I Am Morgan le Fay (18 page)

A
VALON OFFERED ME POWER AND PEACE. THE POWER I learned eagerly, but the peace I could not learn.

I could not even recognize it as the deep magic it was, peace everywhere in Avalon, in the glowing candlelight, the lilting voices, the calm dawns, the sunlit streams and calm pools. I could not see how peaceful were the streams that ran with blood from the Morrigun's washing, the pools from which green-faced women and black, horselike water devils peered. How these things swam in peace I did not understand.

Cernunnos tried to teach me such peace one day early in my stay at Avalon. That dawn I sat on the grassy bank of the pool near the arbor, weary yet not ready to sleep, missing Thomas, watching the swan float like a white feather-flower with its reflection mocking it, glossy black, on the winking water. What depths of mystery hid beneath that bright surface?

Staring bleary-eyed, I thought I saw an image of a towering tree with white branches, living, moving—then I blinked and looked up. Cernunnos stood beside me.

“So, Morgan.” He sat down on the bank with me, so tall that his antlers spread over my head. “What are you thinking?”

“This water frightens me,” I said.

“She does? Ladywater? Why do you sit by her, then?”

I bristled, hearing a quirk of fun in his voice. “I am trying to understand!”

“Understand Ladywater? Impossible, Morgan. You can love her, and you can surrender to her as to fate, but you can never understand her.”

I scowled, for I did not like his teasing tone or his words. “Surrender? What is Ladywater that she should have her way with me?”

He sobered. “Her way is the way of peace, Morgan. You are right to sit by her side. Hearken to her, and she will make you well and whole.”

“I
am
whole!”

He neither smiled nor frowned. “Look at yourself in the pool.”

Oh, for the love of mercy... but I did as he said, leaning forward to look down at my own reflection atop the winking water. I gasped. A plump middle-aged woman looked back at me, not just an image but a soul, as alive as I was, smiling at me with glinting serenity across a distance of time. I gawked at her. She seemed smug, like a kitchen cat, with bright predatory eyes, white-powdered cheeks, a rich rouged mouth. With a shock to my heart I recognized her, I knew her quite surely: myself. Morgan, in a few decades.

No. No, I did not want to be like that. I did not like her.

“Go away!” I exclaimed. Her smile widened, and the surface of the water rippled. She vanished from my sight. That was a long, long time ago. I remember looking at the black reflection of the white swan, then at Cernunnos, then at the water, which showed him truly, a harsh brown handsome man with the crown of a stag.

“Try again,” Cernunnos told me.

“Try
what?”

“To be whole, you must embrace her.”

“But it's all a lie! I am not going to be like that!” I wanted to be loved, lovable.

“You must be all your selves before you can choose, Morgan.”

I stared at him, feeling mulish and stupid. My look made him smile.

“You are woman,” he said, not without reverence. “All the cycles, the phases of the moon are in you. Try again.”

I sighed and looked again for my reflection on the water. And I did not find it. Instead, this time it was as if I looked up into sky instead of down into sunrise-lit water, and as if from far below I saw a great bird flying, a raptor the color of nightfall ashes with its head surrounded by a crown of azure light. I did not understand that blue halo, but I knew that dark, ominous bird.

“The Morrigun,” I breathed.

Cernunnos said nothing.

“Me?” I looked to Cernunnos. “But how?”

“Fate?” He echoed my questioning tone.

“No. I'll not have it.” I scowled. “Does this pool make such sport of everyone?”

“Everyone? Only a favored few come here, Morgan.”

Then Thomas was numbered among a favored few. I demanded, “What would Thomas see in this pool?”

“Likely himself.” But at the mention of Thomas, something eased and softened in Cernunnos, as if he felt the warmth of the rising sun.

“Himself, as in a mirror?”

“Look to your own wholeness, Morgan. You would like to help your mother, Lady Igraine, is it not so?”

I nodded. I wanted her to love me.

Cernunnos said, “But, Morgan, you can help no one until you are whole in yourself. Try again.”

His tone made me want to shake him. I flared, “What about Merlin? The sorcerer, has he looked in this pool?”

Cernunnos stiffened. “Be careful, Morgan. Do not anger me.”

The chill in his deep eyes made me flush and obey him at once, looking at the mirroring pool. And there, for a wonder, my own youthful reflection wavered on the surface. But then my face seemed to swim away like a trout, and I saw instead a Morgan blazing like fire, golden blue bright and breathing flame, a—a dragon? But I hated dragons, I hated the memory of Uther Pendragon's fiery dragon flag frightening me, a child, as he marched into Tintagel, driving my father's men prisoner before him. I blinked. The dragon eddied away, and there was—confound it, the powdered pussycat Morgan again, the pudgy middle-aged wench—

“Embrace her,” Cernunnos urged, his harsh voice low and close to my ear.

Blast everything, I would show him. “Just so,” I retorted, and I spread my arms and lunged. As I splashed headfirst into the pool, I thought I heard someone laughing, and I could have sworn it was she. The witch.

I encountered nothing weird or slimy underwater, blessed be. I kept my eyes shut tight, pinched my nose, kicked my feet against the bottom and shot back to the surface as quickly as I could.

Perhaps it was Cernunnos I had heard laughing. Certainly he was yelping with laughter as I rose from the pool streaming like a fountain.

“That was not what I meant,” he gasped, laughing.

“Did I embrace her?” I challenged.

“I think you chased her away instead.” As if my challenge were of no account, he offered me his hand to help me as I clambered out of the water. At his touch my clothes were dry again. “Very well, Morgan. I see you will learn wholeness in your own way, in your own time, if indeed you learn it at all.”

