Half Sick of Shadows

by Laura Sebastian

  By the time I crawled back into my bed, my decision had been made. I knew that I would go to Avalon, no matter how my mother felt about it. The path was decided.

  I think about that again now as I walk through the woods with Morgana. Arthur and Gwen have run ahead, looking for Lancelot. I’m sure they are both sad to be leaving Avalon, but they’re excited as well. Excited for new lands, for new adventures, for their lives to truly begin out in the wild, unknown world.

  Morgana isn’t excited, though, and having seen what those adventures bring, what that world does to us, I can’t bring myself to be excited either.

  “Will we come back, Elaine?” Morgana asks me after a moment. She’s hesitant, wary—as she should be. She knows by now not to ask me about my visions, how dangerous it is to know what your future holds. She remembers, as I do, what happened the last time I shared what I’d Seen.

  I press my lips together and don’t look at her. If I do, I fear I’ll see the Morgana from my cliff vision, with her spectral eyes and gaunt face and a voice like death itself.

  My mother was wrong about visions—they can change. Nimue told me so. She explained to me how visions shifted and changed over time, how the future was molded by choices, how the more a vision shifts, the less solid it is.

  But that’s the thing—my vision of us on the cliffside has never changed. I’ve seen it dozens of times by now, the same scene, over and over again, exactly the same down to the rhythm of my breath. Solid as the ground beneath my feet.

  “Yes,” I tell Morgana. “We’ll come back.”

  I don’t tell her any more. I don’t tell her that when we do return to Avalon, we will no longer be ourselves. That the humanity she has now, the humanity that makes her who she is, will be long gone.

  8

  I SAW LANCELOT BEFORE I met him, though that vision was cloudy and incomplete—a product of an act of violence and twisted love I never expected. Some nights, I still feel her cold hand at my throat, feel her other hand forcing the mouth of the potion bottle between my lips. I wake up sputtering and unable to breathe, like I’m choking on bile. On nights like that, I almost wish for a drowning vision, to be haunted by the future instead of the past.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself now.

  * * *

  ONE DAY, NOT long after I’d arrived in Avalon, I found myself alone with Lancelot for the first time, trekking through the woods at the northern edge of the island, a place I hadn’t yet explored. The others had been called off to lessons, but as I would find out, Lancelot’s lessons had ended the summer before. He was fifteen, and the fey had decided there was nothing more for him to learn that he couldn’t teach himself.

  Most mornings, he was up before dawn, running or riding his horse or practicing sword fighting. And even as the day went on, it seemed he was always moving, always training, always striving toward something I couldn’t begin to fathom.

  After we wound through the trees for almost half an hour in silence, the sound of rushing water started to underscore the birdsong, and soon a river came into sight, weaving through the forest. Some parts were shallow enough to be only ankle deep, water dancing over smooth stones that lined the bottom. As we followed it farther up, though, it appeared to get deeper, going from crystal clear to a more ominous ink blue, its depths obscured.

  I heard the waterfall before I saw it, the unending sound of crashing water that tied my stomach into knots. The tightly wooded forest opened up into a field of pale purple flowers. The smell of them hit me before I could identify them by sight—lavender. I breathed deeply, the scent draping over me like a warm blanket. As we waded through the meadow, the flowers brushed at my bare calves, making them itch, but I forgot that altogether when the waterfall came into sight.

  The water cascaded down over the craggy side of the mountain on the far side of the meadow in a pure wash of aquamarine, glittering in the midmorning sun in a way that I recognized even then wasn’t strictly magical but didn’t look quite real either. It was too blue, too pure, a color that almost seemed unnaturally pigmented, but wasn’t. It was nature, pure and distilled.

  There was a small pond at the bottom of the waterfall that gave birth to a stream disappearing into the woods we’d just come from. Though the water crashed violently in my ears, bringing up memories of visions, I somehow knew there was nothing to fear there—the water was different than in my visions, too bright and open to be the same place. Still, I hung back when Lancelot walked up to the bank, shucking his shoes and sitting down at the edge to dangle his feet in.

  I suppose he did know I was there in the end, because he looked back at me over his shoulder, eyebrows raised.

  “Everything alright?”

  I must have nodded a little too quickly for it to be convincing. “I think I’ll stay back here. The flowers are lovely,” I said.

  He gave a snort and rolled his eyes. “The flowers are lovely,” he echoed. “Does everyone talk like that on the mainland?”

  “Like what?” I asked, frowning.

  “Like they’re trying to fill the space without saying anything meaningful,” he said. “You say, The flowers are lovely, when what you mean is I’m too scared to get any closer to the water.”

  “I’m not . . .” I started, but trailed off, my cheeks growing hot. “How did you know?”

  “Your heartbeat sped up as soon as we got close, and your breathing became more shallow. Both are classic signs of fear.”

  I took an involuntary step back. “You can hear my heartbeat and breathing from all the way over there?”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “Fay gift,” he said, as if this were commonplace. I hadn’t been on Avalon long enough to realize it was. “Do they not have water in Albion either?”

