A Cathedral of Myth and Bone

by Kat Howard

  “I didn’t even read my card.”

  I didn’t believe her. “Seriously? You’re doing this, and you don’t even know who you are?”

  “I know exactly who I am: Nora.”

  I understood. I did. But she was so vehement about it. “You know what I mean.”

  “Does it matter what name I got for this class? I mean, either it does, and my role will be so obvious and clear I won’t be able to hide who I am no matter what I do and we’re all going to re-create the rise and fall of Camelot around a seminar table, or it doesn’t, and you all can just continue along in your little role-playing game and leave me the hell out of it. Either way, I’m done.”

  “So then why stop coming to class if you think the names don’t matter? You seemed really into all of this at the beginning, so ready to prove Sabra wrong.”

  “Because I know how the story ends. Arthur dies. In every version. And he may be once and future, sure, but I’m pretty sure Sabra isn’t. No matter what name I’m assigned, I’m not up for seeing that part of the story play out, and I’m sure as hell not up for having a role in causing it.”

  I felt my stomach drop.

  “Not so fun now, is it?”

  “Professor Link wouldn’t let that happen.” The words sounded weak, feeble, even as I said them. Morgan from Camelot was here, and I could do magic, and if there really was a fate that needed Sabra as Arthur dead, I seriously doubted there was anything a literature professor could do to stop it.

  Nora’s contempt for my response was visible in every line of her body. “If you believe that the story makes its own pattern, that doesn’t matter.”

  • • •

  “Change the story,” Morgan had said. The problem was, I wasn’t sure how. I couldn’t see enough of our version of the story yet to know what parts we were living, much less to know what parts needed to be different. Sure, Sabra had a sword, but it wasn’t like she was convening knights and riding off to harry the giant Ysbaddaden. Though, really, I would have preferred that to grading midterms. There was no in-seminar love triangle that she and Liam were two points of, and I’d heard no rumors of a Questing Beast leading people on a chase through Severn’s campus.

  We had the names and some similarities, but we weren’t reliving past events. Even knowing what it was supposed to be, I could barely see the story, considered as a whole. Without seeing the whole, I didn’t know what needed to be changed.

  I told Sabra about my magic. She was surprisingly calm about it. “Can you do that thing like Merlin in the movie where you sing a song and shrink all your stuff to be super tiny so it all fits in your backpack?”

  I blinked. “I don’t know.”

  “I hate packing. It stresses me out. Niv almost broke up with me when we moved here for grad school because I was such a horrible person when we were packing our old place. So that would seriously have been the first thing I tried.”

  “Well, if I figure it out, I’ll pack your apartment for you next time.”

  “Excellent.” She grinned. “So what was your first spell?”

  “Hang on. I’ll show you.” I tore a piece of paper from my notebook, wadded it into a ball, and dropped it on the sidewalk. “Fiat lux.” The paper caught, flared, and burned itself out.

  “ ‘Let there be light’?” she said.

  “Or ‘life.’ ‘Illumination.’ It doesn’t work if I use English, so thank God for being a medievalist and having to learn all these weird languages to get my degree.”

  “They should put that on the grad school advertising. ‘Get your PhD in medieval lit. If you can’t get a tenure-track job, you can always be a wizard,’ ” Sabra said.

  I snorted a laugh. “Sad thing is, there are people here who would see wizardry as a poor second choice.”

  “Right? So what else can you do?”

  “I can talk to ravens. Do binding spells. Find people using ink and maps. Basic healing. Transformation.”

  “Right. Basic healing and transformations. The usual, then,” Sabra deadpanned. “Normal wizard stuff.”

  “Yeah. Magic 101.” I grinned, and we both laughed.

  But I didn’t tell her anything else. Didn’t say, “Oh, hey, remember how you die at the end? Got any plans to avoid that?” Or that I’d been scouring the grimoire and memorizing healing spells that went far beyond basic ever since Nora reminded me about that death.

