Poison

by Molly Cochran

  Bryce swallowed, thinking. “No, it’s more than that,” he said. “Morgan is going to destroy Avalon, just as the Seer predicted. Only she’s not going to do it herself.” He narrowed his eyes at me. “That’s why she wanted Katy. As an assassin.”

  There was a swift intake of air from everyone in the room.

  “No!” I shouted. “That can’t be! I didn’t do anything!”

  “Not yet,” Agnes said cryptically.

  • • •

  “Summer and her three friends are all conscious and doing well.” Miss P stood in the archway leading from the kitchen. There were sighs of relief all around. “They all came to at the same time. Not that the hospitals are likely to check with one another,” she added.

  “Then we shall all remain silent about the matter,” Gram said.

  I objected. “But what about Summer? I talked to her when she was inside the doll. I was with her. She’s not just going to forget that.”

  “You’d be surprised the things people forget,” Miss P said primly.

  “Oh.” I was getting it. “Right.” Miss P had gone into Summer’s mind and convinced her that our encounter had never taken place, that she’d never released Morgan le Fay from the piece of amber, that she and her friends had never asked for or received any unusual powers, and that none of them had ever been incarcerated inside antique dolls in a store that didn’t exist. What those four believed, and would continue to believe for the rest of their lives, was that they had drunk some tainted diet tea that had knocked them out for a month and a half.

  “I also urge you not to embarrass yourself by telling fantastic tales to your friends, Katy.”

  The others all squinted at me. “Er . . . okay,” I said.

  “Not even your best friends,” Agnes reminded me. Hattie just rolled her eyes.

  “All right. I know already.” Jeez. Nobody trusted me with a secret as far as they could throw me.

  “The best course of action would be to put this all behind us and move forward with our lives,” Miss P said.

  “Yes, but . . .,” Bryce waffled. “What about the amber?”

  Gram looked earnestly at Miss P. “Penelope, dear, did any of those girls—”

  “No,” she answered. “None of them had any inkling about the importance of the amber.”

  “Then I guess it’s gone forever,” Bryce said morosely.

  “Does it really matter?” I asked.

  “Of course it matters!” he shouted. “Without the amber, Morgan can’t be trapped again!”

  I pressed my lips together, thinking. Something had been bothering me for a long time. “Er . . .,” I began.

  Everyone sighed in exasperation. “What is it now, Katy?” Agnes asked, looking at her watch. “I have an eight o’clock class.”

  “Me too,” I said. “But I need to ask . . . er . . . amber’s a stone, right?

  Bryce sighed. “You don’t even know what it looks like?”

  “Of course I do,” I answered defensively. “Sort of.” Which was to say, I knew it often had things like flies and bubbles in it, but I’d never actually seen a piece of amber, or touched one.

  Hattie clucked irritably, but Gram was unperturbed. “Why, it’s amber-colored, dear. Brownish-yellowish. Transparent. It’s made from the resin of trees, so it’s very lightweight—so much so that it’s often mistaken for plastic—”

  “Oh, God,” I said, closing my eyes. The thing that had been lurking at the back of my mind burst forward. “I’ll be right back.”

  “What on earth . . . ” Gram squeaked behind me as I took the stairs to my bedroom three at a time.

  They were still here, the two broken pieces of what I’d thought was brown plastic that I’d taken from Summer’s room. I pressed the pieces together. Summer had been right: The hole in the middle was shaped like Snow White Barbie.

  And as soon as I touched them, I saw Morgan’s face.

  It was the face of the young girl in my visions. She was younger and less glamorous than the real-life Morgan I’d known, but now that I’d made the connection, it was obvious that they were one and the same. The girl who had befriended me was the monster that Bryce had been hunting all along. And her whole life was contained in these pieces of amber.

  I tossed them into the air and caught them again. This was where Morgan had spent the past sixteen hundred years. And where, once Bryce caught her again, she would spend eternity. Sorry, Morgan, I thought. Wish things could have been different.

