Chapter 31 #2
Grief scalded through me, boiling water under my skin, but I resisted the temptation to react. I was not here to address my own pain.
“I told you,” I said. “I have come to offer you all of my unspoken wrongs, and to be absolved where I am innocent. So Yvain will not suffer for his connection with me, or his fair-mindedness, any longer.”
Arthur nodded and put his hands on his hips. “Enlighten me, then. Tell me something I do not know.”
I wavered, then closed my eyes and thought of my son. “I don’t have Excalibur’s scabbard,” I said. “It’s gone.”
When I looked again, Arthur’s face was hard and pale as marble. “Gone how?”
“After I took it from the abbey, I got rid of it. Threw it in a bottomless lake to rot. I said it was lost to you, and that is what I meant. It no longer exists.”
“Blood of Christ,” he said. “Of all the terrible, faithless things you have done…How dare you take what’s mine and destroy it with such disregard! Yet another betrayal.”
“No,” I argued. “It was my first betrayal. One I do not regret, but perpetrated after the treason you accused me of, in the wake of Accolon’s killing.”
He fell silent for a long moment. When he spoke again, his voice was low, restrained. “Why tell me this? Are you trying to make things worse?”
How could things be worse? I thought.
“I’m telling you because after so many years of lies and conflict, the truth matters more than anything.
If you cannot acknowledge that, we will never have peace.
” I paused, looking steadily at him. “Isn’t that what you want, Arthur—for the kingdom, those you love, yourself?
In everything you do, haven’t you ultimately been in search of peace? ”
My brother’s shoulders dropped, his eyes softening. Somehow it had moved him.
“Go on,” he said, and I felt an eternity of tension leave my body.
“Most of it you know,” I began. “The storms, the birds, the enchanted objects, chaos I have sent to Camelot over the years. No doubt Sir Lancelot told you I kidnapped him. However, I didn’t send the deadly mantle.
Yvain was right—I am far cleverer than that, and would never risk killing one of my own household.
He should not have been banished or punished for merely expressing himself.
It’s hardly the fairness that you preach. ”
I expected offence, but he displayed none. “Then I owe Yvain an apology, which he will have. Though I will not take a scolding on justice from you until I have heard the things I do not know.”
I hesitated, and Arthur coolly noted my pause. He well knew it was easy for me to be honest about what he was already aware of, and that which cast me in a better light. In one move, he had recaptured his moral advantage and it rankled, but if it was to be the truth, then it must be everything.
“I have concealed myself with magic,” I said. “Worn faces not my own, lied with my body and voice to haunt your courts and further my vengeance. Not often, but enough.”
“You came here and I did not know?” he exclaimed. “In someone else’s skin?”
A flash of defensiveness raised my chin.
“They were Merlin’s arts, his strengths and favoured tricks, taught to me against my will.
I won’t excuse my use of them, but it was out of grief and fury, and you can believe I will never use such methods again.
All it did was take me back to my hatred of Merlin and the darkest days of my childhood. ”
Arthur considered me, his expression unreadable. He raised a hand to his temple, rubbing a thumb along the edge of his understated gold crown. Old habits, never dying.
“You hated Merlin all that time?” he said. “I did not know.”
“I kept it from you, not to tear you in two. But I’m sure you can imagine why. He brought death and violence to my father’s door, stole the happy life from me and my sisters, our mother’s from her… ”
I trailed off because I saw Arthur flinch, much as he tried to suppress it. The circumstances of his existence were not his fault, but I knew he took the weight of our mother’s experiences upon himself in private.
“It seems strange now,” I said quietly, “but I used to believe that you were the one goodness that came out of that time. The night you were born in Tintagel, I heard you cry, and when we met again I felt as if I had known you from your first breath. Most of all, I will always hate Merlin for what he did to you and me—what he led you to believe, and that I didn’t understand why you listened to him.
It was so easy for me to mistrust Merlin, I failed to consider how his effect on your life was the opposite to mine, and you could not simply feel the same.
For that blindness, I will forever be sorry. ”
Arthur nodded heavily, as if he could neither agree nor argue otherwise. Silence fell between us, carrying the weight of several lives, so many paths untaken.
“Do you still dream of the sea, Morgan?” he asked suddenly.
I almost replied, before realizing I had never admitted to him what we shared. Yet he looked too certain for me to refute it outright. “Did Ninianne…?” I began.
He shook his head. “She confirmed it, but I already knew. That day in the storm, when you claimed I dreamed alone, I could see in your eyes it wasn’t true.”
Before I could fathom how to feel, Arthur urged, “Well, do you?”
The answer, at least, was simple. “Yes. Almost nightly, when I manage to sleep. It was you who made me realize we were both dreaming of Tintagel.”
“What do you think it means?” he asked.
I knew he must have spent years wondering why; Arthur had been raised to believe in visions and had been on a constant search for meaning since I had known him.
“I can’t define what it means to you,” I replied.
“But to my mind, within Tintagel’s waves is where we were both born, and where I first lost you.
I have come to view the sea as our presence in one another’s lives—the times we have parted, then come together again, as the tides go in and out.
