THE WITCHES OF AVALON: a thrilling Arthurian fantasy (THE MORGAN TRILOGY Book 1)

by Lavinia Collins

  THE WITCHES OF AVALON

  Book I of THE MORGAN TRILOGY

  LAVINIA COLLINS

  Published by

  The Book Folks

  London, 2015

  © Lavinia Collins

  For Kay again, because without Kay there is nothing

  Also by Lavinia Collins:

  Available in paperback and on kindle from amazon.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty One

  Chapter One

  In the fading light, I leant closer to the book, pulling it into my lap. The words were familiar, but unfamiliar. I knew the Latin, but the things it said – strange, and unbelievable. The smell of the vellum – old, dusty, animal – was comforting, and safe, and the feel of the ridges of ink on the parchment under my finger somehow magical, as though my touch were writing the words onto my own skin. Outside, through the open window, it smelled sweetly of the beginning of summer, of fresh-cut hay and sweet apples and firewood burning in the distance. I could hear the nuns calling me from the cloisters, but I did not want to leave the quiet haven of my cell. I did not want to leave the book. I dared to delay a little longer. The nuns would be looking for me, but they had never scolded me badly yet. I wondered if they were afraid to because my mother’s husband was the king of the land, but they should not have been. He hated me, because I reminded him that my mother had had a husband before him.

  When I folded the book closed at last, the sun was dipping against the horizon, bleeding out orange and red at the edge, far away. It made me think of the places in the distance; Camelot, where my mother and stepfather lived, the far, cold North that was my sister’s home, and the lake on the edge of the forest, and across it Avalon, the place where I would go when my education at the abbey was complete. I longed for it already, and the sweet, dark secrets it promised, though I was sure I would miss Amesbury Abbey once I had gone. Amesbury was simple, and it was dull, but it was home.

  As I came down from my cell, I saw two horses tethered in the stables. Horses I recognised. Suddenly filled with excitement, I rushed at a run into the cloister, and there they were, Sir Ector whose lands were next-door to the abbey, and his two sons, one dark, one fair, like two boys from a fairytale. I hung back at the entrance to the cloister garden, a pretty green patch filled with soft grass and winding vines around the stone arches that bordered it. I liked Sir Ector, and if I had been bold I would have run over to embrace him, but my shyness held me back. I did not know if Ector liked me. I knew that I made some people uncomfortable, though I did not know why. But, to my relief, the dark son, Kay, the elder of the two, saw me and his face – which I was just becoming old enough to realise was handsome – broke into a wide smile.

  “Morgan!” he cried, running over and scooping me into his arms, to spin me around. I giggled, despite my nerves. I knew Kay and I were getting too old for these games, for embracing one another like children, but I was always pleased to see Kay, and besides if I had asked him not to, in his excitement he would not have heard me.

  “Don’t hug the nuns, Kay!” Sir Ector scolded, but his tone was indulgent. “They don’t always like it.”

  “She’s not a nun,” Kay protested, stopping still, but not releasing me from his embrace. He was right. I was not a nun, nor even a novice, but I lived and schooled in the abbey, a painful mercy of my mother’s to keep me from my hateful stepfather’s path. “It’s Morgan.”

  “No, Kay,” his father said, more firmly, “it is the Lady Princess Morgan.”

  I blushed at that. I was not a real princess, nor did I want to be called one. If I was a princess they might send me off to marry someone like they had my older sister, and I knew all too well how little that had pleased her.

  Kay and I had splashed about at the edge of Avalon’s great lake together naked as children, and Kay pouted against the new formality that, as we all grew older, his father grew more and more insistent upon. An impish smile grew across his face, and as his father turned away he snatched me up again and I squealed with laughter. Behind me, I heard Ector sigh, though it was a fond sigh. Kay’s wonderful smile was his mother’s smile. She had been a beautiful lady, with the same sparkling brown eyes as her son, the same charming, irrepressible smile. She had died when I was just a girl, but I remembered her well. She was the reason Ector came with his sons to the abbey so often; the nuns here had nursed her in her final illness, and Ector came often to pray for the wife he had loved.

  I had, too, felt from Kay and his mother the feeling of the Otherworld. I did not know what it was until Kay told me, in whispers, late one night as we lay in the cloister garden side by side staring up at the stars. It was a secret, given in exchange for the names of Cassiopea and Orion, the Plough and the Great Bear. I supposed my knowledge must have seemed great to him, but to me his secret was far more precious. He had told me that we three, his mother and he and I, had the blood of the Otherworld in us, and we could sense it in others like us. He told me that she had taken him, once, to Avalon where the druids lived. Where I would go. Where the Otherworld touched the world everyone else knew. I had not known, until then, what the feeling was at the pit of my stomach when I looked out at Avalon, and from that day, it had had a name. Otherworld.

  When Kay released me from his embrace, I walked over demurely to kiss Ector’s other son on the cheek. Arthur, the fair son, was a few years younger than Kay and me, and still a boy at twelve years old. Where Kay was tall and wiry, with the shadow of a man’s beard, I had noticed, against his chin, Arthur was short and broad with their mother’s golden hair and a boy’s look still, and an open, friendly smile. I liked Arthur, but not as much as I liked Kay.

