Poison (21 page)

“They were stuck inside the heat register, I think,” I explained. “They must have been blown there when the thing
exploded. I didn’t pay much attention to them either, until I started to see images from someone’s—Morgan’s—life.”

“Morgan’s?” Miss P asked, cocking her head curiously.

“I didn’t put it together at the time, but yes, I’m sure now that it was Morgan. I caught glimpses of her childhood when I touched the amber pieces.”

“Well, you can keep them,” Bryce said, handing the fragments back to me. “We can’t trap her now. The amber’s broken.”

He looked so forlorn that I hated to leave, but I had to get to my chem test. “I’m sorry, Bryce,” I said putting on my parka. “Does this mean you’ll have to go home?”

He looked stricken. “Home,” he repeated woodenly. I felt sorry for him. I couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to live in Avalon.

•  •  •

To my amazement I got to school on time, sliding into my seat in chemistry class seconds before the bell sounded. As I waited for the exam sheets to be passed out, I saw my ring glowing softly. I rubbed my cold hands together, once again feeling the wave of warmth and well-being that the ring exuded.

Suddenly I stopped and stared at my hands. The ring was large and ornate and—as if it needed anything to make it more conspicuous—
glowing
. So what went through my mind for a second before I became preoccupied with the midterm was this: Why hadn’t any of those powerful witches who’d been grilling me for an hour or more ever mentioned—or even appeared to have noticed—my ring?

•

Dead days.

Every time I walked into Old Town, my heart sank at the sight of the abandoned store with the broken sign swinging in the wind. No one had seen the Emporium of Remarkable Goods except me. It had all been a glamour—the store, the versimka, even Morgan herself, I supposed. Especially Morgan.

Funny, I’d really believed she was my friend.

Some friend, huh?

And what was it those harpies who’d come after me had said?

Poison.

Yes, that was it. But what did that mean? That they knew Morgan had poisoned me? How could they know that? Or were they going to poison me themselves? Didn’t seem to be much point in that, since they were about to tear me limb from limb. Was the poisoning supposed to have come after the dismemberment, or during?

Oh, just let it go
, I told myself.

I don’t really know why, but it was strangely comforting to have the amber pieces back in my possession. I guess part of it was that, whatever Morgan had done, I didn’t want to see her trapped forever in solidified resin. And because I’d known her.

Morgan had been the coolest girl I’d ever met. She was worldly and funny and cynical in a way I could never be. She was brimming with self-confidence. She was okay with being alone. She was fearless. She was magical, a
Traveler
, someone who could move between planes of existence as easily as the rest of us could walk out a door.

She’d been everything I’d ever wanted to be.

I know I should have hated her, especially after what she’d done to me, but even so, I couldn’t. When I rolled the smooth stones between my fingers, all I knew was that I wanted to know more about her.
Give up your secrets,
I thought.
Show me who you are, Morgan le Fay
.

•  •  •

I didn’t have to wait long to see her. She was a few years older than she’d been the last time—maybe my age. I could recognize her face now as the Morgan I knew. Again she was dressed in beautiful clothes, with a metal chain around her waist and soft cloth shoes. As she moved, I realized that she was in a large building with long, slender windows surrounded by a circle of water.

She crept silently up the length of a stone-lined corridor and listened outside a room with an open door. Inside was the same man I’d seen in the first vision, when he had made magic butterflies with his young daughter and then left her to the
vultures as he’d disappeared from view. He had changed considerably since then. His hair had turned white, and he had grown a beard. He was speaking with a man who was around my father’s age, who wore a gold coronet around his forehead.
The king,
I thought.

The old man put his hand on the younger man’s shoulder. “Arthur,” he began.

Arthur? I gasped. The man was the king, all right. The king himself. It had to be. King Arthur.

Out of their sight Morgan leaned against the stone wall that separated her from the men, her fingers splayed and trembling. Morgan shook with rage smarting from her father’s rejection.

I felt it too. Suddenly I understood not just Morgan’s jealousy, but the world that had caused it. Her father had chosen Arthur over Morgan because that had been the way of those times. Boys and men were valued. Girls and women were not.

•  •  •

This was the king her father had raised from a baby, though the Merlin had had to leave Avalon and his own family to be with him. He had lavished his love on the boy, had taught him the Craft even though Arthur had been born with almost no magic of his own, while Merlin’s own daughter had been left to grow up alone, her extraordinary talents unrecognized.

Why?
Morgan asked herself, half choking on her unchecked tears. Why had her father ignored her to spend his life caring for another man’s child?

There were some who claimed that Arthur was the Merlin’s own natural son, but Morgan would not—could not—believe that, no matter what the talk was that circulated around the castle. A magician of his stature would not have fallen so far
into the human realm. No, the truth was much simpler than that. The Merlin loved Arthur because he’d wanted to make a king. And only a male child could become king.

Morgan’s father had loved another child more than he had loved her, his firstborn, solely because the other was a boy. Had she been born male, would the Merlin have used his powers to make
her
king of all England? Would she have been the one to pull the magical sword Excalibur from the stone? Would the great Merlin have spent his life helping to achieve
her
goals, fulfill
her
destiny?

