Morgain's Revenge - Laura Anne Gilman [55]
Right was right, and wrong was wrong. Evil was always evil. Wasn’t it? The sense of clarity she always had with Morgain was gone, destroyed by her own question.
If evil wasn’t always evil…
Ailis frowned, shook her head, looked at Morgain, then looked back down at the simple paste the sorceress had set her to mixing. Yellow and red swirled together to create, Morgain said, a potion that would aid in sleep. Sleep—or, in a certain dosage, death. A starter spell for a witch-child to do on her own. Nothing that could not be accomplished by herbals, but herbal mixtures often went bad quickly or lost their potency.
How easy, to turn helpful into harmful. Ailis could see that. How easy would it also be, then, to turn…good into evil?
Ailis wasn’t naïve; you couldn’t live in Camelot without seeing how the world worked. It would be useful for Morgain to have an ally, however low, in Camelot. The isolation, the treats, the fearsome figure—the sorceress could be trying to confuse her thinking, make her sympathetic to Morgain’s cause, turn her loyalties…and then allow her to return home. And then, someday, when others had perhaps forgotten that she had once been prisoner of the sorceress, she could…
There, Ailis’s imagination failed her. She could not imagine a single thing that Morgain might need her for, in the heart of Camelot. How could Ailis even assume that anyone would ever trust her after all this.
For all she knew, they had abandoned her, thought or even hoped she was dead.
Merlin! She tried to shout with her mind. Merlin, help me!
The only voice in her head now was her own.
“Why…” She paused, then rephrased her question, not even sure what she was going to say until she voiced it. “What did they say must be, that you believed them?”
For a long time, Ailis thought that Morgain was not going to answer her.
“When I was a child, my mother seemed a terribly powerful woman. Within our home, her word and her wish was law. But when my father died, Uther the King decided that my mother would be his bride. There was nothing she could do to stop him. Arthur came of that union. A boy. And because he was a boy, all the power and the glory went to him. Not to the girl-children my mother had borne before. Not to the ones with the true power, the magic, the Old Ways in their blood. My sisters and I were simply not important.
“I was not born to live that way, witch-child. And neither were you.” Morgain lifted her head as though listening to something, like alert dogs in a kennel, and stared at her for a moment. “Come with me.”
Ailis practically had to run in order to keep up, for all that Morgain seemed to glide in exactly the same way the dance master had insisted upon, ages and ages ago back in Camelot. When the sorceress did it, the movements seemed graceful and deadly, not silly.
They went down the stairs, across the jointed walkway where Morgain’s worktower connected to the rest of the fortress, and down a hallway that Ailis had never seen before. By now, the building’s confusing layout had a strange familiarity to it, as though someone had burned the knowledge of every room into her bones. She knew where Sir Tawny would have room to spread his wings, and where she could go to sit and listen to the silence within the stones, should she so desire it. The magic of the undersea room was hers for the using now, and half a dozen other chambers besides.
A door appeared in the wall in front of them, and, without hesitating, Morgain put her left hand up, palm flat, and pushed against it while making a complicated gesture with her right hand held down around her hip. Ailis managed to watch both hands, but only barely—she was pretty sure that she had missed something in that right-hand gesture.
The stone door slid back, the same way Morgain’s workroom doorway had, and