I Am Morgan le Fay (9 page)

“Scone,” I whispered, puzzling aloud, “spoon, stone, crude stone, good stone, trued stone—”

“Morgan,” breathed Thomas, his voice taut. I looked up at him, and he stood like a deer about to leap, his eyes wide, gazing at me.

Druid stone.

Even before I thought it, my hand, which often seemed to have more sense than my head, pressed to my chest. Against my skin I could feel the stone burning like my own fury against fate.

Despite that fire I froze, icy with fear. Terror. Magic? Something magical about me? But I knew nothing of magic, and I remembered the black pits that were Merlin's eyes. What might happen to me if I attempted this fearsome thing?

Yet I had to try.

My hand found the red silk cord knotted around my neck. I drew the druid stone out of my frock and let it swing free and naked in the firelight. In that flickering tawny glow, the milpreve shone with its own fey sky blue-gold light, pulsing like an azure star, a cold spark so bright it made me blink. I heard Thomas gasp, but I did not speak to him; I sensed that I had better waste neither time nor strength talking. I took the fey stone in the palm of my left hand, where it burned blue, blue. With my right hand I pulled the covers back from Nurse. Then my hand hovered over her until, with its own good sense, it came to rest on her chest just where her old brown dress opened into collar, where her breastbone widened at the base of her neck, close to her heart. I pressed my hand into the warmth that had cared for me from birth and whispered, “Please.”

I could feel the life fluttering too weak in her humble neck. Other than that, nothing happened.

“Please,” I said to the night, the stone shining true blue and relentless in the darkness. “I need her.”

Nothing. Not even a chuckle in the shadows.

Then, like the brat I was, like the mule-headed child she had raised me to be, I flared into rage because I was not getting my own way. “A pox on you!” I shouted at the night, at the distant, darkened moon, sending echoes and doves flying; I could hear beating wings and frightened whistlings overhead. “Damn everything!” And in that tantrum moment I somehow knew what I had to say, what I had to surrender. I yelled, “All right, I am Morgan and I am fey, damn it, and I will be—I will be whatever I have to be to save her! Blast it, now make her well!”

Even after all these many years, I do not understand much better than I did then whence the power comes or where it goes. All I know is that it knocks me about as badly as any beating I care to imagine. It walloped me like a blow from Uther Pendragon's mailed fist, like a quoit stone thrown at my head, like a whack from a not-so-playful giant, like being hurled off a cliff into the sea, thrown into a dungeon by huge enemies. All in an instant, not enough time to flee or even to move—but in that instant I felt Nurse move under my hand. I felt the great veins of her neck pulse strongly. I felt her start to sit up, and I heard her blessed voice exclaim my name—and then darkness. I knew nothing more.

T
HOMAS WENT AWAY ONLY A FEW DAYS LATER.

I had lain a day abed, weak and dazed, and then I was all right, although bruised. I hobbled when I walked, and Ongwynn said my face looked tragic, all great black eyes. She made much of me, everyone made much of me, and I gladly let them; it felt wonderful to be cosseted and praised. And it was all because I had dared to attempt magic. That power had made me a heroine. Ongwynn felt as well and strong as when she was twenty, she said. Better than before we left Tintagel.

That day, the day Thomas left, started like a song for me. Ongwynn had Morgause help her carry in extra water, and she heated the largest kettle over the fire, then called me to come bathe. She and Morgause had bathed in the cold spring pool, but there was warm water for me, to comfort every part of me including my soul, and Ongwynn washed my hair for me, and Morgause stood by and wrapped me in shawls when I was finished and made me sit by the hearth to stay warm. Nurse, Ongwynn I mean, started gently combing the tangles out of my wet hair.

I felt blessed and grateful, and such warmth of heart is rare in me. I blurted, “Nurse, how did you come to us?”

She gave me her slow smile but said nothing.

“Because you are Ongwynn, I mean.” Now I wanted my way, I wanted to know. “You are a wise woman, a white witch—”

She said, “You have more of the old, uncanny power than I ever will.”

The memory of that power made me shiver. Still, I had saved Ongwynn.... I asked humbly, “It's not just the milpreve, then?”

“No! The milpreve came to you as a ...” Ongwynn paused at length, listening within herself for the right word. “A sign,” she said finally, “and a blessing, like the crown on a king.”

“It knew me?” I had always felt this to be true.

“It knew you and chose you.”

“Yet ...” This was confusing. “Yet I needed it....” The power had come to me through the milpreve. I sensed this surely.

Ongwynn said to me in her quiet way, “Yes, you must wear it. Without it you are still Morgan, but... is an uncrowned king still a king?”

I sat wondering yet delighted, for a king held his throne merely by birth and force, whereas I ... I was chosen.

I had forgotten my question to Ongwynn, but Morgause had not. “Ongwynn, Morgan's right. If this is your home, what were you doing in Tintagel, being a servant?”

Ongwynn sighed in a way that meant she would answer when she had formed the words; we knew this from long acquaintance with her silences. Morgause sat beside me on the hearthstone. We waited.

When she had combed every inch of my hair, Ongwynn said, “A sending told me to go.”

“Sending?” I did not know what she meant.

“A dream. Strong. A vision in the night.”

“Sent from whom?”

“Maybe the goddess mother of us all. Maybe fate. Maybe—I don't know. I am just a pedlar. I obey.”

Morgause and I sat looking at each other, trying to puzzle this out.

Kneeling in front of me and to one side, Ongwynn started braiding my hair into many long plaits to make it ripple as it dried. “So I walked into Tintagel on the day of your birth, Morgan,” she said.

