“No. I’ll not have it.” I scowled. “Does this pool make such sport of everyone?”
“Everyone? Only a favored few come here, Morgan.”
Then Thomas was numbered among a favored few. I demanded, “What would Thomas see in this pool?”
“Likely himself.” But at the mention of Thomas, something eased and softened in Cernunnos, as if he felt the warmth of the rising sun.
“Himself, as in a mirror?”
“Look to your own wholeness, Morgan. You would like to help your mother, Lady Igraine, is it not so?”
I nodded. I wanted her to love me.
Cernunnos said, “But, Morgan, you can help no one until you are whole in yourself. Try again.”
His tone made me want to shake him. I flared, “What about Merlin? The sorcerer, has he looked in this pool?”
Cernunnos stiffened. “Be careful, Morgan. Do not anger me.”
The chill in his deep eyes made me flush and obey him at once, looking at the mirroring pool. And there, for a wonder, my own youthful reflection wavered on the surface. But then my face seemed to swim away like a trout, and I saw instead a Morgan blazing like fire, golden blue bright and breathing flame, a—a dragon? But I hated dragons, I hated the memory of Uther Pendragon’s fiery dragon flag frightening me, a child, as he marched into Tintagel, driving my father’s men prisoner before him. I blinked. The dragon eddied away, and there was—confound it, the powdered pussycat Morgan again, the pudgy middle-aged wench—
“Embrace her,” Cernunnos urged, his harsh voice low and close to my ear.
Blast everything, I would show him. “Just so,” I retorted, and I spread my arms and lunged. As I splashed headfirst into the pool, I thought I heard someone laughing, and I could have sworn it was she. The witch.
I encountered nothing weird or slimy underwater, blessed be. I kept my eyes shut tight, pinched my nose, kicked my feet against the bottom and shot back to the surface as quickly as I could.
Perhaps it was Cernunnos I had heard laughing. Certainly he was yelping with laughter as I rose from the pool streaming like a fountain.
“That was not what I meant,” he gasped, laughing.
“Did I embrace her?” I challenged.
“I think you chased her away instead.” As if my challenge were of no account, he offered me his hand to help me as I clambered out of the water. At his touch my clothes were dry again. “Very well, Morgan. I see you will learn wholeness in your own way, in your own time, if indeed you learn it at all.”
He ambled away and left me, and I thought I had won. Not until eons later did I understand how much I had lost.
I sat by the pool again, gazed at the swan and dreamed of Thomas. Did he love me? Was I good enough?
I dreamed my way through that day and many to follow. Seasons passed like a dream in Avalon, like a whisper. The ducks would fly away, and sometimes there would be a lace-work of ice on the deep pools, gone before noon. Clouds like fish scales muted the sky and the sun set bloody, but Rhiannon still danced barefoot through longer nights until the ducks returned to nibble new grass so green it seemed to glow. Then everything would mellow for a timeless time, Cernunnos lazing in the arbor and Rhiannon bathing amid water lilies and my mother scrying by moonlight in the still pools and I tagging after all of them as pesky as a toddler, wanting to learn power like wanting to pull a buttercup out of the bud and make it bloom. Often the days and nights seemed very long to me, for I remained restless and uneasy within myself. Yet I lingered beside the waters of Avalon. And one morning the ducks would fly away again and the season turn, and another year was gone.
The ducks flew away three times. Three years gone by.
Eighteen years old now, I wore my milpreve on a band of orichalcum, the silvergold metal of the fays, magical metal I had melted and shaped with my mind. I knew the subtleties of scrying in metal or water; metal is like Redburke, remorseless and sometimes a trickster, whereas water is a kindly mother who sometimes wishes not to tell her children the whole harsh truth. I had neither surrendered to Ladywater nor embraced her, as Cernunnos had said I must, but it seemed not to matter. I knew how to heal all common ailments and how to bestow gifts and blessings and curses. I knew the languages of serpents and fishes and birds, although I spoke to them only haltingly. I had ridden on the milk white mare behind Cernunnos, and I had seen the mare take the human form of a goddess more lovely than Rhiannon, and I knew her name: Epona. I had played chess with that fearsome crone Menwy, and she had cackled like a heron when I was able to defeat her. I had seen the Morrigun at her washing, and I had seen the wild hunt that chivvies the souls of those who have died unforgiven. And I had lived. Slowly I had grown into a sense of what it meant to be Morgan le Fay.
