Half Sick of Shadows Read online

  “I’m not Morgause,” she said when she recovered, a wry smile playing on her lips. “I’m her sister.”

  Once she said it, I noticed that there were small differences between them: the freckles for one, and her eyes had a hint of violet to them, not pure gray. But Morgause’s twin sister had not been at court since long before I arrived, and mention of her was rare, restricted to salacious whispers when there was nothing else to talk about. Some said King Uther banished her to a nunnery because of her ill behavior, though she couldn’t have been more than six at the time. Others said he married her off to some foreign king in his seventies. A few even said that she was quietly put to death because she used fay magic. What I’d never heard was Morgause saying a word in her sister’s defense, no matter how vicious the rumors got.

  “You don’t believe me,” the girl—whoever she was—said when I didn’t reply. “Maiden, Mother, and Crone, my sister must have grown into some kind of nightmare. How old are you?”

  Maiden, Mother, and Crone. The expression was foreign to me then, though in time it would become familiar, and one I deployed regularly myself for everything from a stubbed toe to a bone-melting kiss to a particularly troubling vision. At the time, it merely struck me as something the fey would say. Even though Morgause’s father, Lord Gorlois, fought against King Uther in the Fay War, on the side of Avalon, Morgause herself detested the fey, like everyone else at court. She would never have used one of their expressions. Goodness, she would have said instead, even as her voice dripped with malice. Or maybe heavens or dear me.

  “Thirteen,” I told her, my voice cautious.

  “And when did you come to court?”

  “Nearly five years ago.”

  “Ah, well I suppose that explains it,” she said, leaning against the wall and tugging at her gown. My earlier suspicion was confirmed—she was not wearing a corset, and it was quite obvious through the thin silk bodice of her gown. I averted my eyes, though she didn’t seem bothered by it. “I left a couple of years before that. Our paths never crossed before, but it’s a bit disappointing my reputation doesn’t precede me.”

  “Were you really in a nunnery?” I asked before I could stop myself.

  The girl arched a thick black eyebrow. “A nunnery?” she repeated with a very unladylike laugh. “I would rather die. Who told you that?”

  I shrugged, feeling my cheeks go warm. “It’s what they say when they talk about you. One of the nicer things.”

  “I can assure you, I didn’t go to any nunnery,” she said, indignant. “I think I’d prefer the less nice things.”

  “Where were you, then?” I asked her. Cavernous as Camelot was, I could feel it pressing in on me from all sides, and I was hungry for someplace new, even if it was only secondhand.

  She gave me an impish smile. “Avalon,” she said, as conversationally as she might have if she were taking a holiday in the south. I, on the other hand, couldn’t hide my surprise, which made her laugh again. “I’m only back for a few days, for my birthday,” she added before hesitating. “Our birthday, I suppose, Morgause’s and mine. Uther really wanted Arthur back, of course. I am merely a compromise. But you didn’t answer my question.”

  “I didn’t?”

  “Who are you?” she repeated.

  “Oh. Elaine,” I said before remembering myself. I dropped into a shallow curtsy, wobbling slightly as I rose. I could hear my mother’s admonishment in my head—spine straight, head level, gracefully!—but my body always seemed to have other ideas.

  “Very well done,” she said, and though I didn’t think she was being sincere, I also didn’t feel like she was laughing at me. She was laughing with me, like there was a joke between us. I laughed, too, even though I’d missed whatever joke there might have been.

  She dipped into her own curtsy, somehow both brief and deep. I wasn’t sure how she managed it without falling over. “I’m Morgana,” she said before straightening up once more. “Morgause is being troublesome, you said? She’s always been like that.”

  I frowned. It wasn’t that I was unfamiliar with Morgause’s cruelty, but Morgana wasn’t like me. Even then, I didn’t have the impression that she was someone to be easily bullied. “Like what?” I asked.

  Morgana hesitated for a moment, something dark flitting across her expression before disappearing just as quickly as it came about.

