Half Sick of Shadows

by Laura Sebastian

  Her scream pierces the air, guttural and savage. She isn’t the only one screaming, the only one changing. All of the Lyonessians are shifting beneath the moonlight. But Gwen is the only one of them who also sounds frightened. I didn’t think Gwen capable of fear, but suddenly it is all I see in her. Not a monster, not even when her nail beds pull back and give birth to claws sharp as knives. Not even when she bares her teeth and they are filed into fangs. All I can see is a girl afraid.

  Afraid of Arthur.

  I didn’t want you to know, she’d said. I didn’t want you to remember me like this.

  But Arthur doesn’t step away from her, not even when she begins to snarl. He doesn’t lift his weapon or ready to attack. He just looks at her the same way he always has, like she’s still just Gwen.

  And that is his first mistake. Because she is not just Gwen anymore.

  It was me. But it also wasn’t. I don’t . . . I don’t know how to explain how both can be true, but they are.

  I didn’t know, either, but now I understand it a bit better. I can see the battle behind Gwen’s eyes, I can see that she is not alone in her own mind, that there is a creature battling for control. I can see the moment she lets it go.

  Quicker than a flash of lightning, she pounces and pins Arthur to the ground, causing the Lyonessians to erupt in something caught halfway between cheers and howls. For an instant, I think it is already over, and I squeeze Morgana’s hand back, feeling my nails digging into her skin.

  Do it now, I beg her, but there is no pull yet, no smell of jasmine and fresh-sliced oranges. I glance sideways at her to see her eyes not on the fight but higher, focused on the moon itself, hanging full and bright in the sky. Lancelot puts his arms around both of us, as if he can somehow protect us.

  But Arthur promised he would fight back, and he is nothing if not a man of his word. In a single strike, he throws her off him with his shield, though he barely has a chance to get back on his feet before she springs for him again. This time he is ready. He meets her with his sword drawn.

  I watched Arthur and Gwen duel often enough on Avalon. They practiced sparring and tried out new techniques with each other, and it was always interesting to watch—more like a dance than a fight, with each of them moving together and in sync, anticipating the other’s moves an instant before they made them.

  This isn’t that kind of duel, though. Now, they aren’t coming together in a dance as equals and friends. Now, there is nothing elegant about their movements. It is all desperation and hunger and fury and blood. So much blood I don’t know whose is whose, and I find I don’t care either. Every time one of them gets a hit in, every time one of them gets hurt, I flinch. I cry out. I hold Morgana and Lancelot tighter, and they hold me tighter in turn. Every time they hurt, I hurt.

  “Morgana, it’s time,” I tell her. “Please.”

  Her expression wavers, but after a moment she nods, once. “Brace yourself. Lancelot, keep her upright.”

  “What?” Lancelot asks. “What are you—”

  “Trust me,” she tells him, and just like that the choice is made. It isn’t a question, not even a request. It’s a demand, but one we all agreed to long ago.

  I nod and Morgana squeezes my hand again, but this time, there is something more to it than comfort. This time, the scent of jasmine and oranges floods the air, and I feel her drain me, feel her pulling magic from me. I sway on my feet, steadied only by Lancelot before Morgana takes hold of him too.

  As she draws on both of our energies—both of our lives—the sky above begins to darken. At first, I think I’m seeing things, but I’m not. The moon itself is actually shrinking. The howls of the Lyonessians turn pained and Gwen shudders, stumbling back from Arthur and throwing her arms over her head. The claws recede back into nails, her spine straightens, and she becomes Gwen again, out of breath and wild-eyed but Gwen. Arthur steps toward her, bewildered and dazed but with his sword raised high and ready to strike, ready to end it.

  “Wait,” Morgana cries out, letting go of my hand and Lance’s.

  My mind is such a blur that it takes some effort to focus on her, to reckon with what I’m seeing in front of me. Morgana, her hands held up before her, holding a glowing silver orb the size of her head. It hurts to look at it, but it is impossible to look away. It is the moon itself, brought down from the sky and shrunken.

