I Am Morgan le Fay

by Nancy Springer

  Morgause whimpered, “But—but why?”

  Nurse slogged on without answering. I told Morgause, “Because Uther Pendragon is dead.” Somehow it was now permissible for me to say this.

  “What?”

  Thomas reached over to take one of the bags from Nurse—from Ongwynn, rather. As he walked, he spoke over his shoulder to Morgause and me. “The king is dead. His lords and stewards will want to seize his lands. Your sons, if you have sons, will be the rightful heirs of Cornwall. Anyone who wants to claim Cornwall will try to kill you or imprison you.”

  Including, no doubt, Redburke. We had survived this long because he did not know we knew. He had no reason to think that Thomas would tell us. Thomas was our protector, I realized, as much as Nurse was.

  No, her name was not Nurse. It was Ongwynn.

  Without turning Ongwynn said, “Uther Pendragon would have slain you before now if it were not for your mother.”

  I felt my breath stop. I sat on Annie with my mouth open, gulping like a fish.

  Morgause asked, her voice bleakly calm now, “We—we are not going home again?”

  No one answered.

  I found my breath again, and started babbling, “The—the rings Mother gave us, the rings made of her hair—”

  Ongwynn said, “I have them. Hush.”

  I hushed. I thought of dolls, two red, heart-shaped pincushions, favorite frocks, things left behind. I looked back over my shoulder, but it was too late; Caer Tintagel was far out of sight in the night.

  We traveled until dawn, then took shelter under the shadow of a lonely dolmen—three standing stones with a great flat slab laid atop them like a roof. A place made by a giant’s hand, no one knew why. No one came to such places customarily. Out of one of the bags Ongwynn gave us bread and cheese to eat, and water from a flask. Then we slept, huddled together for warmth on the chill shale.

  Late in the day we awoke, stiff and bone-cold, ate a little and moved on.

  The days and nights of that journey have blurred together in my memory into chill, dark, weariness and little more. We traveled mostly toward the North Star; Thomas pointed it out to me one clear night, and showed me how the little bear and the big bear danced around it, and from far across the sky the giant raised his arrow to take aim at them both. But most nights were neither clear nor starlit, and we stumbled through them. We slipped around villages in the dead of night, hid behind hedges by day. Ongwynn walked ever more slowly, I did not know why—I did not then understand how much her use of the green power had cost her. Perhaps it had even cost her her good sense. Thomas tried to say that Morgause and I should walk and Ongwynn should ride, but she would not hear of it. She plodded on. Thomas taught me to guide Annie by the reins so that he could take both bags from Ongwynn. I grew saddle-sore. We were drenched by rain. Morgause and I grew quarrelsome, then sullen and mute. Somewhere Thomas found us a few eggs; we gulped them raw. We spoke little.

  “What will happen to my mother?” I asked one silent night.

  Thomas looked at me but did not answer. Ongwynn did not turn her head, only trudged on for so long that I thought there would be no answer. When she finally spoke, it was like hearing a voice from the wind. “Whoever claims the throne will also claim the queen.”

  “Likely she has fled somewhere,” Thomas said, low.

  Morgause laid her forehead against the back of my neck but for once she did not cry. We were toughening, both of us, beyond crying.

  Or so I thought.

  One dawn as we cast about for a place to hide during the day we blundered upon the aftermath of a battle.

  The carrion birds were gathering, crows and ravens and black vultures—I shivered at the sight of the vultures, wheeling like omens, like the larger omen I had seen wheeling over Tintagel, the Morrigun. The swarming of the birds should have warned us off; the stench alone should have kept Ongwynn from leading us there. Perhaps she was too weary to notice or care. Or perhaps she wanted Morgause and me to see. There was war everywhere, as Thomas had said, and it was well for us to understand what war meant.

  Remains lay in a twisted mess like wrack and jellyfish on the shore after a storm. The victors, whoever they were, had looted the defeated and also mutilated some of them. I saw headless bodies. I saw a dead man naked from the waist down, a strange, pale, bloated form, like some sort of awful fruit abandoned amid vines. Rising like a scarecrow over that dreadful garden stood a lance, its butt wedged through a tall man’s ribs into the ground, and on its tip his severed head—I supposed it had been his. He had been a goodly, bearded man. Now he was a horror with his face slashed open, his eyes and nose eaten away.

