The three of them progressed past my table on their way to the dais, and I gasped, so struck by surprise that I grabbed at my chair for support: On the left hand of each of them, maiden and matron and ancient crone, shone a silvergold ring, and on each ring I saw just such a stone as the one that hung over my heart. A druid stone. Egg of the world serpent. A milpreve.
I whispered to Nurse, “Are they goddesses?”
She gave me a look full of silence.
More fays walked behind those three. I remember a fierce dark woman with the wings of a raven, a brown man with the horns of a stag, a woman who seemed to be all a flow of green water, a snow white man who carried a naked skull in his hands—I grew afraid to look any more. I hid my face against Nurse and listened to the voices.
“How shall the child be named?” It was the maiden’s melodious voice.
“He shall be called Arthur,” said my mother in a low tone I had never heard from her before. I did not understand the shadow in her voice.
“Arthur,” said a fay; it might have been the ancient crone. “Princeling, I gift you with long life.”
“Arthur who shall be king, I gift you with dominion,” said another.
“Arthur, baby prince, I gift you with strength,” said yet another.
“Thank you,” murmured my mother’s voice.
And so it went on. Courage, manliness, valor in battle. Uther Pendragon had brought Arthur to this place for his name-day just so the fays could come and gift him; Avalon is a magical place, and many such presences dwell there. And it is one of the ways of fays to give gifts to a baby prince. But as I listened, the fire dragon burned in my chest again, and fiercely, fiercely I wished that someday it would be in my power to inflict some ill upon this annoying baby who was a prince and everyone’s darling when I was not a princess and nobody was paying any attention to me. I wished it, and I felt my secret stone turn hot against my skin.
“Morgan,” said a voice that was not Nurse.
Startled, I straightened and looked. The barefoot girl with primroses in her hair stooped to gaze into my face with laughing green eyes.
“Little oddling-eyed Morgan. And Morgause,” she said with a glance at my sister to include her. “And your good nurse.” She gifted Nurse with a secret, loving look I did not understand, then turned back to me. “Little Morgan fated to be fate, do you know why you are here?”
Fate again. That word harrowed me with memory of fearsome Merlin, the haunted darkness of his eyes as he had spoken to me that day upon the moor. Whatever fate was, I didn’t like it. Dumbly I gazed back at the merry-eyed fay, feeling Nurse’s arm creep around me as if to protect me. I felt the snake stone burning against my chest.
“Why are any of us here? For luck for the babe,” the half-naked fay answered her own question. Her eyes were like cat eyes shining in firelight, like clover leaves, like green wells. I cowered, and my hand wavered up to cover my chest as if she might somehow see the milpreve under my frock. She smiled. “You’re here because it would have been bad luck not to include you,” she said. “As if luck matters to fate. Bad luck! Ha! Ha!” She danced away, laughing wildly.
“True love,” the matronly fay gifted the baby Arthur.
“Thank you,” said my mother in that same low, strained voice, cuddling the sleeping baby in both arms.
I laid my head against Nurse again, closed my eyes and gave up trying to make sense of anything.
The next thing I remember is waking up in the bedchamber. It was dark, and I knew it must be mid of night by the snores of Nurse and others; Morgause and I shared that chamber with a couple of ladies and their maids, for there were many guests to be housed that night at Caer Avalon. Someone besides me was awake, for I heard women’s voices whispering.
“Poor Igraine, having to give up her baby.”
“And she a queen. But I’d not trade places with her for all the riches—”
“No, not I either. Three months she’s nursed that babe at her own breast—”
“And where is it to go? Is some other woman to give up her babe now to nurse this one?”
“It’s a hard, hard thing to be a woman, queen or no.”
I felt wide awake—no wonder, as I had been sleeping for hours. And my eyes were making sense of the darkness now; I could see my way to the door. Softly I slipped from my bed and pattered out, my bare feet cold on the drafty floor. Whoever they were, talking, either they did not see me go or did not care.
I did not know where my mother’s chamber was in this place, or why I wanted to find it—perhaps only to stare on mystery as before.
