Chapter 52
“Where is she GOING?”
I hadn’t realized Accolon had returned; he had never reformed so quickly before. He stood at the willow’s edge, observing Ninianne remounting her horse and riding away.
“She’s leaving,” I said, leading us under the tree’s swaying fronds where he could appear whole again. “I told her about Excalibur’s scabbard—that I threw it away. All this time she never knew it was gone. I destroyed her last chance of saving Arthur.”
“She’ll come back,” he said.
“Why would she? I have just set her final scrap of hope alight with another of my acts of defiance.”
I sank down between the willow roots and sighed. Accolon sat at my side, regarding me directly until I raised my eyes to his.
“Morgan,” he said, the way he often did, as though it were a complete sentence.
In that one word I heard it all: his adoration and belief; his sense of when I was giving up too easily; the grit he carried beneath his carefree demeanour that had driven him to his successes and happiness; the strength to bear my heavy heart when I could no longer.
“What about everything else she said?” he asked. “About my presence here—what you have achieved.”
“For a moment, it pleased me deeply,” I said. “That you are real beyond all doubt, and the best of my knowledge and skills brought you forth.”
“But?”
“But it’s not deserved,” I said. “In reality, I was not enough. What I did brought you back only in part. It entrapped you, binding you to the tree—the lake—whichever, it hardly matters. The only thing that makes me happy is…that it’s truly you.
We have had all this time together. And even that is selfish, because what choice have you had?
It’s imperfect, craven, yet this has been the most wonderful thing I have done in the past two decades. ”
“A wonder I wish you believed in,” he replied. “Given the chance, I would have chosen this to be with you again. I will never regret that you tried.”
I smiled sadly at him. “The worst part is, I don’t regret it either. For so long, thinking that we could be together again was all that kept me drawing breath. I was wrong to do it, but it saved me.”
“Then it was worth it,” he said firmly. “If I have to be bound to our lake for eternity for you to believe your life, your future, is worth preserving, then I would answer your call from death a thousand times.”
His love, the absences we could not surmount, ached in me anew. How had we endured, found joy, while being deprived of the closeness of touch?
“I know you would,” I said. “But I have stolen the future of so many—yours, Arthur’s, even Ninianne’s. If I cannot think my way out of this, then every false charge against my name will be proven correct. I will have spent my life in pursuit of destruction, not healing.”
I looked at him, seeking agreement to my dire pronouncement, sympathy for the hopelessness I alone had created. Accolon’s face showed no flicker of pity, but remained tender as he refused to indulge me.
“Then think your way out of this,” he said.
“I can’t,” I protested. “If Ninianne, an immortal water fairy and King Arthur’s own Lady of the Lake, cannot see a way through this fog I have conjured, then what chance do I have? She’s right—there is nothing left.”
Restless, I rose and paced to the edge of the water again. I knew more of Llyn Glas and its depths today than I had learned in years, but now it yielded nothing.
Before the emptiness could settle, Accolon was beside me, sharing the view of our silver-blue lake as we had done countless times.
“Perhaps it’s fine that there are no more challenges to defeat,” I said. “To relinquish control, accept I have gone as far as I can.” I turned to my Gaul, and he faced me, his sunlit beauty arresting me anew. “You are my greatest feat.”
Softly, he smiled, but shook his head. “No, I’m not.”
“Yes,” I insisted. “You always were. Not just my bringing you back, but in life—the fact that I found you at all. The first time, then what it took to keep finding one another, the impossibility of every moment. That you loved me at all is a miracle I cannot imagine being capable of. Yet it happened—we brought ourselves into existence. If that isn’t a feat worthy of legend, then I do not know what is.
How lucky I am to have been loved by you. ”
Though he never forgot his phantom state anymore, Accolon raised his hand to my face as if he could not help it.
At the brush of his warmth, I closed my eyes and remembered his gold-dust fingertips as touch, the proximity of his body a memory of pleasure always too hard to bear, but worth the agony.
“And I by you, mon coeur,” Accolon said. “That you loved me is the only blessing I have ever needed. As for the rest of it, you are wrong.”
My eyes flew open in amazement; in our many lives together, I could count the times he had told me I was wrong on one hand. He offered me his most charming smile.
“All right,” I said ruefully. “Tell me how.”
“It is only what you already know, deep inside,” he replied. “That our love—powerful and deathless as it will always be—is not your miracle. I am bound to your past, and you are so much more.”
“You will never be in my past,” I said. “Forever, you will be with me.”
“I will, in some way or another,” he agreed.
“But I am not all there is—I never was. You are not meant to stop, Morgan. There is no world in which you will be finished with seeking, learning, expanding your mind. Always, you will have more to do. What you are, your extraordinary self, goes far beyond me and our love, the time we spent here.”
“Accolon, no—” I began, but he held up his hand in interruption.
“Do you know what the greatest honour of my life was?” he asked.
A litany of possibilities ran through my mind: his knighthood; the years of joust victories and travel with Sir Manassen; choosing to fight for Arthur and a cause he believed in.
Once he had said it was bringing Tressa back to Alys from a hostile Camelot, or taking Robin in and raising him to become the knight, the good man, that he wanted to be.
His many successes, achieved on his own terms.
“The greatest honour of my life,” he continued, “was that here, in this place of ours, you let me stay by your side. You chose to sit and dance and laugh together, to share your quicksilver mind, to lie with me night after night. You fought for us, you sacrificed, you gave over your heart and trusted me to hold it close. The greatest honour I have ever received, Morgan, is that you paused in flight to be with me.”
