Half Sick of Shadows

by Laura Sebastian

  “Thrilled,” Gwen puts in. “Lady Ducarte once told everyone at court that I was raised by beasts.”

  I frown at her. “You tell everyone you were raised by beasts. How is it an insult if it’s true?”

  She shrugs her shoulders, glancing away. “It was in her tone.”

  I shake my head and look back at Lancelot. “We came to say goodbye,” I tell him.

  Lancelot shoots me a bewildered look before leaning down to pick up another shell, drying it off on his homespun tunic, already splotched with salt water.

  “You didn’t need to come all the way out here,” he says. “I’ll see you at breakfast.”

  I glance at the others, unsure how to say the words, but Arthur gets there first.

  “We won’t be at breakfast,” he says, his voice coming out more certain than I expected. “My father’s dead; I’m king of Camelot now.”

  It’s the first time he’s said the words out loud, and he says them like a question, as if he expects someone to correct him. No one does.

  Lancelot looks between us, waiting for someone to jump in and proclaim it all a joke, but when he realizes that won’t happen, his expression clouds over and he looks away, out to sea. Somewhere, past the horizon, Albion awaits.

  “Well,” he says slowly. “We knew this would happen eventually, didn’t we? Safe travels.”

  He sounds so calm about it that I want to slap him. And I’m not the only one.

  “That’s it?” Gwen asks with a harsh laugh.

  Lancelot keeps his eyes on the horizon. “What do you want me to say, Gwen?” he asks with a sigh. “We aren’t children anymore. We have futures, and now those futures go in different directions.”

  But what is your future? I want to ask him. Collecting shells for your mother when she is perfectly capable of doing it herself? Playing at sword fights you know you’ll win? Running through the same woods you know like the back of your own hand, crossing the same paths again and again and again? Is that what you want? A life unchallenged and easy?

  “This is goodbye then,” Arthur says, his own voice wounded. “There’s no need to see us off—I know how much you value your sleep.”

  At that, Lancelot flinches like Arthur actually did hit him, but after a moment he nods. “I’ll miss you all,” he says finally, turning to look at us again. “You’ve been good friends.”

  And there it is, the crack in his armor, no wider than a hairsbreadth but wide enough to remember that even though he was raised among the fey, even though he shares half his blood with them, he is human as well, mortal, and sometimes his emotions push their way past the calm and stoic surface.

  “I’ll meet you all back at the cottage,” I tell the others, not taking my eyes off Lancelot. “I just need a moment.”

  The others don’t protest, they don’t say anything as they walk back toward the edge of the woods, leaving Lancelot and me alone. Maybe they think they know what this conversation will entail and want no part of it. The thought makes my cheeks warm and I try to ignore it, even when Lancelot turns his eyes to me and one corner of his mouth turns up in a smirk.

  “If you’re looking for a more romantic goodbye—” he starts.

  “I’m not,” I interrupt, crossing my arms over my chest. “Come with us.”

  The words are out of my mouth before I can stop them, but so quiet I think he may not have heard. His shoulders tense, though, and I know he did. I clear my throat.

  “Come with us,” I say, louder this time. “To Albion. To Camelot. To court.”

  It sounds ridiculous when I say it out loud, especially like this. Standing ankle deep in the water with his trousers rolled up and his white tunic wet and unbuttoned, with his mussed black hair overgrown and curling around his ears—he doesn’t belong on the mainland, doesn’t belong at court. I try to imagine it: him in a stiff velvet suit buttoned up to his throat, stuck in a dimly lit castle, surrounded by stone and wood and stale air. I imagine him at a ball, dancing tensely to the delicate and restrained string music—so different from the wild drums of Avalon—twirling around the dance floor with a girl who looks something like me.

  Even in my imagination, he looks miserable and out of place.

  He must realize it as well, but he doesn’t say no right away. Instead, he stares at me, suddenly looking so much younger than he usually does. I catch a glimpse of the man beneath the bravado, and suddenly he’s only twenty-five, torn and confused and losing his only friends, insistent on fighting everyone because he doesn’t know what will happen if he stops.

