I Am Morgan le Fay Read Free Page A

horsemen coming. Usually it meant Daddy coming home, and the castle folk would shout and Mother would come out and stand on the steps of the keep.
    I did not know what it meant this time.
    Caer Tintagel looked small below me now. Silent. Gates open like a beached fish’s mouth.
    I came to a circle stone standing on edge, bigger than a millstone, with a hole through it larger than I was tall. I climbed into the hole, turned sideways to make myself part of the stone and sat, waiting.
    The dust had come closer, and in it I could see ghostlike shapes of men walking, silent, their heads down, their hands behind them. The ones on horses, the knights, herded the walking men like cattle, prodding them with their spears.
    After that came more knights riding double file with their lances raised and in the fore a flag flying. A giant flag shaped like flames. Then I saw that the flames had form. A red dragon.
    The wind made the dragon seem alive. I slipped through the quoit stone and lay on the ground behind it, hiding. I saw no more.
    Perhaps that is what made such a difference between me and Morgause, afterward: that she saw Uther Pendragon ride into Tintagel, driving his prisoners before him, and she saw Mother walk out, barefoot and proud and pale in only her chemise, to surrender our home to him. And that I did not.
    It was not until years afterward that I understood how Uther Pendragon had tricked Mother with Merlin’s magic illusion the night before and bedded her. She never spoke of it.
    I lay behind the quoit stone—some folk said such stones had a magical power to heal a person who passed through them, but it had done nothing for me. I lay there and after a while I realized I was shaking all over, maybe with cold, and digging my fingers deep into the slaty ground. I sat up and saw that my hands were dirty and bloody red from clawing at the shale.
    One hand clutched something, I noticed as if the hand did not belong to me. I willed it to open, and it did. In the palm lay a small something so round it could not have been just a pebble. I stood up and dropped it into the pocket of my brown frock.
    Over the sea the sun was setting as red as my blood. As red as the dragon flag. In the waves its reflection shifted like flames.
    I knew I had to go home.
    Yet I did not see how I could bear to.
    Something sniffed at my ankle. I looked down, so stony numb I was not even surprised. A black dog stood there, neither friendly nor fierce, gazing at me with weird white eyes.
    â€œChild,” said a voice behind me.
    I turned, and at first I thought it was a giant looming over me. But it was Merlin, hard and dark like a standing stone in the dusk. He wore a coarse cloak, like a shepherd’s mantle, and he carried a thick, knotty walking stick, but I knew him. I could never mistake that voice like winter thistles or those black pits, like tin mines, that were his eyes. It was he.
    I had no strength left to scream. I just stared into the midnight of his eyes, and he stared into the green and purple twilight of mine.
    â€œFay,” he whispered.
    I had not yet heard it then, for no one except my father considered me of much account, but my mismatched eyes marked me as one set apart. Morgan le Fay.
    â€œFate upon fate,” Merlin murmured. “Cycles upon cycles of fate. Who are you, child?”
    I could not speak. I tried to back away, but my feet seemed not to work.
    â€œThere is the ancient green power here,” he said. “I smell it. What is your name, child? Is it Morrigun?”
    At last my panic gave me strength. I ran. Headlong, falling down the slope, cutting my knees on the rocks, I ran back to Tintagel and reached it just as the gates were closing.
    The courtyard teemed with strangers. Nobody seemed to notice a bloody child running through. I reached my chamber and found Morgause there, and she looked at me as if I were a stranger, her face as pallid and flat as the moon. Nurse came in after a while,