Or so I thought.
And throughout that timeless time I had asked the mirror and the mirroring water for news of Thomas, much as my mother always and forever asked for news of Arthur. And I had sometimes seen a blond stripling whom I believed to be Arthur because the sight of him made my neck hairs bristle. But neither mirror nor moonlit pool had showed Thomas to me. I dreamed of him often, but the ways of dreaming are even trick ier than the ways of scrying. I could tell little from my dreams except that Thomas was yet alive somewhere. I would have felt it in my dreams if he were dead.
Or the bronze mirror would have showed his death to me. That mirror had the soul of an earth demon, I think. Hateful. It showed me no lies, for it knew I had the power to blast it to bits, but it showed me much hurtful truth. Ongwynn growing old. Morgause growing lonely and bitter. Annie’s death, again and again.
My father’s death.
Even now, hundreds of years later, I can see it in my mind’s eye as dagger-sharp as I saw it that day. In the candlelit bronze circle, shadows swirled and then there was my father riding, his visor raised so that I could see his face—how my heart sprang, leaping and trembling and floundering like a hart struck through by the hunter’s arrow. I gasped for breath yet I could not turn away. I gazed unblinking at the image out of the past: my father, his gray eyes stern under his helm, his gloved hands strong on the charger’s reins, his armor shining—and then he lowered his visor, and, thank mercy, I could not see his face as he raised his sword, as—as he did battle. Even now that I have spread my fateful wings over many battles, I can hardly bear to think of that one, all darkness and moiling confusion and the screams of frightened men. I remember my father’s shouts as they mobbed him and dragged him down from his steed. I remember his death scream.
And I saw what they did to him afterward.
I saw the battlefield, that dreadful garden of death, and my father’s head on a stick like a scarecrow, and I remembered that other battlefield, and how I had cried on Thomas’s shoulder, and how I had flung back my head and gazed into his grave, beautiful face and cried out my defiance of his fate.
From that day forth there began to grow in me a sense, a whisper, of what I, Morgan le Fay, meant to do.
But the conviction grew in me slowly, like a stream gathering its waters to become a river flowing. Slowly, for it would mean leaving Avalon.
If I had my way, fate be damned: Thomas would not die in battle. I would keep him safe with me always.
Before I could leave, however, I had to try to heal my mother.
I knew the task was likely to cost me dearly. Healing is a difficult, dangerous art with love at its heart. Because of the love, I had to be the one who tried; as a fay and as Igraine’s daughter, I just might have the power to restore her. Perhaps not; hers was a stubborn malady. Cernunnos had tried to heal Igraine, and he had failed, although his power was great; I had seen it the day he had healed Thomas with a touch.
“Mother,” I asked not quite idly, “do you remember what it means to be in love?”
She did not look at me or answer. In the three years I had attended her daily, nothing had changed: Igraine no longer beautiful, face like a skull, sat rigid, her scrawny back not touching the back of her chair. And she see
med not to know I was there. “Arthur,” she murmured to the silver circle lying before her like a benighted pool.
“Mama.” I used the word seldom, for it had a small power I wished not to wear away.
My mother glanced at me.
“Mama, what would it take to make you well?”
She shook her narrow head. “I am well,” she whispered as if I had threatened her. She turned back to her scrying.
In the darkness under Avalon’s dome I watched my mother, with a chill prickling my spine. What was it in Igraine that had defied the healing power of Cernunnos? And not only he. Many had tried, among them Menwy, Epona, Rhiannon—and if Rhiannon could not heal my mother, I knew I was an upstart and a fool even to think—
Now. This minute. I knew I had to attempt it at once, before my small courage left me entirely.
I stood, whispered a command to my milpreve—it blazed to life like a blue star—and I laid my hands one on each of my mother’s rigid, brittle shoulders.
Had I known how much it would hurt, to no purpose, I might not have tried.
