Half Sick of Shadows Read online

  I remember the way they treated her in Camelot before, the way they hated her because they didn’t understand her. I thought it didn’t bother her then, the whispers and sideways glances, the wide berth everyone gave her, as if they thought even the air around her were lethal, but maybe I just didn’t know how to read her then.

  “Avalon is my home,” she continues, each word hardened to steel. “The Maiden, Mother, and Crone brought me here, and I belong on this island as much as anyone.”

  Nimue remains unfazed by her outburst. I suppose she’s used to them by now. She’s seen Morgana—seen us all—through childhood, through adolescence. Even if she weren’t an oracle, I doubt there is much any of us could do at this point to surprise her. I remember my mother, had thirteen years with her, but the others have been under Nimue’s care since they were young children. To them, I imagine she’s the closest thing to a mother they have.

  “Until the Maiden, Mother, and Crone decide to walk among us once more, it is up to me as Lady of the Lake to carry out their wishes as I see fit,” she reminds Morgana, patient but tired. She rubs her temples and leans back in her armchair. “Would you like some tea to soothe your mind?”

  “No, I would not like tea,” Morgana snaps. “I would like an explanation.”

  Nimue’s eyes flit to me for only an instant before darting back to Morgana. “I have given that to you twice already, but what’s once more?” she says with a heavy sigh. “Arthur is king of Camelot now.” She nods toward Arthur, sitting in silence beside Guinevere.

  He hasn’t said a word since Nimue started speaking, since she told him his father was dead. Looking at him now, he doesn’t look like a king. He looks like a boy who has just felt the earth shift beneath his feet and is no longer sure of anything. He is twenty-three now—not a boy any longer, not even the youngest king Camelot has had—but it’s difficult not to think of him as the boy I met half a lifetime ago.

  Beside him, Guinevere has his hand folded between both of hers. She usually isn’t one for affectionate gestures, but that makes it all the more meaningful. I don’t doubt she would do the same for any of us if we truly needed her, but there is an unspoken undercurrent to anything that passes between her and Arthur, as if they exist with one foot in this world and the other in a plane just big enough for the two of them.

  Nimue continues. “He’ll return to Camelot to claim his throne and rule there, and all of you will have to go with him.”

  I keep my eyes on Arthur while she speaks, while she outlines a future that he has always known will one day be his. His expression barely changes, but I know him well enough to see the flicker of uncertainty in his amber eyes. A good thing, I think. It means that he understands the weight of the burden he is shouldering. It means that he will not wear the crown lightly.

  “Why?” Morgana asks, her voice breaking over the word. I tear my gaze away from Arthur to look at her instead, and there is no uncertainty there, just anger and fear. Even though they are half siblings, they couldn’t look more different. Where Arthur is pale and russet-haired, with broad shoulders and long limbs that haven’t quite lost their adolescent awkwardness, Morgana is lithe and graceful, with hair as dark as the moonless sky and skin the color of burnished bronze. The only similarities between them are their smiles and the freckles dusted over their noses and cheeks.

  “I can stay here, help him from afar. I’m sure I would be of more use here than at court,” Morgana continues.

  Though I don’t say anything, I agree with her. Especially knowing what Nimue and I do about her and Arthur’s relationship, how everything we’ve seen shows it being the first to fracture, how it leads to everything else. I don’t know why Nimue is so insistent on sending her back to Camelot. She could keep her here, happy and out of trouble. But I’m not foolish enough to believe that Nimue tells me everything she knows. I am a part of this web, my future as tangled with theirs as Morgana’s, and she has every reason to keep things from me, for the same reason that I keep some visions from her.

  It is a dangerous thing, to know too much of your future. Nimue told me that once. It has driven many oracles mad, stuck between the present and future and unable to take a step in any direction.

  “It’s what the Maiden, Mother, and Crone believe is best,” Nimue says, her voice even and placid.

  “Oh, they told you that, did they?” Morgana snaps.

  Nimue ignores her, instead turning to Guinevere and Arthur. “You two have been quiet,” she says. “But it’s your future we are discussing, as much as it is Morgana’s. Surely you have your own concerns.”

  Arthur is still too lost in his thoughts to speak, but Gwen looks up at Nimue, her green eyes pensive.

  “Will I go home first?” she asks. Though she’s spent most of her life on Avalon, she never lost her Lyonessian accent, the hard lilt of her vowels, the soft consonants. “I haven’t seen my father in fifteen years.”

  I haven’t seen my family since I came to Avalon, either, but unlike Guinevere, the thought of seeing them again fills me with more wariness than longing.

  “You will go back to Lyonesse, Guinevere,” Nimue says. “The betrothal between you and Arthur will need to be solidified by your respective countries. Once it’s settled, you’ll join him in Camelot. It shouldn’t be long—a month, maybe two.”

  Gwen nods, relief flitting over her expression. She squeezes Arthur’s hand tightly in her own, but he barely seems to feel it.

  Finally, he looks up at Nimue. “When do we leave?” he asks her. His voice doesn’t sound like his own. It is a hollow thing that cracks and echoes.

  “Tomorrow morning, before dawn,” she says, looking between all of us. “There are reports that several nobles are already making plays for your throne—your bastard brother chief among them.”

