Half Sick of Shadows Read online

  I stare at the blank tapestry, at where Morgana’s figure was only moments ago.

  “I have faith in Morgana,” I tell her.

  “Then you are a fool,” she says, though her voice is soft-edged and not unkind. “An oracle should know better than to have faith in anyone. People lie, visions don’t. Maybe there are many versions of Morgana that would never make that choice, but there is at least one who would. Who does.”

  I open my mouth to argue but I quickly close it again. There is nothing I can say that hasn’t been said already.

  “Did you come to see if I had anything new for you?” I ask her, to change the subject. “I’m sorry you came all this way, but it’s been the same recycled visions for months now.”

  Nimue shakes her head, giving a small sigh. “That is because our world is on a precipice and the future is holding its breath.” She begins to unwind the stitches I made on my loom, unweaving it piece by piece. She doesn’t look at me. “Uther Pendragon died three days ago.”

  It takes a moment for me to hear the words, longer still to make sense of them enough to respond.

  “King Uther is dead,” I repeat slowly.

  I didn’t know the man well, mostly by reputation, and that itself wasn’t entirely pleasant. Still, he was Arthur’s father, and I know that he will feel the loss keenly.

  “Does Arthur know?” I ask.

  Nimue shakes her head. “Not yet. There was some talk among the council as to what it means.”

  The thought of the council arguing over a man’s death for three days instead of telling his son makes my skin prickle with irritation. I have to remind myself that the council is made up of fey and that, to them, three days is a single breath, a negligible amount of time. I have to remind myself that most of their own parents have been dead for centuries, that they don’t truly understand the strength of the bond between humans and their families, no matter how complicated those bonds might be.

  “And what does it mean?” I ask Nimue.

  “It means that Arthur has a throne to claim,” she says, finally looking at me. “It means that his legitimacy as heir is already being questioned, being fought for by others who would take his throne and bring the world we know to darkness. It means that it is time for him to leave Avalon—and for all of you to go with him.”

  Though I should have expected the words, they still feel like a slap. Leave Avalon. I have seen a future off of this island, I have seen the tragedy and loss and hopelessness that that future brings. It has always seemed so far away, a problem for another Elaine, an impossibility that I’ve never fully been able to believe would come true. But here we are now, about to be shoved into a world I only really know through my visions and a few distant memories.

  “It’s too soon,” I say, shaking my head. “We don’t know enough.”

  “You will never know enough, Elaine,” Nimue says. Though her voice remains placid, there’s a tightness to her expression that is new. “The only way you will learn more is to act, and you can’t do that while you are swaddled like infants on this island.”

  “But we’re safe here,” I point out. “All of us.”

  “And you will always be safe here,” she says, and now there is no mistaking the sadness in her, leaking out to color her voice. “But you were not raised to be safe, you were raised to be heroes.”

  * * *

  WHEN NIMUE GOES, I sit back down at the loom, though I don’t reach for the threads again. Instead, my hands bunch together in my lap. The room feels like it is pressing in on me, making it difficult to breathe.

  Suddenly, I feel like I am back in Camelot once more, back in my room in the tower I shared with my mother. I was a different girl then—a sheltered girl who is so afraid of her own shadow that she won’t walk in sunlight, Morgana called me once, a girl who closes her eyes and takes all the injustices the world pushes on her without a word in response, a girl who does everything her mother tells her to and never questions why.

  She wasn’t wrong, but I am not that girl any longer. Still, I can’t help but fear what will happen when I walk through Camelot’s gates once more. Not only because of the things I’ve seen, the dark futures looming over everyone I love, but because I left Camelot Elaine behind ten years ago, and I’m afraid that when I return, she will as well.

  3

  MORE OFTEN THAN not, I had to remind myself of the reasons I loved my mother. As a girl, I would count them off in my mind whenever she said something cruel. I smoothed those reasons over the wounds her words inflicted like a balm that never lasted long enough.

  “Elaine, you aren’t listening to a word I’ve been saying,” she scolded on the day that everything changed.

  We ate our breakfast together as we did every day, in our tower with its gray stone walls and gray stone floors and the single window that let in just enough light to see by, making everything appear dull and spectral.

  When I first came to Camelot at the age of eight, I had thought it a marvel of a place, loud and bright and buzzing with people of all types, but our tower was another world entirely. Days—sometimes weeks—could pass without the sight of a single person apart from my mother and our sparse staff. Lonely didn’t seem the right word for it, though. When you don’t know anything else, even that sort of isolation could seem natural.

  “I’m sorry, Mother,” I told her that morning, ducking my head and staring at the plate in front of me. Like most days, breakfast consisted of biscuits and butter because my mother couldn’t stomach anything more flavorful. She’d insisted that I eat only half a biscuit to ensure that my dress would fit for the banquet at the end of the week. My stomach grumbled painfully, but I’d long learned that my discomfort was far preferable to what would happen if I were to ask her for more.

  Her eyes watched me, a gray so pale that, in certain lights, the iris was nearly drowned by the whites, leaving only a pinprick of black. “Are you ill?” she asked.

