I took a month’s lying-in time, which I was surprised Merlin did not object to. My furious grief for the lost child was an inconvenience to him, no doubt, and would only interfere with our work. Therefore, he kept busy with the stars as the clear skies shook off the frosted grip of a long, dark winter, and dared not breach mine and Ninianne’s convenient ruse to be in company.
As promised, Ninianne came to my bedchamber every morning and stayed all day, needing nothing but herself to teach me protective charms—the words, the motions, how to form the silvery threads and weave them into a veil of safety, and imbue the magic with conditions of my choosing.
“To form these threads, calm is essential,” she told me. “You must focus on the entire elemental structure within you—the air in your lungs, the fire in your belly, the structure of your bones. The roaring water running through your veins. Within that lies your essence, your truth, the surety that allows you to bring forth protection.”
It was difficult at first, for one such as me—my restless, impulsive soul never a thing of balance or quietude. But day upon day, I sought the place she promised was within me, beyond the dragon’s lair of my fury, or the chasm of my guilt and hurt; the place where my essence sat like a cool, deep lake, serene and silver-blue.
From there I drew the threads like streams, the bright runnels of protection, forging them into a shining mail that would armour me and those I loved. My charms would fade and have to be remade, and I was not fairy enough to learn the unbreakable, but by the time our month was over, my strength and calm had grown beyond where I thought possible, and I was ready, in one way or another, to return to the world of the sorcerer.
Merlin leapt upon my return with an enthusiasm that was almost reverent. Like a cat bringing gifts, he offered me dead birds of all sizes and states of decay, wanting only to see the effect of the raven repeated. It did not occur to him that to repeat a scientific act was one thing, but what we were seeking was change, a gain in strength, to make beat again a heart that was larger than a coin. I did not seek to enlighten him.
Nor did he know about the heartsong I had felt in the raven, the shimmering sensation of a life once lived which I soon learned was essential. Not every corpse yielded one, and more than time dead or bodily condition, the heartsong was the one definitive sign of whether a stilled heart would answer my incantation. When a bird didn’t revive, I pretended I didn’t know why.
Largely, I did what the sorcerer asked, in part to distract from my true thinking and because the repetition dulled the sharpness of grief over my stolen child. Every day, I armoured myself with the tranquillity and fortitude I had learned with Ninianne, but it could only last so long before the guilt and futile what-ifs overtook my mind. Only the distraction of work could withstand the assault of memory, the brief, transcendent moments when life conquered death all that kept me from drowning in the flood of my losses.
So I worked, with a fevered, unceasing rhythm, barely stopping to eat or sleep. One day, with a month left until my return to Camelot, I caught sight of my reflection in a night-darkened window and saw myself gaunt and pale as a skull, the same obsessive gleam in my eyes as the sorcerer’s. On the run from my anguish and Merlin’s greedy attentions, my own quest had devoured me instead.
My famed teacher took pleasure in my efforts, but what he did not know was that, since my return to his study, I had kept two sets of notes to record my work: one true and in a code of my own devising, hidden under a floorboard in my bedchamber, and a set of vague, ineffective scribbles kept on my desk. The heartsong I never wrote down at all; I could not lock my secrets away in magic boxes, but Merlin would never hold the key to my mind.
One hot day near the end of July, a dead goldfinch had appeared on my worktable, its heart calling, but its small body missing an entire wing. I had dismissed it, deeming a return to life unfair for a creature reliant upon its ability to fly. But the longer it lay there, the louder its stained-glass aspect sang out to me, along with an idea in the same key.
“I did not think the finch was of use,” Merlin said, when I cast around for the box.
“I’m trying something,” I said vaguely.
He returned his attention to fiddling with his favourite gold astrolabe; when alone, I had loosened two of its interlocking cogs so his star readings of two nights previously would have to be rechecked and he would not pay special attention to my experiment.
I layered the box with its usual leaves and placed the bird within. Turning my back to Merlin, I concealed a pin in my palm and checked the manuscript page from which had sprung my new possibility.
Three drops of blood from a worthy rival of death, to restore the flesh of the righteous.
The wording, hidden deep in the index of one of the sorcerer’s rare volumes on blood magic, was nebulous, the concept of “worthy” so loaded with opinion one could not begin to assess its meaning. A “rival of death” was equally hazy: it could mean a person who had survived severe illness, a pure-hearted knight who had sworn to live chaste, a fairy like Ninianne whose age was slowed to the point of immortality—and a hundred other possibilities. Or, I reasoned, it could mean a woman of few canonical virtues, but with healing in her soul: me.
Surreptitiously, I pricked my left forefinger with the pin and squeezed three red drops onto the finch’s breast, then sealed the box as usual. Right away, the container began to rattle, but I left my hand atop it, intoning the incantation in my head, adjusted to include part of an old blood chant I had once used to save Alys’s life.
All movement stopped, and my spirits sank. On occasion, the process had begun and failed, the pressure too great for a decaying heart. Opening the box, I unwrapped the bird, now on its side. It looked dead at first, but at the sudden light its head twitched and it chirped, fluttering up onto the edge of the box with ease and unusual tameness.
I tried not to gasp. Sitting before me like a cluster of jewels was a perfect, two-winged goldfinch.
