I Am Morgan le Fay (11 page)

Yes. Yes, my mother and father had loved with steadfast love, true love, as I loved Thomas.... The thought caught me by surprise, flowering out of me before I could stop it. It both warmed and frightened me.

“Such love softens a woman,” Ongwynn said.

But—but I could not give up love...

Morgause put in, “Mother had power enough to protect us. Not power enough to keep Arthur, but—we don't know what happened after. Maybe things changed. We don't know. Maybe she had more power than we knew.”

Ongwynn nodded and lifted one blocky hand to move her knight. “Checkmate.”

Confound her. I studied the board. It was checkmate truly enough, and I did not see how she had done it to me.

“As usual,” I grumbled. I swept my black chess pieces aside, reached for the white queen and cradled her in my hands. It didn't matter now what power the queen had. The game was over when the king went down.

Morgause laid her book aside. “Ongwynn, what are we to do with these—these powers you are teaching us? What do you foresee for us?”

Outside, not so far away, wind and sleet hissed like a serpent. Instead of answering, Ongwynn heaved herself up from the table and bent stiffly to feed more peat to the fire. Did her back hurt her? She had never said so. When had she started moving like an old woman?

“You don't have to do that,” I complained as if her stiffness reproached me. “I can do that.”

“There's little enough I can do.” She straightened and faced Morgause. “I do not foresee,” she said. “I am not a seeress.”

“But you must have some idea.”

“Thoughts, that is all.”

“And?” Morgause prompted.

Ongwynn sighed out one of her long pauses before she spoke. “You are fated by birth to lives full of trouble,” she said finally. “You are your mother's daughters.”

Yes. Two half-grown girls hiding in Caer Ongwynn while too many greedy men battled for an empty throne, and my mother the queen, wherever she was, had become no queen but only a pawn.

In a low voice Ongwynn said, “I think both of you will need to live by your wits. Be secret and strong.”

“That's what I mean!” I burst out. “Teach me ...” My hand hovered over my chest.

Ongwynn said softly, “Of that I know nothing.”

“But—”

“I am a pedlar, that is all. Not a fay or a sorceress.”

“Then teach me the power of a pedlar!”

“I can't.”

Something as bleak as the weather in her tone made me catch my breath and blink. I had never before heard that shadow in her voice. Fays live on, Thomas had said, but pedlars ... pedlars dwindle and die. The stark, dark undertone in Ongwynn's words made me hush and say no more.

Until that night, I had thought that it was to hide Morgause and me from prying folk that Ongwynn healed no colicky babies, eased no childbirth pangs. I had thought that she did not want the villagers coming to Caer Ongwynn. And perhaps it was so.

But perhaps ... perhaps her power was weakening as she aged?

Or she had spent it all on us? Given us everything she had?

She sat down and said to Morgause, “Finish the story, child.”

It was a simple enough story, and a sad one. The prince loved his blossom bride so desperately that he began to wonder, even though it should not have mattered to him, her husband and lord and master: Did she love him too? And even though it was a good thing for a woman to be silent, and even though Blossom complied with everything he required of her and fulfilled his every desire, he wanted her to say that she loved him in her heart. He came to yearn for this so wretchedly that he could not eat, he could not sleep, and at length his longing got the better of him. He asked her to bespeak to him her love. And she said yes, yes, my darling, I do love you, I love you utterly. But because he had violated the stricture that held the magic together, Blossom fell to pieces in his arms. Nothing but a few dry, dead petal fragments remained. The prince went sweetly mad. Even though his beloved flower bride had withered to dust in his arms, he thought that he could get her back somehow, somewhere. He spent his life wandering, searching for her and grieving for her until he died.

Even before my sending I grew restless. By my fifteenth summer, I had finally learned enough to defeat Ongwynn at chess, I knew the mysteries of adding sums upon beads, I understood how the planets and stars and sun and moon circled the earth on their invisible golden wires, I had read every book in Caer Ongwynn and some of them I had also heard read to me, and I knew by heart many of the stanzas of the book of threes:

I knew the threes, and I thought I understood some of them. I was, of course, mistaken.

But I felt that I had learned all that Ongwynn could teach me and that I should be doing something—although I did not know what. Find Thomas? But how? Did he think of me as often as I thought of him? Did he love me? If I was his true love, I was to wait until he returned to me; all the stories of noble love said so.

Waiting was hard. I wanted to make something happen. It was a hard thing to be a woman.

When the wild strawberries were in bloom I started taking long rides on Annie for no reason. I rode on the moor, saw the blue violets with their heart-shaped leaves and thought of Thomas. I rode along the harsh stony beach at low tide and thought of Ongwynn. I rode through the silky white lace of breaking waves and thought of my mother. Igraine. Where was she now?

Where were my father's bones, so that I could lay a flower upon them?

Did my mother lie dead somewhere as well?

