Mists of Avalon - Marion Zimmer Bradley [516]
At the end of the song she rose, looking shyly at him. “I thank you for the use of your harp—may I borrow it again, that my hands may keep their skill?”
“It is my gift to you,” said Kevin. “Now that I have heard what music your hands can bring from it, it could belong to no other. Keep it, I beg you—I have many harps.”
“You are too kind to me,” she murmured, “but, I beg you, now that I can make music for myself, do not abandon me or deprive me of the pleasure of listening to yours.”
“I will play for you whenever you ask me,” Kevin said, and she knew that his heart was in the words. She contrived to brush against him as she leaned forward to take the harp.
She murmured, softly so Gwenhwyfar would not hear, “Words alone cannot express my gratitude to you. Perhaps a time will come when I can express it more fittingly.”
He looked at her, dazed, and she discovered that she was returning his gaze with the same intensity.
A double-edged spell indeed. I am victim too. . . .
He went away, and she sat obediently by Gwenhwyfar and tried to turn her attention to her spinning.
“How beautifully you play, Nimue,” said Gwenhwyfar. “I need not ask where you learned . . . I heard Morgaine sing that lament once.”
Nimue said, averting her eyes, “Tell me something of Morgaine. She had departed from Avalon before I came there. She was married to a king in—Lothian, was it?”
“In the north of Wales,” Gwenhwyfar began.
Nimue, who knew all this perfectly well, was still not completely false. Morgaine remained a puzzle to her, and she was eager to know how the lady Morgaine had appeared to those who knew her in the world.
“Morgaine was one of my ladies-in-waiting,” Gwenhwyfar was saying. “Arthur gave her to me as such on our wedding day. Of course he had been fostered apart from her and hardly knew her, either. . . .”
As she listened attentively, Nimue, who had been trained to read emotions, realized that beneath Gwenhwyfar’s dislike for Morgaine, there was something else: respect, awe, even a kind of tenderness. If Gwenhwyfar were not so fanatically, mindlessly Christian, she would have loved Morgaine well.
At least while Gwenhwyfar was talking of Morgaine, even though she condemned her as an evil sorceress, she was not mouthing the pious nonsense that bored Nimue almost to weeping. But she could not give Gwenhwyfar’s tales her full attention. She sat in an attitude of passionate interest, she made the proper sounds of attention or astonishment, but within, her mind was in turmoil:
I am afraid; I can come to be the Merlin’s slave and victim as I would have him mine. . . .
Goddess! Great Mother! It is not I who must face him, but you. . . .
The moon was waxing; four nights until full, and she could already feel the stirring of that tide of life. She thought of the Merlin’s intent gaze, his magical eyes, the beauty of his voice, and knew that already she was deeply entangled in her own spell weaving. Already she had ceased to feel the slightest revulsion against his twisted body, feeling only the strength and life force flowing within it.
If I give myself to him at full moon, she thought, then will the tides of life within us both be taken at the flood, then will my purposes become his own, then will we blend together as one flesh . . . she felt an ache and agony of desire, longing to be caressed by those sensitive hands, feel his warm breath against her mouth. Everything in her ached together in hunger which, she knew, was at least partly an echo of his own desire and frustration; the magical link she had created between them meant that she too must be tormented with