A Cathedral of Myth and Bone

by Kat Howard

  She is here, and she has been thwarted.

  In her tantrum, something else: a door, cracked open. Magic brought into play. She has used hers against one of the players, and so I can use—or share—mine in a way that is more direct than simply making sure that someone finds a sword. I gather what I need.

  A mirror, in which I can see myself and this story’s reflection, the one who shares my name and shares it twice.

  A cord to knot and bind us both together.

  Glass, that I may see her clearly, and feathers to carry the magic on their wings.

  Blood, because it is life.

  And finally, a light to bring life, flame against the darkness.

  I take all these things in my hands, hold them tight together, and I speak her name, my name, our name, and release the spell to the sky.

  — 4 —

  There was no owl with a letter waiting when I got home. I didn’t expect one either—leaving aside the more obvious issues, that was the wrong story. But I wondered if magic—real, true magic—was possible.

  I knew how that sounded, but I was Morgan. If someone in this story, or this pattern, or whatever we were calling it, was supposed to be magic, it was me.

  So I decided I would try something small, something simple. I cast about for ideas but kept tripping over mental images of stage magicians flourishing wands and pulling rabbits from hats by saying “abracadabra.” The Morgan of this story was not a stage magician.

  Then I remembered: the end of The Once and Future King. Arthur, who knows full well that he will fall in battle, asks his page to remember his story. To tell it as a light in the darkness. A candle. I would try to light a candle, and when it didn’t work, I would laugh at myself and move on.

  I poured a glass of wine and found a fat pillar of beeswax, set it on the kitchen table, far away from everything else. Just in case.

  I drew a breath and let it out. Held the image of flame in my head.

  “Light.”

  Nothing. Not even the scent of smoke.

  “Let there be light!” Focus, plus dramatic hand gesture, and I was so glad that I didn’t have a roommate. No one should see you trying very seriously to be a wizard when you are completely certain that you’re not one.

  One. One more time. I’d try once more before I gave myself up as ridiculous. Maybe with better magic words. Something Morgan might have said—words full of ritual and power.

  I placed my feet flat on the floor, looked straight at the wick, and said, “Fiat lux.”

  And there was.

  Without looking away from the flickering candle, I reached out for the glass of wine. I drank all of it.

  • • •

  I stayed up all night lighting the candle. At first because it seemed impossible, and then because it didn’t. Over and over again until it was almost nothing—a breath, a thought—to set it burning. Just past dawn, I stumbled into bed, exhausted. I dreamt of candles. Flickers and glows of light against the darkness.

  I slept poorly, and only for about two hours. The first thing I did when I woke up, sand-eyed and muzzy-headed, was to turn to the candle next to me on the nightstand and command it to light.

  It did.

  My grin stretched huge across my face. Magic was real, and I could do it.

  • • •

  You forget the end of the story when you’re living in it. I mean, it’s right there in the name: Le Morte d’Arthur. The Death of Arthur. Death. There are no versions of the original legend where he gets out alive, unless you count that whole once-and-future bit, where he’s taken offstage to sleep on the island of Avalon. The story of Arthur is always a tragedy. The only question is what the rest of the body count looks like.

  Intellectually, I knew that. Everyone in Professor Link’s seminar did. We spent hours talking about it every week, the way each version of the story either stopped just before the end or walked headlong into disaster and grief.

  But it didn’t occur to me that we were in for the same thing. Not at the beginning, anyway. Not when Sabra pulled a sword from stone, not when magic became like breathing for me, not until later. Not until too late.

  Maybe that’s the nature of tragedy. That you don’t notice. Or you see the signs gathering around you, and still you think: not us.

  Or maybe I was the only one who didn’t see. Because Morgan is always there, at the end, when that black-covered barge comes to Avalon. In every version, she survives.

  • • •

  If I was going to be able to do magic, I wanted to be able to do more than just light candles. Don’t get me wrong: lighting a candle with just words was cool, but it wasn’t exactly useful, especially considering that I lived in a world with easily accessible electricity.

