Chapter 29 #2
It struck with even greater force; the herald would only ask for my reply if Arthur himself had ordered it thus.
“Y-yes,” I said haltingly. “Say…I feel his grief as my own, as both a shared burden and a comfort. And send my thanks.”
The herald gave a deep bow, remounted and left. From the green, I watched until they disappeared, then found myself walking back up the turret stairs to my desk in a daze.
Your brother wishes it known you are not alone in your great sorrow.
Do not take away the kingdom’s future. Please.
I put the Shroud of Tithonus back in its reliquary, and didn’t look at it again.
*
Though the loss of my mother wasn’t unexpected, death had its way of casting a raw light upon life’s empty spaces.
Sixteen years since I had lost Accolon it would be by summer’s end.
Five years since I had regained the Shroud, and still could not bring him back. How long I had lived without his love.
When the torture of an empty bed was too much, I would rise and go to my study to read—the ancient tales, the histories, the poets; words of time and trouble, of adversity, courage and a hundred kinds of passion.
One night, Alys appeared in the doorway in her bed robe. I was sitting at the desk before my old resurrection notes, but had not found the strength to start reading.
“I thought you might be here,” she said, pulling a chair to the desk-side. “Are you working on your formulae again? For the Shroud?”
“No,” I replied. “I told you, it’s too risky. When the Shroud is gone, it’s gone.”
She leaned back in her chair, thoughtful. “I keep thinking back to the magpie you raised. The gold spot on her chest.”
I shook my head. “When she moulted, the mark came away. It was just a stain.”
“From what?”
“I don’t know, but ultimately it couldn’t have mattered,” I said. “Nor did her resurrection, in terms of progress. She’s a mystery, an aberration.”
Alys scoffed. “In all of our work together, you have never let me call something an anomaly. There is always a reason, dear heart, however rare the cause.”
I smiled at her accurate mimicry of me; how once my way of learning had been to push every boundary. “I’m not always right, you know.”
My tone was in jest, but she leaned forwards, her gaze direct, serious. “Tell me about that day. The magpie—every detail.”
I began to protest that I’d told her before, but her expression was adamant. I thought back, describing how I’d decided to stop trying with birds, how I saw the dead magpie and took her into my hands.
“I was afraid, I remember that,” I said. “Thinking of her fledglings, the entire tiding and who would lead them. I knew I couldn’t save her, and I…panicked.”
“Then what?” Alys urged. “What was different?”
“I…don’t know,” I said. “I couldn’t think what to do, so… ” I conjured the sight in my mind, the broken-necked matriarch, how I had felt. “I did what came naturally—I tried to heal her. Pointless, of course.”
“What if it wasn’t?”
A sudden exhaustion washed over me. “I can’t do this. It was fifteen years ago. Why all of these questions?”
“Because you’re pushing me away, Morgan,” Alys said.
“Our whole lives we have shared our thoughts, our pain, our hearts, however difficult the truth, and I cannot bear that you feel you need to keep things from me. I am not your duty, an entity to protect. We are in this together, and always have been.”
I sighed. “There’s just…nothing to tell.”
She regarded me for a long, expectant moment, then said, “Iawn. If that’s the way this has to be.”
Abruptly, she stood and stalked away to the worktable.
I watched her go, regretful but shackled, as she opened a wooden apothecary box and retrieved something, then turned to me with one hand outstretched.
Between her fingers was a small black vial.
Without pause, she unstopped the bottle and emptied the contents down her throat.
“Alys,” I said. “What was that?”
“Wolfsbane,” she replied. “Pure and strong. The deadliest poison known to us.”
“What?” I exclaimed. “Are you testing an antidote? But you should never—”
“There is no antidote, as you well know,” she interrupted. “With the quantity I took, I’ll be dead this half hour.”
Fear ripped up my spine as I tried to think what I should do first. I stumbled towards Alys, but she swerved out of my reach.
“Before you heal me,” she said, “cut your hand.”
Her voice was already breathless with pain, her twisting gut crying out to my senses. Panic surged through me like floodwater; once poison got into the blood, it could be in the entire body within moments, and wolfsbane killed at speed. Time was everything.
“Absolutely not!” I cried. “Aconite is no game, Alys. I must heal you before something terrible happens.”
“Not yet.” She feinted sideways again and swiped the falcon-handled knife out of my belt, holding it out to me. “Take this, now, and cut your palm, as you have done for the sake of experiment many times.”
The knife shook in her hand, her skin chalky, lips turning blue.