  I shook my head. “I just didn’t sleep well last night. I had a bad dream.”

  She gave a loud sigh. “Well,” she said, a single word that felt like it weighed a ton, “if you remembered your medicine, your dreams wouldn’t be so unpleasant.”

  I loved my mother because I knew she loved me more than anyone else in this world.

  For a moment, I considered telling her that I did take my medicine, that I couldn’t forget it if I tried. Every night, it slid down my throat like tar, thick and foul, leaving a taste that lingered well into the next morning. But I still took it without fail because it was what I was supposed to do. But the truth wouldn’t do any good, so instead, I kept my mouth shut and my gaze focused on my plate and the crumbs remaining. I wanted to press my finger against the surface to pick them up and lick them off, but I could already guess at my mother’s reaction to that. It would be better to endure the five hours of hunger until lunch.

  “I cannot stress enough how important it is that you remember,” she continued. “We can’t afford another incident. People are still gossiping about the last time you made a spectacle of yourself.”

  I couldn’t remember much of that night, but still I flinched from the word spectacle, wielded like a weapon. I wanted to protest, to tell her it wasn’t my fault, but arguing with my mother was like kicking a boulder—she remained unchanged, and I was the one left limping. It was never worth it.

  “I’ll try harder to remember, Mother,” I said instead.

  I loved my mother because when we lived in Shalott, she would take me down to the river there and teach me how to make flower crowns. Now, it had been years since she’d been outside—even since she’d been out of our tower.

  The air in Camelot made her head ache, she said. So did socializing with strangers and any kind of music, even birdsong. The food upset her stomach. The sun, even on a cloudy day, hurt her eyes. And so she stayed hidden away in our tower day and night, getting to
o much sleep, plotting my future, and doing little else. She said that I was her eyes and ears, but I suspected she had spare sets to tell her the things that I didn’t.

  “How is Morgause?” she asked, jerking me out of my thoughts.

  At the sound of that name, I took a particularly long gulp of tea to hide my expression, but she must have seen it anyway because she made a disapproving sound, shaking her head.

  I loved my mother because once, she could make me feel safe just by holding my hand in hers.

  “None of that, Elaine. She is the princess of Camelot. You could do worse than make friends with her. Perhaps you could even gather news about when that brother of hers is finally returning to us from Avalon?”

  It seems silly now, but back then, the image of Arthur I had in my mind was that of a storybook prince, tall and golden-haired with broad shoulders and a strong jaw. A prince so perfect he’d been spirited away by the fey when he was barely old enough to walk, the final element of the truce between his father, King Uther, and the fey of Avalon, to put an end to the Fay War that had plagued Albion for half a century.

  The official edict was that Arthur would return to Camelot on his eighteenth birthday, but I’d heard rumors that Arthur didn’t exist at all, that he was only a rumor started to distract from the fact that Uther had no legitimate heir. Even Morgause was the daughter of his late wife from her first marriage, her claim not strong enough to make her a true heir.

  My mother gave a dramatic sigh. “Perhaps Morgause knows more. You could find out, if you were kinder to her.”

  I loved my mother because when she read poetry aloud, she would always sing instead of speak.

  “I am kind to Morgause,” I told her, though I didn’t know how true that was. I tried to be kind, that much was true, but Morgause always replied with cruelty, so maybe, I thought, I was doing it wrong.

  “Well.” She forced a brittle smile. “Perhaps Arthur will make a reappearance for Morgause’s birthday.”

  If Prince Arthur hadn’t come back when his mother died, he wouldn’t come back for his half sister’s birthday.

  “You will have to look your best, just in case,” she said, her gaze turning critical as it swept over my face, taking in my lank blond hair, my sallow skin, the way the cap sleeves of my too-small dress pinched at the flesh of my arms.

  What use do you have for new dresses? she’d asked when I’d pointed out mine didn’t fit right anymore. You could make them fit, if you tried.

  I loved my mother because she used to smell like cinnamon.

  I didn’t argue. I knew she always got what she wanted. It was just a question of how much I lost in the process.

  “Perhaps if you didn’t speak so much,” she said thoughtfully after a moment. She leaned back in her chair to appraise me as if she hadn’t seen me in months. “Maybe it will give you an air of mystery.”

  “I don’t speak much as it is.”

  I didn’t add that it was difficult to carry an air of mystery when everyone knew you as the girl who ran down the halls at three in the morning, barefoot and screaming, waking up from a nightmare that had been too real to be only imagination. But of course, that was one thing my mother would not discuss, no matter how many times I had tried to broach the subject.

  “There are different kinds of silence, dear,” my mother said. “There’s a mysterious kind of silence, and then there’s the . . . well, the strange kind of silence. What was it Morgause has taken to calling you?”

  I loved my mother because she used to call me Little Lily.

  “Elaine the Mad,” I said quietly. Beneath the cover of the table, I clenched my hands into fists, reveling in the bite of my nails on the soft flesh of my palms. Painful, yes, but less painful than the conversation had become.

  My mother scoffed. “Darling, there’s no need to be so sensitive. She only means it in jest.”