  “Is this what you’re looking for?” I asked, handing the pieces to Bryce.

  He leaped to his feet. “How long have you had these?”

  “I got it from Summer’s room after she was taken away,”

  Hattie sputtered, putting down her teacup with a clatter. “Do you mean to tell us that you broke into that child’s room again?”

  “I was trying to find some evidence,” I said, although it sounded more like a question. “And I didn’t break in the first time. The girls opened the door—”

  “Saints alive, will you never cease meddling—”

  “It’s not her fault,” Miss P said, fatigue showing in blue patches under her eyes. Magic takes a lot out of you. “Summer’s room had been cleared out. Everyone overlooked the pieces of amber. Even the police.”

  “They were stuck inside the heat register, I think,” I explained. “They must have been blown there when the thing exploded. I didn’t pay much attention to them either, until I started to see images from someone’s—Morgan’s—life.”

  “Morgan’s?” Miss P asked, cocking her head curiously.

  “I didn’t put it together at the time, but yes, I’m sure now that it was Morgan. I caught glimpses of her childhood when I touched the amber pieces.”

  “Well, you can keep them,” Bryce said, handing the fragments back to me. “We can’t trap her now. The amber’s broken.”

  He looked so forlorn that I hated to leave, but I had to get to my chem test. “I’m sorry, Bryce,” I said putting on my parka. “Does this mean you’ll have to go home?”

  He looked stricken. “Home,” he repeated woodenly. I felt sorry for him. I couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to live in Avalon.

  • • •

  To my amazement I got to school on time, sliding into my seat in chemistry class seconds before the bell sounded. As I waited for the exam sheets to be passed out, I saw my ring glowing softly. I rubbed my cold hands together, once again feeling the wave of warmth and well-being that the ring exuded.

  Suddenly I stopped and stared at my hands. The ring was large and ornate and—as if it needed anything to make it more conspicuous—glowing. So what went through my mind for a second before I became preoccupied with the midterm was this: Why hadn’t any of those powerful witches who’d been grilling me for an hour or more ever mentioned—or even appeared to have noticed—my ring?

  CHAPTER

  •

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Dead days.

  Every time I walked into Old Town, my heart sank at the sight of the abandoned store with the broken sign swinging in the wind. No one had seen the Emporium of Remarkable Goods except me. It had all been a glamour—the store, the versimka, even Morgan herself, I supposed. Especially Morgan.

  Funny, I’d really believed she was my friend.

  Some friend, huh?

  And what was it those harpies who’d come after me had said?

  Poison.

  Yes, that was it. But what did that mean? That they knew Morgan had poisoned me? How could they know that? Or were they going to poison me themselves? Didn’t seem to be much point in that, since they were about to tear me limb from limb. Was the poisoning supposed to have come after the dismemberment, or during?

  Oh, just let it go, I told myself.

  I don’t really know why, but it was strangely comforting to have the amber pieces back in my possession. I guess part of it was that, whatever Morgan had done, I didn’t want to see her trapped forever in solidified resin
. And because I’d known her.

  Morgan had been the coolest girl I’d ever met. She was worldly and funny and cynical in a way I could never be. She was brimming with self-confidence. She was okay with being alone. She was fearless. She was magical, a Traveler, someone who could move between planes of existence as easily as the rest of us could walk out a door.

  She’d been everything I’d ever wanted to be.

  I know I should have hated her, especially after what she’d done to me, but even so, I couldn’t. When I rolled the smooth stones between my fingers, all I knew was that I wanted to know more about her. Give up your secrets, I thought. Show me who you are, Morgan le Fay.

  • • •

  I didn’t have to wait long to see her. She was a few years older than she’d been the last time—maybe my age. I could recognize her face now as the Morgan I knew. Again she was dressed in beautiful clothes, with a metal chain around her waist and soft cloth shoes. As she moved, I realized that she was in a large building with long, slender windows surrounded by a circle of water.