  Because when it came to that, the death at the end of the story, Arthur’s death, and one I would not let Sabra share, every choice I saw before me was wrong. There was the choice to do nothing, which only worked if I was certain that nothing would come from the little cards with our new names written on them in purple ink. Far too much had happened for that to be an option I believed in anymore. I couldn’t say for sure that we were fully bound on some careening, irrevocable path to tragedy, but I also couldn’t say for certain that we weren’t.

  Option two: Tell Sabra. Tell her everything I knew. Show her the grimoire and drag that other, impossible, Morgan before her and . . .

  And then what?

  Morgan didn’t kill Arthur. Neither did Lancelot or Gawain. Mordred did. It was his hand that held the blade in every version of the story—the tragedy of the father slain by the curse of an unwanted son. If we didn’t have a Mordred, Sabra was safe.

  Unless.

  Unless Nora was Mordred, and by taking herself out of the story, she had already changed it, and by telling Sabra that I thought the story might want her to die, I would be putting that possibility back in there.

  Besides. Even with everything, magic and swords and everything else, we knew we weren’t the people in that story. We knew. None of us would kill Sabra.

  Everything would be fine.

  • • •

  Sabra’s pulse flutters beneath my hand like the spasms of a dying bird. The wind off the lake is harsher now and smells of algae and rot. The scent, mixed with the perfume of the apples, is nauseating.

  Time is stretched and strained here, and I have held it in place as long as I can. I feel night coming on, darkness crouching, waiting. The bells aren’t ringing. I wonder if they will.

  There is something I must do.

  Excalibur lies next to the bier, fallen. I reach down, and I pick it up.

  • • •

  After a while, we stopped bringing up our characters in classroom discussion unless we had to. It was too weird, to talk about Lancelot’s struggle against his desire for Guinevere causing him to run wodwo, and have Liam sitting across the table. We focused instead on the characters whose behaviors we could pick apart without it seeming like we were passive-aggressively snarking at one another.

  “Here’s the thing I don’t get,” Liam said. “Merlin’s this great and powerful wizard. Plus, he lives backward. He doesn’t just see the future, he’s already lived it. So why doesn’t he ever step in and stop Arthur? Or, like, magic Mordred to somewhere else? At the very least, tell him that his snake of a son is going to breach the peace, and make sure Arthur doesn’t get killed.”

  “It’s the free will problem. Merlin can warn Arthur about the consequences of his actions—in some of the stories he does—but Arthur still makes his own choices,” I said.

  “Yeah, but getting stabbed by Mordred wasn’t a choice.”

  “Merlin was gone by then,” Nirali said. “Locked in the tree by Nimue. Who either didn’t bother stealing Merlin’s foreknowledge when she sexed him out of the rest of his power, or didn’t bother telling Arthur what she knew.”

  “Earned,” Professor Link said.

  “I’m sorry?” Nirali asked.

  “Nimue earned her power. Not sexed it out of Merlin.” Professor Link’s voice was the coldest I’d ever heard it.

  “What version of the story was that in?” Nirali asked, fingers poised over her keyboard.

  “The true one.”

  Nirali opened her mouth, then closed it again at the expression on Professor Link’s face.

  “Earned,
stole, whatever,” Liam said. “The fact is, someone knew that Arthur was going to die, and did nothing to stop it. Didn’t even bother to tell him. That’s not right.”

  “If it were me,” Sabra said deliberately, “if I were the one who was supposed to die, or whatever, I wouldn’t want to know.”

  “Why not?” Liam asked.

  It was a question I wanted an answer to as well.

  “If it was fate, truly meant to be, unavoidable fate, knowing wouldn’t stop it. And if Merlin or whoever really can see the future, if he can see the future because he already lived it, then it happens. My death. The only thing that my knowing would mean is that I would live those last days dreading what would happen, making myself insane trying to avoid the inevitable, rather than doing normal things.

  “If it was my fate, I wouldn’t want to know.”

