Chapter 321: The Call In The Dark

"One."

"Yes, Your Grace?"

"Tell him the girl will want to see her mother." Ormund’s voice was gentle. "Tell him to let her."

Tavish hesitated.

"Your Grace?"

"Let her leave the palace. Let her come north. Let the kings escort her, if they insist." He turned from the table. "I should like them to come, all four of them, to a small village at the foot of a hill, with a mill and a broken bridge and not a single wall."

"And if Master Kael...."

"Kael will be a father." The High Priest folded his hands in his sleeves. "Which is to say, a liability. But a useful one, for a little while. Let him dream."

He walked to the door.

"Have the carriage readied by morning," he said. "I should like to take the air."

"Where shall I say we are going?"

Ormund paused, one hand on the oak.

He did not look back. He stood in the doorway, tall and white and still, and the lamps behind him threw his shadow long across the floor, a thin black line stretching all the way to the stair.

"North," he said.

***

*MORGANA*

She was standing in a cave.

She knew it at once, the way you know things in dreams, without being told. The air was cold and still and tasted of stone. The floor beneath her bare feet was smooth, worn by something enormous that had walked it for a very long time. Somewhere far above, water dripped into water, one slow note at a time.

It was very dark.

Morgana turned in a slow circle. She could see nothing, not her own hands, not the walls. The darkness was thick as velvet. She told herself, in the calm voice of someone who knows she’s asleep, that this was only a dream. That in a moment she would wake, in her own bed, with the lamp burning low and Rowan snoring in the next room. That she should simply wait.

She waited.

Something opened in the dark.

It was an eye.

It was very high up, higher than any ceiling in the palace, and it opened slowly, like a lantern uncovered. It was gold. It was as wide as a doorway. Deep in the center of it, a black slit narrowed and held her.

A second eye opened beside it.

A third, a little way off.

A fourth, a fifth, a sixth.

Six pale gold lanterns hung in the dark, three pairs, watching her. She felt the weight of them on her skin like a hand. She should have been afraid. She knew that. Every sensible bone in her body should have been telling her to run.

But she wasn’t afraid.

She was only very, very tired, and the eyes were so old, and so patient, and so kind.

"Morgana," said a voice.

It came from everywhere at once. It rolled through the cave, low and slow and rough, like a stone being dragged across another. It was not loud. It did not need to be. It went through her ribs and settled somewhere under her heart.

"Mor-ga-na."

She swallowed.

"Who’s there?"

"Morgana." A second voice, higher, silver and curling."Come."

"Where?"

"Come, little one."A third, deep as the bottom of a well. "We have waited so long."

"Waited for what?"

"For you."

The word hung in the dark.

She felt something tug, low in her chest, the faint bright pull of a thread she’d felt before. It was not the bond. It was older than that, and thinner, a strand spun long ago and left to lie in the dust. It wound down through her ribs and out into the cave, and it led, unmistakably, toward the eyes.

"Come," said the voices, all three together, in the soft, patient chorus of beings who had called a great many times and never been answered.

"Come, Morgana. Come."

She took a step.

She woke with her hand on the latch.

It was a very odd feeling. One moment she was in a cave, and the next she was in her own chamber, with the cold of a stone floor biting her bare feet and her fingers curled around the iron of her own door. The lamp had burned down to a single bead of flame. The room was dim and blue with moonlight.

She did not know how she had got there.

She stared at her hand.

It lay on the latch as though it had always been there, pale and small and perfectly steady. She had crossed the room in her sleep. She had left her bed, and her pillow, and the folded letter she had tucked beneath it, and walked six paces to the door.

She tried to take her hand away.

It wouldn’t move.

It was not that it was stuck. It was that she did not want to move it. A kind of drowsy certainty had settled over her, soft and thick, and under it she could still hear the three slow voices, humming just below the edge of hearing. "Come. Come. Come."

Her fingers lifted the latch.

"No," she thought, distantly. "No, this is wrong, I should wake someone....."

The door swung open.

She walked out into the corridor.

***

Corin had been at his post for six hours when the door of Morgana’s chamber opened.

He had not slept. He did not expect to. The night watch outside the ward’s rooms was the hardest duty in the palace, because nothing ever happened and he was not allowed to stop looking for it. He stood at his place by the stair, with his back against the wall and his eyes on the long dim corridor, and thought about his sister’s wedding, and the price of boots, and the way the lady had looked at Mistress Calla.

He heard the click of the latch.

He turned his head.

The ward stood in the doorway. She wore only a white nightgown, and her feet were bare, and her dark hair hung loose down her back. Her face was calm. Her eyes were open. They were fixed on something far away, a place beyond the corridor and the walls, and they did not seem to see him at all.