by Lee Carroll
In the story my mother had read to me the Château of Lusignan was a great castle with flags flying from its many towers. Melusine had built it for her husband, Raymond, and their descendants ruled there for over four hundred years. Now there was nothing, not even a plaque to commemorate where it had once stood. There wasn’t enough left perhaps to even attract a few tourists. It felt as if Melusine and the dynasty she had founded had evaporated as surely as she had dissolved into water. What was left to return her to? What would she make of her once grand home?
I wandered back down the hill and past the closed tourist office, noticing now a small wooden sign pointing again to LES VESTIGES DU CHTEAU. I followed the arrow down a steep, narrow dirt path that clung to the hillside below the park. As I descended, I heard the rush of water and glimpsed flashes of silver between the trees—the Vonne running below in the valley. I came across a stone wall, a bit of toppled tower covered with grass and moss, like something from a Piranesi etching. I followed the stone wall through a narrow passageway into a round clearing full of wildflowers and dragonflies. Looking up, I saw the railing of the park and understood that the park was laid out on the foundations of the old château and these were its crumbling battlements. The vestiges, upon which the village held its fêtes. I imagined dances at night, children running in and out between the trees, old men sitting on the benches that once held up the walls of the Château of Lusignan.
I thought at lathat Melusine would have been happy to see the château she raised tumbled down into rocks and moss. In the cracks of one of the walls I found a thin stream of water burbling up from some underground stream, even now seeming to erode the rock foundation further. I took out the Poland Spring bottle, uncapped it, and held it over the spring.
“You can go home now,” I said, pouring the water into the spring.
The water from the bottle joined the stream, then pooled for a moment in the cupping rock. A faint mist rose from the pool and spiraled upward. Everything was perfectly still in the grove; even the dragonflies paused in their flicker and dart. I felt the way I had on the platform in Poitiers, that time had stopped, that I was outside time. The mist wreathed itself into a sinuous shape—a woman with serpent tail and batlike wings. She turned to me and I saw the same green eyes I’d seen staring up at me from a pile of goo on Governors Island, only these eyes were full of joy.
“Thank you, Marguerite, my sister, for bringing me home at last.”
“It’s Garet,” I said, recalling that Melusine had called me Marguerite and sister on Governors Island just before she’d dissolved. “Do you remember…?”
“I remember everything,” she said with a shudder that made the mist ripple into shards of rainbows. “Did you find the box?”
“Yes, but then Will Hughes took it. He’s taking it to the Summer Country to summon the creature that made Marguerite mortal—”
“You must ssssstop him!” Melusine hissed, water droplets spraying my face. “She becomes stronger each time she’s summoned, feeding on the need of those who call her. If she gets loose…” The water molecules that made up Melusine wavered in the air with her agitation. I was afraid she was about to break up again, but then she steadied herself and went on, “She’ll destroy everything if she escapes the lake.”
“Why?” What I really wanted to ask was, if I stopped Will from summoning the creature in the lake, then how could he become mortal? And if he didn’t become mortal, how could we ever be together? But those questions all seemed a bit self-centered in the face of global annihilation. “Why does she hate humanity so much?”
Melusine rippled in the air, her molecules refracting rainbows. “It’ssss a long sssstory,” she sighed.
I sat down on a rock beside her. “Go ahead. I have hours before my train.”
* * *
“In the beginning the Summer Country and the human world ran side by side like two streams running to the sea.” Melusine’s voice trilled like church bells in the still air, her lisp gone. I felt that she’d told this story to herself and others—perhaps heard it from others—many times, and like a stutterer who only stutters on her own words but not set pieces, she was able to recite it flawlessly. “irst fey and humans lived peaceably side by side but with little interaction as we were too different. We fey were … ethereal.” A pulse of air and water demonstrated what she meant. “But the longer we interacted, some of us became more … corporeal.” The droplets in the air became heavier and grayer, like the sky before rain. “Most of us then only wanted to play with the humans, but some of us became so enamored of them they wanted to be human. We took shapes that combined their features with the animals they loved. We appeared as winged men and fish-tailed women”—she swished her own tail—“as centaurs and unicorns and dragons. We learned what it was like to feel the sun on our faces and the rush of water over our skin. We learned what hunger and thirst felt like, and desire and love … and pain.” The heavy droplets began to fall. I was afraid she’d disappear entirely, but she collected herself in time and reassembled her molecules. She looked thinner, though, and fainter, and I wondered if she would have enough time to finish her story.