  “Avalon is my home,” he says softly. “It always has been.”

  “So make a new one,” I say. “Home isn’t a place, it’s people. Your people are going to the mainland and you should be coming with us.”

  He shakes his head. “My mother needs me here.”

  It’s the same excuse I gave Morgana a decade ago when she asked me to come to Avalon. I understand his hesitation better than I’d like to, but I push on anyway. “Your mother is stronger than you give her credit for. She is perfectly capable of taking care of herself, and you know that,” I say, and it’s the truth. Arethusa isn’t my mother. She will survive on her own, and she has never held Lancelot too tightly. She will let him go with a kiss on his forehead and words of love in his ear.

  “She doesn’t need you,” I continue. “Not in the same way. Arthur needs a friend, someone who isn’t afraid to speak the truth, never mind his crown. Morgana and Gwen will need you, especially in that viper pit of a court. Both of them will feel so out of place, they’ll need all of the familiarity they can get. Without you, it will always feel like something is missing.”

  Lancelot is quiet for a moment, his eyes heavy on mine. They are no longer stone walls; now his expression is open again and all the more terrifying because of it. I want to look away, but I can’t. Tentatively, he takes a step closer to me, dripping water onto dry sand. I’ve never seen Lancelot tentative about anything, but suddenly he walks like he’s worried the earth will collapse beneath his feet. He stops a few inches away from me.

  “And you?” he asks softly, reaching out hesitantly to touch a strand of hair that’s come untucked from behind my ear. He pushes it back into place. Small a gesture as it is, it undoes something in me. I try not to show it. “Do you need me there, too, Shalott?” he asks, as if he’s afraid of the answer.

  No, I want to say. I know Camelot, after all. I won’t need a warrior or a sparring partner or a tether to Avalon. I won’t need any other friends—three will already be three more than I had last time I was at court. No, I don’t need him, because I’ve seen shades of our future, the soft pastels and the sharp, jarring hues that clash, and I know that one cannot exist without the other so I want none of it at all. I want none of him.

  But I’m not a good enough liar to believe that myself, and so the words die on my tongue.

  “Yes,” I say instead. The word forces its way past all of my defenses. The sound of it surprises me, wrenched from the deepest parts of me like something ugly and shameful and necessary. How awful it is to need someone, but more awful still to admit it out loud. It feels like I’ve cut myself open and set myself out for the crows to pick at. I am fragile and weak and desperate. I am not so different than the girl I was before, in Camelot, the one who needed so much love and never got any of it. I never wanted to be that girl again, but here I am—needing something I know I won’t get.

  For his part, Lancelot looks as surprised by the admission as I am. All we can do is stare at each other.

  After what feels like an eternity, he nods once, sharp and decisive, but he doesn’t look at me. His eyes are focused over my shoulder, where I know he can see the candle flickering in his mother’s cottage window.

  “You can always come back,” I tell him, but even as I say the words, I hate myself. Because I know in the deepest part of my soul that t
here is no truth to them. In all the visions of the future I’ve seen, Lancelot returning to Avalon has never been among them.

  9

  AT BREAKFAST THE morning after I first had the cliff vision, I had to force myself to eat, though with the vision still lingering on the outskirts of my mind, every bite I took felt likely to come right back up.

  “Elaine,” my mother said, her voice cutting through the fog of my mind as she idly stirred her morning tea, though there was nothing idle about the way she watched me. “I heard that you had a visitor yesterday.”

  I couldn’t bring myself to be surprised that my mother knew about Morgana. After all, she always seemed to have eyes everywhere.

  “Yes, Mother,” I said, choosing my words with care. “Lady Morgana and I took tea in the sitting room. It was a lovely afternoon.”

  She digested this information with a placid expression, squeezing a lemon wedge into her cup of tea. “Morgana Tintagel is nothing but trouble. Everyone says so,” she said, her voice crisp at the edges. “You would do well to keep your distance from her—we wouldn’t want people to think you’re anything alike, would we?”