But that was not the way of the world, of any world. Morgan had taught herself how to use her considerable talents. She had learned how to shape-shift by watching the Seer’s guards, those hags who enforced Avalon’s cruel laws by turning into beasts that tore apart the flesh of anyone who dared to defy them. She had learned that she was a Traveler when she’d decided to follow her father through the mists that surrounded Avalon into this other world, this realm where Arthur, the child of Merlin’s heart, dwelled.

In time Morgan refined her gifts. Not only was she able to move between Avalon and the world beyond the mist, but she was also able to move within that world. She discovered that there were places far beyond the borders of England, Arthur’s domain—exotic places inhabited by strange-looking peoples, places that had their own magic. She learned from all of these. Though she was young, she was becoming powerful beyond her own reckoning. Perhaps, she hoped, powerful enough for her father to notice her.

Her tears burned as she leaned against the cool stone wall, feeling the camaraderie between the two men inside
the chamber.
Love me!
Morgan wanted to scream.
Love me!

Her helpless rage sparked out the tips of her fingers. Her father would never love her, not while Arthur was alive. Arthur was
important,
she thought bitterly. He was the king, the one person who, with the Merlin’s help, could save the world from the shambles it had become.

And who was she, Morgan le Fay? Only another unwanted female child, destined to become someone’s wife, nothing more. Given a choice, the Merlin had chosen Arthur. Of course. It was the way of the world. And there was nothing she could do about it.

•  •  •

I didn’t want to see any more. I put the pieces away, thinking about my dad.

•  •  •

According to Miss P, Summer and her friends were doing so well that three of the four were planning to return to Ainsworth after the holidays. Suzy Dusset, who had been an even worse student than Summer, was going to attend a fashionable prep school in Manhattan. None of them remembered anything out of the ordinary. They all believed that they’d gotten sick from drinking some South American diet tea that Summer had bought at a Boston rave. All of them vowed never to experiment with drugs again.

No one at school even mentioned Summer and the other Muffies to me. I suppose that was a kind of apology. After the story got out about the tainted tea, I stopped being the prime suspect in what became known as the “killer weed” incident. I no longer got anonymous gifts of doggie doo, or even any insulting Facebook messages.

By the week of winter frolic, the whole episode seemed to be over. Bryce was gone a lot of the time. He said he was searching for Morgan, but since he usually took Becca with him, I suspected that he had given up his search and now was just trying not to go back to Avalon.

Most of my midterms were over by then, and Peter’s uncle kept him busy almost every night of the week, so I occupied myself with the fragments of amber that had held Morgan le Fay prisoner for so long. I hoped that I might be able to discover something that would lead Bryce to her, although I doubted that he’d be able to catch her even if he managed to find her. Besides, it was sort of fun. I’d never “read” a person as old as Morgan was. Even though she appeared to be not much older than I was, she’d actually lived around the beginning of what we knew as the Dark Ages.

Speaking of which, just as I was beginning to settle in with the amber fragments, the phone rang. I saw on the caller ID that it was my father.

During my first year at Ainsworth, he’d come to Whitfield only once, and that was only because his corporate barracuda girlfriend had had business there. Since then, Madam Mim—that was what I’d called her, after a wicked animated Disney villainess—had been fired from her million-dollar-a-year job and broken up with my dad, so I hadn’t counted on seeing him at all.

But then late last summer Dad showed up to inspect a medieval artifact called a
botte
, or magic box, that had been uncovered in the Meadow. He wrote an article for
Medieval Times Quarterly
, and the article turned out to be the seminal source for information about magic boxes, since a month after its discovery the
botte
disappeared into a sinkhole and
was never seen again. Of course, the Whitfield witches had arranged that, and they certainly knew how to make it reappear again if it was needed, but it wasn’t necessary to inform outsiders about that. Anyway, because of the article, Dad had become a major star in the Columbia University English Department. This term he taught a course on medieval
bottes
and their relation to literature, and was considered one of the leading authorities on mechanical devices of the Dark Ages. He also had a standing lunch appointment with the chairman of the department on Tuesdays. Things like that were important to my father.

“Hello?” I answered tentatively.

“Hello!” It was his hearty-but-clueless voice, the one he used when he’d forgotten who he was calling. “Er . . . ”

“Katy,” I reminded him. “Katherine. Your daughter.”

“Oh. Right you are! Sorry. I was a little preoccupied.”

“Umm,” I said. I’d learned that there wasn’t much point in actually
talking
with Dad, since he usually wasn’t listening anyway. “What’s up?”

“Beg your pardon?”

“You called me, Dad.”

“I did?” There was a brief silence while he shuffled through whichever papers he’d been reading when he’d decided to call me. “Oh, yes. It seems I’ll be coming to Whitfield this Saturday. A colleague at Boston College wants to see the site of the
botte
.” He just threw that out as if sharing his knowledge about the
botte
were nothing more than a minor annoyance, but I knew he totally got off on it. “I thought that perhaps afterward you’d like to join me for dinner.”

“I work on Saturdays.”

“I see.” More shuffling of papers. He was already losing interest. “Well, then, I’ll meet you at your place of work. Henry’s, isn’t it?”

“Hattie’s,” I said. “But come early if you can. Once it starts getting busy, I won’t be able to stop and talk.”

“Quite understandable,” he said.

Well, that was going to be a pain in the butt, I knew, juggling Hattie and the customers and my father all at the same time, but I supposed it couldn’t be helped.

•