  I’ve already Seen this in flashes, the image of her with the moon in her hands. It seemed absurd at the time, the sort of abstract vision that was half-dream, the kind I’d long ago dismissed as an impossibility. But it wasn’t. It was a glimpse of salvation and horror. A glimpse I would need. And I was right—Morgana was capable, but not alone. Not without me and Lance, not without our own power, our own lives.

  It will have its consequences, I see that in the way Arthur’s men look at her, in the way her own hands begin to shake, the way even Lancelot looks unnerved.

  Morgana must know this. She never asked what the consequences would be and I didn’t tell her, but she must have realized. Even if she did, even if she made the choice willingly, it doesn’t ease my guilt. I have seen what Morgana becomes, severed from her humanity, from us, and now I have pushed her down that path.

  “Without this, you are weak,” Morgana says, her booming voice carrying across the courtyard. “If I were to break it, you would never be strong again. You would die weak.”

  “We would all die,” Leodegrance says. In the small moon’s dim light, he looks like the old man he is, not the monstrous creature I’ve come to see him as. “Everyone would, even Albion and Avalon would perish without a moon. You wouldn’t do that.”

  Morgana laughs, sounding unhinged altogether. It’s the way she laughed in my visions of her far in the future. Or maybe not so far after all. “You think I wouldn’t?” she asks, her grip on the moon tightening. In her hands, it looks as fragile as a ball of thin blown glass. It could break beneath her touch alone. “I assure you, Leodegrance, everyone I love in this world is here, and they will die no matter what. I am not my brother—I don’t care a whit about anyone outside.”

  For a moment, he looks like he wants to call her bluff. Even I, as well as I know Morgana, am not entirely sure whether she’s earnest.

  You’re all variables, Nimue told me. But Morgana might be the biggest variable of us all.

  “She’ll do it,” Gwen says before spitting out a mouthful of blood and wiping her lips with the back of her hand, leaving a smear of blood across her jaw. “I wouldn’t underestimate her, Father. She will doom the world to save a few.”

  “And what do you say to that, noble prince?” Leodegrance sneers at Arthur, but he is too winded still to answer, still stuck staring at Morgana in a mix of horror and wonder.

  “He doesn’t have to say anything to it,” Morgana says, her eyes never leaving the king. “He will live to see tomorrow and that is enough. Do we have a deal, King Leodegrance, or would you like to test my will against yours?”

  They stare hard at each other for a moment, but Leodegrance is the first to look away. “Your terms?” he asks.

  “Your head,” she says without missing a beat. “Our safety. The alliance we came for and one of our people on your throne to ensure the alliance holds. Nothing less.”

  “You make steep demands,” Leodegrance says.

  “I hold a steep cost if you refuse,” Morgana replies evenly.

  Leodegrance thinks it over for only a moment, mouth pursed and eyes lingering on the moon in Morgana’s hands. “Gwen,” he says, his voice softening as he looks at his daughter. “Bring a sword and make it quick.”

  Gwen looks at her father, aghast. “No. I . . . I can’t—”

  “You can and you will,” he snaps. “The moon isn’t meant to be out of the sky. She will wither to nothing if she isn’t returned soon.”

  With small and weary steps, Gwen walks toward him. When she
passes Arthur, he hands her his sword and she takes it without looking at him. She comes to stand before her father, and her hands only shake slightly before she lifts Arthur’s sword.

  He whispers something to her that no one else can hear, and she nods once before drawing the blade across his throat.

  Though the Lyonessians are confined to their human forms without the moon, when King Leodegrance’s blood spills, the court erupts in a chorus of feral howls that shake me to my core.

  33

  PART OF ME fears that when Morgana returns the moon to the sky, there will be nothing to keep our arrangement in place, nothing to keep the Lyonessians from attacking and ripping us to shreds before we even have time to scream.

  But they don’t, and it isn’t until Arthur, Morgana, Lancelot, and I are returning to our rooms in the castle that I understand why that is. They’re afraid of us—they’re afraid of Morgana specifically. Because what she did once she can do again, at any time, at her slightest whim. For all their fearsomeness, they fear her. And they aren’t the only ones.