  Morgause said quite calmly, “That is what they did to our father.”

  Until that moment, no matter how many times they told me Daddy was dead, I had not fully understood.

  I did not cry then. But later, when we had found a river hollow to hide in, I could not sleep. I crept away from the others and ran back the way we had come, back toward the stench and the wheeling black cloud of crows and ravens and vultures in the sky.

  I got no farther than a copse of alder trees near the edge of the battlefield. There I stumbled across a body lying facedown, fully clothed, like a person sleeping except for the dark stain on his back. He had tried to run away, perhaps. Or he had crawled here to die. He was a small, slim man, not much bigger than a boy.

  I backed away without touching him, and then I lay in the dead, dirty brown alder leaves on the ground and wept.

  I had not been there long before Thomas found me. He walked silently; I did not realize he was there until he grasped me by the shoulders and lifted me, but I knew his gentle touch at once. “Come on,” he murmured, “before Ongwynn misses you.”

  I stood, but I clung to him and wept against his shoulder. He stood there, stroked my back as if he were patting Annie, and said nothing.

  I flung back my head, peering fiercely at his beautiful face through my tears, and I cried, “It must not happen to you.”

  His azure gaze turned to answer me. He said, his tone as bleak and gray as the sky, “It’s likely to. When I was born, the midwife told my mother I was fated to die in battle.”

  Fate be damned. I felt the secret stone burn on my chest. I cried, “No. No! Never. It must not be.”

  BOOK TWO

  Caer Ongwynn

  5

  HALF AWAKE AT DAWN, I DREAMED I WAS HOME again in Tintagel, for I could hear the roaring of the sea.

  I sighed, stretched, and realized that I lay not in my eiderdown bed but on a heap of straw under a domed roof of stone. Home, yes, but not Tintagel.

  Ongwynn’s home.

  Just the nightfall before, we had dragged in, too weary to notice much or care. Now I sat up to look around me. Peach-colored dawn light and a waft of chill dawn air drifted in through narrow half-moon openings in the rough stone walls, squat arches veiled in heather and ivy. Beside me on the straw, swaddled in her mantle as I was in mine, sleeping in her frock as I had slept in mine, Morgause turned her head away from the light, murmured and slept on.

  I felt exhausted enough to do the same. But I knew Thomas had been up half the night with Ongwynn. I pressed my lips together, rubbed the sleep out of my eyes, staggered to my bare feet and padded off through this wild, rude fortress to find them.

  Not a fortress, exactly, but a—a bastion, a haven, a hiding place. A secret stronghold in the stony bosom of earth herself. A hollow hill.

  Not large enough to be called a fortress either. There were a few sleeping chambers, that was all, honeycombed around a larger chamber with a great stone fireplace. By the hearth Thomas sat nodding, his head on his knees, but the fire burned warmly; not too long ago he had piled on more peat. At his feet, lying on a bed made of everything soft we could find to pile there, wrapped in her mantle and Thomas’s as well, lay Ongwynn.

  Thomas lifted his head as I walked toward him, although barefoot I made almost no noise. “Get shoes on,” he whispered. “You’ll cat
ch cold.”

  Perverse, as always, I ignored his order and sat beside him. The hearth fire would warm my feet. “How is she?”

  He leaned forward and touched Ongwynn’s forehead without speaking, smoothing back her sandy hair grizzled with gray. He did not answer me. The fact that she did not feel his touch was answer enough.

  “Go get some sleep,” I murmured. “I’ll watch.” I could feed peat and whitethorn sticks to the fire as well as he, bathe her hot brow as well as he could. How odd for me to be nursing Nurse. Everything had changed.

  Thomas shook his head. “I have to check on Annie.” He had left his beloved little mare outside, hobbled, to graze. But although he spoke of Annie, he did not move. Too weary. We both sat there, lulled by the warmth of the fire.

  “Thomas?” I whispered.

  He turned his head to me.

  I asked what I had never dared to ask in Nurse’s presence. “Thomas, who is she? Who is Ongwynn?”

  The silence stretched so long that I thought he would not answer. When he spoke he kept his voice as soft as a breath of summer breeze. “She is to whom commoners pray.”

