Merlin patted Sir Rupert’s neck. “Come on, old friend. We must find someplace out of the wind to wait for the morning.”
Uther rode down the causeway, toward Tintagel’s torch-lit gates already barred for the night. “Open the gates!” he shouted, and silently exulted when they obeyed. It had worked! All of them thought he was the Duke of Cornwall, and their rightful liege-lord. The portcullis rattled up, and Uther rode quickly beneath it and into the castle keep.
* * *
Morgan le Fay sat up very straight in her chair, watching her mother brush her hair at the wavery mirror of polished silver. Her father had told her to watch over her mother, and though she was only eight years old, Morgan was determined that she would not fail him. It was the first time he had ever asked her to do anything, and Morgan knew it was a test. If she took care of her mother properly tonight, then Father would accept her and love her despite her ugliness. He would stop making Mother cry with his accusations of her being tainted by the Old Ways. They could be a happy family at last, just the three of them.
There was an unexpected knock at the door and Morgan’s mother looked up from brushing her hair. The door opened. Standing in the doorway was a dark bearded man whom Morgan did not recognize. There was a shimmering blue glow all over him, and his form rippled as though she saw him through water, or smoke.
She looked at her mother, but Igraine did not react to the terrible sight.
“Back so soon, my lord?” Igraine asked calmly.
“Yes, yes. Uther’s really gone, and my place is here with you,” he said impatiently.
Morgan’s eyes grew wide with horror as the apparition stepped into the room. The specter spoke with her father’s voice—but it was not her father.
“Mother—” she cried. Terror silenced her as the man swooped down on her and lifted her up.
“Time for you to go to bed, little lady. Not another word.”
He carried her to the door and set her outside in the hall. She tried to run back into the room, but the stranger shut the door in her face, shutting her out of the light and warmth of her mother’s room and exiling her to the cold darkness of the hallway.
“Mother …” Morgan wailed. She banged on the door as hard as she could, but no one came. No one knew the monster was there but her.
Merlin’s magic hadn’t worked on the brat! Uther cursed silently as he shut the door in her ugly face. It didn’t matter, though. She was out in the passageway now, while he was in here with Igraine.
Uther crossed the room in one stride and took her in his arms lustfully.
“Oh!” Igraine said, looking toward the door. “I didn’t say good night.”
“Good night,” Uther muttered huskily, kissing her ravenously. “Good night, good night, and then good night. …”
In the Sanctum Sanctorum of her underground palace, Queen Mab stared into her scrying glass, watching. The globe of crystal showed her the tiny figures of Igraine and Uther twined together on the bed. She did not know if the spell she had cast upon him at his coronation would survive this night, but it no longer mattered. The spell had done its work. It had tangled Merlin in its net.
Mab smiled wolfishly. Each day made Merlin truer to his heritage of the Old Ways. No matter how hard he fought against her, he could not escape the fact that he was her son, heir to the Old Ways. He’d broken his oath about using magic, and now he was discovering the joys of manipulating the mortal kind for his own ends.
And soon it would be for her ends. Merlin would return to her side, and once more, Mab would reign supreme over all the isles of Britain.
Uther was a clever king, but a weak one, and Mab despised weakness. Still, she had to admire his deviousness. He’d promised Merlin that he would not harm Gorlois, but a king had many henchmen. She waved her hand over the crystal, banishing Igraine’s bedchamber, and set the crystal to find Igraine’s husband. Through the crystal Mab watched as Sir Boris set upon Gorlois and his knights and killed them all, just as Uther had instructed him to.
“So much for your guiltless bloodless victory, dear Merlin!” Mab crooned. “Now your hands are covered with innocent blood, and the child for whom you have done all this will be tainted as well. In the end, Arthur will belong to me!”
The sun rose, turning the walls of Tintagel to silver. Merlin, dozing upon Sir Rupert’s back, was awakened by the clatter of horsemen riding across the bridge. They wore Gorlois’s livery, but the Duke was not with them.
Hasn’t Uther had the sense to leave Tintagel before dawn? The enchantment will not last past sunrise, Merlin fretted uneasily. And if he had already left, where had he gone?