  “We have water,” I said, surprised at how snappish it came out. He was right, I realized. My heart was racing and my breathing was short. It made it harder to focus and harder to hold on to my composure. “Albion has water and trees and mountains and everything else you can find here. And if you must know, we don’t talk to try to fill the space. It’s called polite conversation, and you could benefit from learning the art of it yourself.”

  I regretted the words as soon as I said them, but if he was offended, he didn’t show it. Instead, he shook his head, an irritating smirk tugging at his lips.

  “You won’t drown in the water here, if that’s what you’re afraid of,” he told me after a moment. “Even if you can’t swim, the water will just spit you back out onto shore. I’ve seen it happen before to children who swim too deep.”

  “I’m not worried about drowning here,” I told him, but I didn’t go into any more detail, and he didn’t seem to expect me to.

  He looked, for a moment, like he wanted to push the matter, but finally he nodded. “Do you miss it? Albion?”

  In the week that I’d known him, he’d never asked me anything, at least nothing so genuine. I didn’t realize until that moment that he had only ever asked questions he already knew the answer to.

  “In some ways, I suppose I do,” I told him after a moment. “But I never really belonged in Albion. It was . . . it was like wearing shoes that didn’t fit right. They looked perfectly fine, but they pinched my toes and rubbed my heels raw until it hurt to even move. On other people, they fit perfectly. Just not me.”

  The confession felt like surrendering something, like handing him a knife to turn back on me.

  “You don’t feel that way here?” he asked.

  “No,” I admitted. “It’s only been a week, but I already feel more at home here than I ever did in Albion.”

  For one brief moment, I thought we’d come to an understanding, the kind I’d found with the others but still eluded me with him. He looked at me for a long beat like he saw straight through to my soul.

  And then he laughed, the sound of it cruel and sharp enough to cut through my bones. />
  “You don’t belong here,” he told me. “This isn’t your home. You’re a visitor here, just passing through. Eventually, you’ll go home with enough wild stories to make you seem interesting for a few years. We won’t miss you when you’re gone.”

  I stared hard at him, trying to fight the tears springing to my eyes. “You don’t know a thing about me,” I told him.

  “No?” he asked, lifting his eyebrows. “Tell me which part, exactly, was the lie then, Shalott.”

  But I couldn’t. There was a part of me—a large part—that suspected he was right. That was what made the words hurt as badly as they had.

  “Come on,” he said after a moment with a beleaguered sigh. “We should head back down for lunch.”

  It was my turn to laugh, and I wiped a hasty hand under my eyes to catch any tears that might have seeped out. “I’m not going anywhere with you,” I told him, but even to my own ears I sounded like a petulant child.

  “Oh, so you’re going to stay here, by yourself?”

  “I’m going back to my cottage,” I said, hoping I sounded more certain than I felt.

  “And how are you going to get there?” he asked.

  I turned away from him and started in the direction we’d come from, but as soon as I took a step down that path, nothing looked familiar. I didn’t stop, though—getting lost in the woods felt like a preferable fate to spending another minute in Lancelot’s presence.

  “Where are you going?” he called after me, but I ignored him, walking into a copse of trees that looked like the one we came from.

  Footsteps thudded, and Lancelot fell into step next to me. “You’re going the wrong way,” he said, sounding amused.

  “Oh?” I said. “Well, I suppose it’ll make a good story then, won’t it?”

  “Not if you aren’t alive to tell it,” he pointed out. “About half a mile this way is a pit of quicksand. It’s a bit difficult to tell where solid ground stops and the quicksand begins, but if you’re feeling lucky . . .”

  I stopped short. “Well, that sounds foolishly dangerous,” I said. “Why would you have a pit of quicksand where people walk?”

  He looked surprised at the question. “For the quicksand fey,” he said, like it should have been obvious.

  I stared at him agog for an instant before closing my mouth and straightening my shoulders. “There are no quicksand fey,” I said.

  He grinned. “Look at you, learning,” he said, taking hold of my elbow and turning me to the right. “Now, if you’re really set on storming off, I would recommend doing so in that direction. You might still find yourself falling into a river or off the edge of a cliff, but if you do manage to make it through, you should run right into your cottage.”

  I gritted my teeth. “I’d imagine my peril would only serve to amuse you,” I said.

  “Depends on what sort of peril it is,” he said. “But I doubt Morgana would be amused if I let you die on my watch, so I’d rather that didn’t happen.”

  He started walking again and I tentatively followed, glancing sideways at him.

  “You’re afraid of Morgana,” I said wonderingly.

  He glared at me, but I could see the truth of it in his eyes. “I’m not afraid of anything or anyone,” he snapped.

  I laughed. “I can hear your heartbeat speed up. I can feel your breathing grow shallow,” I said, doing my best impression of his moody scowl.

  He was thoroughly unamused. “From me, that’s a simple observation. From you, that just sounds strange,” he said.

  * * *

  YOU TERRIFIED ME,” he told me, years later. The words were a whisper against the bare skin of my shoulder, a prelude to the soft kiss of his lips a second later.