He ambled away and left me, and I thought I had won. Not until eons later did I understand how much I had lost.

I sat by the pool again, gazed at the swan and dreamed of Thomas. Did he love me? Was I good enough?

I dreamed my way through that day and many to follow. Seasons passed like a dream in Avalon, like a whisper. The ducks would fly away, and sometimes there would be a lace-work of ice on the deep pools, gone before noon. Clouds like fish scales muted the sky and the sun set bloody, but Rhiannon still danced barefoot through longer nights until the ducks returned to nibble new grass so green it seemed to glow. Then everything would mellow for a timeless time, Cernunnos lazing in the arbor and Rhiannon bathing amid water lilies and my mother scrying by moonlight in the still pools and I tagging after all of them as pesky as a toddler, wanting to learn power like wanting to pull a buttercup out of the bud and make it bloom. Often the days and nights seemed very long to me, for I remained restless and uneasy within myself. Yet I lingered beside the waters of Avalon. And one morning the ducks would fly away again and the season turn, and another year was gone.

The ducks flew away three times. Three years gone by.

Eighteen years old now, I wore my milpreve on a band of orichalcum, the silvergold metal of the fays, magical metal I had melted and shaped with my mind. I knew the subtleties of scrying in metal or water; metal is like Redburke, remorseless and sometimes a trickster, whereas water is a kindly mother who sometimes wishes not to tell her children the whole harsh truth. I had neither surrendered to Ladywater nor embraced her, as Cernunnos had said I must, but it seemed not to matter. I knew how to heal all common ailments and how to bestow gifts and blessings and curses. I knew the languages of serpents and fishes and birds, although I spoke to them only haltingly. I had ridden on the milk white mare behind Cernunnos, and I had seen the mare take the human form of a goddess more lovely than Rhiannon, and I knew her name: Epona. I had played chess with that fearsome crone Menwy, and she had cackled like a heron when I was able to defeat her. I had seen the Morrigun at her washing, and I had seen the wild hunt that chivvies the souls of those who have died unforgiven. And I had lived. Slowly I had grown into a sense of what it meant to be Morgan le Fay.

Or so I thought.

And throughout that timeless time I had asked the mirror and the mirroring water for news of Thomas, much as my mother always and forever asked for news of Arthur. And I had sometimes seen a blond stripling whom I believed to be Arthur because the sight of him made my neck hairs bristle. But neither mirror nor moonlit pool had showed Thomas to me. I dreamed of him often, but the ways of dreaming are even trick ier than the ways of scrying. I could tell little from my dreams except that Thomas was yet alive somewhere. I would have felt it in my dreams if he were dead.

Or the bronze mirror would have showed his death to me. That mirror had the soul of an earth demon, I think. Hateful. It showed me no lies, for it knew I had the power to blast it to bits, but it showed me much hurtful truth. Ongwynn growing old. Morgause growing lonely and bitter. Annie's death, again and again.

My father's death.

Even now, hundreds of years later, I can see it in my mind's eye as dagger-sharp as I saw it that day. In the candlelit bronze circle, shadows swirled and then there was my father riding, his visor raised so that I could see his face—how my heart sprang, leaping and trembling and floundering like a hart struck through by the hunter's arrow. I gasped for breath yet I could not turn away. I gazed unblinking at the image out of the past: my father, his gray eyes stern under his helm, his gloved hands strong on the charger's reins, his armor shining—and then he lowered his visor, and, thank mercy, I could not see his face as he raised his sword, as—as he did battle. Even now that I have spread my fateful wings over many battles, I can hardly bear to think of that one, all darkness and moiling confusion and the screams of frightened men. I remember my father's shouts as they mobbed him and dragged him down from his steed. I remember his death scream.

And I saw what they did to him afterward.

I saw the battlefield, that dreadful garden of death, and my father's head on a stick like a scarecrow, and I remembered that other battlefield, and how I had cried on Thomas's shoulder, and how I had flung back my head and gazed into his grave, beautiful face and cried out my defiance of his fate.

From that day forth there began to grow in me a sense, a whisper, of what I, Morgan le Fay, meant to do.

But the conviction grew in me slowly, like a stream gathering its waters to become a river flowing. Slowly, for it would mean leaving Avalon.

If I had my way, fate be damned: Thomas would not die in battle. I would keep him safe with me always.

Before I could leave, however, I had to try to heal my mother.

I knew the task was likely to cost me dearly. Healing is a difficult, dangerous art with love at its heart. Because of the love, I had to be the one who tried; as a fay and as Igraine's daughter, I just might have the power to restore her. Perhaps not; hers was a stubborn malady. Cernunnos had tried to heal Igraine, and he had failed, although his power was great; I had seen it the day he had healed Thomas with a touch.

“Mother,” I asked not quite idly, “do you remember what it means to be in love?”

She did not look at me or answer. In the three years I had attended her daily, nothing had changed: Igraine no longer beautiful, face like a skull, sat rigid, her scrawny back not touching the back of her chair. And she seemed not to know I was there. “Arthur,” she murmured to the silver circle lying before her like a benighted pool.

“Mama.” I used the word seldom, for it had a small power I wished not to wear away.

My mother glanced at me.

“Mama, what would it take to make you well?”

She shook her narrow head. “I am well,” she whispered as if I had threatened her. She turned back to her scrying.

In the darkness under Avalon's dome I watched my mother, with a chill prickling my spine. What was it in Igraine that had defied the healing power of Cernunnos? And not only he. Many had tried, among them Menwy, Epona, Rhiannon—and if Rhiannon could not heal my mother, I knew I was an upstart and a fool even to think—

Now.
This minute.
I knew I had to attempt it at once, before my small courage left me entirely.