Ongwynn was—had lost her powers, it seemed, and was stiffening in her joints, was getting old. The thought that she would someday die chilled my spine. I had never quite been able to think of her as just a person. Had she been born? I could not imagine Ongwynn with a mother and a father, I could not conceive that she had ever been a child. Even less imaginable, had she ever known the love of a man? Had she ever borne a child?

How long had she lived?

I could not ask her. It was not that I was afraid of Ongwynn, but—she was all humble dignity; I would have buried my head in mud before I ventured such questions to her.

Growing old, would she need me? I ought to stay with her.

I wanted to leave.

“Ongwynn,” I asked her as we sat in the sun and mended hose (for the piskies had given me hair ribbons so gossamer they seemed made of moonlight, but had not darned my stockings), “Ongwynn, I wish—I don't know what I wish. What can I do?”

She glanced up at me without speaking, her eyes like stones washed round by the sea.

I said, “How can I give it back to you?”

“Give me what?”

“What you've lost.”

“I've lost nothing.”

“What I owe, then.”

“You owe nothing.”

“But—”

“When you are older you will see,” she said, and she went back to her darning with a decided silence. I could say no more.

 

 

The sending began as nothing more than a dream.

I lay deeply asleep after a day of weeding and spading in the garden. And as with most dreams, I cannot remember it clearly, only shards and shadows. There was something about Annie, sweet round dapple-gray Annie, cantering up the night sky, leaping over the starry Indy blue darkness into the clouds, but then she was the round dappled moon as full as a new mother's breast and as white and—rose, the moon was a rose and the moon rose, growing so that it filled my sight, growing, blossoming. It was the moon yet it was flowers, many flowers white and damask and apple dapple harvest gold and true violet blue, it was moonflowers yet it was a blossom woman smiling at me through clouds of gossamer hair ribbon, smiling and calling me by name: Morgan.

And it was she, the gay, green-eyed, half-naked fay gar landed with primroses, laughing and speaking to me just as she had that day in Caer Avalon: “Morgan. Do you know why you are here?” It was she, that maiden innocent of shame—yet it was an ancient gray crone, as hunchbacked as the waning moon, cackling.

And it was a black vulture circling with a craking cry.

And it was the moon.

And it was Mother.

Igraine. Her lovely face as hollow and gray as a skull.

And it was a voice as big as the moonlit night calling me: Morgan. Morgan! Come here.

I awoke sobbing, but it was not just a dream. The faces remained before me in the darkness of my chamber, shimmering like the moons and stars on Merlin's midnight velvet cloak, but—but I did not understand, the faces were many yet one, a ghostly changing crescent-full-decrescent moon made of flower women hovering close to my face, and their voices—their many voices were one voice, honey sweet but as great as sky, saying, “Morgan, come to Avalon. Come to Avalon, daughter.”

The face of many faces faded away into the darkness, and the voice whispered away yet echoed like a shout within my mind. I jumped up from my bed, weeping like a child, as hard as I had wept the day they cooked my favorite frock black, and I ran barefoot through the cold, stony darkness to Ongwynn's chamber. It must have been the dead of night, with not even mice or piskies rustling, although somewhere an owl spoke. I folded to my knees by Ongwynn's pallet and shook her shoulder, but she was already awake, already struggling to sit up and see what was the matter with me.

“I'm sent for,” I cried.

Ongwynn sat on her pallet, and I could feel more than see her quiet gaze upon me. Morgause pattered in, roused by my noise, saying, “Morgan, what in the world—”

“Her,” I blurted between sobs, “the—the flower fay—and—all, they all said—come to Avalon—”

“A sending?” Ongwynn asked, her voice as level as ever in my life.

I could barely speak. “Ye—yes.”

She lifted her common, heavy hands and placed one on each side of my head just as she had for Thomas, like a blessing. And there was something of the healer left in her after all, for her touch calmed my tears and my heart.

“Then go, Morgan,” she said.

No. No, I couldn't. I had to stay with Ongwynn. I had to wait for Thomas to come back to me.

“Go,” Ongwynn said again, soft as dawn.

It was my fate calling, I sensed. And healing Ongwynn, I had promised to obey my fate. I knew I had to go.

More: I knew I wanted to.

I
LEFT AT DAWN, ON ANNIE. SHORT OF BEING KNOCKED on the head I could not possibly have gone back to sleep that night, and no one else did either. Ongwynn got up, got dressed, and set about provisioning me. I dithered back to my chamber with a rushlight in hand and tried to get some clothing onto myself and some into a bag; I kept changing my mind about which should go where. Morgause drifted around my chamber like a spirit, great-eyed and silent and annoying. “I can't think with you hovering,” I complained. “Go back to bed.”

She did not, but she ghosted out after a while, then slipped back into my chamber and said, “Here,” holding something small toward me.

“What?”

She said nothing. I had to take it to see what it was: a ring woven of human hair. Mother's hair.

“I don't need that.” I tried to hand it back to her.

“Take it with you,” Morgause told me.

“Why? I'll be back.”

Morgause just gave me the look of a big-eyed deer mouse caught in candlelight.