The Watchtower (34 page)

"I have made up my mind, Morgane. I want to share a mortal life with Garet. All I require of you is for you to do for me what you just so easily did for Marguerite. I have the box..." He reached into the bag strapped across his chest.

Morgane laughed. "Do you? I think you'll find your present counterpart has it. You see the box is a constant. It exists outside time and space. When you traveled back in time, it merged with its past incarnation. I believe you'll find your bag is full of rocks."

Will dug into the bag and came up with a fistful of rocks, which he promptly threw at Morgane. She deftly ducked and laughed.

"Don't despair, my boy. You don't need the box. You only need to follow your past self to his rendezvous with John Dee, and then, when Dee has used the box to summon the vampire who made you, you must get a little of that vampire's blood. Drink his blood and you will be mortal again. Then you and my great-niece can wallow in the dung heap of humanity together."

"You swear--on your oath as a Watchtower--that this is the truth?"

The sneering smile left Morgane's face. "What makes you think that I am still bound by that oath?"

"Because as evil as you are, you still would not leave the world without its last Watchtower. And because I know there is one mortal whom you loved. Still love..."

"Don't name him!" Morgane shrieked, rising from the water, revealing that below her waist grew a scaly tail. "Do not pollute his name with your undead lips!"

"Arthur," Will whispered. "King Arthur. You loved him. You carried him to the Summer Country when he was dying and granted him immortality."

"I tried. He refused the gift of immortality. He preferred to share his death with that ninny Guinevere."

"And you granted him that, didn't you?"

Morgane's face transformed from a mask of rage to something almost tender--for only an instant--then she shrugged. "They deserved each other."

"You did it because you loved him. Swear on Arthur's name that you are telling the truth that I can regain my humanity by drinking the blood of the fiend who made me."

"I swear it," she said, her face somber. "On Arthur's name. Now go. Your requests have made me tired."

"Gladly," Will said, taking my hand. He pulled me away as Morgane began to sink beneath the water, but before she disappeared, just as her lips were level with the pool, she locked her eyes on mine and spoke her parting words:

"Remember, even when he becomes mortal, the blood of all his kills will still stain his hands."

27

1602: Primordial Heat

Marguerite had known the blood moon was a sign that the fabric between the worlds was tissue-thin, and that it heralded the best possible moment to gain access to the Summer County. But instead of going outside upon observing it, she returned to bed, unwilling to leave Will just yet.

Marguerite gazed adoringly at Will's sleeping features, brushed an errant lock of hair from his forehead. The crimson light bathed his limbs and hers, uniting them in a baptismal bath of bloodlight. Perhaps, she thought, it was an omen, a sign that she would soon share with Will the blood of a mortal. She felt a profound longing just then, deeper than any she'd experienced in all the centuries she'd lived. And that was to live out her life in a harmonious relationship with Will.

She had missed him terribly while she'd been away from him, missed him so that every drop of her immortal blood, every pore of her unaging skin, felt incomplete. Yet that intense ache was nothing compared to the ecstasy she'd been feeling since their reunion. These emotions combined now to forge a terrible yet thrilling imperative: she
must
make herself mortal, so that she could be with him more fully and more naturally than up until now.

Belonging to different classes of beings was always going to be a barrier between them. It would spark fights that could lead to the end of their relationship. And trying to make Will immortal was too risky. The forces that needed to be unleashed could kill him. Marguerite would be better able to withstand them, transforming in the opposite direction. If they later decided they needed immortality, they could avail themselves of the kind everyone else did: having children. She shivered with pleasure at that thought, in the moonlit darkness of the room. The corners of Will's mouth in sleep seemed to turn up slightly, in a smile, as if he were dreaming her thoughts. Yes, they were soul mates. That was a kind of forever time itself could never match.

Marguerite saw that she had no choice but to turn mortal, saw it with the same clarity those who gazed into the pool at Paimpont without deceit received. She would go to the pool and wrestle with Morgane for the portal reentry Marguerite believed to be her entitlement. Reentry might happen on the shore, or underwater--in the air--it might require a simple plea, or a thousand hours of arguing. But it would happen. She had made up her mind.