  I gasped. “A goddess?”

  “Shhh.” Some things were not to be spoken of so rashly. “No. She’s more of a—a wise woman, a good witch—”

  “A fay? But she doesn’t wear—” I stopped short, my telltale hand flying to my chest.

  Thomas gave me a small, tired smile. “It’s no secret that there’s something magical about you, Morgan.”

  That frightened me. He knew of the milpreve; did he also know of the fearsome stirrings within me, darkness and fire? And—magic? I knew nothing of magic. I stammered, “What—how so?”

  But Thomas said nothing of the stone at all. He said, “Your eyes.”

  I sat speechless.

  Thomas gazed at me. “Your eyes,” he said softly, “like violets at midnight, velvet green and—and porphyry. The Gypsies say—” He stopped.

  “What?” I whispered.

  He looked at the floor now. “A colt with one brown eye and one blue is elf ridden,” he said, giving each word a quiet weight. “A baby with such eyes—a changeling. You—” His glance flashed up to my face and he smiled—his smile took my breath away. “You, who knows? Are you a changeling, Morgan? A visitor from Faerie?”

  His tone was so warm and whimsical that his words added only a little to my fear. “I—I don’t think so!”

  Thomas had mercy on me. “Maybe I have listened to too many firelit tales.”

  Near our feet, Ongwynn shifted her shoulders as if they hurt from some burden, murmuring something as she stirred. I leaned over to stroke her coarse grizzled hair, like a gray horse’s mane, away from her forehead. I would not mind being like Ongwynn, I considered. I asked Thomas, “Is she indeed a fay?”

  “No, I think she is what you would call a pedlar, a white witch. Likely she knows spells for easy birthing and to heal clubfoot, leprosy, colic, that sort of thing. And we’ve seen that she knows something of the old powers.”

  “But ...” It seems laughable now, but his calm listing of a pedlar’s powers awed me at the time. “But what more can a fay do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But you say—”

  “All I know is ...” He stopped to think, then spoke softly. “Pedlars are like the rest of us, they grow old and weaken and die. But fays—stay.”

  “Fays live forever?”

  “In a way.” He frowned, for these were deep matters, and he spoke slowly. “They—they take different forms ... and they are like the cycle of seasons, or like the moon; they wax and wane. They have dwindled somewhat since the old golden days. But they will grow strong again.”

  “Different forms? They change shapes?”

  “I—I have heard so, Morgan, but how can I know? I am just a commoner. Fays are for noble folk such as you.”

  “You’re no commoner,” I declared. No one could look at him and think him a commoner.

  He lowered his gaze. After a moment he said, “I have cast in my lot with commoners.” Then, probably to turn me away from more questions, he looked at me and said, “See if you can’t get some kind of soup cooking for her, would you?” He got up, stumbling with weariness, and left to see to Annie.

  Soup. Soup for Ongwynn.

  I had never touched a cooking pot in my life. But the journey had turned me from a coddled girl to nearly a woman within a fortnight, and I set about doing what I could. Pegged to the chimney walls hung odds and ends of cookware, knives and pokers and such. I found an iron kettle and dragged it out through the portal—I cannot properly call it a doorway, for it was like slipping through a quoit stone, a hole in the stony hillside, hidden amid gorse bushes. This was a secret place, Ongwynn’s home, with the sea washing against rocky shores on three sides and no village anywhere near. Halfway up the hillside behind Ongwynn’s dwelling, the spring flowed from a rocky scarp into a pool where fallow deer and foxes drank, where willow and rowan grew. In their green shadow, silver trout swam with barely a ripple. Standing amid rushes, a bittern lifted its head as I dipped my kettle full of water, and a bittern is the most wild of waterbirds, but this one did not take flight. There was an ancient green magic in this place, giving it great peace.

  I wanted to stay by the spring, even though my bare feet shivered in the dewy heather, but I needed to take care of Ongwynn. Lugging the water back inside, I spilled some on myself and grew truly cold. As I hung the kettle on the hook over the fire, Ongwynn stirred and groaned.

  I knelt beside her and soothed her hot forehead with my cold, wet hand. She opened her eyes and gazed at me.

  “I’m trying to make you some soup,” I told her.