“The pain drove some of us further into our own world, which made our world deeper and began to separate the worlds. But others of us had become addicted to the sensations, the pain as well as the joy—I think maybe there were some who actually came to like the pain best of all because it made them feel most alive. Some say those were the ones who began taunting humans to hurt them, but others say it was the humans who, frightened by the strange shapes we took, tortured some of us. Whoever initiated the cycle of pain, once set in motion, no one could stop it. Our leaders believed it would be best for all—humans and fey—to dwell separately. The two streams of being were diverted, the worlds divided. Only some of us refused to go back to the Summer Country, especially the ones who had become addicted to pain, both the giving and receiving of it. They became what you would call demons and grew so awful that our leaders saw they could not leave the humans alone to deal with them. They set four guardians to watch over the human race and patrol the demons, one for each element. But the presence of the Watchtowers enraged the demons. There was a war and for the first time fey killed fey. One of the Watchtowers, the bravest warrior, my sister Maeve, was killed.”
Oberon had told me that one of the Watchtowers had been killed in a war, but he hadn’t said which—and I hadn’t realized that Melusine was her sister.
“Wait, does that mean you were a Watchtower?”
“Yessss,” she moaned, her lisp back in force. “I loved mankind as your ancestor Marguerite loved it. But when our sister Maeve was killed, our fourth sister was so stricken she turned against mankind. She would have destroyed every last human, so Marguerite and I, aided by the leaders of the fey, trapped her in a lake that lay between the two worlds.”
“That’s the creature in the lake?” I demanded. “She’s your sister? And Marguerite’s sister, too? Which makes her…”
“Your great-aunt. Yessss.”
“So if I went to her and asked as a special favor for her grandniece to give Will Hughes his mortality back…”
height="0em" width="1em" align="justify">A sudden chill fell over the grove. Melusine, her molecules now sharp as pinpoints, coiled in the air, her scales bristling. She lashed out so fast I thought she was going to strike me, but she stopped inches from my nose, her wings beating the air above our heads. “Do you think she’ll obey the call of kin when she cared nothing for me, her ssssissster? She has dwelt in the lake for millennia, her heart growing colder with each passing year. Her only joy is feeding off the hearts of those who come to ask her favors. They say she only grants a wish if she’s sure it will bring the supplicant grief. I told Marguerite that when she asked to be made mortal, and look what happened—as soon as she was mortal, her lover betrayed her and became a monster—”
“And yet she didn’t stop loving him. Nor have her descendants. Oberon told me that Marguerit
es have fallen in love with Will life after life—that he’s spent an eternity trying to keep them apart.”
“Exsssactly,” Melusine hissed, spraying water in my face. “What worse punishment than to know each descendant will be plagued by love for that … man. Even worse than what I have had to suffer. Loving a mortal man only ever leads to pain and heartache. You’d be best advised to leave Will Hughes to his own fate, which, if I know my sister, will be to be eaten alive.”
I was going to tell her that not all men were worthless. I might not be able to make any definitive claims for Will Hughes, but I knew some really decent men—such as my father, my friend Jay, and Becky’s new boyfriend, Joe Kiernan—but before I could launch into a defense of the male gender, I saw another spiral of mist rising from the spring. Following my gaze, Melusine turned to watch just as the mist formed itself into a man in medieval armor.
“I cannot blame you,” a voice rang out like a deeper bass bell to Melusine’s crystalline tinkles, “for so hating my sex after how I treated you, Wife. I have bided all these long years, among the vestiges of our home, for a chance to tell you I am sorry for ever doubting you.”
