The Dragon Kings' Forbidden Witch

Let them look, she thought. ”Ma used to say a village will talk about a woman until the next one gives it something better.”

It was not very comforting. But it kept her walking.

She didn’t see the guard.

She felt him, a vague presence at the edge of her senses, the sound of a boot a little too measured to be the palace’s own. When she glanced back at the second turning, there was only a young soldier in the king’s grey crossing a hall with a message tube under his arm, in no way following anybody. She turned forward again.

***

The lower courtyard opened at the end of the east passage through a pair of oaken doors that stood propped back with iron. Light poured through them, white and cold and shocking.

Morgana stopped on the threshold.

The wind hit her first. It smelled of straw and distant rain and woodsmoke and the iron tang of a forge somewhere out of sight. It lifted the loose end of her plait and tugged at her sleeves. Beyond the doors the courtyard lay open, wide cobbles, a dry fountain, and over it all a vast pale sky streaked with high cloud.

She stepped through.

The cobbles were uneven underfoot. She felt every one of them through the boot sole, a small hard solid thing, and her chest did something she had not expected. It came loose.

She had not known it was tight.

She had not known that for weeks she had been breathing in short shallow pulls, in rooms with stone ceilings and doors that closed and corridors that smelled of beeswax and incense. She drew a breath now, a real one, down into the bottom of her ribs, and the cold air burned and filled her.

Her eyes stung.

She tilted her face up to the sky and let the wind take her hair.

For one moment she was not the ward of three kings, and not a witch, and not the girl whom a white-haired stranger had stared at in a pale room and called her. She was a person standing on the ground with weather on her face.

”Thank you,” she thought, to nobody in particular.

Then she lowered her chin, wiped her cheek with the back of her wrist, and walked toward the stables.

***

She smelled them before she saw them.

Hay first, golden and dry and faintly sweet. Warm horse. Leather and oil and the green rank smell of new manure. The scent struck her like a hand pressed to her chest, and she had to stop at the corner of the long brick building and brace herself against the wall.

It had been a punishment. The whole palace knew it. It had been meant as a humiliation, mucking out stalls and hauling water until her palms split, and she had cried in the hayloft the first three nights.

And it had been the only place in that whole vast cold palace where something had looked at her and not been afraid.

She pushed off the wall and walked into the yard.

The stable hands saw her first. There were six of them at work, a boy at the well, two men forking hay from a cart, a lanky girl with a bridle in her hands. The girl saw her and froze. The bridle slid out of her hands and rang on the stones, and in the silence that followed, every head turned.

Morgana had a flash of memory so sharp it nearly knocked her back. These were the same faces. These same people had lowered their eyes when she walked past and whispered the scheming one, the peasant, the one who tried for the kings behind their hands.

The lanky girl bent and snatched up the bridle. She bobbed a curtsy, too quick and too deep, and said, ”My lady.” Her voice cracked on it.

One of the men took off his cap. He turned it round and round in his hands and said, ”Lady Morgana,” as though the name were a thing he had been handed that might go off.

”Good morning,” Morgana said, and then, because it seemed to be expected of her and because she had no idea what else to say, ”Please. Don’t stop on my account.”

They did not stop so much as dissolve. The boy at the well found something urgent to do on the far side of it. The cart-men resumed their work with a new and nervous vigor. The girl vanished into the tack room.

She stood in the middle of the yard with her hands knotted, and then a door slammed.

It was the heavy double door at the far end of the building, the one to the head stable’s office. A man came through it.

He was tall and broad through the shoulder, and he walked with the slight roll of a man who had spent his life with horses and the hip that came of too many falls. His silver hair was cropped close, and his face was creased and brown. He wore a leather apron over a wool shirt with the sleeves pushed back. He had a currycomb in one hand, and he stopped dead in the middle of the yard and looked at her.

The currycomb fell.

Neither of them moved.

”Garrick,” Morgana said. It came out very small.

He was crossing the yard before she finished the word. She had never seen him move so fast, and he did not stop at a proper distance. He did not stop at all. She had half raised her arms and then she was against his chest, the smell of him around her, hay and leather and horse and pipe smoke, and his arms had closed around her in a grip that was almost painful.

He said nothing.

He held her. His big hand cupped the back of her head, and she felt it shake. His chin was pressed to the top of her hair, and a sound came out of his chest that was not a word.

Morgana put her face into his apron and cried.