Tears were running down my face, my heart so tight in my chest I felt it would burst, but this time it was not from despair but something greater—a soaring song, reaching its peak; a blue-bright sky breaking through clouds. Pure joy, without the crushing companion of grief.
“Why are you saying this?” I asked. “It sounds like an ending, when it cannot be.”
“I say this because I am far from all you have left,” he replied. “Because you belong in the future, mon coeur, creating wonders from knowledge, performing feats of brilliance as no others can. There is more beyond this, and you deserve to find it. But this belief will come only from yourself.”
He was right, but he was also one of the few who could make my mercurial mind stop and listen. “The future,” I said with a sigh. “I wish I knew how to get there.”
“You will find a way,” he said. “That has always been your strength. What I do know is this—whatever happens, your fate is in your own hands. Do not forget, you are Morgan le Fay.”
I let the music of my name from his lips flow through me, the rush of love and quiet exhilaration that came with feeling myself completely known, by one who had seen me exactly as I was from the very first.
“Morgan le Fay,” I echoed. “I am. Now and forevermore.”
Accolon smiled and enveloped me, perfect and made of light. I could have stayed that way for eternity, bathed in his warmth and belief, the love we felt so powerfully, even across our veil of separation.
Instead, a high, impatient shriek cut through our lovers’ haze. We looked up to see a sleek dark falcon over the treetops: Hecate, my fractious peregrine, jesses still attached but climbing towards the sky in furious haste.
Instinctively, I broke away from Accolon and sent up my recall whistle before she could soar out of sight.
The bird heard it, and I saw her falter, and for once she changed her mind.
Curving her path, she tilted down and flew a brisk half circle, alighting on a low branch of the left-hand apple tree.
“One of ours?” Accolon asked.
“My own peregrine,” I said. “She must have escaped the mews.”
On calm feet, I approached the tree, murmuring compliments to the falcon.
Eying me, she no longer seemed sure of herself, and I remembered why I had named her thus—not because of Alys’s tapestry, or my more witch-like interests, but because her namesake was the goddess of crossroads.
Clever as she was, this bird had always been caught at one, between comfort, her training, instinct and a thirst for liberation.
And I had persisted with her complications until she became my favourite falcon, because I understood.
Some birds are only ever meant to be free, my son had said, with wisdom both inherited and his own. He had seen the conflict in her and considered its cure, whereas I had only made excuses to keep her with me. Maybe I had been wrong.
I took a few cautious steps towards the falcon’s branch, low but still far out of my reach.
The bird gave a chirp of recognition, so I wrapped my mantle around my upraised fist and whistled again.
I didn’t expect it, especially without the reward of meat, but the peregrine swooped down onto my clenched hand with a thud. She was trusting me.
With careful fingers, I untied the jesses around her fearsome feet.
She kept her sharp gaze on my face as her fetters slipped away, leaving her lighter, unburdened.
Tentatively, the falcon extended her wings with a slow elegance, barred black and white beneath, slate-blue top feathers shining, experimenting with her new unleashed state.
I moved closer to the water and lifted my arm slightly, testing her in turn. Hecate glanced away, out across the lake, then brought her gold-ringed eyes back to mine.
“Fly,” I told her.
And she did; I didn’t need to throw my arm, or send her into the wind. The falcon went of her own volition, wings catching on the air, gliding over the surface of the lake with bladelike grace. Where she went now, what she did in the wilderness, was undecided, yet to come, but the choice was hers.
Seeing the bird depart, Accolon came and stood beside me. We were just beyond the willow tree, and his edges were starting to blur, but he didn’t seem to mind.
“Do you know what the word ‘peregrine’ means?” I asked, and he shook his head.
“Wanderer,” I said. “She that roams.”
“It suits her,” he agreed. “Where did you learn it?”
“My father told me, on a day not unlike this. It was the last time we ever spoke alone.”
Then, I heard it again, as if Gorlois, Duke of Cornwall, stood by my side on Tintagel’s windswept headland: my father’s voice, telling me about falcons, and though I didn’t know it yet, speaking of life itself.
Do you know what her greatest strength is, Morgan? he had asked of Jezebel, his own favourite peregrine, and now I knew. Not her talons, her sharp beak or the speed and deadly accuracy she had honed since birth.
Survival, he had told me. Any moment she can fly away, knowing she can live. That is the greatest power of all.
A brief piece of wisdom, given from a father to his youngest daughter, a child he would not see grow into the woman she became. Even then, he had known who I was.
True power comes from freedom, and the ability to survive what befalls us.
All along, I had been the bird, the peregrine. She that roams.
Now, at Llyn Glas, my liberated falcon reached the valley’s high mountainside on perfect wings and disappeared over the horizon, not a twitch of doubt or pause in her mind. She understood she was free.
In her wake came another memory of my father, crouching before me on Tintagel’s headland, his deep-blue eyes on mine, and an oath I had sworn to keep.
You are wise, Morgan, you always were. You must use that wisdom, harness it, learn to wield it. Promise me you will not forget.
“I see it now,” I said. “I know what I have to do.”
I turned to Accolon, still there, eternally beside me, waiting for what I would say next. His smile for me was as it always had been—charming, beautiful, full of love.
“Alors,” he said. “Go and do it.”