The Angel's Fall (The Fay Morgan Chronicles Book 6) (7 page)

“Destruction can be lovely. It can be a creative joy,” I said carefully. This was my Lila, and yet not the same Lila I had once known.

“Yeah, you get it, of course you get it. I love that about you.” She strummed her fingers against her bed a couple of times and shifted around as though she could not get comfortable.

“One last thing. I’ve wondered about your bond with the Queen. How can it be broken?” I asked lightly.

Lila flinched away from my words. She scratched her blue arms again.

“Theoretically,” I added. “I’m merely asking theoretically.”

Lila stood and paced across the room. “My Queen can break it. She’s the only one.” Lila spoke quickly, breathing hard. “I never can. I shouldn’t even think about it. I can’t even—”

“Forget I asked,” I said.

“Okay. Okay.” She nodded and sighed. “And, um, well, so, it's time. Is that okay? It's not that I want to….”

“You have been most gracious in fighting your master,” I said.

She rolled her eyes. “Way to rub in the slavery piece, yo.” She snapped her fingers.

My time-loop spell broke with a dull thunk. Lila moved beside me and grabbed my arms. She tied my hands in front of my body with some silver rope that appeared in her hand. “Sorry, sorry.”

“It's fine.” I went limp and pliant. She must do what she had promised the Queen, and there was no reason to make this harder for her than it already was. Besides, I had to go and speak to the Queen. Not because I hoped anything good would come of it, but… Diego. My friend, the Spaniard. The King. I had to at least look him in the eye and confirm that this was where he wanted to be. I owed him that much.

As Lila put a hand at my back and pushed me forward, the compulsion placed on me to get her home flared once again. The spell overwhelmed any will to resist it. If she hadn’t tied my hands, I would be holding that blue piece of topaz and wishing us out of Hell. I squirmed and tried to get to it, failing and helpless to resist.

“You okay?” Lila whispered.

Her concern brought my control back. “Quite.” I breathed hard. “Shall we?”

Lila opened a door that led out into a wide and lovely hallway. “You have a plan, right? Some kind of slickster smart plan?”

“Of course,” I said. I had nothing and no plan beyond this. I had managed to get to Lila, and from here on out it was pure improvisation.

Oh, Morgan,” she said. “You are going to hate this place. It's all caviar on toast and evil manservants in white gloves who get pissed off if you use the wrong spoon, and don't even get me started on the royalist hierarchical bullshit of demanding tithes and controlling goods.”

“Language, Marid,” a woman’s voice called out, echoing through the hallway. “You are at court. You are a representative of Hell.”

“Indeed, I hate it already,” I said, as we marched toward the Queen.

8

The Way of Kings

Even though the Queen knew we walked down her hallway, even though she must have been plotting and scheming our reunion ever since she'd stolen my girl, she did not come meet us.

“Sorry, sorry,” Lila said as she pushed me forward down the lushly decorated hall. It had vaulted ceilings of carved marble and the ground lay covered in blue and white patterned tiles. The walls bore heavy framed paintings. One showed a man getting his skin torn off by jackals. Another had a woman whose eyes, breasts, and toes were being eaten by some sort of impish demon. As we walked, I studied the cord of magic that flowed out from around Lila’s right hand and led into a room in front of us. It grew thicker and sparked with stronger magic as we neared the Queen.

We turned into a room with tall oak doors carved with the images of various screaming creatures. Inside, the room rivaled any cathedral in Europe though this was not, of course, the realm of the Christian God nor any of his many saints. At the far end of the room, down a lush rug knotted with rich reds and blacks, sat two thrones. One was twice as tall as the other. They both reeked of the dank scent of uncured animal skins.

Lila and I walked steadily forward, with her keeping a protective hand around my tied wrists. The cord that led from Lila to the Queen of Hell thickened as we moved closer.

Maria, the Queen, looked no different than when I had seen her last: plump, lovely, dead-eyed, and emanating with dark powers. She also still wore yoga clothes. As we neared, I saw that her throne was made of a patchwork of different pieces of tanned leather stitched together with gold floss. The skins of the former rulers of Hell, and other enemies, I guessed.

“Your throne,” I said. “A bit much, no? A bit too… on the nose. I always found the rulers of Europe who sat upon similar displays of violence to be the most insecure.”

Maria’s lips curled upward. “I will add your skin to it soon enough. Right beneath my ass.”

Diego, the King and my former friend of so many years and decades, sat beside her in his lesser throne. He looked at me, and then away.

Are you there, old friend? Power changed people. His throne reminded me of another time. Of a different King that I’d wanted to save and couldn’t.

Some Western lord was stealing land from my father, and so even though Uther Pendragon was sick and had to be tied to his horse, he had ridden off to slay him. He had left Camelot, sure that he would return that day with another head to place upon a spike to the castle’s entrance, woe to any who thought to challenge the realm of the mighty Pendragon.

Arthur had nearly gone with him. Uther had wanted that. But my half-brother had clearly not wanted to battle beside a cranky and churlish father, so had made up some excuse that he must stay and deal with a feud between some minor lords and an issue of sheep.

Such things could lead to wars if left festering, Arthur had told our Father.

Uther had snarled and coughed up discolored globs of phlegm.

That day on the battle field, his opponents had named him the Half-Dead King, taunting and laughing as he’d fought on the mucky grounds where swords and horses, battle axes and shields clashed. The rebel lord had rallied more men to his side, bolstered by the rumors of the mighty Uther's constant coughing and his slumping form on his black horse. The battle dragged on. It ended, as everyone knew it would, with the rebels left slaughtered on the field, and my father’s army victorious. But the day had gone long, and they’d had to camp out on a rainy and damp night, wearing wet leathers and small clothes, and all had lain shivering, even the King, inside the luxuries of his tent.