I wandered stony corridors at random. Once I heard the scuttling of a mouse, and once I sensed the swoop of a bat, but I saw no folk, heard no—
I stiffened and stopped where I was.
Somewhere, someone was crying. A woman. Sobbing, but choking back the sound. No one was supposed to hear.
Something swept down the corridor toward me.
It was so much like a huge darkness moving in, like storm clouds over the sea, that I froze a moment before I understood that it was a man. Then I heard his heavy footfalls, saw his starry, shadowy floating robes. I shrank against the wall, and Merlin, massive in his hooded mantle, strode past me with the blanket-wrapped baby in his arms. He did not look at me, but I saw his face, for on his forehead, above the terrifying blackness of his eyes, he wore a luminous band. And centered on that band shone a stone I recognized at once.
Long after he had passed I stood there trembling.
4
MANY YEARS PASSED BEFORE I SAW MY MOTHER again, far from Caer Tintagel.
I lost my home when I was twelve years old.
I remember that day well. At the time Nurse was trying to teach me how to spin, and I was sullcily at it in the solarium, producing yards of lumpy thread, when I heard the ring of cantering hooves on the cobbles of the courtyard. I jumped onto my chair so that I could see out the window, and my heart leaped: It was Thomas, on Annie.
I had seen him only a few times since that day he had fetched me down from the quoit stone and given me a pony ride. But I had not forgotten.
Instead, I forgot spinning forthwith. I ran out the door—“Morgan, where are you going?” Morgause called after me from the loom. Without answering I dashed down the spiral stairs to the courtyard. Thomas had already gone in to the steward with his message, but Annie stood steaming at the hitching ring. I did not mind her sweaty hide; I patted and patted her sweet gray face and arranged her forelock between her eyes. She nuzzled me, and I patted her sleek wet neck and stroked her mane.
Footsteps. I turned, ready to resist anyone who might try to drag me away from the pony, but then I forgot all about Annie. It was Thomas.
He was taller than before, but then, so was I. And he was still the Thomas I remembered, a lightweight message rider, not yet a man, his face not yet a man’s face; it was the face of an angel. I was no longer young and silly enough to think that he had been to Faerie, but I still felt that in some way he was True Thomas.
“Lady Morgan,” he said. He remembered me.
“I’m no lady yet,” I said, instantly hating myself; why did the wrong words always spill out of my mouth? I did not want him to find out what a beast I could be. “Thomas,” I added lamely, trying to soften the rude edge.
He smiled, but there was something very dark and worried in his sky blue eyes. He stood close to me and in a low voice he said, “Uther Pendragon is dead.”
I was surprised, but I cared nothing for Uther Pendragon, so the news meant little to me. I was not yet old enough to understand the import of what he said.
But I heard a gasp behind me. I turned, and there stood Nurse, no doubt come to fetch me back to my spinning.
“How so?” she whispered. Her face looked like snow upon a boulder.
Thomas looked at her as if deciding whether to speak on, then spoke, keeping his voice very low. “He sickened and died. Two days ago.”
“What—what is to bec
ome of Queen Igraine?”
I stiffened, for—what was Nurse saying? That my mother might be in danger? I looked to Thomas for an answer. But he gave no answer. He only gazed back at Nurse with that shadow in his eyes.
Nurse asked, “Who sent you here?”
“Uther’s seneschal.”
“The seneschal? Does he now claim the throne?”
Thomas did an odd thing. Instead of answering, he peered over his shoulder toward the steps of the keep, where peasants waited to go in and plead their cases before Redburke, the turnip-nosed steward. And then he looked upward, to where the sky blew low and gray over the walls of Tintagel.
In the sky wheeled a great bird the color of darkest dead ashes, its motionless wings wider than those of an eagle. Beside me, I heard Nurse’s heavy breathing catch. “The Morrigun,” she said, almost choking.
“What?” I asked.
Thomas lowered his sky blue gaze to me, but no one answered. There was a long silence. I stood there staring back at him without comprehension. “What is it?” I demanded finally.