  “No, Mother,” I said quietly, because it was what I was supposed to say. Even though the truth was that I would very much have liked being thought of the same way people thought of Morgana. It was certainly preferable to be feared than ridiculed, I thought, but I knew better than to say so to my mother, who would rather be ignored than either.

  “I’ve heard she was always volatile, even as a child,” she said. “I don’t want her putting ideas into your head.”

  “She hasn’t put any ideas into my head,” I told her, though I realized a second later that it wasn’t strictly true. She had put many ideas into my head during our brief acquaintance, but they didn’t feel like her ideas. Morgana had merely taken a feather duster to my own thoughts and uncovered them.

  “Elaine,” my mother said again, setting her cup down on its saucer with a rattle that echoed in the cavernous room. She fixed me with an unwavering look. “Did you forget to take your potion last night?”

  I chose my words carefully so that they wouldn’t really be a lie. “No, I didn’t forget.”

  But my mother looked at me in that way she had, and I knew she saw straight through me.

  “Really, Elaine. Sometimes I think you behave this way to spite me. All I have ever wanted is what was best for you, and yet you seem to want to throw happiness away with both hands. It’s too much for my poor heart.” She clutched her quivering white hands over her chest in demonstration, like she might claw her own heart out to show me the proof.

  “Maybe . . .” I started, before biting my lip, courage already wavering. I pushed forward. “Maybe my happiness means something different than yours does.”

  For a moment that stretched on for eternity, she was silent, staring at me with milky blue eyes as if I were a stranger to her. Her mouth bowed down, then pursed before she let out a beleaguered sigh.

  “You are a child, Elaine,” she said, each word sharp as glass. “You know nothing about life, so how can you know anything about happiness? Has Morgana been filling your head with lies?”

  No, I thought. Many things, but not lies.

  * * *

  THAT NIGHT, MY mother slipped in through my bedroom door as I was getting ready for bed. I didn’t even hear her come in at first. I was sitting at my vanity, running a brush through my unruly blond hair, when I saw her in the mirror, standing over my shoulder like a ghost. I jumped, snagging the brush in a particularly painful knot.

  “Ow,” I said, extracting it from the tangle. “You frightened me.”

  Silently, my mother extended her hand for the brush and I passed it to her, unable to meet her eyes. I felt like if I did, she would see all the secrets I had been keeping.

  “I am worried about you, Elaine,” she said after a moment of silence. Her low voice prickled dangerously at the back of my neck. “You’ve been acting strange.”

  Looking at her reflection, I realized with a jolt just how old my mother was. How much had she seen? And how much had she Seen? Maybe Morgana was right and my mother didn’t know everything about the world, but I felt then that she must have known more than most.

  “I’m still me,” I assured her. “It’s only . . . I’m questioning some things that I’ve never thought much about before.”

  Her eyes turned sharp. “Some things aren’t meant to be questioned,” she said. With one last, sharp tug through my hair, she set the brush aside. “It’s time for bed.”

  I stood up from my vanity bench and turned to face her, struggling to smile pleasantly even as something prickled beneath my skin. It felt like fear, but that was ridiculous. I had nothing to fear from my mother. “Good night,” I told her, trying to push the feeling aside.

  But she remained standing there, making no move to leave. “Don’t forget to take your medicine,” she said, eyes heavy on me. A warning.

  Every muscle in my body went taut, and the prickling feeling beneath my skin grew stronger. Run, a voice whispered through my mind.

  “I won’t,” I told her, struggling to keep my voice level. Still, she didn’t move. She wouldn’t, I realized. Not until she saw it with her own eyes.

  I crossed to the shelf and took the bottle down, unstoppering it, feeling her shrewd eyes tracking my every movement. I met her gaze as I lifted the bottle to my lips. The noise of the little liquid left sloshing around the bottle sounded impossibly loud in the dead quiet that enveloped us. I kept my lips sealed tight against the opening, not letting even a drop get past.

