Chapter 244: Morgana Asked To Visit The Stables

Morgana looked at her in the mirror.

Agnes did not look like an old woman at that moment. She looked like a person who had spent forty years watching a palace for signs of storm and knew what one looked like when it came.

"I want to go outside," Morgana said.

Rowan went still behind her.

"Outside," Agnes said.

"Beyond the walls of this wing." Morgana turned her head so she was no longer talking to the glass. "I’ve been in this side of the palace for weeks, and for most of them I’ve been shut in some room or other. A cell. A chamber. A hall. The last time I stood on open ground....." She stopped. The memory of the night flight rose, wind in her hair and Kaelen’s warmth beneath her and the black sky wheeling, and she pushed it carefully aside. It had been the sky. It had not been the ground. "I haven’t stood on open ground in a long time. I want to. I want to feel dirt under my shoes."

"Where did you wish to go, my lady?"

Morgana drew a breath.

She had not decided she would say it until it was already out of her mouth.

"The stables."

The room went very quiet.

Rowan’s hands tightened on the gowns. Agnes’s face did not change at all, which was in its way an answer.

"I was sent there," Morgana said. She kept her voice steady. "It was meant as a punishment. Everyone knows that. But I...." Her throat caught. She swallowed. "There was a horse. A black stallion, Shadowmere. No one else could go near him. He knew me before I knew myself." She laughed, small and a little shaky. "And there was Master Garrick. He gave me a room when I had nowhere. He covered for me when he had no cause to. When they came for me, he stood in the yard and tried to speak, and Calla told him he’d be taken too if he did." Her eyes burned. "I never saw him after. I never thanked him. I don’t know what they said to him, or whether he’s well. He doesn’t know I’m.....that I’m not....."

She could not finish.

Rowan crossed the room in three steps and put one hand on her shoulder.

Agnes was still silent.

Morgana turned to look at her, and the old woman’s face had finally changed. It was small, only a softening at the corners of the mouth and a faint shine in the eyes. But it was there.

"I’d like to see them," Morgana said. "If I may. Can I?"

The question hung between them.

She heard how it sounded. She was a ward of the crown, with a bruise on her shoulder that every servant in the palace knew the cause of, asking permission of a maid to walk out of a door. But it was true. She did not know, truly, what she was permitted to do. She had not asked. No one had said anything about it.

Agnes took a deep breath.

"Of course, my lady," she said. "You can certainly visit the stables."

Something loosened behind Morgana’s ribs.

"Truly?" She asked.

"You are the king’s ward, child. No one in this palace can tell you no." The old woman’s mouth moved at one corner. "Though I would not be surprised if a few would try." Her tone softened. "Master Garrick has asked after you every week since you were taken. He sends word by the stable boys to the kitchen, when he thinks no one notices. I always say you are well. It will do him good to hear it from your own mouth."

Morgana pressed her lips together hard. She was afraid that if she spoke she would weep, and she had wept enough in the last day for a month.

"Thank you, Agnes."

"There’s nothing to thank." Agnes turned to the wardrobe. "Now. Rowan, the riding clothes, the soft brown wool. The good boots, not the slippers. Her hair in a plait, a simple one, close to the head. She will not want it in her face if there is wind."

"There’ll be wind," Rowan said, and went to the chest at the foot of the bed.

Agnes crossed to Morgana. She took the brush from the table, and Morgana held still.

"You must eat again before you go, once you’re dressed," Agnes said. She drew the brush through a damp tangle with a firm, steady hand. "I will send up something for the pockets. Bread, a little cheese. Horses do not care for hungry girls, and neither do kings."

Morgana laughed again. It was easier this time.

Rowan returned with the clothes over her arm: a soft brown bodice, a fitted skirt cut for riding, a linen shirt, a pair of well-worn boots that Morgana did not remember owning. They had been softened with oil and smelled faintly of leather and horse, and she realized, with a small shock, that someone had gone and found them. Someone had thought.

Thorne, she thought. Or Kaelen. Or someone they had sent.

She did not know which, and she was almost afraid to ask.

Rowan laid the clothes across the bed. Agnes finished the brush and began on the plait, working it tight along Morgana’s scalp in the old way, the way her own mother had braided it for market days. Rowan came and knelt with the boots and began to work the laces loose.

The two women moved around her in silence, one at her head and one at her feet. The morning light fell in a slanting bar across the floor. Somewhere beyond the window a bell rang the hour and was answered by another, far away.

For one moment, Morgana sat very still between them and let herself be tended.

It was not a thing she had known she needed.

She closed her eyes.

Shadowmere, she thought. Garrick. The smell of hay and warm horse and cold morning. One more hour of being only myself.

Agnes tied off the end of the plait and set it over her shoulder.

"There," she said softly. "Now, let’s get you dressed."