He whispered so softly I barely heard him. “The Morrigun is flying.”
“There will be war,” Nurse said in a crushed voice. “Men are fated to die.”
Fate again. I hated fate. What was this meddlesome fate that it should concern me? Fate had better let me alone. “War? Where?” I demanded.
His voice low, Thomas told me, “Everywhere, most likely. There are many who will wish to be king.”
I began to understand, but only insofar as it concerned him. “What will you do? Where will you go?”
“I don’t know.”
I heard a ladylike rustling of skirts and turned to find Morgause standing beside me. I tried not to scowl, but all I could think was that Thomas might like Morgause better than me, for Morgause was a sweet, shy violet of a young lady, mannerly, soft-spoken, everything I was not.
With an abrupt change of tone, as if we had been discussing nothing more than social pleasantries all along, Nurse asked Thomas, “Will you stop here tonight?”
“Yes. Annie must rest.”
“I’ll find you a pallet, then.”
“No need.” He gave her a long look. “I’ll make myself a bed of straw in the stable.”
Nurse nodded, beckoned to Morgause and me, and led us inside, back to work.
“Who was that?” Morgause asked.
Nurse seemed not to hear. Morgause spoke so softly and gently, always, that she was accustomed to not being heard. She did not ask again.
At the door of the solarium, Nurse touched my elbow to hold me back while Morgause entered.
“Morgan,” Nurse murmured to me, “not a word. Our lives depend on it.” She gave me a look that took me in with a power I had not known was in her. Her eyes shone like the laughing fay’s that fearsome time at Avalon, like cat eyes gleaming in firelight. Shimmering clover green. Like falling into a deep, tree-shaded well. Was this—Nurse? My stolid, familiar nurse, with such unaccountable green power in her? It seemed so. Her gaze enchanted me and terrified me for a flashing moment before she turned away and led me back to my spinning.
Perhaps an hour later I sensed someone watching me and looked up to see Redburke, of all people, looming in the doorway. Certainly he had never before taken such an interest in Morgause and me and our industry at the wheel and loom, but there he stood, all six broad burly feet of him, scowling out of his bearish hairy face at both of us. Morgause gazed blankly back at him, then ducked her chin in maidenly confusion. I merely stared like the rude child I was. Nurse stood up, curtsied, and said in her flat country way, “Your servant, Lord Steward. You wish something?”
“Bah,” he growled, and he went away.
That night I could not sleep for thinking of Annie and Thomas, Thomas and Nurse, Nurse and the potent caution she had laid on me, and Redburke, and Uther Pendragon dead and Mother and Thomas again, round and round, a glimmering green eddy of thoughts swirling ever back to Thomas until I grew tired of lying still.
But when I slipped from my bed to go wandering, my snoring nurse, without breaking the rhythm of her drone, reached up from her pallet and seized me by the arm to stop me. I was so surprised I squeaked.
“Shhh.” She sat up, and even in the dark I could see that she was not wearing her nightshirt. Instead of being a white blur, she looked like a shadow. Under her blanket she was wearing her daytime clothes. “Dress,” she whispered to me. Then she stood up and joggled my sister. “Morgause. Come, get up. Dress.”
She reached into our chests of clothing and without searching, as if she had laid out everything earlier, she handed us what we were to wear: warm wool stockings, our plainest brown frocks, shawls, mantles, stout shoes. While we struggled to dress in the dark, she pulled out from under her bedclothes bags already packed full of we knew not what. She handed us each one to carry and took two herself. “Have you your stone?” she murmured to me.
I pressed my hand to the front of my dress and nodded.
“Very well. Follow me. Not a sound,” she cautioned, and she led us out of the chamber.
By back ways, motioning us to tread softly, she led us through the kitchen and the scullery and the creamery and the mews to the stable. These were not places where we commonly went. Maids slumbered by the hearth in the kitchen. Hooded hawks slept erect, one foot pulled up to their breasts, on the perches in the mews. All was shadow and mystery, as always when I wandered the night, but this time I was not alone, and my heart pulsed hard with wonder: Where was Nurse taking us? Her silent power made me mind her for once, so that I walked like the others, slowly, slowly, careful not to knock into anything. Above the sound of our own breathing we could hear the footsteps of guards in the courtyard, but no one saw us as we slipped into the stable.