As a child—that is to say, up until a few weeks before that day—I had assumed that Nurse had been there for me forever, like Tintagel, like the stones on which the castle stood. Morgause must have thought much the same, for she exclaimed, “I was a year old already?”

“Yes.” This time Ongwynn's slow smile spread wide, almost mischievous. I had never seen such a smirk on her or such a glint in her pebble brown eyes. “You had another nurse taking care of you.”

But then—but then why had they needed Ongwynn? I sat gawking.

She almost grinned. “I looked your mother and father in the eye,” she said, “and told them I had come to nurse both of you girls, and that took care of it.”

Green power.

The uncanny power of her gaze. The power she had used against armed guards to protect our escape from Tintagel. The power that had cost her so dearly that she had sickened and nearly died. I hesitated to speak of it, but I asked anyway, “It didn't tax you to do that?”

She knew exactly what I meant. Slowly she shook her head. “I was younger and stronger then.”

I wondered whether there was not more to the matter than that, and I might have asked, but at that moment Thomas called from outside the portal, “May I come in yet?”

“Just a minute!” Morgause and I both shouted at once, and I bolted into my bedchamber, where a clean frock was laid out for me. It seemed that there had been a mighty washing of clothing during the day I lay abed, whether by my human companions or my small unseen ones I was not sure, but my sense was that the denizens helped those who were trying to do for themselves, and that Ongwynn and Morgause and Thomas had done much. The stone walls and ledges shone now from scrubbing. Sweet rushes lined the floors. Fat perch that Thomas had fished out of the spring pool lay cleaned and scaled and ready to poach for supper.

Dressed, I trotted back to the warmth of the hearth, where Ongwynn knelt at my other side and set to braiding my hair again. “Come in,” she called to Thomas.

He did so, lugging a bundle of sticks and a sack of peat, which he unloaded, stacking the squares to dry near the fireplace. At first I listened only to the good feeling of Nurse's fingers tidying my head, but then the silence of Thomas's back began to work upon me, and I turned to look at him. He felt my look and gave me a half smile over his shoulder, but still he did not speak.

“What is wrong?” I asked him.

“Nothing.”

Ongwynn let off plaiting my hair and turned to peer at him. He set the last square of peat in place, stood, straightened his shoulders and spoke to her.

“If all is well here,” he said quietly, as if speaking of a bucket to be mended or a hare to be skinned, “I'll be leaving.”

The words went through me like a spear. I leapt to my feet. “Thomas, no!” I cried before I realized it was not my place to speak.

Morgause spoke out of turn also. “Leaving? But Thomas, what for?”

He kept his eyes on Ongwynn's face, and to this day I am not sure whether he was speaking to her or to us. “It is not fitting that I should remain here.”

And already in my heart of hearts I knew well enough what he meant. I had not yet experienced the monthly courses of a woman, and my breasts were just beginning to bud, but I felt the ache in me and I hoped he felt it too. I knew.

“No,” I bleated like a child. “Thomas, no, stay, you must stay here with us!”

“Hush, Morgan.” Lumbering to her feet, Nurse laid her palm upon my dewy, half-plaited head. “Thomas is right.” To him she said, “Where will you go?”

He shrugged, and gave no other answer.

“Have you no home?”

He shook his head. “Like the youngest son of the poor nobleman in the old tale,” he said, trying to joke, “I must venture forth to seek my fate.”

“Fortune,” Ongwynn corrected him, and leaving my hair half-dried and half-dressed as it was, she set about packing him a bag of provisions as if the word
fate
meant nothing to her. But it froze me into such a misery of fear for him that I could barely move, for I remembered: The midwife who had birthed Thomas, who might have been such a wise woman as Ongwynn herself, had said he was fated to die ... I could not bear to think
in battle,
to remember the blind head on a pike like a scarecrow over death's ghastly garden, so I went numb. I sat on the hearth, hugging myself and watching the others as if watching reflections in water, hearing them as if they were very far away, without much comprehension.

“Give me no more than I can carry,” Thomas was telling Ongwynn. “I'll leave Annie with you.”

He was giving away his most precious companion. He saw death before him. I knew it. And—what could I do? Could I change his fate with the milpreve? To heal Ongwynn, I had somewhat promised to submit to my fate; was Thomas's fate part of mine? I did not know, I did not understand enough, I was not strong enough; I could do nothing. I could not move even to cry.

“Thomas, no,” Morgause protested. “You don't have to leave Annie, you need her! How will you—”

“I'll walk.”

“But—”

“I'm not trying to be noble,” he said with a hint of exasperation. “I've outgrown her, that's all.”

“But you'll miss her!”

I wished she had not said that. It made him wince.

I do not remember whether he replied, or how. Time became a sharp stone that skipped, rippling the watery images before my eyes. Thomas was saying his good-byes. Ongwynn reached up—Thomas was that tall now—and took his head in both her hands, blessing him.

“Protector, thank you for everything,” he told her.

“You will meet with dangers,” she said as levelly as if speaking of the weather.

“I know. I will be wary.” He turned and hugged Morgause, then walked over to where I was sitting and—

I don't know what I was expecting or hoping for. A kiss? A pledge, a token?

He reached down and tugged one of my braids as if I were a child.

My chill misery heated in a flash. Fit to breathe fire, I leaped to my feet, yelling at him, “Stop it! Let me alone! Go on, get yourself killed, see if I care!”

His taut face flowered into a grin, and his eyes shone happy, like blue violets in the spring. “I'll be back,” he said as if it were a taunt to provoke me. But then his voice gentled. “I'll be back, Morgan.”

He whistled a lilting melody as he headed out the portal.

Three years passed without a word of him.