  She crept silently up the length of a stone-lined corridor and listened outside a room with an open door. Inside was the same man I’d seen in the first vision, when he had made magic butterflies with his young daughter and then left her to the vultures as he’d disappeared from view. He had changed considerably since then. His hair had turned white, and he had grown a beard. He was speaking with a man who was around my father’s age, who wore a gold coronet around his forehead. The king, I thought.

  The old man put his hand on the younger man’s shoulder. “Arthur,” he began.

  Arthur? I gasped. The man was the king, all right. The king himself. It had to be. King Arthur.

  Out of their sight Morgan leaned against the stone wall that separated her from the men, her fingers splayed and trembling. Morgan shook with rage smarting from her father’s rejection.

  I felt it too. Suddenly I understood not just Morgan’s jealousy, but the world that had caused it. Her father had chosen Arthur over Morgan because that had been the way of those times. Boys and men were valued. Girls and women were not.

  • • •

  This was the king her father had raised from a baby, though the Merlin had had to leave Avalon and his own family to be with him. He had lavished his love on the boy, had taught him the Craft even though Arthur had been born with almost no magic of his own, while Merlin’s own daughter had been left to grow up alone, her extraordinary talents unrecognized.

  Why? Morgan asked herself, half choking on her unchecked tears. Why had her father ignored her to spend his life caring for another man’s child?

  There were some who claimed that Arthur was the Merlin’s own natural son, but Morgan would not—could not—believe that, no matter what the talk was that circulated around the castle. A magician of his stature would not have fallen so far into the human realm. No, the truth was much simpler than that. The Merlin loved Arthur because he’d wanted to make a king. And only a male child could become king.

  Morgan’s father had loved another child more than he had loved her, his firstborn, solely because the other was a boy. Had she been born male, would the Merlin have used his powers to make her king of all England? Would she have been the one to pull the magical sword Excalibur from the stone? Would the great Merlin have spent his life helping to achieve her goals, fulfill her destiny?

  But that was not the way of the world, of any world. Morgan had taught herself how to use her considerable talents. She had learned how to shape-shift by watching the Seer’s guards, those hags who enforced Avalon’s cruel laws by turning into beasts that tore apart the flesh of anyone who dared to defy them. She had learned that she was a Traveler when she’d decided to follow her father through the mists that surrounded Avalon into this other world, this realm where Arthur, the child of Merlin’s heart, dwelled.

  In time Morgan refined her gifts. Not only was she able to move between Avalon and the world beyond the mist, but she was also able to move within that world. She discovered that there were places far beyond the borders of England, Arthur’s domain—exotic places inhabited by strange-looking peoples, places that had their own magic. She learned from all of these. Though she was young, she was becoming powerful beyond her own reckoning. Perhaps, she hoped, powerful enough for her father to notice her.

  Her tears burned as she leaned against the cool stone wall, feeling the camaraderie between the two men inside the chamber. Love me! Morgan wanted to scream. Love me!

  Her helpless rage sparked out the tips of her fingers. Her father would never love her, not while Arthur was alive. Arthur was important, she thought bitterly. He was the king, the one person who, with the Merlin’s help, could save the world from the shambles it had become.

  And who was she, Morgan le Fay? Only another unwanted female child, destined to become someone’s wife, nothing more. Given a choice, the Merlin had chosen Arthur. Of course. It was the way of the world. And there was nothing she could do about it.

  • • •

  I didn’t want to see any more. I put the pieces away, thinking about my dad.

  • • •

  According to Miss P, Summer and her friends were doing so well that three of the four were planning to return to Ainsworth after the holidays. Suzy Dusset, who had been an even worse student than Summer, was going to attend a fashionable prep school in Manhattan. None of them remembered anything out of the ordinary. They all believed that they’d gotten sick from drinking some South American diet tea that Summer had bought at a Boston rave. All of them vowed never to experiment with drugs again.