  My previous experience with anything remotely connected to magic and witchcraft had been limited to the high school rite of passage stuff—Ouija boards that predicted death in grisly ways; slumber party games of “Light as a feather, stiff as a board” that worked just well enough to make us believe we were powerful; small curses and big wishes, both of which were cast around events that likely would have played out as they did even without our efforts. I had liked playing at magic and was secretly sad that I didn’t have any real evidence that any of it had worked. I still read my horoscope in the backs of fashion magazines so I could take advantage of my guaranteed lucky days, and I had an app on my phone to tell me when Mercury was in retrograde.

  Some days I sort of believed in some of it.

  Unfortunately, the offerings of the Severn University library were a lot closer to the history of the Ouija board and how to do sleight of hand, and nothing like how to do actual magic. Not that I thought I was going to find an old spell book stuffed on a forgotten shelf somewhere, but I figured that something in the medieval section might be helpful. Alchemy was once an actual science, after all, and the history of magic was an academic discipline. But no. I spent a frustrating hour searching the stacks, and another making interlibrary loan requests so I could pretend I’d accomplished something, before deciding anything else was futile and gathering my stuff.

  Tired, I slumped against the wall of the ancient, creaking elevator, rolled my eyes when it stopped after one floor. The library elevator was notoriously cranky, sometimes deciding to stop on every floor, regardless of what buttons had been pushed, and often coming to a halt on the third floor and refusing to move in either direction for hours. This stop, at least, had been needed—a clutch of undergrad women crowded on, mid-conversation.

  “I heard he knocked out the guy with one punch!”

  “And then kept him there until the police came.”

  “He walked her back to the house and stayed outside all night, not even sleeping, so she could feel safe.”

  “I’m sorry,” I interrupted their conversation. “Mei, right? You were in the Shakespeare class I TA’d last fall, I think?”

  “Oh, hi, Morgan! I didn’t notice you when we got on.” She smiled and shifted her bag to her other arm.

  “What happened?” I asked. “Who are you talking about?”

  “One of our sorority sisters got followed home from a party—this douche-bag guy wouldn’t leave her alone, you know how it is. And when she tried to walk away, he grabbed her by the hair and yanked her to the ground. Like he would have . . . ugh, I can’t even say it. It was almost horrible.”

  “But she’s okay?”

  “Yes! Totally fine. This grad student—Liam O’Brien, he taught my freshman comp section—he came out of nowhere and rescued her. Knocked the guy out, stayed with her till the police came, called out their bullshit when they asked if she had been drinking or had ‘accidentally’ invited the guy home with her. The whole bit.”

  “Like a knight in shining armor,” I said quietly.

  “Exactly,” she said. “Like, I thought he was nice before, but this is like superhero stuff. Plus, he’s hot.”

  “We’ve got a class together. I’ll be sure to tell him you said so.”r />
  She laughed. The elevator stopped with a thud on the ground floor, and Mei and her sorority sisters waved goodbye and walked into the grey drizzle of the evening.

  I didn’t know Liam well, not at all outside of our seminar. So rescuing a woman from an attempted assault and helping her deal with the aftermath could have been completely in character for him—some people truly are that decent.

  Still. He was Lancelot, and Arthur’s knights had all been required to take a vow to come to the aid of any woman who required it. Helping someone once was an isolated incident, not a pattern, and I didn’t want there to be enough women attacked for there to be a pattern. But. Still.

  • • •

  The bells in Severn’s clock tower rang out as I hurried across campus. Rain was sheeting down, and the wind turned my umbrella inside out and useless. I didn’t see the woman until I ran into her.

  We both went tumbling to the ground in a collected heap of limbs and books. “I’m so sorry,” I said as I pulled myself up and held out my hand to her. “Are you all right?”

