No whirlwind, no flash of light, no commotion. He appeared, that was all, with his staff in his hand and his black dog with the fey white eyes sitting mannerly by his side. Merlin, unchanged in many years, his eyes still like black pits in his bearded face and his druid stone glowing on his forehead.
All those who stood near him gasped and stepped back, but Mother turned to him without fear, smiling. “Well met, sorcerer,” she said, her voice queenly.
“Greetings, Igraine the Beautiful.” With his starry robe flowing around him, Merlin bowed over her gloved hand. Even in the sunlight, shadows shifted around his head and shoulders.
“You have come to escort me to my son’s coronation?”
“Indeed so.”
“It was you who sent to me the vision I scried?”
“You guess well, my queen.” That sere voice, I had never forgotten it, or the dawn I had first heard it. “Shall we be going?”
I called, “Merlin, wait.”
All eyes turned to me as I strode barefoot up the grassy slope to speak with the sorcerer. But I felt Merlin’s stare most of all. Still, other than knowing myself to be almost naked compared to my gloved and mantled mother, I did not feel much. I did not shrink, I did not tremble. I had no plan, expected nothing. I wanted to hear what he might say to me, that was all.
He turned his shadowed head toward me, and I looked straight into the blank blackness of his eyes. It was like looking into the endless depth of a starless night sky. “Lady Morgan?” To my surprise, Merlin bowed—but I suppose he was on his best behavior that day. “I beg pardon, Lady Morgan; I did not know you were here! Avalon has sheltered you well.”
“I am no lady any longer,” I told him.
I suppose there was an edge in my voice, and now I saw black ice in his stare. Still, I faced him levelly. “We have met before,” I remarked. “Do you remember?”
“Yes. On the moor, the day of your father’s death.”
As if it also remembered, the black dog stood up and sniffed my bare knee. I remember the touch of its cold nostrils and the warmth of its breath, although at the time I barely noticed.
Merlin was saying, “You were a child then, and frightened of me.” His bearded lips stirred; he smiled like a skull. “But you are not frightened any longer.”
I searched inwardly and found no fear. “True.”
Merlin asked, “What have you seen in the swan pool, Morgan?”
I smiled, almost laughed. “Horrors—as you know well, is it not so?”
The tautness of his face, like mine. His smile, like mine. “Yes.” He looked away. “They tell us to embrace,” he said, his voice low, “that darkness we all harbor in our dragonish hearts, they tell us to accept it, befriend it, love it as ourselves. And so they do. To find peace they weaken the beast within, they tame it. But you, Morgan—”
Standing by, my mother interrupted, “Good sorcerer, will you soon be ready to escort me to my son?”
Merlin ignored her, his gaze on me. I grew aware of the circle of fays all around, silent and watching, of Rhiannon standing by my mother’s side murmuring something to her to soothe and quiet her.
But most of all I was aware of Merlin, mighty Merlin, standing an arm’s reach away from me with the druid stone winking at me like a third eye from his forehead ... why was I not afraid? Because already I had lived through the worst that could happen to me?
“I, Morgan,” I echoed Merlin, mocking, “what do I care for peace, or love either? Look what love has done to me.” I thrust my crippled right hand toward him so that he could see the milpreve couched in my palm.
His eyes widened, and his spangled robes rustled as he swayed. I had staggered him.
“They say we choose our fates,” I remarked, “but I wonder.”
He raised his stare from my hand to my face, and his eyes were not quite blank, black nothings after all; I saw wonder in them. “Morgan,” he asked, pointing with his beard toward my palm, “was that done destroying Redburke’s army?”
“Yes.”
“Then indeed you have reason to question the ways of fate. If it were not for your making away with his most powerful enemy, Arthur would likely not be King today.”
His words turned a bitter knife in me, and I think he knew it. I saw the shadow of a smile beneath his beard.
“Would you like to come with us to the coronation?” he asked courteously. “Your sister will be there.”
Although I was Arthur’s half sister, it had not once occurred to me to be a presence at his king-day. Now I felt a dare and the prodding of a doom I did not understand and a reckless willingness to embrace both. Perhaps I could wreak mischief upon this upstart Arthur? I would enjoy that. “Why not?” I said, very cool, very much the lady indeed. “Yes, thank you for thinking of it. I will go with you.”
“You are very welcome.” Merlin reached toward my right hand. “May I try my powers upon that?”
All ladylike indifference deserted me. My chest gulped breath and kept it a moment longer than usual. My lips parted but did not speak. I felt some fear now, yet I nodded and lifted my hand toward him.
He clasped it in both of his, and the feel of his hands surprised me, as dry as his voice yet warm and calming. He closed his fearsome eyes, and I saw the shadows gathering thicker around his shoulders—then I closed my eyes as well, for I did not want to see the forms shaping around him. I heard a confused clamor of voices, chitter squeak giggle too dark to be piskies. And I heard fays exclaiming, Merlin chanting, and I felt—power, power almost as fearsome as that of my stone but more controlled, force running up my arm clear to my heart, my shoulder blades, my spine.
Although it did not hurt, I think I screamed, and then there was a weight dropping away from me, and silence in which I felt the black dog licking my knee.
I opened my eyes, my left hand reaching down of its own accord to pat the dog, my right hand hovering before my face whole, healed, as well as the other.
A sunlit gleam of orichalcum drew my glance to the ground. My milpreve lay there in a mass of the silvery metal. As I looked, it fell loose and rolled a few inches into the grass.
I stared at it.
Then I looked up at Merlin. He had stepped back, and it was hard to tell with the shadows settling like a mantle around him, but I thought his face looked gray. Weary.
