“I met him in Lothian,” Aislyn answered, “and he scorned my love.” Before Morgana could press her for details, she hurried on, “I am sorry for what I did to him, Your Grace. I know now that it was wrong. I had already made up my mind to leave.”
Morgana stroked the cat, her expression pensive. “Then why are you still here?”
“Well . . .” Aislyn swallowed hard. “I meant to go this morning.”
“Did you indeed?” Morgana glanced at the twisted bedclothes, then turned her dark eyes on Aislyn. “What spell,” she said, “did you use upon Gawain last night?”
Aislyn felt her face grow hot. “I—I only made him think that he was dreaming.” Seeing the horrified disgust in Morgana’s eyes, she added quickly, “I wasn’t like this! I changed back to my own form. No harm was done.”
“No harm?” Morgause regarded her thoughtfully. “So you think I should let Dame Ragnelle walk away?”
“I won’t come back, I promise.”
“And then what will happen to Gawain?”
Aislyn shook her head, uncomprehending. “He will be free.”
“He is wed to you. Without proof of his wife’s death, he will be bound to her forever.”
Aislyn had not considered this before. “Then I will renounce my claim on him and bid him have the marriage annulled.”
“On what grounds?”
“Non-consummation.” Aislyn bit her lip in mortification as Morgana glanced significantly toward the bed. “But—but he does not know,” she stammered. “He thinks it was a dream—”
“What you have made him believe does not alter the truth.” Morgana put her hand on Aislyn’s, looking hard into her eyes. “There is more to magic than mastering spells, and I fear your knowledge has far outrun your wisdom. Given who your teacher was, that is hardly a surprise, but the responsibility for your words and deeds is yours alone.”
“I will make it right,” Aislyn swore.
“How can you? It is beyond your power to undo what has been done or unsay the lies that you have spoken.”
“But I’ll end the marriage—he will be free!”
“Lies come easily to you, don’t they?” Morgana went on as though she had not spoken. “You have not yet learned what a burden they can be.” She smiled suddenly and patted Aislyn’s hand. “I am going to give you a great gift.”
“You—you are? Thank—”
“I am going to make your lie the truth.”
“What? What lie?”
“That’s the trouble with lies,” Morgana said, shaking her head sadly. “One leads to the next, and soon it is impossible to keep them all in order. But we shall simplify matters. You wanted to be Dame Ragnelle—very well, then, Dame Ragnelle you are and shall remain.” Aislyn gasped, sudden pain bending her double, though it was gone before she could cry out. “There,” Morgana said. “Now there is no lie to trouble you.”
“You cannot mean—you wouldn’t—”
“I do and I have. Did you really think you would escape unscathed after such an affront to Gawain’s honor?”
“But—but how can it help him if I am left like this? He is miserable—”
“’Tis a bit late for
that
to trouble you.” Morgana’s lips curved in a smile. “Dame Ragnelle is very old. I daresay he will outlive her and wed again.”
Aislyn clutched the bedpost. “You cannot leave me like this!”
Morgana’s brows lifted. “Can I not?”
“Please,” Aislyn whispered. “I was wrong, I know that now. I will tell him everything—”
“Too late,” Morgana said, rising to her feet and brushing the cat hair from her skirt. “That is the way of life, I fear. You know a thing should be done, yet you put it off, and then the chance is gone. You will not tell him anything of this. Oh, you can try, but you will find it impossible to speak the words. You are Dame Ragnelle and always have been.”
“Your Grace,” Aislyn said, “have mercy—”
“As you did when you forced my nephew to marry a hideous crone? No,
don’t
weep. It does not become one of your years.”
Outrage snapped Aislyn’s neck straight. “I am not weeping.”
“Better.” Morgana nodded her approval. “Perhaps there is something to you after all. Oh, very well, I will give you a chance to undo what I have done . . . in part. Should Gawain kiss you—a true kiss, offered with love and accepted in kind—then shall you revert to your true form for half of each day.”