Swiftly Merlin used his magic to transform himself into another of Gorlois’s soldiers. With Sir Rupert’s help, he caught up with the mounted troop and entered Tintagel’s gates with them. He could see that the men had seen heavy fighting. They carried their fallen comrades wrapped in cloaks and tied to the backs of their horses.
“Where is the Lady Igraine! Send for the Lady Igraine!” the captain shouted.
“What is wrong? My lord and lady sleep within and fain would not be disturbed,” Tintagel’s castellan said.
“Cornwall sleeps a deeper sleep than his lady’s, I’ll wager,” the captain growled. He dismounted from his horse and lifted down one of the wrapped bodies, laying it on the flagstones before the castellan. “Here he is.” He flung back a fold of the cloak to expose Gorlois’s death-pale face.
Uther, you have betrayed us all! Merlin thought in anguish. He had no doubt that somehow Gorlois’s death could be traced to Uther’s plottings. He broke away from the others and ran up the stairs, thinking that at least Arthur would now be born—and that Britain must have a king, even if a bad one, to hold the throne for him until he was old enough to take it.
The others were close behind him. At the top of the stairs, Merlin ran down the hall to the lady-bower where Igraine slept. A simple gesture unbarred the door, and Merlin swung it open.
But he was already too late. Uther sat upon the edge of the bed, regarding Igraine with baffled disgust, as if he could not imagine how he had come here. The morning sun showed him as he truly was, and Merlin wondered if there was enough time to cast another spell of disguise and hope Uther could bluff his way out. But Igraine was stirring, and as Merlin entered the room she sat up, and looked toward the man whom she thought to be her husband.
Her eyes grew wide at the sight of Uther, and she screamed.
The king snatched up a sword to defend himself, and Merlin quickly banished his own disguise, lest Uther strike at him. But Gorlois’s men were only seconds behind, and in the moment Merlin saw Uther recognize him as an ally, the first of them rushed in.
“An intruder!” the soldier cried, rushing at Uther.
“No!” Merlin shouted, but it was already too late.
Uther flung up his sword and cut at the soldier. He no longer carried Excalibur, but the king’s blade was sharp. The trooper went down, dying as he fell. Igraine screamed again, in horror and pity.
In desperation, Merlin cast the first spell he could think of, closing his eyes and drawing his fingers across them, then flinging the spell out into the room. In that instant, everyone there was struck blind. Their cries and screams filled the hall and chamber, breeding chaos and confusion.
“Uther!” Merlin whispered, taking the king’s arm. The king startled and swore at the touch, but he recognized Merlin’s voice. “Come with me.”
“Damn you, Merlin, what have you done to me?” Uther demanded, staring sightlessly toward Merlin.
“It will pass,” Merlin said shortly. He was angry at a blindness of his own—once more Uther had managed to transcend Merlin’s low opinion of him. “In the name of heaven, Uther—come now or stay and die.”
Reluctantly, the king allowed himself to be led away. The doorway was choked with blinded guardsmen, but Merlin led Uther toward the window … and through it. A second spell brought the sea-mist boiling up beneath the tower, to sol
idify into steps that allowed the two men to reach the causeway unobserved.
With another gesture, Merlin canceled both spells. The mist began to fall away from the tower, and Uther blinked, owl-like, at the dim light of day.
“Where’s my horse?” he demanded.
“Where’s your army?” Merlin shot back. “I told you Gorlois was not to be harmed!”
“By me,” the king amended, smirking. “You said I wasn’t to harm him, Merlin, and as God is my witness, I kept that vow.”
Merlin turned away with a groan of disgust. All his ideals, all his good intentions, turned to naught by the banal spitefulness of a dissolute king. Despite his care, despite his vows, Merlin’s hands were red with innocent blood.
Uther began to laugh, a harsh bray of triumph.
“Not so high-and-mighty now, are you, Merlin? You’re just as easily fooled as any other man!”
“Get away from me!” Merlin shouted, filled with revulsion. Mab’s mocking laughter seemed to ring in his ears—from the very beginning, she had known it would come to this, that Merlin would become a pander to a lecher, and an executioner for a tyrant. All his ideals were dead, murdered with Gorlois.
