I Am Morgan le Fay Read Free

warmth. After a while I slept.
    Oddly, Nurse let us girls sleep late that morning. When we awoke, we saw that she had been crying. She gave us porridge to eat, then told us that our father was dead.
    I did not understand dead. I understood only that Daddy was gone. Somehow he had been turned into this Sire person, who turned out to be Uther Pendragon.
    I did not think to fear that I would lose my mother also.
    Nurse put us in our plainest frocks—brown wool—with brown hose and shoes. She brushed our hair smooth but let it hang loose down our backs. All the while Morgause cried, squeakily, like the mouse she was, until she hiccuped. But I did not weep. I turned to stone.
    When she had dressed us, Nurse took us to our mother and left us.
    Perhaps she thought that our mother would comfort us, or that we would comfort her. But no. Mother sat dressed only in a chemise—I had never seen her so, and she seemed to me even more beautiful that way, in that simple shift of white, than when she wore silks and velvets and jewels. Her dark hair flowed loose like mine, rippling down over her pale, naked shoulders. She sat at her chamber window and stared. Morgause ran to her and laid her head in her lap, weeping, but Mother did not move. She did not even lower her eyes from their staring. She sat like a lovely statue and let Morgause weep upon her.
    There were servants in the room, but they either wept upon one another or stood behind Mother, staring eastward as she did. I studied Mother for a while. Then, as she did not move—no one moved—I turned to the door, lugged it open with my heels digging deep into the scented rushes on the floor, and went out.
    No one seemed interested in keeping me from wandering. I looked over my shoulder for a moment at the door that had closed behind me, then pattered off to see what was happening elsewhere.
    In the kitchen they were cooking clothes. I had never seen such a thing. A huge pot boiling, and clothes going into it and coming out drippy black, like wet crows. I saw my favorite frock, red with blue larkspur trim, go in, and I cried out and ran forward to try to save it. I would have dived into the vat after it, and been boiled black in my turn, but one of the cooks seized me. Without scolding, without even speaking, she put me out the door.
    I wept for the frock as I had not wept for my father, and I ran out into the courtyard, its cobbles ever shadowed by high walls. Beyond those walls the sea crashed cold against the cliffs, and always the wind swept down raw off the moors, but although I wore no shawl, I did not feel the chill. I was a weeping stone; what did I care whether the wind blew?
    Where was everyone?
    The gates stood open. No guards. No one coming or going atop the walls or within them.
    I stopped weeping but kept running. I ran out through the yawning gates, past the village huts huddled against the outside of the wall, and up the rugged grazing lands toward the moor.
    In that high place there were no people, only furze and heather and stunted thorn trees, deer and foxes and wind and stones. But giants used to live on the moor, Nurse had told me. Great stones taller than two men stood on end where the giants had placed them, maybe to play at quoits, for huge hoop-shaped stones lay strewn here and there. They must have been playful giants, because they had balanced the logan stones atop the cliffs also, stones the size of six horses, yet they rocked in every breeze as gently as cradles. The giants were gone now, Nurse said. Heroes had thrown them into the sea. Once I had asked her if Daddy had ever thrown a giant into the sea and she had laughed, but then she had said yes, he might have done so.
    Maybe Daddy was in the sea now. Maybe a giant had come back and thrown him in. Maybe that was why everyone was acting so strange.
    The steep moor slowed me to a walk. I trudged up the rocky hillside with no idea where I was going or why. In the distance, dust rose. That meant