  I still wasn’t comfortable with the idea of silence, but that seemed the end of it. Enough to know that Sabra didn’t want the direct reminder of the end of the story. A clear sign that she’d thought about it and didn’t want to have the discussion.

  So I held my tongue.

  Once

  THESE CHILDREN.

  They talk about fate as if they understand what it means, as if it is simply a thing that happens—someone falls in love, as fast as a heartbeat, and of course it is fate. Someone achieves glory, status, a name written in the stars, and what else could have caused that blaze of greatness but fate? Someone dies cruelly young, and that, too, they comfort themselves, is fate.

  They do not understand that fate is the thing that happens no matter what. That its signs are written everywhere, and cannot be evaded or escaped. That it is both map and prison.

  They cannot know that it binds like shackles and sinks into your skin, as you watch again and again, as you cast cards and look for signs writ on the water and in the flight of birds. As you bloody your hands with sacrifices, hoping that it will change its iron grasp, and still there is not enough to satiate its hunger.

  My brother was fated to die, and I did everything I could to save him. I broke three lives and a story in the attempt.

  I will not pretend remorse: I would do every single piece of it again.

  — 7 —

  It was the sort of day that fall is made for. The air just cool enough to make your wool jacket comfortable, the leaves bright flames against the grey of the sky. The wind rippled the mirrored surface of Lake Severn, and the path was crowded with joggers out for a run.

  Liam ran by, then stopped and circled around. “Morgan! How are you?”

  “Good.” I smiled.

  Leaves crunched beneath our feet as we traced the curve of the lake. Then we turned a bend in the path and stood in a grove, and all the trees were full of ravens.

  They spoke to me.

  Change the story. Find the king. Soon. Now.

  Over and over, the words intermingling into a cacophony. I stood in the whirl of their feathers and voices. They landed on my arms and on my shoulders, the weight of their attention far greater than the bird weight of bones and feathers. I changed my voice to match theirs and asked: “How do I change the story? Do you know where he is? How much time?”

  They didn’t answer, only continued to call out their questions. Then, as one, flew away.

  Liam pulled in on himself. “What the fuck was that?”

  “I’m Morgan,” I said, as if the name itself was an explanation.

  “You spoke to them. Like you were a raven. What are you?” His voice, just on the edge of horror.

  “Morgan is a sorceress. You know the story.”

  Silence stretched between us and was broken by the crash of wind on the water.

  “No. That doesn’t happen. This does not happen.” He didn’t run from me.

  Not quite.

  • • •

  My phone rang before the sun was even up. I reached to hit the ignore button, but it was Sabra’s number on the caller ID.

  “What is it?” I asked, my voice froggy with sleep.

  “There’s a . . . It’s . . . Look, can you just get down to the crew launch, please? It’s important. It’ll make sense when you get here.”

  “Okay.”

  I pulled on the nearest clothes, ran to the lake, and hesitated for a beat when I saw Sabra standing on the end of the launch. She had her sword in her hand, which wasn’t helping with the promise that this would make sense.

  I ran out onto the deck. “What is it?”

  “There.” She jerked her chin toward the center of the lake, where a whirlpool spun. Water spat and splashed around it, and the surface shimmered like an oil slick.

  “Okay, that’s weird, but I’m not sure if your sword is going to help.”

  “Just watch.”

  The whirling stopped, changed direction, and then. “Sabra. That is a fucking sea monster.”

  Scaled and reptilian, fanged and clawed. Shades of green in fish-scale shimmer. It roiled and bent, in and out of the water. Opened its mouth and howled and howled, and in the roaring, such pain that I almost went to my knees before it.

  “She’s hurt,” Sabra said. “Really hurt. I don’t want to have to kill her, but if I swim out there right now, she’ll drown me, and if I leave her alone, she’ll attack whoever goes into the lake next, and I’m pretty sure there’s crew practice today. So I called you.”

  I turned from the impossibility in the lake. “Sabra, how do you know all of this?”

  “You can’t understand her?”

  “No.” But I thought of the magic that had let me be a bird, of the way I had learned to shift my hearing and my sight, to take myself out of my world and step into theirs. I whispered the words under my breath.

