The Hollow Hills - Mary Stewart [176]
She got swiftly to her feet. "Why did you not tell him then, and let him kill me? Would you not have wanted that?"
"To add another and worse sin? You talk like a fool."
"I shall go to the King!"
"To what purpose? He will spare no thought for you today."
"I am always by him. He will need his drugs."
"I am here now, and Gandar. He will not need you."
"He'll see me if I say I've come to say farewell! I tell you, I will go to him!"
"Then go," I said. "I'll not stop you. If you were thinking of telling him the truth, think again. If the shock kills him, Arthur will be High King all the sooner."
"He would not be accepted! They wouldn't accept him! Do you think Lot will stand by and listen to you? What if I tell them what Arthur did last night?"
"Then Lot would become High King," I said equably. "And how long would he let you live, bearing Arthur's child? Yes, you'd better think about it, hadn't you? Either way, there is nothing you can do, except go while you can. Once your sister is married at Christmas, get Lot to find you a husband. That way, you may be safe."
Suddenly, at this, she was angry, the anger of a spitting cat in a corner. "You condemn me, you! You were a bastard, too...All my life I have watched Morgian get everything. Morgian! That child to be a Queen, while I...Why, she even learns magic, but she has no more idea how to use it for her own ends than a kitten has! She'd do better in a nunnery than on a Queen's throne, and I -- I..." She stopped on a little gasp, and caught her underlip in her teeth. I thought she changed what she had been about to say. "...I, who have something of the power which has made you great, Merlin my cousin, do you think I will be content to be nothing?" Her voice went flat, the voice of a wise-woman speaking a curse which will stick. "And that is what you will be, who are no man's friend, and no woman's lover. You are nothing, Merlin, you are nothing, and in the end you will only be a shadow and a name."
I smiled at her. "Do you think you can frighten me? I see further than you, I believe. I am nothing, yes; I am air and darkness, a word, a promise. I watch in the crystal and I wait in the hollow hills. But out there in the light I have a young king and a bright sword to do my work for me, and build what will stand when my name is only a word for forgotten songs and outworn wisdom, and when your name, Morgause, is only a hissing in the dark." I turned my head then, and called the servant. "Now enough of this, there is no more to say between us. Go and make yourself ready, and get you from court."
The man had come in, and was waiting inside the door glancing, I thought apprehensively, from one to the other of us. From his look, he was a black Celt from the mountains of the west; it is a race that still worships the old gods, so it is possible he could feel, if only partly, some of the stinging presences still haunting the room.
But for me, now, the girl was only a girl, tilting a pretty, troubled face to mine, so that the rose-gold hair streamed from her pale forehead down the cherry gown. To the servant waiting beside the door, it should have seemed an ordinary leave-taking, but for those stinging shadows. She never glanced his way, or guessed what he might see.
When she spoke her voice was composed, calm and low. "I shall go to my sister. She lies at York till the wedding."
"I shall see to it that an escort is ready. No doubt the wedding will still be at Christmas, according to plan. King Lot should join you soon, and give you a place at your sister's court."
There was a brief flash at that, discreetly veiled. I might have tried a guess at what she planned there -- that she hoped, even at this late date, to take her sister's place at Lot's