“But that is impossible!” Aislyn cried. “He will never kiss me—not the sort of kiss you mean, not as I am now!”
“It doesn’t seem likely, does it? But love has a way of overcoming obstacles.”
“Love?” Aislyn laughed wildly. “He detests me!”
“I daresay. What do you feel for him?”
Aislyn opened her mouth to say she disliked him, but then she remembered the wild magic that had flared between them last night. “I don’t know.”
“Then you had better find out, hadn’t you?”
Chapter 11
“DO you have need of me today, madam?” Launfal asked.
“Why?” Morgause, seated at her writing table in her chamber at Lothian Castle, did not look up from the parchment she was reading.
“I had a mind to go down to the practice yard.”
“I don’t think that would be a good idea,” Morgause said absently, waving one hand in dismissal. For a moment the temptation to seize her wrist and snap it was so strong it frightened him. These impulses had been coming more frequently of late, a black tide that washed away all rational thought. He lived in fear that one day the tide would simply take him—and if it ever did, he would not stop until he’d killed her. He would be a dead man anyway, why should he go to hell alone?
But he had not yet abandoned all hope and sanity, so he deliberately relaxed his fists before he spoke again.
“The exercise would do me good. And if you have nothing else for me to do—”
“I didn’t say
that
.” She glanced up at him with an arch smile that chilled his blood. “I know I have been neglecting you of late,” she went on, “but I may have time for you when I am finished here.”
Her definition of neglect was not one he shared: a mere two days had passed since he had last been called upon to pleasure her. Other men might scorn him, believing he led an easy life, but none of them had experienced Morgause in bed.
“That would be wonderful!” he said warmly. “And if you do, you can send for me—”
She looked up at him directly then. “
Send
for you? Why should I? What
is
this about?”
“I need to get out,” he said, deciding that a touch of honesty would not come amiss. “To breathe the fresh air.”
“Do you?” She gazed at him thoughtfully, brushing the feather of her quill across her lips. “Well, Launfal, if my service is so wearisome, you could always return to the fields. There is plenty of fresh air there.
And
exercise.”
Yes,
he thought,
send me back. Anything but this!
But once again, he bit back the words. If he went back among the varlets now, it would be over. He would never leave this place. Never become a knight. Even the faint hope of achieving that dream would be at an end, and without his dreams . . .
He could not bear to go back to the life he had known after Aislyn had vanished and he and his mother had fallen so abruptly from the queen’s favor. Between one day and the next, Launfal had found his status changed from that of guest to the meanest servant. His mother, the one time she had dared to speak to him, said only that they must both adjust to changed conditions. But she, at least, still dwelt among the queen’s women, while Launfal, with no place in the strict hierarchy of the castle servants, was the lowest of the low.
He was given the most difficult and noisome tasks, and his ignorance of how to perform them earned him frequent beatings. The friends he had made among the squires no longer knew him, and he could not even speak to his new peers, for their language was so unfamiliar that he might as well have landed in a foreign country. They understood him well enough—had, in some cases, served him in the past—but now took a vicious pleasure in pretending they did not.
Twice he had run off and twice been taken before the steward and whipped. “Try it again, lad,” the steward had growled the second time, “and you’ll be branded.”
That put an end to his attempts to escape. No man so marked could ever hope to become a knight.
Launfal learned to fight then—not the noble feats of arms he had dreamed of, but silent, deadly struggles over half an onion or a bit of cheese. Even when he won, it was never enough to fill his belly, and he lived for the moment he could crawl beneath a mound of straw and lose himself in dreams of the day this would all be over and he would be back where he belonged. If that hope was lost to him, he might as well be dead.
Now he forced himself to laugh as though Morgause had made a joke, though he knew her to be serious. “Wearisome? Oh, madam, you shouldn’t say such things! ’Tis only that you’ve been so occupied of late . . .”
“And do you think to find companionship in the practice yard?” she asked, still regarding him with that unsettling intensity. “I seem to recall that the knights have been unkind to you in the past.”