  “When we were children, she would lock me in closets until our nanny came looking for me. Sometimes it took hours and I would sit there in that dark, cramped space, crying and afraid.” She turned over her left hand so that I could see the puckered skin of a thick scar slicing across the skin of her palm, all the way from the heel of her hand to the first knuckle of her smallest finger. “And when we were six,” she continued, tracing the scar with her finger, “she was angry with me for eating the last piece of cinnamon cake at dinner, so she bided her time and waited until we were out in the meadow and our nanny turned her back. Then she took a sharp rock and dragged it across my palm.” She closed her hand over her palm, making the scar disappear. “She used to terrify me.”

  “She still terrifies me,” I told her.

  Morgana wavered for a second. “What you need to understand about Morgause is that she doesn’t like people she considers to be different. She used to hate me for it.”

  “Used to?”

  She shrugged. “Now that I’ve been away for a while, I’ve realized that Morgause hated me because she feared me. So now, I’ve decided to make sure she is too busy fearing me to remember to hate me.”

  “Why would she be afraid of you?”

  Though Morgause was terrifying, there was something about Morgana that I liked, even then, before I knew more about her than a name and a scar. She intimidated me, I couldn’t deny that, but I wasn’t afraid of her, certainly not in the same way that I was afraid of Morgause.

  Morgana didn’t answer right away. Instead, her eyes slid to the tapestry, and she tilted her head to one side thoughtfully. “Are you particularly fond of this?”

  I looked down at the tapestry I’d spent the last month working on and realized that I wasn’t. It was well made enough, but when I looked at it, all I saw was the hours of silent sewing I’d done while the other girls talked and laughed among themselves. To me, the tapestry just looked like loneliness.

  “It isn’t for me, it’s for Prince Arthur,” I said instead of answering. It was the expected answer, and the correct one, but Morgana only laughed.

  “And Arthur will be mortified if he ever sees it,” she scoffed, still staring hard at the tapestry. “You would be better off giving him a book or an ancient scroll if you want to endear yourself to him. You do know that the unicorn is symbolic of a woman’s virginity, don’t you?”

  “Virtue, I thought,” I said.

  She gave a rude snort. “I suppose virtue is the term used in polite conversation, so that well-bred men can pretend they aren’t concerned explicitly with what goes on between a girl’s legs. I would hate to destroy your illusions, but no one particularly cares about how virtuous your heart is. They care about how virtuous your body is, and the better term for that is virginity.” She didn’t wait for me to answer, instead plowing forward as she paced around the table, letting her fingers run over the stitches. “So . . . if the unicorn is for virginity, what can we make of this gallant young knight—meant to be Arthur, I suppose, though he isn’t nearly so tall—riding the unicorn?”

  It took a moment for her meaning to make sense, but when it did, embarrassment clawed over my skin, and I could feel my neck and cheeks flush. I looked around the room to make sure there was no one to hear her speaking so bawdily.

  “At least you aren’t so naive that you don’t know what I’m speaking of,” she said with a laugh, though she didn’t so much as glance at me. All her attention was focused on the tapestry. She circled it like a wolf stalking its prey.
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  I followed her intent gaze and noticed a thin spiral of smoke coming from the center where the unicorn’s horn was. At first, I thought it was only a trick of the light, but it began to grow quickly, thicker and thicker. I still remember the moment I realized what was happening, like a fog clearing before my eyes, leaving only one possible explanation: magic. Morgana was using magic.

  As soon as I realized, I could suddenly taste it in the air—the faint scent I would later come to recognize always accompanied Morgana’s magic, one best described as jasmine and fresh-sliced oranges.

  It would be what I smelled when she brewed a potion to help Guinevere focus, when she fixed Arthur’s favorite book after he’d read it to pieces, when she sent a gust of wind to knock Lancelot off balance mid-joust because he was getting a little too full of himself. It is what I will smell in the future as well, when she brews the potion to kill Arthur, on countless other nights to come.

  There was a quiet but distinct pop, and a small flame appeared. I jumped back and gave an involuntary shriek, turning to Morgana, who was watching the flame with a mild interest as it grew bigger, spreading slowly over the unicorn’s head.