“I can’t…not like this,” I insisted. “Dear heart, just let me… ”
“No,” she said. “This is what we do, Morgan. We learn, we try, we fail and try again. Curiosity, challenging assumptions, the bravery needed to truly seek knowledge—I learned that from you. I don’t want to die in this moment, but if it saves your brilliance and brings back truth between us… Cut your hand.”
How she could be so heartfelt and insistent while her body fought death was a wonder, and it moved me even in the midst of my exasperation.
“God’s blood, you are impossible,” I hissed. “Give me that.”
I snatched my father’s knife out of her hand. Its edges caught the candlelight; since girlhood, I had learned to keep it sharp.
Curling my fingers around the steel, I closed my eyes and clenched my fist tight.
The blade sunk into my flesh instantly. As pain arrived with its banshee scream, the healing inside me answered, rushing like sunrays towards every part of my damage.
I released the knife and the wetness of blood tickled through my fingers, hot and alive.
Alys gasped, the air tearing through her failing lungs.
My eyes snapped open; we had wasted too much time.
I grabbed her wrist with my good hand and pulled her close, sending the full force of my healing into her body.
She stiffened as the wolfsbane fought back, but I persisted, pushing the poison into retreat through her veins, into her stomach, bright shoots breaking apart the dark, twisting tendrils.
As the power balance shifted into my favour, Alys began to cough, exhaling curls of black smoke, corruption leaving her body until her breath was clear air again. I held her to me as her pulse recovered its rhythm, her bloodshot eyes clearing to amber and white.
I glared at her face from a distance of inches. “Don’t you ever risk yourself like that,” I told her. “Not for my sake.”
To my astonishment, she only smiled, no regret on her pale, sheened face.
“As you always say, cariad, it was worth it.” She nodded down to my slashed hand, bleeding at my side. “Edrych.”
Only then did I raise my arm and see what Alys’s dangerous, valiant experiment had done.
The blood running through my fingers was molten gold.
*
Resurrection as I had known it wasn’t far behind.
Once I understood how to shift my body into its mercurial state, I never failed to turn my blood into a river of bright, rushing gold.
How right it felt, how obvious that my most beloved skill was what had revived the magpie matriarch from death, and was everything I had been seeking all along.
Healing was my peak, my power, and I was its mistress.
If I was ever worthy of being called Morgan the Goddess, then this was why.
Alys had suspected the answer lay within me all along, her belief the miracle I most needed. She and I spoke a great deal in the days and weeks later. I told her everything I had kept inside for years, and once I began, it felt like magic, a resurrection in itself.
Within a month, I had achieved more than in years of trying.
I raised dead birds again through their heartsong: from finches to song thrushes; a wild and broken-winged goshawk returned to glory; a mangled swan, trampled by a bull so badly it lost a foot and half its beak, restored to its alabaster entirety.
In late summer, when hounds-in-training accidentally took a mother doe out of season, I saved the huntsman’s guilt and conveyed her torn-up body from the hanging room back to the forest, where my refined formula set to work.
The deer burst forth from her grave of leaves on the second night, fully formed, and returned to her waiting fawns.
After that, there was nothing more for me to do. My golden blood had recreated every marvel from my time at Merlin’s, and gone beyond. I had the Shroud of Tithonus, and the power with which to use it. I was ready to perform a miracle of my own.
Yet between my rapid victories and Ninianne’s echoing pleas was a question growing louder: What happens next?
Failure had been my companion for fifteen years; I knew how it felt, and understood the consequences. As I stood with victory within my grasp, I still did not know what it meant—or what it might cost—to succeed.
So I reverted to old habits. Every day before the household stirred, I went to my study and took out the reliquary and silver box containing Accolon’s heart, hoping to find myself feeling differently, or understand why I did not.
One gilded autumn morning, I had been contemplating the Shroud for a while when footsteps sounded on the stairs and the huntsman appeared, two senior grooms hovering behind him in the doorway.
“A knight has been spotted just outside the boundary, near the chapel,” he said. “His leg is bleeding, and he’s jumpy. We’ve tried to send him to the infirmary, but he keeps circling his horse and refuses to come any closer.”
I rolled my eyes; some still believed my Vale of No Return would trap knights indefinitely. I went to Alys’s remedy cabinet and brought them a small ceramic pot. “Take him this salve. If he won’t come in, this will soothe his cut leg and help it heal.”
No one accepted my offering. “Unfortunately, my lady, that’s not possible,” said the huntsman. “We cannot get closer than fifty yards.”
A shiver passed through me, the kick of wind before a rainstorm. “Why not?”
“His…companion, Lady Morgan. The knight is riding with a lion by his side.”
I had rushed down the stairs and was calling for a horse before they had a chance to ask what it meant.