Slowly, I reached out, and the bird let me cup my palms around it without struggle. I splayed one wing, then the other. Only when I had counted every feather and felt along every bone did I allow myself a shaky exhale of joy.
It caught the sorcerer’s ear right away, his black gaze rising to the live bird in my hands. He shut the window with a flick, and at the noise the goldfinch took flight, darting around the room on a pair of beautiful wings.
“My word. Feather and bone,” Merlin said. He cut keen eyes back to me. “How was it done?”
“I put ground bloodstone in the box,” I lied, pressing my thumb against my pricked forefinger and healing away the mark the needle had made.
Two weeks later, Merlin left a note under my door in the middle of the night saying to meet him outside the house the following noon. After my triumph with the goldfinch, he had obeyed my request to leave me alone to refine the formula, when in truth, my year was coming to an end, and I wished to keep the sorcerer as far away from my work as possible. I had five days left before I was free.
I stepped out into a glorious day: between the long winter and my various confinements, I had forgotten how good summer felt, air warm and sweet with scents of fruit, moat rushing brightly over the rocks. I half expected to see Ninianne, resplendent in the midday sun, but got no sense of her anywhere, and I realized that in my dark cell of grief and endless work, I had lost count of the days since I last laid eyes on her.
Merlin stood at the foot of the giant oak, its roots waist-height, thick boughs stretching far above the tower top. He wore a narrow-sleeved mulberry coat over breeches and boots, and carried an almost human air of authority.
“This oak is all that survives of the original grove,” he said. “Three sacred trees placed by the old gods. The elder on the other side is a descendent, not the first. The ash that once grew where the house stands burned with lightning for seven days, and what was left became my desk. When all three were alive, they formed an intersection of magic that imbued the very earth beneath our feet. It is why I chose this place to live and work.”
I shrugged. “Very well. Why are you telling me?”
“Because there is power here, waiting to be exploited.”
He stepped aside to reveal a large mound, covered in sackcloth.
“What’s that?” I said uneasily.
With a flourish of his hand, the sacking flew back to reveal a pale, twisted form, which I soon recognized as a dead deer—a rare and pure white hart, gone very wrong. Its startling hide was marred with violent red gashes, some so deep I could see the remnants of ravaged organs. A front leg had been torn from the joint, leaving a gory bone socket. The creature’s fine, antlered head lolled back, one ice-blue eye open in death, the other missing, leaving an endless staring maw.
“A once glorious creature,” Merlin said. “Brought too early to death in a state of violence and maim. In other words, Lady Morgan, a marvel yet to come.”
“You intend on resurrecting this?” I exclaimed. “It’s mangled, half blind, unable to walk. It would be sheer cruelty to make it breathe again.”
“Not so,” said the sorcerer, “if it’s resurrected whole.”
I knelt at the white hart’s head, examining the gaping eye socket, the deep gash under its throat, the jagged edge where the front leg had been torn free. A pack of something had been let loose on the poor creature, and how Merlin had acquired it was best left to the imagination. “Impossible. There’s too much missing, and nothing we’ve done compares. This creature is…”
I stopped, mouth formed around the word doomed, as a wavelet of sensation shivered across my palm where it rested on the deer’s breast. The creature’s heart, sturdy and whole, singing despite everything.
In his impatience, Merlin spoke without noting my pause. “A bird is not a man, you said. We must seek to do more. This beast is large—if the formula works, it means a man’s body should not take much more. I bring a challenge that could advance our work almost to its conclusion, yet now you balk? Are you too timid for this, after all?”
I rose, dusting dirt and dried blood from my hands. “I’m saying it will fail. If magic is all about cost, this risks exhausting us in body and mind, when we could be seeking more certain solutions.”
My objection was fraudulent, based purely on my concern that any shared new effort could reveal the gaps in my supposed formula. I had less than a week left and intended on guarding my secrets.
Merlin sneered, as if I’d confessed to being afraid of the dark. “Very well, Lady Morgan. If you are so fearful, I must try it alone. Though it is strange you will not attempt to help, at least for King Arthur’s sake.”
His determination to proceed pinned me like a boar hunter’s spear. Merlin would fail, I knew that—he still knew nothing of the heartsong or the use of my blood—but his intention to test the spell by himself might be more risk than I could afford.
I pulled a face, pretending his invocation of Arthur had goaded me. “I’m not afraid, as you well know,” I said. “Without me, you wouldn’t know how to begin. For my brother’s sake, I will do it. Dig a grave and call me when the witching hour comes.”
Later, when midnight had long passed, Merlin drove a pair of torches into the ground on either side of the slumbering oak. At length, we hoisted the beleaguered deer into the hole he had made and I had layered with yew branches, herbs and goose down.
“We need something to cover it,” I said. “Soil will be too heavy.”
The sorcerer smiled enigmatically, and in a sweep of his arms, the torchlight was aflutter, leaves gusting in from the woodland and filling the white hart’s grave until it left a neat mound.
Five days passed and the temple of foliage remained undisturbed as expected, the white hart likely rotting within its damp earthen cavern. The sorcerer said little, but spent most of the days at his study window, gazing at the mound under the oak tree, his frustration on the air, crackling through me as satisfaction.
Merlin would never know there was more within my power, but I could not forget. And still the white hart lay dead, its heartsong calling out, waiting for me.