  By the time we sat down to dinner with the nuns, it was clear why Sir Ector had come with his sons. I had thought it was just to pray for his wife, or perhaps also to see me, to check for my mother’s sake that I was well, or to bring a letter from her as he did from time to time, but I could see the concern on his kind face as we gathered around the long table, and the Abbess said grace, that Ector had come with sad news. When the prayers of the nuns fell silent, and they picked up their hunks of bread to dunk them in the vegetable stew we always ate, Ector cleared his throat, and I turned to look at him. Kay, beside me, looked at his father too, as did Arthur. I got the feeling that they were both reluctant to meet my eye.

  “My Lady Morgan,” Ector began slowly, turning his eyes on me in a fatherly look. “I come, I am afraid, with sad news. Your stepfather, King Uther, is dying. He is in the care of his witch, Merlin, but it will not be long. The chill he took in the winter has not left him. There are men at court saying Merlin has poisoned him, but the truth is Uther is old and weak and death will come for him soon.”

  I did not care about Uther, but I was old enough to understand the danger that the realm would fall into since Uther and my mother had made no heir together. Uther, a hardened warrior, had had no wife before my mother,
and no child meant war among the lesser kings of Britain. Besides, I was more concerned about the danger that would befall a widowed queen when her husband was no longer alive to protect her. There would be men thinking already that a marriage to Queen Igraine would secure their claim to the throne. Or her murder.

  “We must move soon to protect my lady mother,” I told Ector, with quiet determination. Ector sighed and nodded.

  “You are young, Morgan, to have such concerns on your shoulders,” he replied sadly.

  I knew he was right, but I did not feel so very young. I had seen wars before; I was a small child indeed when the war that killed my father came, but I still remembered it. The smell of fire and blood, and the sound of horses screaming as they died. I knew what war meant. I also knew what this would mean for me. People would start wanting to marry me, to try take Uther’s place as king of Logrys. However, the obvious candidate was my sister’s husband, Lot, who was already king in Lothian, and who had already three sons, two of whom must have been almost of age.

  So Uther was dying. There would be a new king. But what did that mean for me?

  “I will go with my lady mother back to Tintagel,” I told Ector, mustering up all the sternness that I could. “In my father’s castle she and I will be safe. War is coming, is it not, once Uther is dead?”

  “I fear it is, Morgan,” Ector answered darkly, “but for now you should remain here, at Amesbury. No one will try to harm you in the care of the nuns here, and I will be at court with my eye on Queen Igraine.”

  I nodded, but only because I did not feel brave enough to insist on my point.

  That night I did not feel like playing with Kay and Arthur as they chased each other round the empty cloister, smacking at one another with sticks. Kay was old enough to train as a knight already, and yet it seemed to me the younger brother had the more natural skill at fighting. Kay was faster, more lithe, and yet his little brother seemed to land more blows with his stick, laughing with glee every time that he did. And yet when the time came, Kay would be the knight and Arthur the squire, age rather than ability dictating what role each boy was to take. I only watched for a little while, and then retreated to my room, to the lovely welcoming stack of books at my desk, to read.

  Among the books in the abbey, old and smelling like ash and dust, blood and bone from the vellum they were made of, deep in the library, I had found these books, books that described strange things. Wonderful things. Impossible things. I understood little enough of what they said, at first, but the more I read the more it seemed to me that in them was an ancient recipe of words that would allow a person to change their shape. I wondered what the nuns wanted with books like these, but when I asked them, they told me that no such thing was possible, except when the bread and wine of mass became the body and blood of Christ. I stood before the books that night, and imagined myself turning into Kay. A boy, young and strong and free, without a stepfather King or a woman’s place in a marriage-bed or abbey. I could have a life running free, if I were Kay. But, when I turned to look at myself in the window, reflected against the dark of the night beyond, I just saw my own dull, pale oval face, in its plain setting of long brown hair, staring back, and I was still tall and skinny, and weak as any girl.

  Ector left the abbey the next day to return to court, but with no mother at home to watch over them, his boys stayed and I was glad of it. I supposed they had nowhere else to go. I grew bored quickly alone with the nuns, and I was glad of any company my own age. We walked out, the three of us, to the lake at Avalon, to swim. It was a hot day and on the walk there I felt myself sweat uncomfortably in the black wool dress, the sun beating down heating the thick hair on my head, burningly hot against my skin. The boys, in their thin shirts and light breeches, bounded ahead of me, laughing and running, and I struggled to keep up, holding the heavy skirts of my dress in a bunch around my knees. When we reached the water’s edge, Arthur and Kay threw off their clothes and dived in. I stood at the shore, holding a hand up to my eyes against the dazzling light of the sun on the lake, and suddenly I felt self-conscious. Last summer, when we had done this, we had all been children, and suddenly Uther was dying and I had small but unmistakable breasts and I was noticing Kay in a way that I had not before and I did not want to be naked in front of him. Kay stopped to stand waist-deep in the water and turned back to me. I could see a shade of dark hair across his chest that, too, had not been there last year.

