Chapter 3
I stared at the bowl in disbelief.
Fresh daylight enhanced the silver’s definitive lustre, conjuring images of the vessel filled with water. I wondered whether Ninianne and I could indeed communicate through our shared elemental connection, how such a thing might feel.
I brought the bowl closer, tilting my senses towards its power, and the bright metal caught the sun’s reflection, searing across my vision. I recoiled, annoyed that Ninianne had managed to intrigue me yet again. Whatever this object was, I didn’t want or need it.
“Morgan, you’re back!” came a shout across the front green.
I looked up to see Alys hurrying out of the house with Tressa. I slipped the silver bowl into the deep pocket inside my cloak and went forth to meet them.
“Cariad, thank goodness.” Alys embraced me as if I had been gone for months. “We were worried. Riding off like that, without telling anyone.”
“I left word,” I protested, though I knew a scribbled note nailed in Phénix’s stall was not good communication.
“Alys was worried,” Tressa corrected. “I tried to tell her that you knew what you were doing. How was the journey?”
I looked around to remind myself I indeed was back in Belle Garde, after so many hours spent in dense ancient forest. The day was rising blue and warm, songbirds flitting over the treetops, the river trickling its late-summer music.
I let myself exhale; I had gone to Merlin’s lair and returned, and would never have to see it again.
“Tiring,” I replied. “Long, even though it wasn’t. Strange.”
I went to my horse’s side and unbuckled my purloined cargo, slipping the Book of Prophecies from the saddlebag into the first sack. My women followed, arriving just as I concealed the golden covers.
“Did you get what you needed?” Alys asked.
“The Shroud of Tithonus wasn’t there,” I said. “Though Ninianne was.”
“No!” Tressa exclaimed. It distracted them both with a satisfying sense of drama, allowing me to move us away. I wasn’t ready to explain my possession of the book that had practically run the kingdom since the day Merlin took my mother’s only son from Tintagel.
“What did she say?” Alys asked.
Sir Accolon lay in the abbey for four days.
I cleared my throat. “She insists she doesn’t have the Shroud, and claimed Merlin never returned to the house before she locked him away to rot. Of course, anything she says could be a lie.”
“She could be protecting someone else who is in possession,” Tressa suggested.
Such a thought had not occurred to me, but it was a strong possibility. If Merlin never returned after Camelot, he could have given the Shroud to Arthur. Ninianne would never tell me, if she knew.
“Then what of Sir Accolon,” Alys said. “Does that mean you can’t…?”
She trailed off, lips pursed and amber eyes shining.
I had become used to that bittersweet expression over the past year—loyal, admiring of my supposed bravery, but sad, regretful there was no elixir to make me feel better.
I couldn’t tell her that she and Tressa did more than enough; that some days, their love and care was the only barrier between me and the bottom of a lake.
“It’s all right,” I said. “I’m going to start work anyway. I’ve resurrected birds and restored a mangled white hart with my own hands, so I… ”
My voice faltered at the sight of a figure hesitating in the house doorway, his red curls tinted by morning. I dropped my sack and went to him.
“Robin,” I said, putting my arms around his wiry frame. “How are you?”
“Glad to see you back, my lady,” he said. “I wish you had let me ride with you.”
He was almost of age now, deep-voiced and taller than us, but since Accolon there had been a droop in his shoulders that nothing could lift.
“I was fine,” I reassured him. “I needed you here to watch over the household.”
He nodded and drew away, regarding me with eyes bruised with fatigue. The past week had been hard on us all, but whereas I had taken the dubious relief of escape, he had been denied the same, and perhaps yearned for it just as much.
“I’ll take the horse to the stables and see him rubbed down,” he said, gesturing to Phénix. I laid the reins across his hand, and he paced away, head bowed.
Alys and Tressa shared my view of the boy’s stooped retreat.
“How has he been?” I asked. “He seems just as despondent as the early days.”
“It was difficult for him to realize it had been a year,” Alys replied. “People mend, go on with their lives, but his heart is still broken.”
“He’s not the only one,” I said. I had not meant to say it aloud, and waved the comment off before they could react. “Will he be all right, do you think?”
“He’s finding his way,” Tressa said. “He spent the last few days building a—what do the household call it?”