  She looked windblown, tossed. Dark hair in soaked ropes, shadowed hollows under eyes that were tawny and sharp, like a bird of prey’s. “Yes, yes,” she said. “It’s this cursed rain—I didn’t see you. Oh, all your books!”

  My tote had gone flying, spilling my books across the path and into the grass. “Shit. The library is going to kill me.”

  “Let me help you.” She gathered a stack and dropped them into my bag.

  I settled my bag back over my shoulder, readjusted to the weight of it. “Is the clock still ringing?” Minutes had passed, but I would have sworn I still heard the deep, sounding chimes tolling the hour.

  “Are you sure you’re all right?” she asked me, her hands on my shoulders.

  “Just dizzy, I think. Thanks.” Soaked and mud-smeared, I decided to skip my evening class and limped back home.

  I was shivering by the time I got back, aching from my fall, and in a mood as foul as the weather. All I wanted was a steaming-hot bath, a glass of wine, and a pizza. Possibly eaten while in the bath.

  I kicked the door shut behind me and let my bag drop. A book I didn’t recognize fell out. Heavy, and bound in old, worn leather, pages warped with age. A lock held it closed but snicked open when I touched it.

  Words I didn’t recognize swam dizzily across the pages, then halted and resolved themselves into English. Instructions for magic, all neatly organized. It was, I thought, a grimoire. My head throbbed, but I couldn’t stop reading. Each page was full of spells, their ingredients in recipe lists, followed by incantations. A variety of ways of making magic, all written out. Inside the front cover: “Ex libris Morganae.”

  Morgan’s book.

  Morgan’s.

  My hands shook as I turned the pages, then closed the cover.

  Reasonably sure that this constituted finding something weird, I thought of calling Sabra but set the phone back down. Before I shared this, I wanted to know what I could do.

  Thoughts of bath and pizza pushed aside, I lit my candles, opened the book back up, and read.

  • • •

  I didn’t leave my apartment for a week. I cut all my classes, even the ones I was supposed to be teaching, and Professor Link’s seminar. At the end of those seven days, I was exhausted, held together by coffee and will, but I could do much more than simply call flame to a candle.

  There were birds drawn in the margins of the manuscript: perching, mantled, in flight. They flew me through the pages, guided my way through the spells.

  The first thing I learned was their calling. Not just the sounds, the way of changing the shape of my voice in my throat to fit, but the way to send that call to their ears, to be able to bring a response. Next I learned their speech, how to shape my ears to their voices.

  Even now, a flock of ravens was a set of smudged shadows muttering amongst themselves in my trees. A comfortable, reassuring cohort in the pale-silver light of dawn.

  The pages of the grimoire moved like feathers beneath my hands and brought me to the next spell, and I learned to fly like a bird. To shrink myself down into wings and talons, to have a heartbeat that raced and eyes that saw forever compared to my human ones. I flew everywhere, all over campus, through the orchard and to the shores of the lake where every morning Sabra went to try to outrun herself.

  Back in my own body, I felt light-headed and strange, as if I were living outside my skin, as if the air were a lightning storm I walked through. I could feel time, stretching and branching in all directions, until seconds met and coiled themselves round as clocks, and I could feel the worms crawling beneath the ground, and the wind on the water, and the quiet drowsing of the trees as fall came upon them.

  Magic came faster and faster to me after that. It was as if I were a glass, and magic the sand that poured in to fill me. I learned words for binding things, for knitting skin together once torn, for closing a mouth that would speak an untruth.

  I could pour ink on a map and find a person as they walked, and I could shield my own self from seeking eyes. (Thinking of Professor Link, I cast that one every day as soon as I woke up.)

  There were others, too, that I didn’t try. Spells to stop time. Spells to bend another’s will to mine. Spells to cause obsession.

  A spell to prevent death in battle.

  • • •

  No, that’s not what I’m supposed to use.

  Trust me.

  That was the spell that started all this.

