I Am Morgan le Fay (19 page)

I stood, whispered a command to my milpreve—it blazed to life like a blue star—and I laid my hands one on each of my mother's rigid, brittle shoulders.

Had I known how much it would hurt, to no purpose, I might not have tried.

It was her pain that I encountered, such a knotted, stubborn, fearsome inward pain that I could not bear it, let alone budge it. Yet I experienced it through my hands clear to my heart, the power of that pain taking me over, when I would by far have preferred the fey power that had felled me when I had healed Ongwynn. The force of my mother's relentless suffering sent me staggering back, gasping and whimpering. Tears almost blinded me, but through the blur of misery I could see my mother sitting as before, staring at her mirror, as if she had not even felt my hands upon her.

I had managed not to scream, or not loudly, but somehow Rhiannon knew anyway and was there in an eyeblink, her arms around me. “Oh, Morgan,” she whispered.

She smelled of waterflowers, as always. I laid my head on her half-naked shoulder and wept like a child, but within a moment the agony seeped out of me and my heartbreak turned to fury. As if I were still a six-year-old, that same old hateful fire dragon blazed hot, hot in my chest. I pulled away from Rhiannon and shouted through my tears, “She doesn't love me! She has never loved me!”

Rhiannon did not dispute it, but merely asked, “Do you love her?”

“Of course I do!” But I knew the moment I said it that it was not true enough, curses take it, and that was why I had failed. I did not love my mother as I loved Ongwynn. It would have been more true that I wanted Mother to love me, to think of me, to ask for me and not always and forever that hateful Arthur, Arthur, Arthur.

“Arthur,” my mother murmured yet again to the shadowy mirror. “Show me Arthur.”

“Maybe it's not so simple,” I told Rhiannon wearily.

“Is love a simple thing?”

I shook my head. “It's no use for me to try again.”

“Perhaps in another season or two? You are still very young.”

I lifted my eyes to hers, feeling spent enough to tell her plainly, “I must leave soon.”

“Morgan! But why?”

Love,
murmured the shadowy river of self gathering within me, growing, starting to sing.
Love always and forever, never to be lost.

To Rhiannon I answered only, “I have plans.”

Still, I might have lingered a while longer, for time meant little in Avalon, and a morning beside those shadowshining waters passed like a moment—but the very next day, Ladywater herself set spurs of fear to me and rushed me on my way.

I remember as if it were yesterday: I walked barefoot through rank new grass, wild with buttercups and bluestars, to the swan pool. I sat on the grassy bank in the sunshine, thinking of nothing but Avalon's beauty; how could I leave this place of wonders? But then in the mirroring water I saw an image of Ongwynn lying white-shrouded amid wreaths of columbine.

Dead.

My heart went numb. I sat without moving or speaking as the image rippled away and the white swan drifted past, its black reflection turning its graceful head to look at me.

The message was kindly meant, I knew. This was Ladywater, the very tears of the great mother. She would not show me anything to hurt me unless she had a reason.

Columbine. Ongwynn was fated to die in the early summer. I had time.

Motherwater had showed me to give me time.

It was time to leave Avalon. Time to go home.

 

 

“Mother,” I told Igraine, “I don't know whether I will ever see you again.”

She did not look at me. “Arthur,” she murmured to the mirror.

I hugged her around her narrow shoulders, kissed her cheek—cool and withered, like shirred silk—and turned away.

I had already said good-bye to the others: Rhiannon, Epona, Menwy, and many whom I have not named. I did not turn back now, could not turn back. I raised my head and stiffened my spine.

The petal-portals of Avalon were just closing as I strode outside, where in the dawn light Cernunnos awaited me beside a caparisoned steed pulling at its reins.

I did not ask him where he had procured that grand horse for me. I knew that sometimes false-hearted knights were still foolish enough to venture to Avalon.

“Thank you, my lord.” I bowed my head to him and sketched a curtsy of sorts—I wore the clothing of a lady again, or approximately so, with a mantle around my shoulders and a heavy skirt flowing to my feet, and I gave him the courtesy of a lady. But he surprised me. He hugged me, and my heart swelled when I felt the warmth of his embrace; I returned it, laying the side of my head for a moment on his brown-furred shoulder.

“You know you are not yet whole,” he said. “You have not embraced your shadow.”

I pulled away from him, harrowed by the memory of shadows in the mirroring pool: the matron and the crone. Age and death. A sorceress and the Morrigun. I flared, “I will never embrace.”

“Do not say that! You do not yet know; you are a young moon just rising. Do not yet set yourself to battling the tides.”

Nonsense,
I thought. I felt that I was ready and equal to all that I planned to undertake. But I said nothing, only looked into his face.

Under his crown of antlers his deep brown eyes, shadowed like forest pools, gazed back at me. “You have not yet come to the choice,” he told me.

The choice of which he had spoken that first day, between the peaceful ways of fays and the shadowed ways of sorcery.

“How can you say to embrace, then say to choose?”

“You must
be
to choose who you will be.”

“But have I not chosen to be a fay?” I argued. “Why would I choose an evil path?”

“Not so much evil as ... restless, discontent, out of tune with the cycles. Estranged from the mothers.” As he spoke, his eyes blazed golden, so hot I stepped back. “Trying to be a lord over the earth. Apart.”