  I suppose there was nothing funnier than knowing that everyone around you called you names behind your back. Unless you counted the fact that they said them to your face as well.

  I loved my mother because she didn’t believe anyone was evil, even someone like Morgause. Despite all evidence I had provided to the contrary. Every arm bruised from her sharp pinches, every time I had come home crying because of something she said or did, every cruel nickname she’d bestowed upon me—my mother ignored them all, dismissing them with a comment about how girls behaved at our age.

  I loved my mother because she was all I had—because I believed she was the only person in the world who could love me back.

  * * *

  MY MOTHER WILL not be waiting for me when I return to Camelot, though I suspect there is nowhere I can go that her ghost will not follow.

  4

  THERE WERE TIMES when I envied my mother her solitude. She could stay in her tower all day long—and did so without fail. I, on the other hand, had no such luxury.

  On the day that everything changed, I was forced out to meet the other girls my age to work on Prince Arthur’s birthday tapestry. One daughter from each family had been chosen to contribute to it, and the idea was that when the prince turned eighteen, or whenever he happened to return—if he ever returned—it would be presented to him as a gift from all of the eligible young ladies of court, one of whom he would choose to marry.

  It was a strange custom, but an old one. I wasn’t sure I understood the concept. Was he expected to fall in love with my tiny, evenly spaced stitches? Would he somehow be able to tell mine apart from every other girl’s? What was more, no one had seen Prince Arthur since he was two years old, and that had been more than ten years ago now. Back then, Arthur wasn’t a real person to me, more of a ghost mentioned only in hushed whispers but never seen.

  None of us knew then how fruitless our efforts really were. Even then, when Arthur was only just thirteen, he was already madly in love with Guinevere. No tapestry was going to change that.

  One of the less formal sitting rooms in the east wing of the castle had been given over to our work, with the normal plush velvet furniture pushed to one side to make room for a large table surrounded by eight chairs and the brocade curtains drawn tight to protect our delicate skin from the midday sunlight. Candles were lit instead, large white tapers clustered about the room with trickles of wax dripping down. Still, it was never bright enough to see by, and I often found myself squinting, even as I heard my mother’s voice in my head warn that I would get wrinkles that way.

  Our work so far had been spread on top of the table, the center already stitched in but its edges only marked with chalk to guide us where to go next. The design was slowly taking shape, showing a white unicorn ridden by a knight whose face is hidden by his helm but who could only be presumed to be Prince Arthur.

  I was the first one there that day, so I circled the table, reaching my hand out to feel the stitched area. It was so small for the six months’ time it had taken us. It would be another year before it was done, maybe two.

  “It’s a bit silly, is it not?” a voice behind me asked, surprising me. I turned to see Morgause leaning against the doorframe with her arms crossed over her chest, lips pursed and eyes narrowed.

  Though Morgause wasn’t actually a princess—she was the daughter of the queen from her first marriage—she held herself like royalty, as if the very air belonged to her and the rest of us breathed only because she allowed it. She was beautiful in a cruel way, with luminous bronze skin, long, wavy hair the color of jet, a hawklike nose, and a wide mouth painted red as blood. That day, I thought she looked half-feral; her hair was a mess of curls, and freckles were showing on her cheeks. Morgause was normally so careful about the sun, never walking outdoors without at least three servants carrying parasols and trailing after her.

  I remember thinking there was something strange about her dress as well. Its voluminous petticoat and bell sleeves were fashionable enough, but it was crafted
from ink-blue silk—darker in color and lighter in fabric than was common among ladies at court. And though it was difficult to say for sure without staring outright, I didn’t think she was wearing a corset.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” I told her, taking a step back, my heart already beating quicker in my chest. I remembered coming across a deer once when I was a child, in the woods outside my father’s castle. For a second, we had both been frozen, our eyes locked on each other, its ears quivering before it darted away. It had been afraid of me then, just as I was afraid of Morgause now. The only difference was that I hadn’t meant the deer harm. Morgause, on the other hand, had never said so much as a word to me that wasn’t barbed, and I was sure she was nudging me toward some kind of trap.

  “I think it’s coming along quite well.” I cast a glance around, but the room was empty. Were her friends hiding behind the closed door, waiting for their cue?

  Normally, Morgause wasn’t there for our sewing group—she couldn’t very well marry her brother, after all—but I thought perhaps she’d had nothing better to do.

  “Arthur will be very . . . amused by it, if nothing else,” she said with a smirk at the tapestry before turning her attention to me. Her eyes searched my face for a moment, and a frown tugged at her mouth. “Who are you?”

  Morgause was often cruel, but this was a new prank. For a moment, I considered playing along, but I did not feel like games that day.

  “I only want to get through this quickly so that I can go home, Morgause. Can’t you leave me alone today?” I meant for my voice to come out strong and level, but instead I sounded like a mouse even to my own ears.

  She laughed, but it wasn’t the high, derisive giggle I’d always heard from Morgause while she and her friends exchanged gossiping whispers. This laugh was full and throaty and so loud that she had to throw her head back from the force of it.