  I saw how the Albion soldiers looked at her—or rather, how they didn’t look at her at all. They didn’t thank her. They kept their eyes downcast when she walked past them, their faces paler than the moon she held in her own two hands. The image of King Leodegrance bleeding to death is what should stay with me, or even Morgana holding the moon, but it’s the fear in those men’s eyes that I can’t get out of my mind. Fear like that will not be rationalized with, it will only grow wild and untamed, spreading further each day.

  “We knew there would be a price to pay,” I say to her when we are alone in our room once more. “It would seem to be your reputation.”

  She looks at me, unsurprised and nonplussed. She shrugs her shoulders. “An easy sacrifice then,” she says, flopping back on the bed and staring up at the ceiling. “You know I didn’t have much of one to begin with.”

  I shake my head. “It’s more than that. Word will spread throughout Albion,” I say, pacing the length of the room. Outside the window, I catch sight of the moon, back in the sky where it belongs, hanging full and round amid a star-littered sky like nothing ever happened to it at all. “They’ll call you a witch, paint you as evil. You’ll be their villain.”

  She doesn’t say anything for a moment. “I saved their lives—all of our lives. You said it yourself—there was no other option.”

  “You know that and I know that, but it isn’t about truths. It’s about stories, remember? They won’t like that story, and so it will cease to be the truth. You will be their villain because they will want you to be, truth be damned.”

  “Yes,” Morgana says after a moment, though she doesn’t sound bothered by that notion. She sits up slightly, resting on her elbows. “But Arthur is alive, Gwen is alive, you and Lancelot as well. We are alive and safe and I did that. You told me there would be a cost and I didn’t care—I still don’t care. I’d do it over again if I had to.”

  I pause in my pacing, a realization dawning. “You made yourself a villain so that Arthur could remain a hero.”

  She glances away, out the window. “Nimue would be awfully proud, wouldn’t she?” she asks, her voice brittle as frozen glass. “Arthur before all.”

  I can’t form words. I try a couple of times, though I don’t know quite where to begin. I don’t know how I can possibly tell her that in saving Arthur today, she’s doomed him in the future. We have doomed him. Because even though Morgana chose the path, I led her right to it. And if I hadn’t—if we—hadn’t? Arthur would be dead right at this moment. It was the right choice, wasn’t it? But the more I think about it, the more my mind ties itself into knots that I doubt I’ll ever be able to undo.

  I don’t know how to explain to Morgana that this will be the beginning of the end, the first fracture between her and Arthur that will soon widen into an uncrossable chasm. I don’t know how to say that the sacrifice she made today will eventually drive her mad with resentment, how it will eventually make her hate Arthur so much she would see him dead. I don’t know how to apologize for my own part in it.

  There is no saying any of that, even if I could find the words to express it. To tell Morgana anything I’ve Seen would break all my vows and could make things infinitely worse. There is nothing to say, no reply to make at all.

  So instead, I can only laugh, and it is some time before I stop.

  * * *

  ARTHUR AND LANCELOT join us in our room just before the moon slips out of the sky, both with the same sleepless and haunted look in their eyes. Arthur’s wounds have been shoddily patched up, his left arm wrapped in a makeshift sling and bandages stretching over the right side of his face. He doesn’t seem to be in much pain, though that might just be Arthur’s stubborn bravery.

  “Do you want me to . . .” Morgana asks him, gesturing to his arm.

  Arthur shakes his head, the movement causing him to wince. “I think you’ve done enough for one day.” Though he says the words mildly enough, Morgana still flinches away from them.

  “It wouldn’t kill you to thank me, you know,” she says, not just to Arthur but to Lancelot as well. “If I didn’t do what needed to be done, we would all be dead.”

  “Of course everyone is grateful,” I cut in. “It just . . . it wasn’t how any of us imagined it going.”

  At that, Morgana laughs. “No, because Arthur thought he would show up with his righteous ideals and swoony sentiments and Gwen would fall all over herself to marry him and everything would be tied up in a neat bow. That was never going to happen.”

  Arthur finally forces himself to look at his sister.