  She doesn’t say his name, but I hear it all the same. Mordred. Though I met him only once, I’ve seen enough of his future that the mere mention of him crawls over my skin like the fingers of a cold shadow, raising goose bumps in their wake. “We received word that he’s married Morgause, which will only strengthen his claim. It’s important you act quickly.”

  I look to Morgana, searching for some reaction to the mention of her sister, but she gives nothing away. Her thoughts are sealed behind the seething thundercloud of her rage.

  “If you make me leave,” she tells Nimue, biting each word out, “I’ll never forgive you. I’ll hate you for it until I draw my last breath.”

  Vicious as the words may be, they slide off Nimue’s back like water from a duck’s wing. Maybe because she’s heard them before, maybe because she’s already come to terms with how true they are.

  “You’ll understand one day,” she says, though I’m not sure she truly believes that.

  Then she turns and leaves us alone. The door behind her closes firmly, decisively, but not quite with a slam—slamming doors and shouting and any kind of spectacle is strictly human behavior, after all, and Nimue would never indulge such a base impulse.

  “Did you know?” Morgana asks me when she’s gone. I feel guilty before realizing she’s not asking if Nimue confided in me first. Her voice is tentative, like she’s asking something forbidden. She’s asking if I Saw it.

  “No,” I tell her honestly.

  For a moment, she stares at me and I think she might push the issue, but instead she only nods.

  “I can’t go back there, Elaine,” she says quietly, her words only for me.

  And they are, because I am the only one who truly understands what she’s saying. Gwen and Arthur will adjust well to the world outside of Avalon. They are personable and easy to like, and they get on well with pretty much anyone. Morgana and I don’t, for very different reasons.

  We are, as my father once said about me when I was young, acquired tastes.

  I take her hand in mine and squeeze it hard, but I can’t form any words of rea
ssurance. She would see right through them. And besides, I don’t think she really wants to be reassured.

  “I’ll be there too,” I say instead. “So will Arthur and Gwen. You won’t be alone.”

  Her expression remains taut and troubled, but she squeezes my hand back.

  Arthur stands up abruptly, and in that instant, I see the torment in him plain as the moon shining through the window. He looks adrift.

  “I don’t know how to be a king,” he says, shaking his head.

  “You won’t be alone either,” I tell him. “You’ll have us.”

  He nods slowly, turning the words over in his mind. I can see the gears spinning, like the mechanism that brings up a drawbridge.

  “We have to tell Lance,” he says suddenly. “He doesn’t know yet. He should know.”

  I don’t say anything in response to that. I’ve Seen Lancelot in Camelot, but as with most things, the timeline is murky, hinging on choices that have yet to be made—I don’t know if he gets there at the same time as we do or not for years. A small, ugly part of me hopes he never comes at all because it would be so much easier for me if he doesn’t. But I know that he’s needed there, as much as any of us.

  6

  ONE DAY, A couple of days after she’d set the tapestry on fire, I came downstairs from my room to find Morgana alone in the sitting room, standing by the unlit fireplace, dressed in a lilac silk gown that hugged her figure but belled out around her knees and elbows. I couldn’t find a single gem on it, unlike Morgause’s dresses. Even though it likely had been made for her by the royal seamstress, she looked uncomfortable in it, fiddling with the only adornment she wore—a large, circular black diamond that hung around her neck on a plain gold chain.

  “What are you doing here?” I blurted out before my thoughts could catch up with me. I never had visitors in the tower, but I imagined she should have been announced or sent word, not simply appeared in the sitting room like a specter.

  She glanced up when she saw me, and a slow smile spread across her bloodred painted lips.

  “You’re a hard girl to track down, Elaine Astolat,” she said, rather than answering my question. “Did you know that there are six Elaines at court in Camelot?”

  I had never counted them myself, but the number sounded right.

  “How did you get in here?” I asked again, sitting down in the velvet high-backed armchair. I could still smell the sweet smoke that had clung to it since my father’s last visit.

  She sunk down into the matching chaise across from me, primly crossing her ankles, though the ladylike effect was ruined when she slouched against the arm, propping her head up on her bent elbow.

  “It turns out being the stepdaughter of the king gets you just about anywhere,” Morgana said with a shrug. “I deduced fairly quickly that you weren’t Elaine the Old. Then there was talk of Elaine the Sour-Faced, which I also assumed not to be you. A little more narrowing down and I realized you must be Elaine the Mad.”

  Heat rose to my cheeks, though it wasn’t the first time I had heard it said. With Morgana, though, there wasn’t a trace of the malice that usually accompanied the name, or any apology for that matter. When she saw my expression, her dramatic eyebrows arced even higher. “I’m sorry, I’d gathered it was an old epithet.”

  “It is,” I admitted before pausing. “Did anyone tell you where it came from?”

  Even now, I can’t explain why I said it, why I offered up that part of myself to a stranger. I think perhaps the name bothered me more than I let on, even to myself. I think maybe I knew, even then, that the truth of it wouldn’t scare her, that she might even prefer it to the more demure lies my mother had covered it up with.

