Merlin stayed away from the classroom for several days, stoking my silent seething and putting me under Ninianne’s quiet supervision once again. With her, I could bend water, air, fire and earth to my growing will, a process for which I did not have to sacrifice parts of myself or relive my worst memories; a power that gave, not cost, and cleaved to my spirit like the finest suit of armour.
Yet somehow it was not enough. Merlin’s dismissal, the knowledge that he purposefully kept the keys to Arthur on an impossible shelf, continued to seep through me like venom.
“Morgan?”
Ninianne’s hand warmed my forearm, drawing me back into the room. She rarely touched me, due to her natural lack of intimacy and an awareness of the effect her fairy presence had on us faint-hearted mortals. I could understand why: in times of frustration, despair or longing for those left behind, the idea of resting bare fingers against her glowing skin was almost irresistible.
“You should master this today, but for your distraction,” she said.
A heart-shaped cabbage sat on her marble table, a tight teardrop of layered, shirred leaves. I had been trying to turn it to stone for an hour, but aside from a slight hardness at the edges, it had stayed pliable and pale green.
What does it matter? I wanted to say. Turning a whole fleet of horses into courtyard ornaments wouldn’t have filled the hollowness created by Merlin’s taunting, his blocking the path to Arthur’s right hand.
“You never told me why I can’t tell Merlin of my skills,” I said abruptly.
Ninianne recoiled. “Isn’t it enough to believe me?”
“Not when I suffer the consequences,” I said. “He’s keeping me from gaining the means to help Arthur and the realm. Besides, he’s always known I’m a healer—he probably already suspects.”
“You cannot tell him. Trust me on this.”
“How can I?” I exclaimed. “You told me not to trust you, and never explained that either. Perhaps you don’t want me to show him because you’re fearful Merlin’s favour will change if he sees everything I’m capable of.”
Ninianne shot up from her chair, face blazing like a wronged goddess. “Is that what you think of me? That I strive to keep Merlin from you out of a petty sense of ownership, rather than for your own protection?”
“I cannot possibly know,” I snapped back. “You’ve never told me a damned thing about you, or what you’re thinking. Every day, I see you scowl then simper at him. I watch you shudder with disdain then whisper in his ear and disappear into his tower. You’ve lived with Merlin for decades, learning his ways, participating in his schemes. Why would I assume you care anything for my protection?”
“And you know everything, of course,” she said. “You have no earthly concept of what my life here has been like. What I have given, what I’ve lost, to gain the knowledge I have. Decisions I was too young to understand. Sacrifices I didn’t know I would have to make until there was no choice.”
Her voice was low again but tremulous, unsure. She pressed her fingers to her lips and sank back into her seat beside mine, next to the chair she had brought for me after years of preserving her solitude. A thin whistle of doubt cut through my anger.
“Ninianne…” I began, but she shook her head.
There was a heavy pause, then she made a sudden sweeping movement with the edge of her skirts, shifting aside layers of soft violet to reveal her long, gleaming leg.
“To understand,” she said, “you must look.”
I dropped my eyes to where her hand held back her robe, revealing a band of symbols in dark-blue ink, curving around her upper thigh in a dance of lines and whorls.
“Who did that?” I asked.
“I did,” she replied. “I tattooed these marks, and the same on my other thigh. They are part of a protective charm that I taught myself, out of necessity.”
She smoothed her robe back into place with uncertain hands. “When I met Merlin, I was a girl—not a child, but not far enough from it to know better. I wanted to learn, wished for all the knowledge there was, both to understand my own power and to master what existed outside. I came here because Merlin promised to teach me everything I had long dreamed of. But it was not all that he would want.”
“Ninianne,” I said quietly. “You don’t have to tell me this.”
She cut me off with a halting hand. “Merlin is fascinated by natural-born power,” she went on. “He has none himself. Nothing to be ashamed of, but everything he can do, he had to study and learn. It is difficult, all-consuming. When he sees innate ability, he becomes fixated upon the potential, the one who possesses it. I understand this impulse for knowledge and so do you. Whatever you feel about him, in that way the three of us are the same. As scholars, we have all felt that pull of obsession. But it has consequences.”
I felt a quick, vicarious dread. “What did he do to you?”
“Nothing,” she insisted. “But I was too innocent, blind to everything but my great need for knowledge, my wish to impress my fascinating teacher. By the time I realized how Merlin loved me beyond reason, it was already too late.” Her gaze strayed to the window, at the enclosing trees beyond. “At first, he accepted that I was still a girl, but that only meant there was a time in his mind when I would be one no longer. Inevitably, he thought I would give myself over to him, at the very least in gratitude for his teaching.”
She looked back at me, her eyes Greek fire. “You will ask why I stayed, next.”
“No,” I said. “I know why. You had nowhere to go.”
A deep exhale deflated her formidable figure. “Yes. My home was gone by then, destroyed by war. More to my fault, I had no desire to give up my studies. As the years went by, I learned to live with Merlin’s obsession, but I knew the time would come when his wants would overwhelm his reason, his claims of love and respect. I had to protect myself.”
“So you tattooed a charm into your own flesh to keep him from possessing you,” I said. “Is it permanent?”
“Yes. It means I can never know physical intimacy, nor act upon any desire I might feel for another. I chose knowledge over love because I had no choice.”
All at once, it made a sad, terrible sense why she insisted love was a weakness. “Does Merlin know?” I asked.
“Of that I cannot be sure. Regardless, he kept teaching me, and I kept accepting his teaching. It began, after a while, to feel like a sort of power. He probably knows and has been trying to find a countercharm all these years, not realizing that it’s deep fairy magic, old as the rivers and hills, and completely irreversible.”
“It sounds more of a curse than a charm,” I said.
“Charms, curses—there are not truly such things. There are only questions, and the intent with which one answers them.”
“I have always felt the same way about physic,” I agreed. “Cure and poison can often come from the same source. But if you are so learned and in command of your powers, why do you stay now?”
Her face took on a cast of serenity. “King Arthur. At his first breath, I felt his possibilities more deeply than anything I had ever experienced. So I stay with Merlin, where I can take part in the pursuit of a better world. People talk, of course—they say that I will be Merlin’s ruin because of my hunger for knowledge. Future poets will claim I bewitched him, that I teased and tortured a heartsick man for his wisdom until his brilliance was no more. But if I can help your brother fulfil his greatness, what I have sacrificed will mean something, in the end.”
“You don’t have to renounce everything of yourself for another,” I said. “And there are other forms of love than desire. To eschew them all is denying yourself so much possibility.”
I circled a palm over my rounded belly and a flutter rose up to meet me, a tiny answering limb, bringing the joyous thrill that this utterly singular sensation always did.
Ninianne’s gaze followed my hand around my abdomen. “All forms of love are weakness in some way, and I have no need for any. Even you are more pragmatic than you admit. I tell you this not so you will lament my fate, but protect yourself as well as you can.”
“Are you saying I must guard my body in the same way?”
“You cannot,” she replied. “You have known love and acted bodily upon it. This charm is not strong enough to counteract the experience of true passion.”
She was right; one glance at Accolon and my desire felt like it could burn down the world. “What, then?” I asked.
“It’s as I have told you,” she said. “Keep the secret of your power from Merlin. Do you understand me, Morgan? It is the only way to stay free.”