  “Did you . . . ?” I started to ask, but I couldn’t find the words to finish the thought out loud.

  Magic had been outlawed in Albion since the end of the Fay War, when I was just a baby. I’d heard stories of it, told in hushed whispers, as if even speaking of it could get a person executed, but I had never seen it myself. The only person who was allowed to perform magic in the country was the king’s sorcerer, Merlin, and his power was reserved for the king himself, to keep peace. Never for show.

  But Morgana had summoned flame as easily as she exhaled, as if the magic and the flame were an integral part of herself, a part that couldn’t be smothered or ignored. As if the small act wasn’t a death sentence for her, should anyone find out, but as if it were the only thing keeping her alive.

  “You’ll want to run along home, Elaine,” Morgana said, pulling me out of my shock. “It’s safe to say that your little sewing circle is off for today, and you don’t want to be lingering about looking suspicious when it starts to spread, do you?”

  * * *

  BY THAT EVENING, Morgana was the only topic of conversation. When I took my nightly walk through the castle to stretch my legs, I heard her name whispered by everyone I passed, spoken with the same tone I’ve heard people use when discussing the rats that were rampant in the streets or the plagues that swept through the countryside every couple of years.

  “I heard she was spotted coming out of the east wing just a moment before the drawing room caught fire,” Duchess Lancaster murmured to her husband, the corners of her pinched mouth turned down in a permanent frown.

  “They say she set fire to the nunnery as well,” the Earl of Bernswick said to his companion, Lord Newtrastle. “That was how she escaped.”

  “The abbess was found with a letter opener through her heart,” Lord Newtrastle replied, his eyes glinting. “Of course, no one can prove Lady Morgana had anything to do with it, but . . .”

  “I heard she did away with Prince Arthur,” a girl younger than me said, the daughter of some lord I couldn’t quite remember the name of. “She wants the throne for herself—as if that would ever happen.”

  That, it seemed, was a rumor too far, because her older sister pinched her arm hard, eliciting a yelp of pain from the girl.

  “Don’t make up rumors, Lewella,” the older girl snapped. “If she killed Prince Arthur, do you really think the king would want her here?”

  Lewella rubbed her arm, scowling at her sister. “He would if he didn’t want anyone to know the prince was dead,” she replied.

  “Hush, before I tell Mother you were spreading lies.”

  But as the rumors spun wilder and wilder, painting a portrait of a monster in an uncorseted gown, I couldn’t forget the Morgana I’d met. Ferocious and intimidating, yes, but just a girl. At the time, I didn’t understand why they were so angry, so vicious toward someone they didn’t know the first thing about, but now I know—there was nothing more terrifying in Camelot than a girl who refused to follow the rules.

  I rounded the corner, ready to start back to the tower for dinner with my mother, when I nearly walked into a couple walking arm in arm.

  The boy I didn’t recognize at the time, though later, his face would haunt my nightmares—both the ones that might come true and the ones that were only dreams. He was tall with a sharply angled face and a hooked nose, with close-cropped sand-colored hair and gray eyes that glinted like cold steel. I couldn’t explain it then, but when his eyes met mine, I felt a chill all over my skin that I couldn’t get rid of. I was so distracted that it took me a moment to notice the girl next to him.

  This time, I was sure it was Morgause. There was no mistaking her scowl, or the way she held herself, like there was a heavy crown resting on top of her pinned-back black hair that she couldn’t let fall.

  “Elaine the Mad,” she said, drawing out my name in a long purr that somehow sounded like a threat to my ears. Of course, everything Morgause said had the sound of a threat to me.

  “Lady Morgause,” I said, trying to step around them, but she moved so that she was standing just in front of me.

  “How fortuitous,” she said. “We were just speaking of you.”

  Anything that was fortuitous for Morgause certainly wouldn’t be for me, but I forced a smile and steeled myself, waiting for the inevitable attack.

  “Oh?” I said.