Melusine quivered, each droplet swelling like dusky grapes. I could feel her hesitation, heavy as coming rain. All the centuries of wounded pride hung in the air between them. Would a simple apology suffice?
It did. I saw it first in her eyes—recognition, forgiveness … and then a love so startling in its clarity that the whole grove filled with light. She embraced him, water swirling into water, two streams once divided racing to join one another again. As they merged, I felt my own face grow wet, but then as they began to sink, a fountain in reverse, I collected myself.
“Wait! You haven’t told me where I’m supposed to go next.”
“I should think it would be obvious,” Melusine’s voice rilled in the air, its timbre already merging with the rush of the Vonne far below us. “The place where my sister Morgane dwells is protected by an enchanted forest which you have to pass through first. Val sans Retour, they call it. The Valley of No Return.”
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Effigy in Stone
Of all the ways I’d imagined embarking for the Summer Country, speeding down the E50 at 140 kilometers per hour in a Peugeot had not been one of them. But there I was, strapped into the passenger seat, trying not to squeal every time Octavia La Pieuvre used one of her hands to peel a hard-boiled egg or reach in the backseat for the map. She still had two hands on the wheel, after all, and seemed to be an expert driver.
“I drove an ambulance in both World Wars,” she said when I complimented her. “Nothing like dodging exploding artillery shells to hone one’s reflexes. This”—she gestured at the straight highway running between flat fields—“is child’s play. I want to get to the hotel in Paimpont before dark so we can both get a good night’s sleep. We’ll need it tomorrow.”
When I’d related to her that Melusine had said we had to go to the Val sans Retour, her pearly skin had turned ashen gray, but she wouldn’t tell me why the place frightened her. I’d looked it up on the Internet and found out that the Val sans Retour in the forest of Brocéliande, the modern forest of Paimpont, was mentioned in Arthurian legend as the place where the enchantress Morgan le Fay had trapped her faithless lovers. Was it just a coincidence, I wondered, that Melusine had said her sister’s name was Morgane?
“This creature below the lake, Mor—”
All of Octavia’s hands flew up in the air and the car swerved momentarily into the next lane. “We don’t speak of the Watchtower who betrayed humanity.”
I clucked my tongue impatiently. “We’re on our way to see her and ask her favors. I should think saying her name was the least of our problems.”
Octavia’s hands resettled back on the steering wheel, but she still looked inky.
“And besides,” I added. “It’s not like I’ve never heard the name before. Morgan le Fay, half sister of Arthur, sorceress, is pretty famous. Is this woman under the lake the same person?”
Octavia sighed, but didn’t answer. She tilted the rearview mirror with one hand and tisked at the inky flush on her face. Only when she had withdrawn a seashell-shaped compact from her purse, administered powder to her face, and clicked shut the compact with a decisive snap did she answer my question.
“Morgan le Fay,” she declaimed loudly, as if inviting the universe to smite her, “Morrigan, Modron, Muirgen … her names are legion. She is the oldest of the four Watchtowers and the most … elusive. She is the gentle queen who escorts Arthur to Avalon, but also the enchantress who ensnares men in the Valley of No Return. She is Morrigan, the crow queen of war and destruction, and Modron, goddess of fertility and the harvest. She ruled over death and birth and could grant immortality to humans and mortality to the fey. They say she loved humanity best of all, but when her sister Maeve was betrayed and killed by a man, she determined to destroy the whole race. Her sisters Marguerite and Melusine tricked her into the pool at the center of the forest of Brocບnde and trapped her there using her own snares and spells.”
“The forest of Brocéliande? Okay, here’s something I don’t get. If you already knew that Morgane was trapped in a lake in the forest of Brocéliande, and you know that Brocéliande is the modern-day Paimpont, then why couldn’t you just go to Paimpont, find the lake, and ask Morgane to make you mortal? Why did you need me? And why did I have to sit in a church in Paris for a week and then go to Fontainebleau and Lusignan?”