  “Elaine,” my mother warned, giving me a stern look. Before I could do anything, she closed the distance between us and took hold of the bottle herself, pinning me between her body and the wall behind me. “Drink.”

  I shook my head, trying to get away, but she held tight to the bottle and to me, keeping me in place. She reached up to pinch the bridge of my nose so that I couldn’t breathe unless I opened my mouth. Her eyes had grown hard and impassive, until it felt like she was no longer my mother at all, but a stranger. When she spoke, her voice was distant and gravelly and so unlike the voice that sang me lullabies as a child.

  The words she spoke burned themselves in my memory that night, strange and nonsensical as they seemed at the time. Some mornings, when I wake up from a dreamless sleep, I hear them again, whispering through my mind in her voice and lingering throughout the rest of the day.

  “Beware, beware three maidens fair. With bloody hands. Trust not . . .”

  She jerked her head to the side as if an invisible hand slapped her cheek hard. “Help not . . .” Another jerk of her head in the other direction. She clenched her jaw tight, like she was fighting the words, but they came forth anyway.

  “She’ll burn the world to ash and flame.”

  The words didn’t make sense and her eyes had grown faraway, like she might have been half-asleep. This must be it, I thought through the cloud of panic, what I had seen and felt in my dreams. Drowning, but not in the way I had expected. Finally, I had no choice, I had to open my mouth. Immediately, the potion flooded in, but still she didn’t let go of my nose.

  “Swallow,” she said, but she sounded like herself again at least. I had no choice. I swallowed, the thick, bitter liquid oozing down my throat.

  Immediately, she softened and her hand released my nose, brushing against my cheek and smoothing down my hair.

  “Good girl,” she said, brushing papery lips against my forehead. “Get some sleep now.” She pressed another kiss to the top of my head, and then she was gone and I was left alone.

  As soon as the door closed behind her, I ran to my washbasin and hunched over it, willing the potion to come back up. I had never thought that I would actually want to be ill, but that night I thought I would give anything for it. I had only just gained some measure of control over my l
ife, and I was not ready to give it up again. I pounded my fists against my stomach, hoping that would work, but it only made it ache. After trying for a few minutes, my legs gave out and I collapsed to the ground. Tears came freely and I didn’t make any effort to stop them.

  * * *

  WHEN I WOKE the next morning, I was keenly aware for the first time of the lack of a vision. I’d taken that potion countless times, and in the mornings all I remembered was dreamless sleep, unless I’d dreamt of drowning. It hadn’t quite been peace, but it was close enough.

  But that morning, I knew enough to feel the absence of the vision. It was like the space left behind by a lost tooth—I couldn’t resist prodding at it, feeling for any sense of what might have been there.

  And something had been there. I was sure of it. I could feel its absence, feel something dancing just out of my reach, teasing me like a forgotten dream. The more I tried to remember, the more it slipped away. After I lay in bed for the better part of an hour, the only thing I could remember was a set of unfamiliar green-gold eyes, locked on mine.

  Later, I would realize they were Lancelot’s. The first time I saw him on Avalon, the pieces would click into place.

  Sometimes I wonder what that vision was. Have I seen it again since? Maiden, Mother, and Crone know I’ve had enough visions of Lancelot. Or was it something else, a vision now lost to time? On days I am less kind to myself, I am convinced that it was a vision that could have changed everything, if only I’d been smarter, stronger, more determined to fight off my mother somehow.

  I never saw her again.

  When I eventually dragged myself from bed, I packed up a few things—dresses and shoes I would never wear on Avalon—and slipped out of the tower without a backward glance. I left a note behind, only seven words long.

  I love you, but I’m not sorry.

  Then I found Morgana and we left for Avalon right away, the birthday banquet be damned. She didn’t need much convincing on that count—I suppose she’d gotten what she’d really come to Camelot for after all. She’d gotten me.