  “Morgan!” he shouted. “Come in!”

  Arthur, following Kay’s shout, turned around in the water, gazing at me on the edge.

  “She’s afraid of the cold,” Arthur laughed. Even on him, as well, I could see the beginnings of the shape of a man; powerful shoulders, a broad chest. I was suddenly no longer sure it was right for me to throw off my clothes and swim naked with them. I was sure if the nuns had known that was what we had set off to do, they would have stopped us.

  “I’m not afraid of the cold,” I said, quiet and defensive. Arthur splashed the water at me with his foot, and laughed as I squealed.

  “Morgan, it’s boiling hot in the sun. Stop being silly and get in,” Kay called, as he turned to swim away from me and Arthur, sensing the potential for competition, swam off to catch his brother up. He would want to try to race to the other side, as he always did. They never made it to Avalon.

  They might forget me if I snuck away, caught up in their games, but it was hot, and last year we had all swum together all summer long in a blissful timeless innocence. While their backs were turned I pulled off the wool dress, and then the undershift and dived in with a splash, feeling the delicious cold of the water rush through my hair, against my face, across the hot limbs of my body, and I opened my eyes against the cool, clear water of the lake. I always felt, as I swam in the lake, that I was being made new.

  I swam under the water for as long as I could, until I spotted Kay’s feet, pink and kicking under the water, and grabbed him by the ankle to pull him under playfully as I rushed up to the surface. By the time Kay caught his breath and bobbed back up beside me, we were both laughing, coughing and spluttering. We looked around for Arthur, but it was apparent where he had gone when Kay disappeared under the surface again and they both came up laughing hard. Kay shoved Arthur more forcefully, still laughing, and Arthur disappeared under the water again, just for a moment, and came up to spit a jet of water in Kay’s face. Kay splashed him back, but it was clear from the wicked look on Kay’s face that a different kind of game had sprung to his mind.

  “Arthur kissed a girl,” he told me, with an arch of his eyebrow. Arthur, blushed and pushed Kay angrily.

  “I didn’t,” Arthur protested, but he was obviously lying. I wasn’t sure why Kay was telling me. It was probably just to tease Arthur in revenge for Arthur spitting water in his face.

  “It was just a servant girl, but I saw it. I’m going to tell the nuns that Arthur has been kissing girls.”

  Arthur shoved Kay again, harder than was playful, and Kay’s grin flickered slightly on his face.

  “At least I haven’t been kissing boys,” Arthur snapped, his face bright red. I was not sure if that was directed at me. I didn’t see how it could be, since I had been only with the nuns, but before I could say anything, Kay had pushed Arthur under the water again with so much force that they bobbed down under the surface together. When they came back up, they were both laughing hard again, and the argument seemed to have been forgotten.

  Then, loud and scolding and awful, I heard my name called from across the lake. I saw the Abbess standing there, her wrinkled old face knotted in anger, and my white cotton underdress clenched in her hand. I felt my heart thud suddenly in my chest as though I had been caught at something awful. But last year this was not forbidden; the words came to my mind, but I knew they would be useless in appeal against the Abbess. Beside her stood the Lady of Avalon, and behind her, her ward, the orphan boy Lancelot. From far away, I could not see him clearly, but I knew it must be him from his dark hair.
It had been a year since I had seen him, too, and he was obviously grown taller, taller now than the Lady of Avalon herself. I was not sure how I liked him; he was always quiet and thoughtful, and when I saw him and Arthur and Kay in the summer I used to trail around after him, trying to get him to read with me, or walk with me while Arthur and Kay played at fighting, because he was quieter than them, calmer, and seemed to like books. He had never wanted to read with me, though.

  “You’re in trouble,” Kay whispered by my ear, with wicked glee. Kay seemed always to enjoy it when someone else was being scolded. Perhaps it made a change for him. After all, it was not often that neat, quiet Morgan was reprimanded while the impish Kay stood by in innocence. I think I was Kay’s favourite person of all to see scolded.

  I swam slowly to the edge of the lake, reluctant to stand or get out of the water naked before the Abbess, and the Lady of Avalon, and her boy. As I swam closer I could see that Lancelot had grown not just taller, but out of childhood. Like Kay, he was tall and wiry, but where Kay’s face was bright and smiling, Lancelot had grown quietly, darkly handsome. He looked far more serious than I had remembered him, with his steady blue eyes and high cheekbones, and I felt myself blush already, to feel nervous and strange before him in a way that I had not felt before with anyone else.

  As I reached the edge and I felt the bed of the lake under my feet, grainy, muddy, disgustingly soft, I crossed my arms over my little chest and stood up in the water, where it reached up to my shoulders.

  “Lady Abbess?” I said, in my most beseeching, obedient voice.

  “Morgan.” Her voice was stern, and the angry look on her face tightened even more. “You are a princess, and this is not seemly behaviour. Besides, you are far too old to be swimming with boys. Come on, get out.”