It smelled warmly of straw and horse in there, and I heard the flutter of nostrils and the thud of a hoof as someone’s hot-tempered charger stirred in its stall. Dim orange light filtered in from torches burning in their sconces on the courtyard walls. In that light I saw—
“Thomas!”
I did not say it loudly, but Nurse dropped her bags and clapped her hand over my mouth, pinching my shoulder hard with her other hand.
“Shh, Morgan,” breathed Thomas, his tone gentle. He picked up the bags, looped them together by the handles and slung them over Annie’s rump; there stood the little gray mare saddled and bridled and looking as fresh as morning. Waiting for us.
“Girls on her?” Thomas whispered to Nurse.
She must have nodded, because Thomas took my bag and set it aside, grasped me by the waist, lifted me and swung me onto Annie, seating me sideward in the saddle. “Swing one foot over her neck,” he whispered, and I did so, bunching my skirts around my knees, wide-eyed with the glory of being perched high and astride. Nurse helped him hoist my sister up behind me; Morgause clung to me around my waist as if I might somehow protect her from all this strangeness. Without a word Nurse picked up the bags we had been carrying and Thomas took Annie by the reins. Nurse and Thomas looked at each other.
Nurse motioned with her head and walked out the big stable door. Thomas followed her, and Annie followed Thomas.
My heart pounded, and I could not think. Riding Annie, astride, in the dark of night—the king had died, and now something huge was happening. Something midnight hidden, something Redburke must not know. Where were we going?
Laden by baggage, Nurse trudged across the courtyard to the gates, and—now what? There were guards at the gates. They would send us straight to Redburke.
“Halt! Who—”
“Open the gates,” Nurse said in that flat way of hers.
Her female voice brought a sentry out of the gatehouse to look at her. He scanned us all and grinned. “Woman, are you moon-mad? Where do you think—”
Nurse gave him such a look as she had given me earlier that day, the fey green gaze that had kept me from saying to anyone, even to Morgause, what I had heard. I saw her eyes flash green, like the f
lash of a salmon just under the surface of a wave, and I shivered.
“Open the gates,” Nurse told him, and without another word, dumbly like Morgause’s muslin doll, he turned and began to crank up the portcullis. The wheel creaked, the chain rattled, and other guards came running down.
“What—”
“Open the gates,” Nurse commanded them. Her back was to me, so I did not see her eyes. But the same green power must have been in her, for their eyes widened, their mouths closed, and they obeyed. They spread the gates wide.
We issued out in silence. I heard the gates close behind me, but I did not look back. Morgause hid her head against the back of my shoulder and began silently to sob.
In that moment I felt a chill in the marrow of my bones, a sure sense that my life had utterly changed.
Under a vast, cold indigo sky we wound our way up the moors, past quoit stones and tall upright stones that stood like shadowy giants in the night. I drew my mantle close over my chest and felt glad of Morgause’s warm presence at my back. She had ceased crying, but no one spoke.
Finally in a low voice Thomas said, “Protector, by what title am I to address you?”
Nurse turned to him and said gently enough, “By my name.”
I must have been quite stupid as a child. It had never occurred to me that Nurse had a name.
But she did not tell it to us. We plodded on in darkness and silence.
Thomas hazarded, “Ongwynn?”
She turned to him as if to an equal. “Yes. How did you know, Thomas?”
“I—I don’t know. I don’t know anything.”
“But you do. You know much.”
Ongwynn? It was not a name I had ever heard. Who was Ongwynn? And who was Thomas, that he knew of her?
Morgause must have felt as bewildered as I did. From just behind my ear her voice quavered, “Nurse?”
“Yes?”
“Where are we going?”
“To my home.”
It had never occurred to me that Nurse had a home either.
I Am Morgan le Fay Page 4