  • • •

  Sitting through that week’s seminar was like bracing for an explosion. Magic surged beneath my skin, looking for a way out. Static in my blood. I couldn’t concentrate, could barely sit. My discomfort was so obvious that Sabra, sitting next to me, typed “R U OK?” into her notes and angled her laptop toward me. I nodded, lying.

  “Well, we’ve gone longer than I meant to, but this is a good stopping point. Rather than taking a break and starting a new topic for half an hour, why don’t we just go home early today?”

  I was packed up and out of my seat before Professor Link had finished talking, knocking my chair over in my hurry to get outside. I kept going until I got to a small clump of trees. Stopped and leaned against one, letting the soft, cold rain wash over my face until my heartbeat felt like mine, and not like a bird’s in my chest.

  “Morgan?” Liam’s voice.

  I opened my eyes.

  “I thought this might help.” He held out a to-go cup.

  “Normally, I’d say yes, but I don’t think coffee’s a good idea right now.”

  “It’s tea,” he said, turning the cup so I could see the string from the tea bag. “And lots of sugar.”

  “Thank you.” I sipped at it, the warm sweetness easing whatever it was that had been trying to shake me apart from the inside.

  Liam leaned against a tree of his own.

  “You don’t need to stand out here in the rain with me. I’ll be fine.”

  “You’re still shaking, and you’re currently the palest live human I’ve ever seen. A little rain won’t hurt me.”

  “You really know how to flirt with a girl, Liam.”

  “I’ll do better later.” He grinned.

  The rain fell harder and was cold enough that I was shaking from the temperature, rather than an excess of magic. “I should go home.”

  “Do you mind if I walk with you? I mean, I’m sure you’re fine, but it would reassure me.”

  “A ‘verray, parfit gentil knyght,’ ” I said.

  He laughed. “My mom gets low blood sugar. Hot sweet tea helps steady her. More chemistry than chivalry.”

  I thanked him when we got to my apartment.

  “You’re sure you’re going to be okay?” he asked.

  “I really am much better,” I said.

  The rain silvered around him like armor as he walked away.

  • • •

  I did feel better, but I wanted to know why I had felt so strange in the first pl
ace. I paged through the grimoire, wondering if I had missed some warning against combining certain spells or using an excess of magic.

  Nothing. Maybe it was just my body adjusting. But it had been unpleasant, and I wanted to avoid something like that happening again.

  I closed the grimoire, rested my fingers on top of it. They tingled, like I’d grasped a nettle in my hand.

  There was, perhaps, someone I could ask.

  I got out a map. A campus map, the scale small enough to see the paths and buildings. There was no guarantee, but our class was here, we were here, and she—whoever she was—had come here to give me the book.

  I said the words of the scrying spell, poured ink in a thin stream over the map, and watched as it beaded up in the middle of Lake Severn.

  Which, unless she was out rowing with the crew team, meant I had done the spell wrong. There were no islands in the lake.

  I cleared my thoughts of everything but the woman who had given me the book. Held her image so bright in my mind I could see her raven eyes. I spoke the spell again, and this time . . .

  Once

  THE AIR OPENS BEFORE ME like a mirror, bright as lightning, and a face that is not mine looks up from a book that is. I do not usually see my shadows, my story-selves, at times when I haven’t gone looking for them. And never before has one come looking for me.

  But here she is.

  I reach out and bind my magic to hers.

  — 5 —

  This time, I could see her. See her, and the island she stood on, with impossible apple trees, in bloom and in fruit all at once. It was fog-draped, but I could hear the susurrus of waves against the shore. A jolt, electric. My flesh lumped up, and all my hair stood on end. She seemed real enough to touch.

  “Can you hear me?” I asked.

  Her head cocked, birdlike. “I can.”

  This was amazing. Impossible. Beyond. “I have so many questions.”

  She held up a hand. “In three days. When the clock chimes. The ravens will bring you.”

  Her voice pulled farther and farther away with each word, a tide going out. With the end of the sentence, the link between us was broken.