“A carnedd,” Alys said quietly. “A tower of stones in Sir Accolon’s honour. Apparently, he’s been collecting them all year. He finished building it yesterday.”
It struck me a blow to the ribs; that Robin had been forced to build a monument to Accolon because I had not.
I had given the household no grave, no tomb, no place they could visit to pay their respects, aside from a small shrine I had allowed in the northern valley’s chapel, which I no longer attended.
For them, I could not even stay to mark his passing, or explain why I was so unwilling to accept that my Gaul was forever gone.
No one but Alys and Tressa knew I possessed Accolon’s heart, turned to marble and hidden in my study.
Only they understood I could not lay him to rest up at our lake as I had first intended—as he had wished for—because of my wild determination that I was going to resurrect him body and soul.
Belle Garde’s household remained unfailingly loyal, but my inaction must have read as madness.
“Where is it?” I asked. “The carnedd?”
Tressa nodded across the river, to the long meadow beyond.
“The tiltyard,” I said. “Of course.”
The jousting field Accolon had built and ridden daily, one of his favourite places to spend time.
Robin had chosen the perfect location for his tribute to the man he loved as a second father, his guardian and teacher, who had offered the knightly future he had dreamed of, only for it to vanish within a strike of a High King’s sword.
“He hasn’t shown it to anyone,” Alys said. “He wants you to see it first.”
The thought of walking over the bridge into a domain that was only ever Accolon’s—where his hoofbeats and lance splinters, his prodigious skill and exhilaration were steeped into the very soil—brought a rush of dread.
For Robin, I hoped I would be able to do anything, but my grief had proven a cruel, inconstant beast. Some days I rose in fire, furious with strength and defiance, and on others I awoke shattered to pieces, drowning in an abyss with no surface to breach.
There were times I could barely withstand the joust meadow view from my turret balcony.
So much of myself I simply could not predict anymore.
I pulled air into my lungs to stop tears from forming. I had not cried in front of anyone since the day I brought the household news of Accolon’s death, and I didn’t intend to start. It was the least I could do—holding myself steady in public so they could heal a pain to which I couldn’t lay hands.
“Morgan?” Alys said. “Are you all right?”
I tore my eyes from the tilt field. “I’m fine. I must get these manuscripts to the study. Will you call someone to carry up the sacks?”
“We’ll help you,” Tressa said. “I can find shelf space and put all this away.”
“No indeed,” I replied, forcing lightness into my voice. “You are both busy. Besides, when have I ever permitted anyone else to shelve my books?”
They hesitated, but did not question me. Alys summoned two lads for the sacks and I left them, heading for the entrance hall and twisting turret staircase that led to my study.
Halfway up, I pushed open a door and entered the dim circular room where I now slept—or tried and failed.
The windows were open, casting slim arches of sun across my undisturbed bed.
Since Accolon, I had never returned to our long pale-blue bedchamber with its tall windows, secluded courtyard garden and huge carved bed, birds painted on the walls. I could not be there without him.
At length, I took off my travelling clothes and dressed in a clean gown, then retrieved Ninianne’s bowl and returned to the spiral stairs.
Sometimes, it felt as though my existence had narrowed until the turret contained my entire life, but on my frequent restless nights, it was a relief and a consolation to have my library only a few steps above.
My study looked as I had left it. Recently, Alys, Tressa and I had been sharing the worktable again, attempting to finish our manuscript on women’s afflictions, begun long ago.
My notes on types of headache were laid out alongside Alys’s tincture recipes and Tressa’s neatly scribed pages, open balcony door letting in scents of meadow grass and climbing firethorn.
The normality of it loosened a knot in my chest.
I headed for my desk and examined Ninianne’s bowl. At closer inspection, it was a vessel both light and weighty, thin and solid, surface frictionless as water. I tapped the base and it played a strange, sonorous note. A fairy object and no mistake.
I turned to the alcove behind my desk, cut deep into the stone wall.
A pair of impressive tapestries hung over the shelves, woven with depictions of Hecate: one showing the witch goddess at a crossroads under moonlight, then brightly robed and busy at her potions amidst books, braziers and wild animals.
Alys had made them as a gift a few years before, and I had enchanted her skilful work to guard my most precious possessions.