  The air shook around me and I could see the lake the way the creature saw it—some strange new place she had been pulled into, away from home and safe haven. Could understand her words. Not a sea monster, she said. An afanc. Her voice was the sound of the last gasp of the drowned before the water took them, the crack of wrecked ships as they groaned and splintered, the hurricane’s howl. She was begging for release from chains.

  “Chains?” I asked Sabra.

  “Look again,” she said.

  I hadn’t noticed them at first. Too overwhelmed by the immensity of the strangeness, at the sight of something out of myth swimming in the same lake where the crew team practiced, where we burned a boat at Homecoming while drunken undergrads shout-sang the Alma Mater. But there. Like creases in her skin, deep lines of muddy greyness, edged in rust.

  Chains. An ancient, heavy horror, there so long that they had become near part of her.

  “Oh, you poor thing,” I said.

  “I did that to her.” Sabra’s voice a hollow glass.

  “Sabra? Are you okay?” That same pronoun slip I’d heard before, and it raised the flesh on my arms. Time stuttered beneath my feet.

  “Arthur. Arthur did. I know that. Not me. But it feels like I did. Morgan, I can see my hands holding the chains.” Pain in Sabra’s voice then. Pain to almost match that of the impossible creature, shrieking in Lake Severn, who had been chained for a small eternity.

  “I need you to help me get them off.”

  “Okay. But I need to go back to my apartment. I don’t know the magic for something like this.” I wasn’t sure if I had seen a spell in Morgan’s book that would help—even the unbinding spells I had read had been for metaphorical chains, not physical ones. But at least if I had the book, I would have something that might tell me what to do.

  “You don’t need to. Just ask her to come here, and tell her I’m going to help.”

  I wasn’t sure that was a good idea, but it was better than Sabra swimming out to meet the afanc like something out of Beowulf, and definitely better than leaving the afanc alone and hurt and liable to eat the crew team in a rage.

  “Hello!” I called. The magic that changed my language to hers shredded my throat, and I tasted copper, penny-bright. “We’d like to help you.” I coughed,
spat blood on the dock.

  The churning of the lake slowed, and the afanc’s head rose above the waters. “You are small and weak. How would you do that?”

  “We can take off your chains.”

  “Do you swear? Swear true, your lies a poison in your mouth?” Her eyes, deep and ancient, fixed on us.

  “Yes,” Sabra said before I had a chance to ask. “Tell her yes.”

  I did, praying that Sabra knew what she was doing.

  “The last time I trusted, moons and tides ago, I was bound. Cast out. Made into this. Why should I come near?”

  “We can help—” I began.

  “Tell her I offer myself as surety,” Sabra said.

  “What? Sabra, no. I get that you have good intentions, but I am right on the edge of out of my depth here, and all you have is somebody’s SCA sword.”

  “You know it’s more than that, Morgan. Tell her.”

  I thought for a moment of lying. But Sabra could—somehow—understand the afanc’s language; she just couldn’t speak it. I drew in a deep breath. Fuck it. If Sabra was all in, so was I. “We offer ourselves as surety.”

  “Prove it.” Bitter, bitter, the afanc’s words.

  Before I could say anything, Sabra drew her palm against her blade and held her hand out over the water so that the blood dropped in. I sucked in a breath and then, less poetically, coughed and spat again, this time letting my blood fall into the water. “We swear by blood.”

  The lake stopped spinning.

  The afanc sank down beneath its surface, and I could track her progress toward us by the ripples on the water. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

  “I do.” With a splash, Sabra stepped off the edge of the dock.

  The monster rose up next to her, wrapping herself around Sabra. The afanc reeked of blood and rot, her sickness caused by those ancient chains. Sabra raised the sword, and in that moment, it didn’t look like a prop, like a too-thin piece of metal. It looked like a weapon, like power. Like it held death.

  “Your promise!” the afanc shrieked, and sank her claws into Sabra’s other arm.