Page 27 of The Faerie Morgana
Morgana didn’t wait to see if Arthur would heed the warning. “Braithe, I’m going to see what I can do for those people. Stay with the prince.”
“Yes, Priestess,” Braithe said. She took up a stance before Arthur as if she would physically stop him from moving. Morgana doubted Braithe could deter him on her own, but the Blackbird took Arthur’s other side, and she hoped that would be enough. She spun, making her robe swirl, and set off towardthe lower level of the castle, where the band of refugees had been escorted.
She found them huddled in one of the windowless storerooms below the kitchen. There were kitchen maids and house servants bustling around them, offering ale and bread, trying to make them comfortable. The small space already smelled of unwashed bodies and the tang of blood. At a glance, Morgana saw that most were unhurt, only tired and hungry, but there were two—a boy of perhaps eleven, and a girl of about sixteen—with visible injuries.
The boy had taken a blow to the head, and an old woman was doing her best to soothe the bloody gash with a stained rag. The woman was sobbing silently. The boy stared into space, as if he didn’t know where he was or what had happened to him. When Morgana came close, the old woman looked up with thin, weary tears streaming down her wrinkled cheeks. “He tried to fight’m,” she said. “Tried like a man, he did, and him only a lad.”
“Let me see, grandmother,” Morgana said. She carefully peeled the blood-soaked cloth from the wound and picked up a candle burning nearby so she could get a good look.
The cut was not deep, but it was bleeding freely. She called to one of the kitchen maids to bring her a fresh cloth. “A clean one!” she ordered. “And a bit of lint.” To the old woman, she said, “The wound is not serious, but he will have a scar to boast of.”
“But he won’t talk!” the woman cried. “Wouldn’t move ’less I dragged’m!”
Indeed, the boy still gazed at nothing, his lips slack, his eyeswithout life. “He has had a shock,” Morgana said. “Something too terrible for him to understand. I will send a potion for him, something to help him cope.”
The old woman suddenly focused on Morgana. Her eyes widened, and her sobs abruptly ceased. “You’re a—you’re one ofthem, yah? The Nine?” she whispered. The woman next to her hushed her. Both fell silent, but they shrank away from Morgana as if there was danger in her touch. She stifled a sigh at their reaction to her, but she understood. In the farthest outposts of Lloegyr, many believed the Nine were fae.
Morgana took the things the kitchen maid brought. She pressed the lint into a pad and tied it against the gash with a clean cloth wrapped around the boy’s head. “Keep it there,” she told the old woman, taking care to speak gently. “Don’t let him pull it off. I will return later.”
With the old woman still goggling at her, she moved to the girl, who lay limp on the floor, her head in another woman’s lap. The girl’s breathing was rapid and shallow. Her eyes were closed, and her lips were white with pain. The woman who was holding her said bitterly, “Bastard killed her husband with a sword, and she went after’m with her kitchen knife. He knocked her down, kicked her, nearly killed her, too.”
Morgana knelt beside the injured girl. She didn’t touch her, but her hands hovered over her body, her chest, her stomach. She exhaled slowly through pursed lips as she let her gaze blur.
What she saw was terrible. She felt the girl’s agony in her own body, felt the blood pooling within, the torn tissues burning with pain, the girl’s chest growing tighter with every breath.She blinked her eyes open. “I have a poppy tincture,” she said, her voice low and hard. “I’ll fetch it for you now.”
The woman lifted her gaze to Morgana’s. She wasn’t much older than the wounded girl. “She’s dying, yah. My friend.” It wasn’t a question.
Morgana had to harden her heart against the grief in the woman’s face. She said evenly, “The tincture will ease her way.”
“No magic to fix her?”
“I’m very sorry, sister. No magic can fix this.”
She rose and threaded her way out of the crowded room. She supposed she appeared cold to the grieving woman, but there was nothing to be done about that. She dared not give in, or she would be overwhelmed.
The common folk, like this sad woman, believed that the priestesses of the Lady’s Temple had power over life and death. They journeyed to the Isle despite their fears of the fae, convinced that the priestesses’ magic could work any miracle. The Temple encouraged their belief, because it was profitable.
Such thinking laid a further burden on the shoulders of the Nine. Some carried the weight lightly, untroubled by the fiction. Others—Niamh, Joslyn, Olfreth, Morgana herself—felt it as an obligation, and never more than in a situation like this one.
She knew, as she measured out the tincture of poppy, that more deaths lay ahead. The Romans, abetted by the bloodthirsty Saxons, would see to it.
At least, she told herself, Arthur was not well enough to go to war. She would not allow it, nor would the Blackbird. Letmurderous Uther, so greedy to keep his stolen crown, be the one to face the invaders.
Another group of terrified women and children appeared in the late afternoon, and the Blackbird hurried to help tend to them. There was a child with a broken arm, who required a dose of poppy tincture before Morgana could move the bones back into place and wrap the arm in linen. One girl of thirteen or fourteen had very nearly been carried away, and she was still hysterical. Morgana gave her mother a potion of lavender to calm her, with instructions to administer it whenever she began to scream again. She had to avert her gaze so as not to see the grief in the mother’s face. Her husband had fought for his daughter and had been cut down by a Saxon axe.
There were other stories, other tragedies. The kitchen maids proved invaluable in helping to stanch wounds and distribute water and food. The Blackbird was gratified to see Braithe put aside her natural inclination to weep in the face of these horrors and shoulder her share of the labor. More than her share, in truth, he thought, because she was young and strong and had learned so much in her service to Morgana.
Arthur, leaning on a stick to steady himself, moved from keep to barracks to granary to kitchen, mustering the supplies needed for a campaign, organizing the knights and their mounts, wielding his authority as if he were already king.
The Blackbird listened to the fearsome tales of slaughter and looting with a heavy sense of recognition. He had heard it allbefore. It seemed there would never be an end to the stories of the evils men were willing to perpetrate on innocents. Sometimes he wished that when the Lady anointed him, she had not extended his life so dramatically. It was wearying to see that through the long years, nothing had changed.
The Romans had decided to kill any male of fighting age or close to it, leaving bereft mothers and wives hollow-eyed with grief. When the survivors had been fed and cared for as much as possible, the Blackbird sent Morgana and Braithe to their beds. Arthur, too, returned to bed, pale with exhaustion. The Blackbird lay down in his own chamber but found he was unable to sleep.
He gave it up after an hour. He left the room and climbed the stairs to the door that led outside, onto the broad top of the courtine. He strolled along it, his wrinkled fingers trailing along the thigh-high parapet as he listened to the night sounds of the castle and worried over the decision he had to make. A harsh white moon hung in the summer night sky, making the wall glitter and the towers shine as if rimed with ice. On any other night, the beauty would have soothed the Blackbird’s spirit. On this night, such relief didn’t come.
Arthur was right, of course. The attacks on the remote villages of Lloegyr must be addressed. The prince had been impressive this day, despite the ravages of his illness. The knights of Camulod had not hesitated to obey his orders, to prepare as he instructed, fully demonstrating their readiness to follow him. He would one day be a great king.
But his time had not yet come. His destiny lay in the future,part of the Lady’s great plan for her beloved Lloegyr. It was Uther who must lead the strike against the Romans and the Saxons.