“Thank you,” I whispered to him.
He nodded.
I found my voice. “From my heart I thank you,” I said humbly, speaking loud enough for the others to hear as well.
“The day may come when you will not thank me, Morgan,” said Merlin in that sere voice of his—it seemed to come out of the wind, from a distance, even though he stood right there. “But yes, we do indeed choose our fates. What will you do with that?” He inclined his head toward the stone lying on the grassy ground.
The milpreve. Already my gaze had gone back to it.
The choice.
“Morgan,” came Cernunnos’s low voice from my side, “you are far from whole, and peace is a stranger to you. You are further than ever from being ready.”
“I will never be ready,” I murmured.
“Listen to your heart,” he said, and something in his voice made me think with hazy surprise, He loves me. He knows me truly, the dragon in me, yet loves me.
He loves all of us.
But love only hurt me.
Gazing at the blue stone, trying not to think, only to know myself, I heard my mother say plaintively, “Good sorcerer, I want to go to Arthur now, please. I want to go to my son.”
I knew.
In that moment I knew who I was.
I was the one who would bring down King Arthur.
And if that meant being a smirking sorceress—no, worse, a vulture swooping over the battlefields—then so be it. Damn my fate and damn my future, but only turmoil and black wings and the cackle of a hag made sense to me anymore.
As if my father’s spirit whispered in my ear I heard his golden-honey voice: �
�... daredevil ... firebrand ... you are born for trouble, Morgan.”
I smiled as I bent and picked up the milpreve. It nestled warm between my fingers, bright blue and happy, naked and free. But not for long. From my long loose hair I pulled three strands—I still held the third strand of fate in my never-ready hands, and I meant to keep it. I twisted the strands together into a long fine thread, kissed my milpreve and wished. Yes. I still had powers. I held a strong silk cord now, bright red.
I slipped it through the hole in the stone, then looked around. Rhiannon gazed back at me. Epona. Menwy. Cernunnos.
“I will see you again, I am sure of it,” I said, my voice wavering a little, “but I want to tell you now that I thank you and I love you.”
I would see them again, but I would no longer be able to speak of love. Fate willing, I would no longer feel love either.
They said nothing. They knew my choice by my need to say those words. Cernunnos stood with his lips pressed tight together, his face pale despite his tawny skin.
I did not look at Merlin, but at somber Cernunnos and sweet Rhiannon, as I reached up and bound the milpreve to my forehead.
Then I looked at Merlin, and he bowed. “I will be honored to escort you to Camelot, Morgan le Fay.”
He carried me away on a steed of air, and I did not think to look back.
Epilogue
ONCE AGAIN MISTRESS OF TINTAGEL, IGRAINE STOOD atop the tallest tower, leaning on her cane, her pure white hair piled atop her head and bound with strings of pearls on golden thread. King Arthur had sent a messenger to give her his greeting and tell her he would ride that way, perhaps today. Therefore she stood watching for a first sight of him.
Years ago, Igraine remembered, that messenger might have been Morgan in bird form, a swallow, a swift falcon, or even a golden eagle with a blue jewel shining in the middle of its regal forehead. Igraine shook her ancient head to shake away thoughts of Morgan. Although she had no proof, nothing but a mother’s hunch to go on, it still seemed to her that her daughter the sorceress had somehow caused that terrible situation with Arthur and Morgause, the illegitimate child born of incest, Morgause a ruined woman and Arthur—
No. She would not think it. The fate that Merlin had prophesied might not happen for a long time. Might never happen, now that Merlin was gone.
Was that dust she saw rising in the distance, or just her bleary old eyes fooling her? She straightened and peered, but could not be sure. To rest her eyes she scanned her homeland. Rocks against which the sea ever broke and broke its white waves. The fields, the grazing land, the moor, standing stones and quoit stones and furze and—and great antlers, like those of a stag? But no, it was a man, a stranger, riding a white horse—Igraine blinked, and all she saw now were the bare branches of a dead tree. Stupid old eyes. Being a woman was a curse, but growing old was worse. Igraine turned back to watching for Arthur.
Her son, Arthur, High King, blessed ruler, protector of peace—and oh, the fighting it had taken to make him so. And even more lives might have been lost had it not been for Merlin and, yes, Morgan, she and Arthur seemingly friends at first, Morgan wreaking warfare at Arthur’s side in the shape of a lion, a dragon, a giant serpent with a blue stone blazing between its mismatched eyes—uncanny. Igraine shook her head again. Utterly uncanny, that girl, and always had been, Igraine had known it from her first look into the midnight of Morgan’s baby eyes, one darkest green, one darkest violet. As a young woman, young and foolish and wanting only to be happy, she had looked away from the child and tried to deny it, tried to wish it away. But old now and wiser, she knew better: No amount of wishing would make Morgan go away.
If Arthur had listened to his mother, he would have kept Morgan as a friend, gifting her as he did his other allies with a castle and domain, even though she was a woman.
It was a hard thing to be a woman, and unfair. Even for a queen, it had been—
Igraine forsook all thoughts of the past, leaning heavily on her cane to crane her head forward and look, as if a few inches gained could help her—but yes, surely that was a cloud of dust approaching, and in it the dim forms of horsemen, and a flame-shaped scarlet flag in the fore, and the glint of a golden crown.
Igraine turned and shuffled toward the stairs, hurrying her old feet as much as she could, hunched over her cane. She did not notice the shadow, or the great soot gray bird swooping overhead, the stone glimmering like a blue tear between its uncanny eyes. She did not feel a thing when the dark feather floated down to touch her gently, oh so gently, on the shoulder.
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