  “I overheard different tales,” she admitted, her eyes on me, appraising. “Each more ridiculous than the last. But you’ve heard what they say about me by now. Morgana the Evil, Dark Morgana—”

  “Morgana the Fay,” I supplied before I could stop myself.

  She looked surprised for a second before her mouth curved into a wide grin. “Yes, I’m quite fond of that one, you know. I certainly prefer it to the nunnery story.”

  “Is it true, then?” I asked. I wasn’t sure where the boldness was coming from. Maybe hers was contagious.

  “Are you truly Elaine the Mad?” she replied.

  There it was. The question I’d been waiting for. I thought back to the night I’d gone screaming through the corridors. Years had passed, but I could still feel the cold stone floor under my bare feet like it had happened the night before, could still feel my throat raw and hoarse from screaming. And then there had been the other nights, nights when I woke up drenched in icy sweat without a memory of what I’d dreamt. Other nights when I’d dreamt of drowning.

  “Yes,” I said after a moment. “I suppose I am.”

  “Well then,” she replied, sitting up a little straighter. Her red mouth curved into a grin as dangerous as a knife’s blade. “Tell me about it.”

  * * *

  THE ONLY OTHER person I’d ever told about what I’d dreamt that night was my mother, after she brought me back to my room and tucked me into bed. It wasn’t the first dream I’d had that felt real, but when I woke from a drowning dream, all I could remember was a feeling. This dream, I remembered every detail of. I rattled them off to my mother, who listened in stoic silence. Her face had turned ashen by the time I was done, but she forced her mouth into a strained smile before kissing my forehead, her lips icy against my skin. Then she pulled back a couple of inches to fix me with the sternest look I’d ever seen from her.

  “You must never tell anyone what you just told me,” she had said, her labored expression betraying her soft voice.

  “But shouldn’t someone warn the king?” I had asked her, thinking of the queen’s face as I’d seen it in my dream, lovely as always but pale with a sheen of green to her skin and angry red slashes of color over her cheekbones. I had known, deep in the pit of my stomach, that she was mere breaths from death. It was only a dream, I knew that now that I was fully awake and back, safe in my own bed, but it hadn’t felt like a dream. It had felt the way my dreams about water felt—like a memory, which was impossible.

  “And say what?” my mother had asked. “That the queen will become ill? How do you think he would respond to that, Elaine?”

  I had to think for a moment. I had spent the last eleven years of my life being told that honesty was the best course of action, but suddenly my mother was contradicting that, and I didn’t understand why. But that wasn’t the answer she was looking for, so I tried to think of an alternative.

  “He might suppose it was my fault?” I said slowly. “That I had made it happen, somehow? That I had magic?”

  The last word came out in a whisper, so dangerous that I half expected armed men to leap out from the shadows of my bedroom to arrest me for merely speaking it. My mother seemed shaken by it as well. She didn’t speak for a long moment, but I knew by her expression that I was right.

  “The past has not been kind to oracles,” she told me finally, her voice fragile. “Even before the Fay War, when other types of magic were commonplace and unrestrained.”

  “Oracles?” I asked, unfamiliar with the word.

  “It is an old term for those with a sight that allows them to glimpse beyond the present and into the future. You come from a long line. With some of us, it manifests itself as subtly as a strong intuition. The rest of us are not so lucky.”

  “I think it’s happened before,” I told her.

  Pieces I didn’t realize I had were falling into place to form a picture I could only barely make out. A strange sense of having seen something before, been somewhere before, met someone before. Our tower at the castle, for instance. When my mother had brought me there for the first time just before my birthday, I was certain I’d been there before. Upon seeing my room, I’d found it suddenly hard to breathe
, and tears welled up behind my eyes, though I hadn’t been able to explain why.

  I opened my mouth to tell her about all of it, but her cold index finger came to rest against my lips again.

  “Hush,” she said, her voice managing to be both soothing and barbed with a threat. “Elaine, I need you to listen to me very carefully. You mustn’t speak of this ever again, not to anyone, not even to me. If they discover what you are, they will try to use you, and when they realize that nothing they do will make any difference, they will blame you. I have seen it happen before, and I will not see it happen to you. Do you understand?”

  With her finger still pressed against my mouth, I could only nod, though I didn’t understand. These visions were a kind of magic—if anyone found out, they wouldn’t use me or blame me or any of that. They would kill me.

  Her smile softened and she drew her hand back, going to the pocket of her nightdress, from which she pulled a vial the size of my forearm. She pressed it into my open hand.

  “From now on, every night before you go to bed, you will take a sip and it will keep your Sight at bay. It will keep you sane, just like every other girl. Do you understand?”

  I didn’t, but again that seemed like the wrong answer, so again I nodded. She smiled, satisfied, before standing up and starting toward the door.

  “Mother.” She didn’t turn back to look at me, but she did linger. “Is it going to come true? What I saw of the queen?”

  “Yes,” she said after a few strained seconds. “I’m afraid it will, though I don’t know when or what the illness might be.”

  “But . . . then shouldn’t we try to change things?” I liked the queen. I had met her only a couple of times, but she had a soft voice that sounded like honey and a kind smile. I didn’t want her to die.