I understood much that he was not saying, would never say: that he had been a god, like the others, whereas a sorcerer like Merlin only aspired to be a god. Estranged from the ancient power of earth, Cernunnos had said. It was in the cycles of earth and moon that Cernunnos and the fays found life and strength. I asked, “From what do sorcerers draw their power, then?”

Cernunnos gave me a long look, the golden fire in his eyes dimming to a gentle glimmer. He answered quietly, “From self-will such as yours, Morgan.”

My heart burned dragonish with vexation. I wanted to breathe fire at him, and I could have done it, but I stamped my foot instead. “You think I will be that sorceress I have seen in the pool? Never! I hate her!”

Cernunnos only sighed, then smiled upon me, wistful and wry and not quite human. Without another word about wholeness or choice or fate, he helped me onto the charger and handed me the reins. “May the Lady give you a safe journey, Morgan,” he blessed me. “Farewell.”

I hated him. I adored him. My feelings battled within me so fiercely that I could not speak, but I lifted my hand to answer his blessing and bid him good-bye. Then I turned the steed toward the mountains and let it carry me away as fast as it liked. And so I departed from Avalon.

 

I stopped only to sleep or wash my face and once to lay blue windflowers on Annie's cairn. That foul knight's armor still lay over her where I had piled it, and his whitening bones lay amid rotting woolens nearby. Odd that nothing had been disturbed.

I knelt there a moment by Annie—what was left of Annie—then rode on.

Three times by then I had met with knights errant, but I had not troubled myself to hide from them; I had stared them down. It was not the usual thing for a girl of eighteen to ride alone, on a war horse, wild-haired and astride, with a split velvet skirt flowing down over spurred boots and a blue stone flaring with its own fey light on one finger—not usual at all. Perhaps it was my defiant strangeness that gave them pause. Or perhaps it was the way I could control the charger with a touch or a thought, with no need of bit or reins. And no need of a pack horse, for fays have ways of procuring what they require. Perhaps those knights whispered to themselves, “Fay.” Perhaps they saw my uncanny eyes, or—of course there was the shimmer of faery power all over me; I am always forgetting that. No wonder they growled in their beards and let me alone.

And likely they spoke of me to those whom they met: Did you see her? Who was she? Where did she come from? Where is she going?

None of this frightened me, although it should have.

And so kicking up rumor like dust wherever I passed, I scaled the tors and cantered curveting through the villages and let my courser gallop across the moors and journeyed swiftly to Caer Ongwynn.

I
CLATTERED IN JUST AT SUNSET, AMID PEACH-AND-PURPLE light glancing off the billows of the sea, and my noise brought Morgause out of the portal. She wore one of the gowns I had left, in ruins now, and her hair hung in a long frazzle, echoing—lines on her face? But she was only nineteen, a year older than I. How could she be so worn?

At first she gawked at me—I think in the sharp-edged light slanting off the sea she could not at once tell who I was. Then her taut face twisted, and she shouted, “High time you came home!” as she burst into a spate of tears. As I jumped down from the charger, she strode over and hugged me hard, then pulled back as if she wanted to slap me. “Morgan, you are so beautiful. Do you have a sweetheart? I hate you. Where is Annie?”

“Dead,” I said as gently as I could, and still my voice came out with an edge. “My fault. Ongwynn?”

Morgause went very still, her wet, weary face trying to spare me.

Columbine; Ladywater had shown me Ongwynn's body draped with columbine. And columbine would not be in bloom for a month yet. Ongwynn could not yet be dead. Must not be dead. I asked, “She has taken to her bed, is that it?”

My sister nodded.

I reached up and touched the horse in the middle of its forehead to tell it not to wander, left it standing in its gear and strode into Caer Ongwynn.

It was dim and smoky in there, with the chill salty air seething in the ivy-mantled wind holes just the way I remembered. Peat piled by the hearth, onions hanging in bunches, chickens scratching at the dirt floor—nothing had changed at all. Yet all seemed petty, rude and strange to me, perhaps because I was a fay now and accustomed to the grandeur of Avalon—or perhaps because one thing was greatly wrong. Ongwynn's bed stood before the hearth, and she lay in it, and the very stones of Caer Ongwynn mutely wept.

Ongwynn. I stood for a moment by her bedside gazing down at her face—lidded eyes, silent mouth, a face as simple and stolid as a water-sculpted stone. “Nurse?” I whispered.

From behind me Morgause said, “She can't hear you anymore.”

I sat down on the edge of the bed, put my mouth to my hand and thought a wish to my milpreve and kissed it, then laid that hand to the side of Ongwynn's still face. “Come, weary one, wake up for a moment,” I murmured.

Ongwynn's eyelids fluttered. She opened her eyes and gave me a placid tan look. Her mouth stirred; she smiled at me. “Morgan,” she murmured, “you're back. Good.”

From behind me Morgause gasped. “Can you—Morgan, can you heal her?”

“No.” Ongwynn spoke before I could, her voice like a whisper through dried grass. “It's my time.”

Without turning—for I wanted to look only at Ongwynn—I said to Morgause, “Cernunnos has spoken for her. And somewhere a baby girl has been born who will be the next Ongwynn.”

“And you, little Morgan?” Ongwynn spoke like a breath of west wind. “Who will you be?”