Some knights told the story that Uther had woken in the night and gone to the small pool of green water in a nearby faerie glen. Some say he was tricked into drinking poisoned water that killed him quickly. But as no under folk ever claimed that murder for their own, my guess was that the consumptions felled my father, as normal men fall, and that his most loyal knights made a better story of it, so that long might the story of Uther's end loom large.

In any case, by morning he was dead, and they dragged my father home on a sledge made of woven pine boughs to mask the reek of his rotting body.

The burial was that night, and the coronation the next day, for the powers around the throne knew that another king must be put in place immediately, lest the small and under folk get any ideas that they might not need a king at all.

Camelot was abuzz with a thousand small chores on the day of Arthur’s coronation. All day long it teemed with flocks of priests arguing about the correct readings and blessings while the castle's workers hung garlands and spread rushes across the cold stone floor. The cooks slaughtered four whole pigs and grumbled that the old king couldn't have died in spring, no, it had to be late winter. Turnips served for a coronation dinner? But what could you do.

I'd paced through the castle, roiling with the emotions of a young girl whose father had just died. A hated father. A terrible father. But a father nonetheless who loomed large and whose influences had been wildly formative. I paced around, storming with every step, going over again and again all the things I'd never told Uther Pendragon. All the words I'd held back. All the things I could have said to cut him down or make him truly see me, just once.

Had I ever said half the things I thought on that day, I surely would have been beaten and shackled, at best, and murdered in a public way, most likely. But the freedom of Uther's death unleashed in me the coiled rage of all the wrong he'd done. Some small: the many times he'd made his bastards know their place. Some larger: dragging me away from Avalon and bringing me to this cold castle that knew no freedom nor joy besides the ones I’d stolen for myself.

As I walked down the stone hallways of Camelot, people kept passing by and offering their murmured condolences. These made it all the worse, and I could feel the screams building in me.

Not having the mind to think of where I was going, merely that I wanted to be away from all people, I opened a door into a large and empty room and finally found some silence. A place where I could storm and none would get rained upon. I stomped down the middle of the room on a path set with pine boughs and cedar shavings.

“Gods, Morgan. I can almost taste your anger from here,” a soft voice called out. Arthur. My half-brother. My soon-to-be King.

He sat, at the far end of the room, in the throne that would soon be his. He shouldn't be sitting there, not yet, not that I cared for any of the conventions that strove to make a man appear more than just a man. Arthur looked small in the throng. My father had always filled it and could terrify a whole room with one scowl. One arched eyebrow.

Arthur? His legs looked thin and he squirmed a bit, trying to get comfortable in the seat that would never bring him any comfort. The throne was made of rowan wood embedded with jewels to show off the wealth of this court, though each one must have dug into the royal buttocks and back in an unpleasant way.

“And you, brother,” I said. “How do you feel on this day? Do you miss your father?”

Arthur gave a most un-kingly roll of his eyes. “Miss him? You did meet the man, didn't you?”

“He was better to you than any of your half-siblings,” I said.

Arthur nodded and stood. He walked toward me. “Better but never good. Not good to anyone, ever.”

“I've been screaming words in my head all day, of all the things I will never get to say to him,” I admitted.

Arthur dug his hands into the pockets of his long, embroidered robe. He kept pace with me as I continued to stomp down the center of the coronation room, to the end of the long rug, and then turn and go back again.

“I would have liked to stand beside you and yell at Father as well.”

I glanced at my brother. I loved him. And I didn't want him to turn into someone that mirrored Uther in any way.

Arthur continued, “I've been thinking about how miserable he was to everyone, and how that was its own weight. The miserable are miserable. Perhaps that was Uther’s punishment.”

“I can think of far better ones.” I sighed. There was nothing that could ever be rectified. He was dead. “And you, my almost-King. The crown may bring you misery as well.” I tried to speak it lightly.

“I will not rule as he did. Ever,” Arthur said flatly. He jutted out his chin and walked taller. “I will be fair and just. I will be a good king.”

There was so much I would never say to my father, but what about my brother? “A good king?” I said carefully, for before the day was through he would be my ruler. He would have full power over me and every other soul in Camelot to do with as he pleased. “I wonder, have you ever heard of a truly good king?”

“All of them have their glory and moments,” he said, not answering my question. “And I’ve always liked the stories of Nothatus and how he walked the lands and spoke with all people, common and royal alike.” He was well learned in the history of kings. His tutors had seen to that.

None had ever tutored me. A bastard and a girl—why bother? Yet I had been taught by my mother to read before I’d come here, and I’d read every book in the castle I had been able to get my hands on. “Nothatus hung a lot of men,” I said.

Arthur frowned. “What else could he have done to the ones who betrayed him?”

“Banishment? Or servitude, any lesser evil than death. Not slaughtered them,” I said. Before Arthur could protest, I continued. “Which isn't to say he was bad. Only
…
there is a problem inherent with the system, I think, that once you sit there—” I pointed to the throne. “You get used to your will being done. You get used to never being questioned and always getting your way. It changes a man, I think.”

“I am not our Father.”

“You are my brother. And I love you. But I also love the land and people.”

“As do I.” A sharpness spiked through his voice.

I nodded, already hearing the same tone I'd heard my whole life. The tone that said be careful what you say, and I am above you, and who do you think you are, Morgan le Fay?

“You could have a little faith in me, on my coronation day,” Arthur said. “You could tell me that you are glad I will be King.”

I wanted to wish him well. I really did. But I wasn't sure there would ever be a day when I was glad anyone was a king. “I am ever happy you are my kin and glad you walk this green country.”