I Am Morgan le Fay (6 page)

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 become 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 flash 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.

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.

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.