“Get away from me!” Merlin shouted again. He turned away from Uther and began to run through the morning mist, but no matter how he fled, he could not outstrip the wild laughter that filled his brain.
Fool—fool! Merlin the butcher, Merlin the fool. …
CHAPTER FIVE
THE THRONE OF BETRAYAL
The room was filled with candles, rack upon rack of them, until the chamber blazed with light like the cathedral on a feast day. Their flame made the warm summer air stiflingly hot, but neither of the chamber’s occupants complained.
One, because he had no choice but to be here. The other, because he wanted light at all costs—light to drive away the shadows that filled his waking dreams with terror.
On the morning he had awakened in Igraine’s bed, Uther had felt as if he had roused from a fever dream. His lust for Cornwall’s wife had vanished like dew in the morning sun, and he could no longer remember why it had ever seemed so important to him to possess her.
But he remembered everything else very well. How Merlin had tricked him and stolen Excalibur. Had tricked him again, giving him a woman he no longer wanted. Tricks, all tricks, and Pagan wizard’s lies. …
“Tell me, Yvain. How many kings have you served?” Uther asked. Beads of sweat rolled down his face, and his linen tunic was soaked through with perspiration, but despite the heat, King Uther lounged at his ease upon the Pendragon throne, drinking brandy from a blue glass cup that had come all the way from Byzantium. Once it had belonged to the tyrant Vortigern, just as the man before him had.
“More than one,” Yvain the Fox answered, “but all of them well.” He was a slender man with greying hair and a narrow beard, such as had become the fashion at Uther’s court. The thick gold hoop that he wore in his left ear sparkled in the candlelight.
“A good answer,” Uther said genially. He drank again, his eyes darting about the room nervously, and wiped his forehead with the edge of his tunic. It was night, and Uther hated the darkness. “And will you serve me well?”
Yvain the Fox bowed silently, imperturbable even in the oven-heat of the King’s throne room, and waited for Uther to come to the point.
“I want you to go to Tintagel,” Uther said. He leaned forward and lowered his voice, and Yvain took a step closer to the throne. “The Lady Igraine—Cornwall’s widow—is with child.”
Yvain nodded. All the world knew the story of how Uther had pursued the lady, laying siege to her husband’s castle for months in a hopeless attempt to possess her. And at the moment of her husband’s death, Uther had seemingly lost interest in his prize.
“I want you to wait there until the child is born, then take it and bring it here to me,” Uther continued. “It will be a son.”
“The lady may object,” Yvain said cautiously.
“I don’t care,” Uther enunciated slowly through gritted teeth. “Bring me that child!” And then, unexpectedly, the king began to laugh.
“Frik … what are you doing?”
Mab sat upon her carven throne in the room where Frik had once tutored Merlin, staring intently into the polished surface of a dark, misshapen crystal. Into it she poured all the unchanging nature of stone, the inertia and passivity of rock.
Frik sat behind her at a high desk. He was writing in a large book with a very long quill pen.
“Writing fairy stories. So you’ll be remembered,” he answered in a hoarse, quavery voice. He was wearing a scholar’s hood and robes, and the gingery hair and whiskers of this persona fluffed wildly about his face. Crooked wire-rimmed glasses balanced on the end of his nose.
“You don’t need to do that, Frik. I’ll not be forgotten,” Mab said confidently.
“Well …” the gnome said doubtfully.
“Well?” Mab demanded, turning in her seat to glare at him.
“For us!” the gnome improvised hastily. “Things are going rather well—for us!” He cringed, hoping to avoid one of his volatile mistress’s painful reprimands.
“I’m going to make sure,” Mab said. She gazed into the black stone a moment longer, then tossed the crystal over her shoulder in Frik’s direction.
“See to it.”
Merlin and Sir Rupert stood once more on the ridge that overlooked the causeway that led to Tintagel, waiting for the birth of Igraine’s child. He had last been here on the night that child had been conceived, and his memories of that night were not happy ones. Uther had never returned to marry the woman he had lusted for so disastrously.