  Morgause glanced at her companion, then back at me. “Rumor has it that you were in the east wing when my sister set that fire,” she said, choosing her words carefully. “In fact, I’ve heard it said that you came out of the room just before the smoke was spotted.”

  I forced a laugh, but even to my own ears it rang false. “I don’t know anything about that,” I told her. “I was on my way to the sewing circle when I was told about the fire. I don’t even think I made it to the east wing.”

  I’d practiced the lie dozens of times over the course of the day, playing it over and over in my mind. But somehow, it still didn’t sound convincing.

  “You’re a terrible liar,” Morgause said before her expression softened into a smile. I’d seen her cruel smiles before, with bared teeth that might have resembled fangs. I’d seen her tight-lipped smirks. But I’d never seen a smile like that from her. At first glance, it almost might have seemed sympathetic.

  “She’s a wretched creature, isn’t she?” she asked, dropping her voice to a murmur. “I don’t blame you for being frightened of her. But if you tell us what really happened, we can see to it that she pays for her crime.”

  Her crime. Yes, starting a fire was a crime, of course, but the weight in Morgause’s voice made me sure that wasn’t all she was talking about. She knew about Morgana’s magic. She knew, and she would see her sister die for it. A shudder coursed its way down my spine.

  I was tempted to tell her exactly what she wanted to hear—more tempted than I’m proud to admit. It would have been the right thing, wouldn’t it, to simply tell the truth? Magic was outlawed for a reason, it was dangerous, Morgana was dangerous. The laws we lived by said that what she’d done was a crime punishable by death. Who was I to say otherwise? And if telling the truth earned me kindness from Morgause, if it made her a little less cruel to me, why shouldn’t I do it?

  But Morgana had been kind to me when she had no reason to be. She might have been guilty of using fay magic, and of arson besides, but I couldn’t believe she deserved death. Especially not when the same might have been said of me. I couldn’t bring myself to offer her up to Morgause for a few words of kindness, with hooks lurking just beneath.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Morgause,” I said. I had to force myself to meet her eyes, not to wither beneath her gaze like a thirsty fern. I imagined how Morgana woul
d say the words, how she would hold her own next to her sister.

  For a moment, Morgause only stared at me, her eyes narrowed and mouth twisted. Eventually, she tore her gaze away and turned to her companion.

  “I told you she was a loon, Mordred,” she said with a heavy sigh. “But someone must have seen it.”

  It was the first time I heard his name. Mordred. In time I would learn he was the king’s bastard son, that he had a thirst for power that rivaled even Morgause’s. I would learn that even then, as a youth, he was courting favor in the castle, promising things he had no business promising, making allies out of those who would scorn him. Later, I would learn to fear him, to see the ruin he trailed behind him, the threat he posed not just to me but to everyone I loved, but that day I was only wary, as I was of anyone in Morgause’s company.

  He watched me for a moment more, his own gray eyes thoughtful. “Perhaps you’re right,” he said slowly. “Whatever the case may be, she’ll be gone before long.”

  They continued on past me, leaving me alone in the corridor, but even when they were out of earshot, I still heard Mordred’s voice in my mind.

  She’ll be gone before long.

  It was a fact, plain and simple, one Morgana had said herself. She was here for only a few days and then she’d be gone. She was even looking forward to it. But the way Mordred had said those words sounded like a threat. They worked their way under my skin until I could think of little else.

  5

  MORGANA TAKES THE news the hardest that night, when Nimue sits us down in her room after dinner. Even Arthur, the father he barely knew dead, doesn’t carry on as dramatically as she does. But Morgana isn’t mourning Uther—I doubt she’ll spare him another thought. She’s mourning Avalon, the only place she’s ever called home, the place she once told me she wouldn’t leave even after her body had turned cold.

  “I won’t go,” she tells Nimue now, her violet eyes hard and defiant. Though she’s nearly twenty-five, she could practically pass for a child again now, on the cusp of a temper tantrum. But beneath that bravado, there’s something else that I understand all too well: fear.