Page 31 of The Faerie Morgana

As Morgause tiptoed gingerly through the pool of blood around the assassin’s body on her way to call for a servant, Morgana slipped through the private door into the empty bedchamber.

There she divested herself of her men’s clothes and tossed the whole pile of them out the open window.

The tunic and trousers caught on the branches of a tree, where they hung like empty, defeated ghosts.

Aware of the need to hurry, she began to change her form.

It was harder this time. She was weary from having held a man’s shape for so many hours, and from having dealt with Morgause and her assassin.

She had to summon every last shred of her energy for the transformation.

What had come with ease before was now labor.

Her toes became claws, but they wavered, becoming toes, then claws, then toes that were half-claw and half-not.

Her shoulders and spine shrank, but unevenly, and the tail she expected to sprout grew only halfway and then stopped.

She struggled, her head spinning with the effort, her stomach churning.

It was hard to breathe, as if her lungs couldn’t work properly in the uncertain frame of her ribs.

She was in this state, half human, half something else, when she heard the clatter of feet on the stair, rushing to the queen’s aid. Morgana pressed her hands to her brow and clenched her belly, forcing herself.

Moments later, a coterie of manservants, led by a guard with his sword at the ready, burst into the bedchamber. Morgause was behind them, pointing. “There! My bedchamber! I saw him go in.” One of the men peered into the room, then turned to Morgause with a shrug. She cried, “He was there!”

The men crowded through the doorway and milled about the chamber, looking behind a curtain, crouching to look beneath the bed, one peeking through the narrow door into the dressing room. Finally, the guard sheathed his sword and turned to Morgause.

“My lady, I don’t see anyone. He couldn’t have got past us. Nor could he have jumped from this window, it’s too high. He’s just not— Sorry, my lady, but there’s nothing in your bedchamber but that cat.”

“Cat?” Morgause shrilled. “I don’t keep a cat!”

“You don’t know it? Pretty black one, with the yellow eyes? It must have climbed in through the window.”

Morgana, sleek and black and nimble on four neat paws, leaped up onto the window ledge and sprang into the branches of the tree below.

She ignored the faces that peered out the window after her as she scrambled down the tree trunk and off across the keep.

She dodged the feet of the people gathering for the ceremony, dashing beneath the half-built dais, where the carpenters shouted at each other as they hefted timbers.

She darted past the stables, hissing once at a barking dog, aiming for the main gate.

She paused there to glance over her glossy black shoulder, the tip of her shining tail switching furiously. She looked up, past the excited throng, past the scarlet pennants already hung from the castle windows, signifying that the king—the new king—was in residence.

She was gratified to catch a glimpse of him.

He stood in the window, beaming down at his people as they prepared for him to take his throne.

His fair hair glowed in the early-morning sun as if he already wore the gilded crown.

His blue eyes shone with pleasure, and his clean-shaven chin lifted with pride.

There was also something diffident in his stance, something that told of his awareness of the mantle of responsibility about to fall on his youthful shoulders. Morgana was glad of that, and glad also to see that over the rich tunic he wore, her charm hung from his neck.

Her charms never failed. Even Uther’s had done precisely what she had intended. Whatever the Blackbird’s complaint about the true king ascending to his throne, her charm would keep him safe. Her magic was strong. Had it not warned her of Morgause’s treachery?

She could make her way back to the Isle of Apples, confident that her chief purpose in life had been fulfilled.

Exhausted, she turned away to slink out of the keep, her four legs trembling with fatigue, her tail dragging the ground behind her.

She feared she wouldn’t be able to hold her shape much longer.

She padded down the slope through the woods, moving as swiftly as she was able.

She had told Braithe to meet her on the dock at the Isle, but she no longer had the ability to go so far.

At the dock, she crouched beneath a hawthorn bush, her chin on her paws, her eyes closing with fatigue. She couldn’t do it. She had meant to resume her own shape and row herself back to the Isle, but now that the moment had come, she had not the strength.

Nor had she the clothes to dress herself. She was helpless, about to revert to her own form, and she would be naked.

Braithe stood, irresolute, on the dock below the herb garden where she had promised to meet Morgana.

She had Morgana’s shift and black robe over her arm and her sandals in her hand, ready to dress the priestess when she became herself, but something was making Braithe uneasy about all of it.

It was an itch in her mind, a call that made no sense.

She had tried to ignore it all day, but it refused to subside.

As afternoon wore into evening, the itch grew more intense.

The call seemed to grow louder, as if someone were screaming at her.

She wished for the hundredth time that she had deep sight. She had wondered, as she gathered up the clothes, if she should try one of the methods of divination she had seen Morgana and Niamh use, but she felt foolish for even considering it. Now she stood on the dock and fretted.

An empty rowboat bobbed against its tie rope, its oars shipped and ready.

Braithe felt the tug of an impulse, arising to intensify her discomfort.

Did she dare to climb into this boat, to row across Ilyn, hoping to meet Morgana on the opposite shore?

The usual fog encircled the Isle, and night was falling, but Braithe supposed that if she tried to row through it, she had a reasonable chance of going in the right direction.

She refused to think about what would happen if she lost herself in the mist. She was no rower, but she was used to hard work, and the boat was small.

The dark water was calm. Surely she could figure out how to pull the oars.

She palmed Morgana’s sigil, hanging at her breast, and argued with herself. What if Morgana made her way back and Braithe wasn’t waiting here as she had promised? But what if she was in trouble on the shore of Camulod?

Braithe paced up and down the dock, her shoulders tight with anxiety. She peered into the darkness in hopes of seeing Morgana in her man’s form, rowing toward her. Once she thought she heard the splash of an oar, but it was only a fish, leaping to snap at an errant fly.

The mist was too thick. The fish missed its prey, but in the ripples it made when it fell back into the water something appeared.

It was vague, ghostly, not something Braithe saw with her eyes.

It was some other part of her that perceived it.

She couldn’t have called it a vision, precisely, but an image, something that spoke to her from deep in her mind.

Was this what it was like when Morgana stirred the ashes in the little divining bowl? She didn’t know. Braithe clutched Morgana’s robe to her, aching to understand.

It was a cat that she thought she saw in the water.

It lay on the surface of the lake, a black cat barely visible in the shifting shadows.

Its long tail curled around its paws, and its eyes flashed gold, looking directly at her for a heart-stopping instant until the ripples died away and the image dissolved.

Braithe had yearned for such a manifestation when she was an acolyte, still hoping her magic would show itself, would prove her worthy. There had been nothing then and nothing since. But this! What was this? Had she imagined it, calling it up out of her need? Was she dreaming?

Or was this—could it be—actual magic? If so, where had it come from? She had none of her own, everyone knew that, but…

Whatever it was, it was not done with her.

A voice spoke in her mind. It was distant, but it was clear, and it was Morgana’s.

Never deny your intuition. Braithe’s bones began to tingle as they always did when magic was close.

She made up her mind on the instant. She threw the clothes and sandals into the rowboat and climbed in after them, bracing herself against the rocking as she settled onto the seat.

She took up the oars, one and then the other, trying them in the water once, twice, three times, feeling their weight.

Then she leaned toward the bollard, untied the rope, and let it fall in a mound at her feet.

She was clumsy with the oars at first. The boat wobbled away from the dock, moving awkwardly.

It juddered and jerked as she tried to correct her direction, and she feared getting turned around in the growing darkness.

She suffered a terrible moment of doubt about what she was doing.

She glanced back and saw the shore receding into the gloom.

She turned forward again, but she could see nothing past the ring of circling mist.