  Her lips moved. “I need ...” But her voice was like the sighing of a sea wind. I could not make out the words.

  “What, Nurse? What do you need?”

  Her gaze clouded. She closed her eyes.

  “It sounded like scone. Rude scone, or something like that,” said my sister’s voice. I looked up to see Morgause standing over me, sleepy-eyed, her hair tangled and riddled with straw, as I am sure mine was also. “Morgan, you’re soaking wet. Your feet are blue with cold.”

  I did not bark and snarl at her as I would once have done. While I still scorned her as the mouse she was, during the long days of riding I had realized that I needed her.

  “Go put on stockings and shoes,” she said.

  “In a minute.” I turned to check on the fire. It burned strongly enough. “What goes in soup?”

  “Meat and barley and leeks and such.”

  Oh, certainly. And a roast suckling pig and a fresh roe-filled salmon or two. “Where shall we get”—I mimicked her voice—“meat and barley and leeks and such?”

  Morgause shrugged. “I’ll look around. You go find dry clothes.”

  There were few enough clothes to share amid the pair of us, all of them in sore need of washing. Shivering in the chill of our straw-piled bedchamber, rummaging in our bags, it took me a while to find something dry and only moderately filthy to put on. When I got back to the warmth of the hearth, there at the rude table to one side of the fireplace sat Morgause placidly chopping carrots and parsnips and something brown—dried meat.

  Dried meat! “Where did you get that?” I exclaimed.

  “In the pantry.” Morgause slipped a bit of carrot into her mouth. “Mmm. Sweet. Nice and fresh.”

  I grabbed an orange circle. “Why would there be fresh carrots in the pantry?” I mumbled around my own chewing. Ongwynn’s home had the feel of having been empty for years. It was a cave, for the love of mercy. A hollow tor echoing with the roar of the sea. That sound of grumbling salt water, and the salt air I breathed, made me feel at home here, but in truth this place was not much like Tintagel. No busy comings and goings. No folk. Not a cottage in sight. “Does someone know we are here?” I reached for a whole carrot, but Morgause snatched it away from me.

  “Don’t. We need it for the soup. That’s all there
is.”

  Behind me I heard a surprised breath. I turned. Thomas stood staring, a few wild onions dangling in his hand.

  “Where—” he whispered.

  “In the pantry,” Morgause said at the same time I did.

  Thomas took a long breath and lifted his head, turning toward the morning light. He scanned the domed and groined hall of stone. I looked to see what he was looking for and saw nothing but rock, dust, cobwebs and shadows. Yet Thomas spoke. “Thank you, dwellers in Caer Ongwynn,” he said softly to the shadows.

  Caer Ongwynn? This was no castle.

  Yet no one laughed.

  Except, perhaps, the denizens. From somewhere there sounded a kind of squeak or chuckle—it might have been a hedgehog or some sort of bird. I wanted to think it was just a bird or a mouse that had come in from outside.

  Morgause and I looked at each other. Neither of us spoke. She turned back to slicing parsnips.

  On her makeshift bed Ongwynn stirred and murmured.

  “Has she come to herself at all?” Thomas asked.

  I nodded. “Just for a moment. She said something I couldn’t quite catch.”

  “Something about bread,” Morgause said.

  “Scone,” I corrected, for a scone was not quite the same thing as bread.

  “Bread would be better for her,” Morgause said.

  “What does it matter? Scone or bread, we do not have it to give to her.”

  The water in the kettle had finally started to steam, although it was not yet boiling. Morgause scooped up handfuls of chopped dried meat and plunked them in, then the vegetables. Wobbling with weariness, Thomas nudged peat into the fire.

  “Thomas,” I told him, “go sleep.”

  “I’m not tired,” he said, and he sat down on the stone floor near Ongwynn. Glancing at him a moment later, I saw that his head drooped, eyes closed.

  “You’re going to fall over and conk yourself,” I told him.

  He did not answer, but began to sag to one side. I could have bowled him over with a touch. The thought tempted me and made me smile, but I took him by the shoulders and eased him to the stone, where he sprawled and slumbered. I stood gazing at him. Many folk look more beautiful, more innocent, more holy when they are sleeping, but Thomas did not. It was not possible. He had about him the innocent courage of a holy hero always.