“The mythical forest of Brocéliande is not a place of this world. It can’t be found on a map of France. You can’t reach it on the E50”—she gestured with several hands to the blur of highway outside the car windows—“or take a TGV from Montparnesse and expect to find the door open to Brocéliande. You could wander for days—for months, years even—in the forest of modern-day Paimpont and never find the pool where Morgane dwells. When Melusine and Marguerite imprisoned her there, they set spells to guard the approach so only a very few—those vetted by the fey—could find the pool. Even though you have gone through the steps and been sent on by Jean Robin, Sylvianne, Hellequin, and Melusine, you still have no guarantee that you’ll find your way to the pool. The final test will be in the Val sans Retour … and it won’t be an easy one. And, as the name implies, there won’t be any second chances. Either we’ll find the pool tomorrow or we’ll remain in the Valley of No Return forever.”
* * *
After that dire pronouncement there didn’t seem to be much more to say. We both lapsed into silence, Octavia intent on driving fast while I stared out the window at flat fields and turreted towns in the distance. I got the best sense of where we were from the large decorative billboards of each town—a cathedral for Chartres, a portrait of Proust complete with tea and madeleines for Illiers-Combray, bicyclists for Tours. Eventually I drifted off to sleep. When I awoke, we’d left the highway and were on a narrow country road bordered by towering trees. We passed rough stone cottages with brightly painted red or blue doors and delicate lace curtains in the windows.
I yawned and looked over at Octavia. “Are we there?”
For answer she pointed to a sign painted on the side of a gas station. A lascivious, doe-eyed fairy in skimpy dress sat on a toadstool beneath the words BIENVENU À LE PAYS DE LA FÉE MORGANE. I’d been surprised by the lack of tourism surrounding Melusine’s old home, but there didn’t appear to be any lack here in Morgane’s old stomping ground. We passed a camping ground decorated with tin cutouts of fairies, dragons, and wizards. The campers themselves were wearing long dresses and floppy shirts. It looked like a Woodstock reunion. A sign advertising a FÊTE MÉDIÉVALE explained the archaic dress. This must be a French version of the Renaissance Faires popular in America. When we pulled up to the Relais de Brocéliande, a half-timbered lodge sitting above a walled town, abbey, and lake, the parking lot was full of painted minivans and VW Beetles circa 1968.
“Is there something going on here this weekend?” I asked.
Octavia shrugged as she pulled a cloak over her shoulders. “There’s always some sort of festival or fair going on here. The young people are quite enamored of fairies and Arthurian legend. I often wonder what Arthur and Guinevere would make of it all.”
Before I could ask if she’d actually known Arthur and Guinevere, Octavia was out of the car and striding briskly up the ramp to the hotel, pulling a Louis Vuitton valise behind her. By the time I had wrestled my battered duffel out of the trunk, she was already at the front desk signing us in. As she handed her credit card to the clerk, I noticed how tired she looked—and how dry. Of course, I realized, she hadn’t had a chance to hydrate since we’d left Paris. My guess was confirmed when I heard her ask if there was a tub in her room.
“I’ll need to … rest for a while if we’re to attempt the forest tomorrow,” she said as we followed the bellboy up to our separate rooms. “Do you mind if I leave you on your own for the rest of the evening?”
“Not at all, Octavia. Is there anything I can get for you? Some … bottled water?”
“Yes, that’s a good idea. If you wouldn’t mind having room service send up two dozen oysters and three liters of Perrier and telling them just to leave the tray in the room. Thank you, my dear.” She touched my hand and I was alarmed to feel how dry and papery her skin felt.
“I’ll do that,” I said. “Would you like me to stay with you?”
“No, dear. It’s best that I’m alone. I need to focus all my reserves.”
I had the restaurant send up the oysters and water and waited outside the room to make sure the waiter left the tray without disturbing Octavia in her bath. I could hear the splash of water from behind the closed door and could only hope that she was all right.