Uther betrayed me … and I betrayed Igraine by helping Uther seduce her, by luring Gorlois into that ambush, by not distrusting Uther as much as I should have, even after all the warnings he gave me. The Wheel of Life turns, one betrayal leading to another, and another. And the innocent die. …
These days, King Uther kept court at Pendragon in Londinium just as his father had, and there were rumors that he was also growing as mad as Old King Constant had been. But even that did not matter very much to Merlin, not now that Arthur was about to be born. Everything Merlin had done to get a good king for Britain would be justified once Arthur ruled the land. And the blood on his hands would at last be washed away. …
During the past several months as he awaited the baby’s birth, Merlin had prepared a place for the baby Arthur with Sir Hector of the Forest Sauvage, far to the north. There he could teach Arthur all he would need to know to be both a good man and a good king.
And everything would be all right at last.
In her lady-bower within the walls of Tintagel Keep, Igraine writhed upon her bed in hard labor, choking back her screams. The priests said that the pain of childbirth was woman’s price to pay for her betrayal in the Garden of Eden, and that the pain of childbirth suffered now limited the pains of Hell later.
Igraine did not believe it. She knew that God was punishing her, that her soul was damned by what she had done. The agony she suffered now was only a foretaste of the suffering to come. God had given her Morgan as a warning of her wickedness, and she had not listened. Now Gorlois was dead and Igraine was an adulteress, and for that she would surely burn.
The midwives bustled about the bed, doing all that they could to soothe her. They said it would not be much longer, but Igraine knew the truth. This was only the beginning. The pain would go on forever.
The stabbing pangs began again, harder than before, and Igraine screamed.
Morgan le Fay sat at the table in the nursery, listening to her mother’s distant cries with a certain gloomy relish. Her father was dead, and, since the night the king had come to Tintagel, her mother had grown cold and distant, sitting alone for hours, staring at nothing. No one had any time to spare for her, and she was lonely.
Morgan’s nursery was a large barren room. Her outgrown toys were scattered about, intermixed with newer ones—like
the rocking unicorn in the corner—that had been bought for the new baby. Morgan’s old cradle stood by the door, waiting for its new occupant, the baby that was even now being born in the room at the end of the hall.
“Hello, Morgan,” an unfamiliar voice said.
Morgan turned toward the door. Standing in the doorway was a peculiar creature dressed all in close-fitting black. His long pointed ears curved upward like horns, and his goggle eyes were pale yellow, like a cat’s.
Morgan was startled but not afraid. She had never been afraid of the unknown, even as a baby. “Who are you?” she asked curiously.
“I’m a gnome,” the gnome announced.
“You’re tall for a gnome, aren’t you?” Morgan asked suspiciously.
“Gnomes do indeed come in all shapes and sizes. I’m the tall kind,” the gnome said proudly.
“Can you do magic?” Morgan asked. She’d never given up hope of finding someone who could. Magic, she knew, was of the Old Ways, and her father had said that the Old Ways had made her, so perhaps that meant she could do magic, providing she could find someone to teach her.
“Of course,” the gnome said, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. “Watch.”
With a sweep of his hand, Frik transformed himself. No longer was he crooked and dark and ugly—no, now Frik was tall and golden-haired, a dashing adventurer wearing a voluminous white shirt and tight black leather pants and carrying a very sharp rapier.
“Ah, beautiful lady!” he cried, bowing, and now even his voice was beautiful, a rich, deep, heroic voice. “I am at your service! Your wish is my command.”
Morgan laughed delightedly, clapping her hands.
“Watch me swash a buckle!” Frik cried, leaping to the table. He engaged in a fierce combat against a nonexistent opponent—a combat which he, of course, won. He bowed again and leaped lightly down from the table, reverting to his original form once more.
“That’s weal magic, not twicks!” Morgan lisped in delight. Frik knew exactly what the girl was thinking: Just as she had always suspected it would be, magic was fun. With magic, she would not have to be alone and ugly and forgotten. Magic could transform her life. She could have friends and adventures and everyone would love her.
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