  We were lying together in my bed, the stars glittering down through the skylight. White sheets were tangled around bare limbs, damp with sweat. My fingers traced the terrain of his bare chest, over the hills and valleys of muscle—cartography I already knew by heart. When he spoke, though, my fingers stopped short and I laughed.

  “I did not,” I told him, sitting up to look at him fully, though his face was open and guileless. It would never stop feeling like a rare sight to me, his expression unguarded as it was during those long, languid nights together.

  “You did,” he insisted. “Because I knew you didn’t come alone. You brought change in your wake, and I knew the day would come when they would leave me behind.” He didn’t specify who they were, but he didn’t need to. I knew he meant Arthur and Gwen and Morgana. Even in those private moments, they had a way of lingering on the edges, not intruding, but present all the same. “I said you didn’t belong here, but the truth is, none of you do. And one day, all of you will leave and I’ll still be here, alone.”

  He said the words simply—a fact stated, not meant to incite sympathy or pity or reassurances. I wasn’t sure how to respond, though part of me wanted to tell him then that he could join us, that I’d seen that possibility. But the future still seemed so far off then, impossibly far away, a quandary for a different Elaine and a different Lancelot. There would be many of those, I knew; it couldn’t hurt to add one more to the pile.

  I brought a hand to rest over his heart, feeling it beat against my fingertips like the wings of a caged bird.

  “It seems I still terrify you,” I said, shifting so that I was leaning over him, hands braced on his shoulders. My hair fell in a curtain of gold around us, blocking out the stars above shining down from the open roof, blocking out Avalon and the others, blocking out the future pressing in around us. The world narrowed to just him and me, narrowed further to the rhythm of his heartbeat and my own, to the breath held between his lips and mine.

  “I can hear your heartbeat speed up,” I told him, doing my best imitation of his deep, wry voice. My impression had gotten better since that early day when I’d first tried. By then, I knew his voice as well as my own. “I can feel your breathing grow shallow.”

  He held my gaze, his laugh a soft rumble in his chest that reverberated through my whole body. Then he tilted his mouth up to catch mine in a kiss, and our world narrowed further still.

  * * *

  WE FINALLY FIND Lancelot on the beach, collecting shells for his mother, Arethusa.

  There are many stories about Arethusa, and they have a habit of changing each time they’re told, shifting colors like the patches of opalescent scales that still cling to parts of her skin. Lancelot never talks about it himself, but from what I’ve gathered, her story goes something like this.

  Before Lancelot was born, Arethusa was a water goddess whose domain stretched over the rivers and ponds of every land and through all the seas that connected them. Even the dirty puddles that dotted Camelot’s streets were under her reign, and she could travel between each body of water as easily as I could take a single step.

  Her power was great and her hold was strong and she was happy. Mostly. The water could be a cold and desolate place, after all, and Arethusa grew lonely.

  She showed me her scales, once, the first time I had tea at her cottage. They cling in patches to the undersides of her arms, her stomach, her thighs, and she usually wears long, flowing dresses to cover them, though I didn’t understand why. They were iridescent and glittering and delicately beautiful.

  Once, she said, they covered most of her skin. Once, she had gills in her neck so that she could breathe underwater. Once, her legs ended in fins instead of feet.

  From the river one day, she saw a man in the woods. She didn’t say he was handsome, but she didn’t need to—men in stories like this are always handsome. It is both the bait and the hook.

  Maybe he loved her back, for a time. Maybe the promises he whispered in her ear were made in good faith. Maybe he never intended to leave her alone, her belly swollen, her scales falling away from her gilded skin because she had been out of the water for too long, waiting for him
to return. Maybe it was all an accident. Arethusa still believes that, and I suppose she would know better than the rest of us.

  Maybes don’t matter, though, because he did leave her, she did lose her scales, and a few months later, she did give birth to Lancelot, alone and mostly human in a world she did not understand.

  Nimue brought both of them back to Avalon, and for a time, everyone was certain that her scales would grow back, that she would be able to return to the sea, but that never happened. Some say it’s a punishment by the Maiden, Mother, and Crone for abandoning her duty for a mortal man, but others say it’s no punishment at all but Arethusa’s choice to stay on land with her son.

  I can’t say what the truth is, and I doubt Lancelot could, either, if you asked him.

  Now, the seashells are among the only tethers Arethusa still has to the sea. She showed me once how they contain messages, whispered into them hundreds of thousands of miles away. She showed me how to make my own, to toss them into the sea and trust that they would find their target in time.

  I tried it myself after I first arrived here, whispering messages for my mother every day for a month, but they all went unanswered, so I finally stopped trying. I wasn’t doing it right, I told myself, the messages never reached her, though I think some part of me has always suspected that was a lie.

  “Any gossip from the mainland?” Morgana asks Lancelot when we approach, trying to keep her voice light.

  Lancelot raises an eyebrow—a talent I’ve long envied. Every time I try to mimic him, I only succeed in looking like I have to sneeze. “These are important missives, M,” he says. “Not gossip.”

  Morgana says nothing and after a moment he sighs.

  “Lady Ducarte of Lyonesse is trying to seduce a shepherd two decades her junior with little success and everyone at court is laughing at her,” he says. “Happy?”