laptop dry.

  Professor Link’s gaze never left mine.

  At the end of class, she stepped in front of me before I could walk through the door. “I’d like it if you could come with me to my office, Morgan. I think there are some things we should discuss.”

  I thought about refusing. Acting like I didn’t know what she was talking about. But there were things I wanted to discuss too. “Of course,” I said.

  I walked with her in silence, on the red brick path, through grass in the process of browning before the winter. Flame-colored leaves hugged the tree branches, and the wind chased wisps of clouds across a sky turning sunset lavender.

  As cool as it was, the window in her office was still cracked open, to let in the sound of the lake. I kept my jacket on, my bag in hand, and perched on the very edge of her visitor’s chair.

  “She’s taught you, then.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m not sure who or what you’re talking about.” I was pretty sure I knew both, but I wanted Professor Link to be the one to say it.

  “Morgan, of course. And magic. Let’s not waste time pretending either of us is stupid. Has she been giving you lessons?”

  “Nothing like that. We’ve only ever spoken a couple of times.” My knuckles were white around the strap of my bag, the sharpness of my nails digging into my palm a reminder to take care.

  “She’ll have told you her version of events by now, an attempt to play on your sympathy. She’ll want you on her side of the story.”

  I didn’t say that she hadn’t, that she had simply given me a book of magic, a series of visions, and an order. “Why don’t you tell me what really happened, then? Give me a chance to make my own decisions.”

  Professor Link tapped her fingers against her lips, considering. “The first thing that you need to know is that Arthur was always supposed to die. Die completely, none of this once-and-future business.”

  I didn’t so much as blink.

  “There were fates,” she continued. “Auguries and omens, and no matter which ones were cast, no matter who read the signs, Arthur died in all of them. Young, and not particularly heroically. It was Guinevere who was supposed to bring the peace while acting as regent for Mordred. Arthur should have passed quietly out of history, been a footnote at most. Had things simply been left
alone, it would have been a true golden age.

  “Merlin couldn’t bear it. All his plans, all his manipulation of Uther’s line, to be lost because of an infected battlefield scratch. Something so petty, and all his power couldn’t defeat it.

  “So he lied. He went to Morgan, who was far greater at magic than he was, and cast the one spell that was his great strength.”

  “Illusion,” I said, remembering the story of how Merlin disguised Uther, made him appear exactly as Igraine’s husband, and brought about Arthur’s conception through deceit.

  “I’m glad to see you’ve been doing the reading,” Professor Link said. “Merlin told Morgan there had been a new omen in the stars, and asked her to recast Arthur’s fate. As she did, he cast his magic, and for all her power, it broke Morgan’s heart every time she foretold her brother’s death. So it was easy for Merlin to make Morgan see what he wanted: that she could save Arthur. That there was one magic strong enough.”

  “Excalibur’s scabbard,” I said.

  “Precisely. She wove it with her own hands, wove her magic into it. Whoever wore it would be protected from any wound received in battle. And it worked. Arthur lived for decades longer than he should have. It was one of the greatest sorcerous achievements of any age.

  “But Camelot itself, everything around Arthur, turned sour as a result. Guinevere grew bitter over Arthur’s neglect, and the knights grew quarrelsome, pushing against one another in hopes of petty advancement. Fate tried to rewrite itself, to undo Arthur, to put back into play what should have been. All of it Merlin’s fault.”

  “Not Morgan’s?” I asked.

  “She did the magic, yes. But she was as used by Merlin as Igraine was. He took her love and twisted it for his own ends. I didn’t blame her for it, but that didn’t mean I could let it stand.”

  “You?” I asked.

  The wind came in stronger, carrying the scent of the lake. “Come now, Morgan. You know the story well enough. Think about the names.”

  “Viviane,” I said. She had a different name in almost every story—Viviane, Elaine, Nimue, and variants of each. “Your name is Viviane. The Lady of the Lake. You did those things.” My mind bent itself around the recalculated story line, and I almost missed her next words.