Maybe we are destined to confront one another, over and over, until the whole truth between us is spoken. ”
He sighed and drew a weary hand over his face. “I’ve had a dozen wise men working on an interpretation for years. Of course you are the one who makes the most sense.”
His honesty thudded into my chest. “Perhaps all you needed was one clever sister who knows what lies inside of you.”
Arthur’s eyes widened, and I hoped my candour had struck him in the same, bruising way. “We’ve been in disagreement so long,” he murmured. “I often wonder—at what point did this all become too late?”
“You know when. There was always a route back until you killed Accolon, and blamed me. That was the end of us then, and the beginning of what we are now.”
He shook his head vehemently. “Our trust had been broken long before.”
“Nothing was irreparable until you put Accolon to the sword,” I insisted. “I would never have destroyed the scabbard if not for what you did to him. It was the cause of every treason I’ve committed since. Even if none of it has scratched your shield.”
“As I’ve said in the past,” he said tersely, “ if you hadn’t given Sir Accolon the scabbard, I would have had no need to punish you.”
“You hadn’t seen the scabbard for years,” I shot back. “How did you know his carrying it involved me at all? You knew nothing of us.”
Arthur faltered, as if the question had struck the harshness from him. “When he…I…As the duel concluded,” he managed. “Accolon…told me of you and him. Your love.”
“That’s a lie,” I said. “He knew of my troubles with Camelot and would never have willingly revealed us. How did you force it from him?”
“No, Morgan,” he protested. “I would never…Not from duress.”
I held up my hand, refusing his excuses. “If there is any honour left in your heart, you will tell me the truth.”
Arthur sighed, so long and deep it pulled his body into a curve. When he looked up at me, his eyes were quicksilver.
“I know because…with his dying breath he spoke your name.”
It was the truth I had asked for, and it gutted me in an instant. How much I wanted to cry then, for Accolon, for my losing him, every tear I had held back in the years he had been gone. Except I could not do so in front of my brother, his killer. Now, I could not yield.
“The Devil take me,” I said fiercely, and my father’s old phrase brought me strength. “The Devil take you, Arthur. You will not distract me with this.”
“Sister, I am not trying to—”
“Save your breath,” I cut him off. “I came here only to gain the one thing I deserve—my exoneration. Whatever I’ve done since, I never had anything to do with any betrayal prophecy.
Yvain is owed the truth so he can live free of the mark of my sin.
The court, and my son, must hear it from you directly. ”
Arthur still looked shaken, but my tirade had restored his regal aloofness. “I’ve spent years enduring your treason, sister. Why would I change my mind now?”
“Because after all this time, what reason have I to lie?”
I was almost pleading—for myself, for Yvain, but also in part for relief, from vengeance and all I had carried, the weight of this great golden castle upon my shoulders.
Yet for me to show him the betrayal did not lie at my feet, I had to meet Arthur inside his own beliefs.
I needed him angry, I needed him righteous. I needed him convinced.
“It’s not your fault that Merlin interpreted his prophecy incorrectly,” I said. “But that doesn’t mean he was wrong. You have been deceived, just not by me. Lancelot and Guinevere are betraying you, Arthur. They are deep in an adulterous love affair, and have been for years. That is the truth.”
He stared at me for so long that this time I believed my words had found their way in. Then, like water under a winter’s night, I watched him turn to ice.
“My God, not this,” he muttered. “Anything but this.”
He began to pace back and forth, then immediately stopped with accusation in his eyes.
“You were the damsel at Westminster,” he said.
“It was you who came and claimed Lancelot was dying. When he returned and said he had been in your captivity, I suspected the young woman was under your orders, but it was far worse. All along, you were there.”
“I won’t deny it,” I replied. “I told you about the disguises of my own volition. It doesn’t change what I am telling you now. The emerald ring, Guinevere’s grief, Lancelot’s breach with you after living with her—your wife and closest knight are lovers.”
“None of that is proof!” Arthur shouted. “Where are the witnessed acts, the written declarations? What have you seen with your own eyes that speaks to anything more than the affection we all acknowledge?”
His point stopped me dead. What had I seen, aside from one overwrought exchange before Guinevere’s trial? Even in my captivity, Lancelot had never uttered a word of confession. I knew I was right, but my brother’s logic was undeniable, and it infuriated me.
“You had instinct once, Arthur,” I said. “You alone were enough. Now what are you without your adoring public and sycophantic court to agree with your every word? Have you so lost your way that you cannot see what is obvious?”
The insult was his last boundary, and I saw it break. “Of all your dark acts, this is your worst,” he growled. “You did not come here for my own good, or to respect the truth, only for your satisfaction. After this, how can I trust a single…word…you’ve… ”
He spun away, hand to his forehead, breathing hard.
Pain rang out to me like a reverberating bell, my blood lighting up in response.
The air trembled with his sudden, violent headache of old, the affliction so familiar to me I could have almost healed him across the space between us.
I resisted the urge to go to him with every fibre of my being as he staggered to the long table, reaching out to steady himself.
“Arthur,” I said, only to be cut off by a tremendous slam as he brought two hands down on the tabletop. He looked up at me with bloodshot eyes.
“Get out,” he said. “Before we both do something we regret. Go from me, from Camelot, and never come back.”