Arthur's Siblings
Amid the weeping and lamentations heard that morning at Tintagel, one voice rose above them all: a child crying 'Dad!...Dad!...'
Morgan had dreamt the night before she had seen her father die, watched him as he fell from his horse, watched as King Uther's men set upon him with their spears. She woke up crying, and her half-sisters Margawse and Blasine comforted her, told her it was a nightmare. 'Look,' they said, 'look, there's your father out there now.'
Indeed the man they saw into the castle courtyard that night looked like father, sounded like father...but there was something wrong, Morgan thought. She saw a crow circling the sky above the castle, silhouetted by the full moon, and she thought she saw a bright red glint in one of its eyes.
The man who had come and embraced Ygraine was her husband, there could be no mistaking it. He was flesh and blood enough. But now Sir Brastian was telling her that he had never left the castle Terrabyl, save only to attack King Uther's camp. The man that came to her was no illusion, all in Tintagel had seen him. Confusion gave way to a cold dread, for she had heard stories of incubuses. She said no more, and could only wonder what would become of her family now. What would become of her daughters? What of her son Cador, who was now the inheritor of the title of Duke of Tintagel?
Margawse and Blasine were round about Morgan and Cador's ages when their own father, Ygraine's first husband Howel, brother of King Aramont, had died. But Gorlois had been more of a father to them than their own sire, whom they did not see much of in the brief time they knew him, had been. Gorlois did not treat them differently from the children he himself had with Ygraine, and he showed all four of them the kind of love a father should show his children.
Now they were all gathered round the bloodied body that they had called father. No more would they hear that rumbling voice of his. No more would they hear his laughter. Morgan clung to that body. Her cries turned to screams, as though the sound would somehow wake her father up. The boy Cador could not bring himself to touch his father, and in the end he turned away and he held one of Gorlois's hounds and buried his face in its grey fur.
Blasine remembered when she was a child in Brittany and one day she and Margawse and their parents were riding through the woods when they saw a little wolf cub. The wolf cub was alone. It looked sad and desperate, its fur was filthy and matted, and it was howling mournfully, over and over again, and Blasine covered her ears, both wanting the howling to stop and wanting to hear the howling of another wolf pack who might come to the cub's aid. She never found out what happened to the cub. She remembered crying herself to sleep that night thinking about the cub and then having a terrible dream that she did not wish to recall. Seeing her little half-sister Morgan in distress reminded her of that cub. Blasine went and held her sister and wept with her.
Margawse turned away, kept to herself, grief and rage warring within her. Gorlois had taught her how to fight and how to joust because she wanted to learn those things, because it seemed exciting. He had gifted her with a specially-forged suit of armour for her birthday once. She wanted to arm herself now, to ride out and kill Uther Pendragon, or die trying. Or die trying. No. She couldn't do that. She couldn't leave her mother and sisters and her brother behind. She would weep for Gorlois, and she would wait.
In the morning sky, a crow once again circled the castle and settled on a turret. No one paid it any heed, and thus no one saw that one of its eyes was red like the fires of Hell. The strange crow looked at the scene, remembered his own family and what the Devil had done to them. What will be will be, Merlin thought, though it did not lessen the pangs of sorrow he felt within his breast.
This post was done for @caer-gai's April Arthurian Showers.