  “Would you have done it?” he asks her quietly. “If it had come down to it, would you have really destroyed the world?”

  Morgana doesn’t answer right away. Instead, she picks at a thread in the comforter, her eyes focused on that so she doesn’t have to meet his gaze.

  “I didn’t have to make that choice, so what does it matter?” she says.

  “It matters,” he tells her, because to Arthur, it’s the only thing that does.

  She lets out a slow exhale before drawing her eyes up to his. “Yes, I would have done it,” she says, her voice so low I barely hear her. “Cast the entire world into darkness. And why not? What good is a world without you in it? It would have fallen to darkness anyway.”

  Arthur has nothing to say to that, but nothing needs to be said. A thousand words lie in the way he looks away from her, in the way the corners of his mouth turn down, in the furrow of his brow. Morgana sees it as clearly as I do, and she shrinks in on herself in response.

  She might have prepared for the world to fear her, she might have steeled herself against their hate and misunderstanding. But she never in a thousand years expected it from Arthur.

  “I saved us,” she says, to him and to herself. Her voice is thread thin, lost to the night as it fades into a new dawn. “And I will not apologize for finishing what you didn’t have the stomach to.”

  Arthur has no response to that, and Morgana doesn’t seem to expect one from him. She turns and walks out of the room without a glance over her shoulder. The door shuts behind her with a slam.

  Though part of me wants to, I don’t go after her, and neither does Arthur or Lancelot. After all, in a land of monsters, Morgana is still the most fearsome creature around.

  * * *

  WITH HIS INJURIES, Arthur needs sleep more than Lancelot and me, so I give him a dose of the sleeping draught Morgana and I packed, and in a matter of minutes he is fast asleep in the bed. His snores are loud, but I’m grateful for something to fill the silence that hangs in the air between Lancelot and me as we sit on the sheepskin rug stretched out before the dying fire.

  The air is cold, so I draw my knees up to my chest, hugging them tighter beneath the threadbare blanket. For his part, Lancelot seems unbothered by the chill, though he does seem to be
unbothered by most things. When he sees me shivering, he hands me the only blanket without a word.

  “Did you See it ending like this?” Lancelot asks after a while, though his gaze is focused on the flames burning low in the fireplace.

  “I Saw a dozen different versions of it,” I say. “A dozen different ways our journey here would end. The only good one I Saw was us returning to Camelot triumphant, but I never Saw how. There was another vision, though, some time ago, of Morgana holding the moon in her hands. I never knew what to make of it—I thought it was some abstract dream, nothing as literal as what happened. But the more I thought about the problem before us, how big a part the moon played, the more I thought about that vision. So I suggested it to Morgana, if she could get enough power to do it.”

  “And, of course, Morgana took that as a challenge,” he says, exhaling loudly.

  “But I’ve Seen other things,” I add, unsure of why I’m saying the words until they’re out of my mouth. Lancelot is surprised as well, his eyes darting from the fire to rest on me. “Things I think we’re getting closer to now more than ever, that I’ve pushed us toward tonight. Worse things.”

  “Worse than being eaten by Lyonessian beasts?” he asks.

  I pause before nodding. “I can’t say more,” I say.

  “I know,” he says, and he does, better than the others. Unlike them, he’s never asked about my visions, not even in jest. Because he was born and raised on Avalon, among the oracles. He knows the rules as deeply as I know which type of fork to use for dessert. “I wish you could, though.”

  I shake my head. “Everyone always says that, but it’s a heavier burden than you would think, to know the fates of the people you love.”

  For a moment, he doesn’t say anything. “I’m sure it is,” he says finally. “That’s why I wish you could share it. So that you wouldn’t have to shoulder the burden alone.”

  He goes back to staring at the fire, but I let myself look at him, taking in the sharp planes of his face, the intensity of his green-gold eyes. After a moment, I inch closer to him, opening the blanket up to share it with him, wrapping us both in its warmth. He settles an arm around my shoulders, and I don’t know if it’s meant as a gesture of comfort or one of romance, but I find I don’t care either way because whatever it is, it feels good. It feels right.