Chapter 9 #2
I wanted to tell her that she alone had done it, as I had been only distracted, but she insisted we share in the triumph.
The culmination of our vision of healing all who asked for help—originating in St. Brigid’s Abbey and continued in Gore, when we used our skills to secretly help the women in the village—now stood before us, firm upon our land.
“It may be ours,” I said, “but I would not have made it this far without you.”
“Oh hush,” she said sensibly. “Let’s put ourselves to work.”
So we did, and despite my private conflicts, in Belle Garde’s new infirmary I found the greatest peace I had ever known.
When the sick and injured came, I diagnosed, observed and laid hands to the cases that Alys’s herbs and traditional physic could not solve, returned to the challenges and fulfilment of healing without the need to hide my abilities.
I was free to use my skills boldly and be proud, in a way I had never before experienced in life.
Soon, word spread, and the valley was busy with people requesting help, problems that I was capable of fixing.
Whatever else I could not change, the infirmary was where I made a difference.
No one mistrusted me there; I was needed, respected and appreciated, transcending the corrupted mark that had been put upon my reputation.
“Have you heard what they are calling you around the valley?” Tressa asked, after the infirmary’s third winter eased to spring with no patients lost. “Morgan the Goddess.”
I had heard the name in passing, a moving gesture of faith from those who had willingly bestowed their loyalty.
Yet part of me wondered if it was accurate in another way—that I was now a remote figure, existing outside everyday life; an Eris in her high tower, holding her vengeful heart at a distance.
However, not even my fearsome reputation was immune to the shifts of time.
After years of attempts, new knights still came from Arthur’s various courts, but with lessening context for mine and my brother’s long conflict.
This lack of enmity let them through the protective charms, into a world of ease and hospitality they had not expected.
Some were injured or lost, others tired from questing for the Crown, wishing only for a soft bed and good meal.
A few spoke of Camelot carelessly, irreverently, in a way that would have damned them in years past. They had lost faith in the strict systems, with little guidance or appetite for the virtuous greatness they had been promised.
They brought gossip of discontented barons, whispers that the King had become aimless, rumours of factions returning to their strongholds to contemplate a different future.
Their talk was amusing, useful, and I hoarded it away like jewels in a vault.
To these knights, I also proved a surprise, a powerful woman far from the humourless, vicious crone they had imagined.
Occasionally, where my charm went, their desire followed, and I ate it like sweetmeats, the power honey on my tongue.
The first time a knight was brave enough to declare his admiration, I felt it as an even darker revenge, and an answer to quite a different hunger.
When I knocked on his chamber door in the violet-black night and he stepped aside with awe, I took him to bed as the goddess of discord I had become, defying the natural order to feed her own wants.
More I devoured thereafter, the knights most handsome and incautious, whose enthusiasm matched my restlessness as I sated the appetites my body did not know how to forget.
To lie down with another in carnality, freed from love or consequence, brought a brief oblivion that calmed my senses for the strategic requirements of my days.
Amongst other things, it pleased me to return these men to Camelot, gratified and dazed, questioning everything they had been taught, riding back to their oaths and duty in a mild state of mutiny.
They were not the only ones who sought the freedoms of Belle Garde.
Women came too, wronged maidens, lovers, sometimes wives, abandoned or jilted in the wake of questing knights.
To them we offered harbour: rest and comfort; friendship; an education if they wished.
With Alys’s nunnery connections, some took the veil, and others helped in the infirmary or were drawn to Tressa’s many practical interests—her orchards and cider house, beekeeping, scribework and illumination—then settled in the valley, or took their skills and newfound purpose to share our wisdom elsewhere.
In these small but significant ways, Belle Garde strengthened with every healed affliction, each enlightened mind, every soul that came and went feeling better than before.
Within myself, I was not content, exactly, but willing to let Alys and Tressa believe I had settled, returned to the art of physic for my mind, and the pleasures of the body in whatever fleeting way I chose.
I had men to seduce, a cause to rail against and work at my fingertips.
To those who loved me best, it seemed a decent start towards my own restoration.
No one needed to hear how I still awoke from my insufficient sleep, Accolon’s absence a crevasse in my bed, Tintagel’s sea roaring through my body. No one knew that if I cut my heart from my chest and lay it alongside Accolon’s, it too would be marble, cold and lifeless, just the same.
Not a soul needed to know me at all anymore, outside of my reputation for vengeance and Belle Garde’s famed revels and hospitality.
While I warred with my brother, sowing destruction throughout his lands, all who came to mine were healed in some way, and I did not mind such a paradox.
If enduring rage and my valley’s sanctuary were what Morgan le Fay offered the world, I could not argue with such a legacy.
For once, I had earned both my bad name and the good.
Regardless, in Camelot, they called my domain the Vale of No Return.