Marguerite took one last look at the room in which they had spent so much of their reunion, a room that she could see, even with the moon behind clouds, had taken on a blood-lit glow. As if her decision to become mortal had a life force, one so fierce that it had excited the atoms in the room to primordial red heat. The glow was like a marker, she thought, delineating her long past life from her much shorter, but much more fulfilling, life to come. She kissed Will on the forehead and made her way down to the pool.

* * *

The thing that frightened Marguerite the most about summoning her sister from the pool was Morgane's ability to change her shape. She could emerge from the water as a mermaid with a monstrous face, or as a hummingbird, or as a fire-spitting dragon. The one option Marguerite was reasonably certain Morgane would not choose was to appear as herself, the sister she had grown up with in their immemorial past. It would create too much intimacy and connection.

The last time Marguerite had seen her, anguish had serrated Morgane's features upon her learning of their sister Maeve's demise in war. They were the most agonized expressions Marguerite had ever seen on a human, or nearly han, face. She didn't anticipate anything like them now, but she suspected Morgane would not receive her request to leave their family's tradition kindly. Nor the reason for it.

As she prepared to kneel, overlooking the pool, a crackling sound from the woods behind her made her whirl around. She stared into the dark forest that rose steeply from the shore, using all her preternatural senses to detect an intruder, but the sense she got from the forest was ambiguous. She felt some kind of presence--or
presences
--but no threat. She felt as though some benevolent being might be watching over her. Almost as if some sister of the Watchtower had come to aid her in her quest. But that couldn't be. Of her sisters, Maeve lay dead in a tomb in the Val sans Retour, Melusine haunted a castle hundreds of miles from here, and Morgane lay beneath the pool. And no one would call
her
benevolent. No, it must have been her overwrought imagination.

She tried to relax, body and spirit. It was useless to focus on the enormity of what she was attempting. That would make her do nothing. She relaxed until she could feel her spirit assume wings and begin to glide along the predawn sky directly above, as if looking down at and watching over her. When she could see from that lofty vantage point and gaze calmly into the pond, she felt at peace, whole. She had unified different parts of her being. She could speak to Morgane.

"Beloved sister, it's me, Marguerite," she whispered to the pool. She knew Morgane's abilities enough to know the volume of her voice didn't matter. Morgane could hear to the ends of the earth, to the pitch-black bottom of the sea. "Please come up and meet me. I need your help on a matter of vital importance ... vital..." Marguerite imagined her words radiating in the pool like moonlight, growing dimmer and dimmer, but still audible.

Silence, for several seconds.

Then Marguerite thought she heard a faraway rumble, way down in the water, so deep it was near the center of the earth.

Silence again, for several seconds. Now a less muffled roar, lasting nearly half a minute. She couldn't identify what sort of creature it came from. But the sound did have an undercurrent of agony to it.

Silence, for several more seconds.

Then a bellowing so loud Marguerite had to clasp her palms over her ears. The pool's placid surface became tumult and surge, cauldron and whitecap. Morgane shot up out of the center of the pool, a winged seal about twenty feet in length, hovering as a bird might have, then twisting to face Marguerite. She had no talons, claws, or other weaponry. But she wasn't blubbery, either. She was a trim giant seal, and something in her lean, glistening frame unnerved Marguerite. Her sister was unlikely to attack her, but the language Marguerite read in her musculature was dominance and anger. Marguerite had better watch what she said, she told herself. The fleeting centuries had not made them closer.

"What sort of advice could I possibly give you, worldly sister?" Morgane asked her condescendingly. "I, who seclude myself in such a different world?" The voice was human and showed no influence from her shape.

But Marguerite would answer prudey. "My question arises regarding the boundary between our worlds. You are the only person in either world fit to answer it," she flattered, although her statement was also accurate. "What is of greater value, immortality or love?"

"Neither is worth anything. You know that, dear sister. Why do you ask?"