  No one at school even mentioned Summer and the other Muffies to me. I suppose that was a kind of apology. After the story got out about the tainted tea, I stopped being the prime suspect in what became known as the “killer weed” incident. I no longer got anonymous gifts of doggie doo, or even any insulting Facebook messages.

  By the week of winter frolic, the whole episode seemed to be over. Bryce was gone a lot of the time. He said he was searching for Morgan, but since he usually took Becca with him, I suspected that he had given up his search and now was just trying not to go back to Avalon.

  Most of my midterms were over by then, and Peter’s uncle kept him busy almost every night of the week, so I occupied myself with the fragments of amber that had held Morgan le Fay prisoner for so long. I hoped that I might be able to discover something that would lead Bryce to her, although I doubted that he’d be able to catch her even if he managed to find her. Besides, it was sort of fun. I’d never “read” a person as old as Morgan was. Even though she appeared to be not much older than I was, she’d actually lived around the beginning of what we knew as the Dark Ages.

  Speaking of which, just as I was beginning to settle in with the amber fragments, the phone rang. I saw on the caller ID that it was my father.

  During my first year at Ainsworth, he’d come to Whitfield only once, and that was only because his corporate barracuda girlfriend had had business there. Since then, Madam Mim—that was what I’d called her, after a wicked animated Disney villainess—had been fired from her million-dollar-a-year job and broken up with my dad, so I hadn’t counted on seeing him at all.

  But then late last summer Dad showed up to inspect a medieval artifact called a botte, or magic box, that had been uncovered in the Meadow. He wrote an article for Medieval Times Quarterly, and the article turned out to be the seminal source for information about magic boxes, since a month after its discovery the botte disappeared into a sinkhole and was never seen again. Of course, the Whitfield witches had arranged that, and they certainly knew how to make it reappear again if it was needed, but it wasn’t necessary to inform outsiders about that. Anyway, because of the article, Dad had become a major star in the Columbia University English Department. This term he taught a course on medieval bottes and their relation to literature, and was considered one of the leading authorities on mechanical devices of the Dark Ages. He also had a standing lunch
appointment with the chairman of the department on Tuesdays. Things like that were important to my father.

  “Hello?” I answered tentatively.

  “Hello!” It was his hearty-but-clueless voice, the one he used when he’d forgotten who he was calling. “Er . . . ”

  “Katy,” I reminded him. “Katherine. Your daughter.”

  “Oh. Right you are! Sorry. I was a little preoccupied.”

  “Umm,” I said. I’d learned that there wasn’t much point in actually talking with Dad, since he usually wasn’t listening anyway. “What’s up?”

  “Beg your pardon?”

  “You called me, Dad.”

  “I did?” There was a brief silence while he shuffled through whichever papers he’d been reading when he’d decided to call me. “Oh, yes. It seems I’ll be coming to Whitfield this Saturday. A colleague at Boston College wants to see the site of the botte.” He just threw that out as if sharing his knowledge about the botte were nothing more than a minor annoyance, but I knew he totally got off on it. “I thought that perhaps afterward you’d like to join me for dinner.”

  “I work on Saturdays.”

  “I see.” More shuffling of papers. He was already losing interest. “Well, then, I’ll meet you at your place of work. Henry’s, isn’t it?”

  “Hattie’s,” I said. “But come early if you can. Once it starts getting busy, I won’t be able to stop and talk.”

  “Quite understandable,” he said.

  Well, that was going to be a pain in the butt, I knew, juggling Hattie and the customers and my father all at the same time, but I supposed it couldn’t be helped.

  CHAPTER

  •

  TWENTY-NINE

  I ought to mention that Peter—or rather, the missing person formerly known as Peter—chose this time to move yet again, this time into the Shaw mansion.

  “Why?” I shouted after I’d found out by way of a text message he’d sent me. A text! I stomped over to the house—well, palace, really—and pounded on the door until the butler answered. “Did you move away from school just so you can cater to your uncle’s every whim, day or night?”