It was her pain that I encountered, such a knotted, stubborn, fearsome inward pain that I could not bear it, let alone budge it. Yet I experienced it through my hands clear to my heart, the power of that pain taking me over, when I would by far have preferred the fey power that had felled me when I had healed Ongwynn. The force of my mother’s relentless suffering sent me staggering back, gasping and whimpering. Tears almost blinded me, but through the blur of misery I could see my mother sitting as before, staring at her mirror, as if she had not even felt my hands upon her.
I had managed not to scream, or not loudly, but somehow Rhiannon knew anyway and was there in an eyeblink, her arms around me. “Oh, Morgan,” she whispered.
She smelled of waterflowers, as always. I laid my head on her half-naked shoulder and wept like a child, but within a moment the agony seeped out of me and my heartbreak turned to fury. As if I were still a six-year-old, that same old hateful fire dragon blazed hot, hot in my chest. I pulled away from Rhiannon and shouted through my tears, “She doesn’t love me! She has never loved me!”
Rhiannon did not dispute it, but merely asked, “Do you love her?”
“Of course I do!” But I knew the moment I said it that it was not true enough, curses take it, and that was why I had failed. I did not love my mother as I loved Ongwynn. It would have been more true that I wanted Mother to love me, to think of me, to ask for me and not always and forever that hateful Arthur, Arthur, Arthur.
“Arthur,” my mother murmured yet again to the shadowy mirror. “Show me Arthur.”
“Maybe it’s not so simple,” I told Rhiannon wearily.
“Is love a simple thing?”
I shook my head. “It’s no use for me to try again.”
“Perhaps in another season or two? You are still very young.”
I lifted my eyes to hers, feeling spent enough to tell her plainly, “I must leave soon.”
“Morgan! But why?”
Love, murmured the shadowy river of self gathering within me, growing, starting to sing. Love always and forever, never to be lost.
To Rhiannon I answered only, “I have plans.”
Still, I might have lingered a while longer, for time meant little in Avalon, and a morning beside those shadowshining waters passed like a moment—but the very next day, Ladywater herself set spurs of fear to me and rushed me on my way.
I remember as if it were yesterday: I walked barefoot through rank new grass, wild with buttercups and bluestars, to the swan pool. I sat on the grassy bank in the sunshine, thinking of nothing but Avalon’s beauty; how could I leave this place of wonders? But then in the mirroring water I saw an image of Ongwynn lying white-shrouded amid wreaths of columbine.
Dead.
My heart went numb. I sat without moving or speaking as the image rippled away and the white swan drifted past, its black reflection turning its graceful head to look at me.
The message was kindly meant, I knew. This was Ladywater, the very tears of the great mother. She would not show me anything to hurt me unless she had a reason.
Columbine. Ongwynn was fated to die in the early summer. I had time.
Motherwater had showed me to give me time.
It was time to leave Avalon. Time to go home.
“Mother,” I told Igraine, “I don’t know whether I will ever see you again.”
She did not look at me. “Arthur,” she murmured to the mirror.
I hugged her around her narrow shoulders, kissed her cheek—cool and withered, like shirred silk—and turned away.
I had already said good-bye to the others: Rhiannon, Epona, Menwy, and many whom I have not named. I did not turn back now, could not turn back. I raised my head and stiffened my spine.
The petal-portals of Avalon were just closing as I strode outside, where in the dawn light Cernunnos awaited me beside a caparisoned steed pulling at its reins.
I did not ask him where he had procured that grand horse for me. I knew that sometimes false-hearted knights were still foolish enough to venture to Avalon.
“Thank you, my lord.” I bowed my head to him and sketched a curtsy of sorts—I wore the clothing of a lady again, or approximately so, with a mantle around my shoulders and a heavy skirt flowing to my feet, and I gave him the courtesy of a lady. But he surprised me. He hugged me, and my heart swelled when I felt the warmth of his embrace; I returned it, laying the side of my head for a moment on his brown-furred shoulder.
“You know you are not yet whole,” he said. “You have not embraced your shadow.”
I pulled away from him, harrowed by the memory of shadows in the mirroring pool: the matron and the crone. Age and death. A sorceress and the Morrigun. I flared, “I will never embrace.”
