“I never forgave myself.”

 

 

He nodded and retrieved his helmet, and I helped him don it. While I remained kneeling, he stood and grasped both my hands.

“Queen Morgan of Gore, I accept your fealty, freely offered and fairly sworn, and pledge to protect you and your lands from all your enemies. Rise, my good and faithful servant. And my beloved sister.”

Beloved sister… I cannot speak for how Arthur must have felt in that moment; as for myself, it felt as if the purest, holiest water on earth had sluiced every last black speck from my heart, mind, and soul. If the intensity of his embrace was any indication, he must have felt it, too.

However, the spell upon the others was teetering upon the breaking point, and I had more yet to accomplish.

I held up my palms. “As my fealty-gift from you, I crave only to touch Excalibur’s scabbard.” Arthur glanced at the more quickly unfreezing people and objects, unbuckled his sword belt, and laid the scabbard across my outstretched hands. I clenched it, eyes closed, feeling power flow from my fingers to enchant this non-magical copy of the original that I had stolen from him long ago, so that it would guard him as its predecessor had done. I girded it on him, and he stooped to pick up Excalibur. “Look for me, Arthur, after this battle.”

An anguished grimace contorted his face. “This thrice-curst battle proves England is done with me. For more than a score of years, I gave unto her my utmost. It was not enough.”

I laid a hand on his breastplate, over his heart. “Your utmost was, is, and ever shall be enough. May God strengthen your body, your heart, and your spirit, Arthur my king and my beloved brother, and may He guide you safely beyond.”

He barely had enough time to nod and prepare to meet Mordred’s blade. I snapped my fingers to conjure a suit of armor over Ambrose’s body—noting to retrieve his pistol after the fray and throw it down the nearest well; no sense in allowing that bit of twenty-first-century lunacy to be introduced into the sixth—and dived under the table.

The spell shattered. The warriors clashed. The objects of peace fell.

Accidentally I jostled Bishop Gildas, who was too busy stammering out prayers to pay me any heed. In the off chance that two pray-ers might prove more effective than one, I added my fervent pleas to the bishop’s.

Nothing worked.

“Alas this unhappy day!” I heard Arthur exclaim as Excalibur chimed in the performance of its deadly work.

Men screamed and collapsed with fearsome clatters of arms and armor, the survivors screamed in triumph, more challenges belled out and were just as loudly accepted, and the battle surged outside the tent to envelop the armies, heralded by the blaring of trumpets and horns upon both sides.

Thousands more men would die, kingdoms would fall, famine and pestilence and poverty and chaos would ravage the land; I foresaw everything as clearly as if it were unfolding before my very eyes, even though I could see nothing from beneath that camp table except the bloodied and cooling bodies of Ambrose and the first few fallen knights. And it was all. My. Fault.

My fault for having dragged Ambrose here, my fault for failing to prevent the knights from fighting, my fault for not having dealt with Ambrose in that future time, my fault for being such a poor sister to Arthur in this one; obsessed with my zeal to exact revenge, I had traveled forward with the intent of destroying the Yankee’s world… but in the end, I had destroyed mine.

In the Yankee’s chronicle, an adder had started this battle. Any other day, I might have named that sly serpent Ambrose; in sooth the adder was me. To quote a poet whose birth lay a thousand years distant, “O, I am fortune’s fool!” I could imagine Fortuna enjoying a grand sardonic laugh at my expense.

Never mind Launcelot and Guenever and Mordred and Gawaine and everyone else whose lust, treason, avarice, and bellicose natures had labored toward crafting this last battlefield. Had I lived up to being “Morgan the Wise,” I could have headed off all those issues years ago by effecting real solutions rather than being the nexus of gridlock in perpetuating the problem. I chose vengeance over wisdom and led us all to the edge of ruin, to the very point where one naked—if well-intentioned and justified—sword could topple us into the abyss.

The way down was very long, very steep, and very, very dark.

Crushed under this burden of guilt, I hugged knees to chest, threw back my head, and uttered a piercing wail that burst, unabated, from the bowels of my soul. I did not know I could make such a chilling noise, and it frightened me,—the more so because I sat powerless to stop it even to inhale until it had played out its entire wretched breadth.