Marguerite asked because she hoped to fool Morgane into a theoretical statement that could lead to an agreement. "If immortality is worthless as you say, it might reasonably be bargained for something trite, no? Something as trite as, even, let's say, love?"

Morgane growled before replying, more a bear than a seal. And more a creature than human. This put Marguerite's nerves on edge and signaled to her that Morgane did not have endless time for talk.

"If our family had no sense of honor left, yes, by all means trade immortality for love! But fortunately that is not the case. Come, my dear. You obviously have some dreary circumstance on your mind. What is it?"

Marguerite took a deep breath. "I have fallen in love with a mortal and want to relinquish my immortality so we can have a life together. I understand that if I am allowed this transformation, I may have to take on some new worldly responsibility to uphold the family honor. I am willing to do that."

"What is the name of the dung heap?"

Marguerite chose not to object to her sister's coarseness. It would have been futile; the only way to get her agreement was to cooperate with her. "Will Hughes," Marguerite said in a soft voice. "The now estranged firstborn of Lord Hughes of Somerset. He's an angel."

"I do not know him," Morgane replied clinically, as if she were a naturalist referring to a species of reptile. "Nor, needless to say, do I have any inclination to. But is this pathetic turn of fate what you want for yourself, Sister?" Morgane's seal eyes opened wide and quizzically.

"I do not need to live forever. And I cannot live without my beloved. I must become a mortal."

"Then you can be one," Morgane said swiftly, surprising and delighting Marguerite with her unexpected assent. "And, yes, the part of me that is analytical says, 'Let her spend her mortal life rolling around with slime. It is a typical human decision.'"

But then Morgane spun in a full circle in the air, twitching with rage, and by the time she glared down at Marguerite again, her eyes were dark pools with red, vertical pupils. Sudden-grown fangs reached out toward Marguerite.

"The part of me that is royal, however, that supervises the tradition of the D'Arques nobility, damns your blasphemous decision and is tempted to refuse it. But I overrule my indignation as it is simply too sweet, dear sister, to contemplate you with that filth until you perish!" Her fangs seemed to gleam with relish. "So I accede to your wishes, with the conditions being that all of your descendants will be mortal, and the first female born in each generation will continue your appointed role of Watchtower, guardg against usurpers and vipers crossing the boundary from mortal to immortal in either direction. And even guarding humankind, loathsome as it is, along with ourselves, from those malefactors like werewolves, shape-shifters, incubi, or--"

Morgane looked over Marguerite's shoulder as if contemplating the eons through which Marguerite's descendants would struggle. The view seemed to amuse her. Her mouth curled back over her fangs in a cruel snarl.

"--or vampires who would seek to conquer or destroy humankind, or we fey or both. You must especially swear to abhor all vampires."

Marguerite nodded and uttered the words required to seal the oath, with a sense of relief despite Morgane's insults. The obligation required as compensation could have been far more onerous. Or so, at least, she wanted to think.

"Go then, wretch. May you never besmirch my presence with your foulness again. And that will go for your descendants as well."

"Nothing horrible you say makes you any less my sister. No matter how much you hate the thought of it. I still love you."

"You are no sister to me. Nor are you fey any longer, except in name and your one obligation on pain of annihilation. Never again in spirit, or blood. Go, thing! Of two worlds that together are none! Go!"

Marguerite hesitated. "Is that it? Nothing else happens? How do I know that I have been ... changed?"

Morgane sneered. "You will know soon enough." She dived back into the pool, ripples from her plunge visible in the first blush of dawn.

Marguerite stood and watched the ripples in the water dissipate. It was fine for Morgane to say that she would "know" that she had become mortal, but she required proof. She stuck her cloak pin, shaped like a small dagger, into her index finger. She gasped at the pain and then stared in fascination at the drop of blood that welled up, beaded, and spilled down her finger. She regarded this proof of mortality somberly. An appropriate mood, she reassured herself. What kind of person would she be if she weren't somber at a moment as portentous as this?