“Do not say that! You do not yet know; you are a young moon just rising. Do not yet set yourself to battling the tides.”
Nonsense, I thought. I felt that I was ready and equal to all that I planned to undertake. But I said nothing, only looked into his face.
Under his crown of antlers his deep brown eyes, shadowed like forest pools, gazed back at me. “You have not yet come to the choice,” he told me.
The choice of which he had spoken that first day, between the peaceful ways of fays and the shadowed ways of sorcery.
“How can you say to embrace, then say to choose?”
“You must be to choose who you will be.”
“But have I not chosen to be a fay?” I argued. “Why would I choose an evil path?”
“Not so much evil as ... restless, discontent, out of tune with the cycles. Estranged from the mothers.” As he spoke, his eyes blazed golden, so hot I stepped back. “Trying to be a lord over the earth. Apart.”
I understood much that he was not saying, would never say: that he had been a god, like the others, whereas a sorcerer like Merlin only aspired to be a god. Estranged from the ancient power of earth, Cernunnos had said. It was in the cycles of earth and moon that Cernunnos and the fays found life and strength. I asked, “From what do sorcerers draw their power, then?”
Cernunnos gave me a long look, the golden fire in his eyes dimming to a gentle glimmer. He answered quietly, “From self-will such as yours, Morgan.”
My heart burned dragonish with vexation. I wanted to breathe fire at him, and I could have done it, but I stamped my foot instead. “You think I will be that sorceress I have seen in the pool? Never! I hate her!”
Cernunnos only sighed, then smiled upon me, wistful and wry and not quite human. Without another word about wholeness or choice or fate, he helped me onto the charger and handed me the reins. “May the Lady give you a safe journey, Morgan,” he blessed me. “Farewell.”
I hated him. I adored him. My feelings battled within me so fiercely that I could not speak, but I lifted my hand to answer his blessing and bid him good-bye. Then I turned the steed toward the mountains and let it carry me away as fast as it liked. And so I departed from Avalon.
I stopped only to sleep or wash my face and once to lay blue windflowers on Annie’s cairn. That foul knight’s armor still lay over her where I had piled it, and his whitening bones lay amid rotting woolens nearby. Odd that nothing had been disturbed.
I knelt there a moment by Annie—what was left of Annie—then rode on.
Three times by then I had met with knights errant, but I had not troubled myself to hide from them; I had stared them down. It was not the usual thing for a girl of eighteen to ride alone, on a war horse, wild-haired and astride, with a split velvet skirt flowing down over spurred boots and a blue stone flaring with its own fey light on one finger—not usual at all. Perhaps it was my defiant strangeness that gave them pause. Or perhaps it was the way I could control the charger with a touch or a thought, with no need of bit or reins. And no need of a pack horse, for fays have ways of procuring what they require. Perhaps those knights whispered to themselves, “Fay.” Perhaps they saw my uncanny eyes, or—of course there was the shimmer of faery power all over me; I am always forgetting that. No wonder they growled in their beards and let me alone.
And likely they spoke of me to those whom they met: Did you see her? Who was she? Where did she come from? Where is she going?
None of this frightened me, although it should have.
And so kicking up rumor like dust wherever I passed, I scaled the tors and cantered curveting through the villages and let my courser gallop across the moors and journeyed swiftly to Caer Ongwynn.
BOOK FOUR
Caer Morgana
14
I CLATTERED IN JUST AT SUNSET, AMID PEACH-AND-PURPLE light glancing off the billows of the sea, and my noise brought Morgause out of the portal. She wore one of the gowns I had left, in ruins now, and her hair hung in a long frazzle, echoing—lines on her face? But she was only nineteen, a year older than I. How could she be so worn?
At first she gawked at me—I think in the sharp-edged light slanting off the sea she could not at once tell who I was. Then her taut face twisted, and she shouted, “High time you came home!” as she burst into a spate of tears. As I jumped down from the charger, she strode over and hugged me hard, then pulled back as if she wanted to slap me. “Morgan, you are so beautiful. Do you have a sweetheart? I hate you. Where is Annie?”
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