They despised him to a man, called him the queen’s whore and worse—not troubling to lower their voices, either, for they had learned he would not fight back, though they did not know what held his hand.
Morgause had forbidden him to fight. She did not want his face marred, nor for him to be incapacitated when she had need of him. “I ask very little of you,” she had said the one time he disobeyed her, “but if it is too much, you need only say so.”
That had been a mere two years ago, though it seemed an age. He had still retained some innocence then, enough to believe her capable of human emotion. “Oh, no, madam, I am pleased to serve you,” he had said earnestly, “it is only that I would like to serve you as a knight.”
Morgause had laughed. “A knight? You? Oh, no, Launfal, you are quite unsuited to
that
role! If your service to me irks you, then you shall return to your place among the varlets.”
He still remembered the shock of that, as though she had struck him across the face. “But—but you said that was a mistake!” he had stammered in bewilderment. “You said you never meant for me, a knight’s son, to—”
“I?” She raised her brows, looking at him as though he had gone mad.
Had he known her better, he would have stopped right there. But he had not yet realized that to Morgause, truth was not an absolute, but a weapon she wielded according to her whim.
“It was the night you first brought me to your chamber, do you not remember?” that innocent, ignorant boy had protested, as though she could be moved by reason. “You must! You sat just there—surely you recall—and said you were sorry, that you hadn’t known I was sent to live among the servants, that—”
“Lower your voice,” she said coldly.
“But you must listen—”
“
Must
? How dare you speak to me like that? Your disobedience—your gross ingratitude and impertinence— have wounded me deeply.
I
am queen of this demesne, and
I
shall set the terms of your service. If I say you are a varlet, then so you are. Do you understand me?”
And then, at last, Launfal did understand. Her soft words and apologies that first night had all been lies. Now that those lies no longer suited her, she had changed them for a different set. There was but one grain of truth in what she’d told him: she was indeed the queen, and her word was quite literally the law.
Two years had passed since that realization and Launfal was still alive, a victory won at the cost of a thousand betrayals of himself. Did one more really matter?
Yes,
he thought, looking at her sitting at her writing table.
Yes, it does matter.
Morgause smiled indulgently, and throwing down her quill, she stood. “Oh, very well,” she said. “I can see I
have
neglected you, but I shall make amends.”
The black tide swept over him again, and again he beat it back as she approached him slowly, no longer the queen but a woman bent upon seduction. How could she not know how she revolted him? In the days since their return from Inglewood Forest, it had become almost impossible to hide.
His anger died, leaving the familiar bewilderment in its place. He had always tried to be a good son, a good brother—even a good servant when such had been his lot. Yet despite all his efforts, God had been blind to his plight and deaf to his prayers.
There is no God, he thought. Heaven holds only stars and empty air. There is nothing but ourselves.
Morgause was close enough that he could smell the scent she favored, one that had once delighted him and now made his stomach twist.
I cannot do this,
he thought,
or no, I could. I have before.
I
will
not.
He straightened, and for a moment she hesitated, a flicker of uneasiness passing across her face.
“Madam,” he began, and was interrupted by a knock upon the door.
“A messenger from Camelot,” the serving girl said, and Morgause forgot him instantly as she swept from the room. Launfal waited only long enough for her footsteps to vanish down the passageway before he slipped after her and out a side door, not bothering to take even his cloak.
HE made it only as far as the orchard before he was halted by a squire from the queen. He thought briefly of making a run for it, but now that he had determined to leave at any cost, his mind was working with cool precision.
Wait,
it said.
Your chance will come.
“The queen is in a rare mood,” the squire said as they walked back to the castle. “It seems Sir Gawain has wed without her leave—they’re saying there’s something odd about his marriage.”
Morgause was pacing her chamber, two knights standing by the window and eyeing her warily. Her face was mottled with hectic color, her eyes narrowed into slits. Launfal had once told her she was beautiful in a temper, but like most of what he said to her, it was a lie.