I Am Morgan le Fay by Nancy Springer

speak. “Ye—yes.”
    She lifted her common, heavy hands and placed one on each side of my head just as she had for Thomas, like a blessing. And there was something of the healer left in her after all, for her touch calmed my tears and my heart.
    â€œThen go, Morgan,” she said.
    No. No, I couldn’t. I had to stay with Ongwynn. I had to wait for Thomas to come back to me.
    â€œGo,” Ongwynn said again, soft as dawn.
    It was my fate calling, I sensed. And healing Ongwynn, I had promised to obey my fate. I knew I had to go.
    More: I knew I wanted to.

BOOK THREE
    Avalon

8

    I LEFT AT DAWN, ON ANNIE. SHORT OF BEING KNOCKED on the head I could not possibly have gone back to sleep that night, and no one else did either. Ongwynn got up, got dressed, and set about provisioning me. I dithered back to my chamber with a rushlight in hand and tried to get some clothing onto myself and some into a bag; I kept changing my mind about which should go where. Morgause drifted around my chamber like a spirit, great-eyed and silent and annoying. “I can’t think with you hovering,” I complained. “Go back to bed.”
    She did not, but she ghosted out after a while, then slipped back into my chamber and said, “Here,” holding something small toward me.
    â€œWhat?”
    She said nothing. I had to take it to see what it was: a ring woven of human hair. Mother’s hair.
    â€œI don’t need that.” I tried to hand it back to her.
    â€œTake it with you,” Morgause told me.
    â€œWhy? I’ll be back.”
    Morgause just gave me the look of a big-eyed deer mouse caught in candlelight.
    â€œOh, for the love of mercy . . .” I put the ring on a finger of my right hand and turned my back, going about my packing.
    The piskies didn’t care that Morgause was silently saying I might be killed. They chuckled and chittered and rustled everywhere in my chamber, so excited that several times I almost caught sight of them, glimpsing movement from the corner of my eye, shadows scampering. And whenever I lacked for anything, I had only to turn my back and when I turned around again, it would magically be there. When my rushlight burned out, a candle flame without a candle lit my chamber. When I needed string for bundling, silken cord appeared. When I realized I had only a few shabby patched frocks and a crude homemade pair of shoes by way of clothing, I turned around to find fine soft leather boots and a full dozen gowns—not the frocks of a girl or the skirts of a peasant woman, but the flowing silk-and-velvet garb of a lady. I stood there with my mouth open as the piskies laughed at me, the sly little never-seen brats, and to this day I do not know whether the gowns were magicked in a moment or took months in the making, whether they somehow knew beforehand that I would have need of a lady’s clothing.
    â€œThank you, brats,” I managed to say at last, and they laughed at me more than ever.
    Morgause stood gazing at the gowns as if they had dropped onto my bed out of the moon.
    â€œHere,” I told her, “I don’t need all these. You take some of them.” We were the same size, she and I, and we still looked almost as much alike as twins, Ongwynn said, but I was the one who could be counted upon to be making noise or difficulty. “Which would you like? The rose-colored ones?” She could have those. I hated pink.
    She shook her head. “They’re yours.”
    â€œI want to give you some! Which ones?” I grabbed a satin gown that looked like a frothy sea at sunset, and tried to hand it to her, but all by itself it flew out of my arms and landed on my bed again.
    â€œThey’re yours,” Morgause said.
    â€œBut Annie can’t carry all this!” I wailed.
    Such silliness, fretting over satin and lace when I was setting forth to make my way alone through wilderness or battlefields or both.
    In the end, I wore the