Britannia, NY

It's a risk she's taking, walking downtown in the broad daylight with no safeguard but her evident youth. But Morgan has never been noted for her caution, when she's on the trail of something she wants. She has a secure line on Morvydd, and she's feeling confident. If she can make headway with her daughter, then Accolon, Ywain, even Mordred, ought to pose no difficulty.

So she wanders down the street, leisurely, peering into the windows of shops, pausing to read the Historical Interest plaques posted here and there. When she reaches the bakery she lingers, slim and elegant in her black wool coat, to study Of The Lake's unprepossessing façade.

For the last two weeks Jim has been on leave from his job, leaving the students newly returned to school with a substitute teacher. Canine Companions has a fourteen-day training period where prospective dog owners take an obedience course with their service dogs and get to know them. It's over now, but the upshot is he's home with a black lab that has to wear one of those half-jackets with SERVICE ANIMAL printed on it in big black letters, and she knows when he's feeling sick or strained, can sense even the small changes in his gait when there's pain in his legs.

And Nathan's managed to coax him out on a walk (Sheila does need to be walked) to the bakery. He grips the leash fiercely, still unused to it, but he's getting the idea.

In general he's content these days. He gave up cigarettes for a pipe, he doesn't expect Amanda to call, he pushes away all thoughts of Mike as anything more than a friend. It's just that somehow he still feels unfulfilled; his body still feels emptied out and he's always hungry but never for food. In this regard Sheila is more helpful than for his CP. She's undemanding and solid under his hands, and when she's out of her harness she likes to be scratched and petted. (He wishes this had come to him when he was still a boy, uncertain of himself and shaking, aware of the disappointed eyes of his parents.)

But the walk, at least, is pleasant. He draws his coat a little tighter against the wind, and she looks back over her shoulder at him for a moment.

It takes a lot to make Ivy angry, although it's been done periodically by foolish clients or foolish members of the justice system, and the occasional infuriatingly misogynistic romantic comedy. The recent burst of magic, though, has succeeded where lesser offences have not.

For the sixth or seventh time since Elaine first lit her candle Ivy has been awakened in the night by the prickle of new magic. She doesn't wake Ken. Instead she gets out of bed, goes quietly downstairs, out into the yard, and sets her hands against one of their tall trees.

She's not good at magic that's any bigger than keeping a sense of warmth in the house in winter, or sharing some of her strength with someone else, but she's borrowing from the tree, from all the trees in their yard, which know each other beneath the earth, in the deepest tangles of their roots. What she takes is enough to send a jolt down the spine of any unsuspecting practitioner without some sort of ward set up. It feels like lightning splitting an oak, and the message it leaves in its wake feels like rapid scrawled handwriting against the inside of your skull: For God's sake can't you be discreet?

All the power it takes leaves both her and the trees looking somewhat the worse for wear. She stomps into the kitchen weakly and fumbles in the refrigerator, looking for something to restore her energy. Big magic feels like getting hit by a truck.

Jim has definitely started smoking again, the upshot being that he hasn't touched his whiskey, or any kind of alcohol, as per the doctor's orders.

Christmas passed uneventfully, as did New Year's Eve--he got a call from Amanda wishing him a happy new year, and just as he was about to hang up Laurie Jean came on the line and said she was grateful to him for staying out of their lives, and not trying to turn Amanda against her or her new husband; and Jim said it was nothing he'd ever consider, and then the conversation was over.

New Year's day finds him up early in the morning, reading on his couch with another cigarette. He has a quilt over his legs and he's on the verge of dozing off again; luckily Nathan still has his own set of keys.

Perhaps starting small is the best plan. It will be some time before she can clap her hands together and bring on a thunderstorm, or turn a boy into a hawk or fish, but there are things she can try. Small magic, hedge and hearth-craft. The 'low' magic she can remember him scorning, leaving to wisewomen and charlatans once he left the woods behind. Magic for midwives and superstitious peasants, not for Kings.

Sapa will be easy enough to find, just warm grape juice; she could use oxymel, she supposes, but her stomach flips at some old memory of choking down the honey-salt-vinegar concoction, so sapa it is. Chervil, likewise, is hardly exotic. Where she's meant to get papaver rhoeas, cicely or lemon balm...

(Never mind the things she's thinking of if this works; henbane, mandrake, monkshod... A diamond dissolved in goat's blood will, she fears, be quite impossible)

Perhaps it's working some magic already, even before she's gathered her reagents and made the concoction; the act of making the list seems to clarify her thoughts a little, to pull her back from wandering in dreams, so she looks more stable than she has since Elaine cast her spell, her coat drawn around her for the first time in ages – stable, or else old, the conversation with Arthur having left her with a keen sense of exactly how much more ancient she is than her appearance would indicate, the chill of winter finally settling in her bones. That she's ended up sat at the lakeside doesn't exactly argue stability either.

( I want something/That's purer than the water/Like we were/It's not there now/In eloquence and anger/Are all we have/Like Saturn's rings/An icy loop around me/Too hard to hold/Lash out first/At all the things we don't like/Or understand/And it's beginning to get to me/That I know more of the stars and sea/Than I do of what's in your head/Barely touching in our cold bed/Are you beginning to get get my point/That all this fighting with aching joints/It's doing nothing but tire us out/No one knows what this fight's about )

Ivy hasn't felt right since her encounter with Elaine, and to top it off, yesterday she and Ken went to see a new gynecologist in Manhattan. This one has even better credentials than the last one, and he did lots of tests, and he's going to call them with the results by Monday but she hasn't got any more faith in him than she had for any of the ones before--he's going to call back and say that all of her tests came up perfectly fine and there's no reason she shouldn't be able to conceive. They all say that.

She's just locking up the office, her tote bag of legal files under her arm as she turns the key. For someone who's usually a bundle of manic energy, it's hard to imagine her looking more subdued.

( never seems to die / the trail's spent with fear / not enough living on the outside )

( I'll draw three figures on your heart... )

( For it's my thoughts that bind me here/It's this love that I most fear/And this child I would destroy/For I hold her pain most dear/No haven for this heart/No shelter for this child in mazes lost/Heaven keep us apart/A curse for every mile of ocean crossed )

( Oh my God how you make it hard/Not to pick the apple/Pick the apple/And Lord I long to give it back./And I was on shaky land/Lost and unsure I opened my hand/And she held it like sinking sand/But all, all, all of my light is for you/And home, home's anywhere you are too/So take this one fallen man on his knees/Saying please/Forgive me )

Laurel sometimes wished she were the sort of woman who cried. She couldn't remember the last time she had: college, probably, if she thought hard. But her entire adult life, she'd just gotten a hot, dry feeling in her chest and throat when something was wrong. She couldn't say, with certainty, why, but it wasn't something that gave much of a catharsis, even when it eventually eased.

She didn't know whether it was helping the man in the art store the other day, or the talk with the scared girl who'd bought just one flower, or nothing at all, but her dreams had gotten worse. Well, that was an understatement. Her dreams had become awful. Nothing, of course, that she could describe as a nightmare. There was nothing violent, nothing patently dangerous in them. But everything was saturated with a deep sorrow that time somehow seemed to be making worse, not better. Stupid as she knew it was, she couldn't seem to shake the mood, even when she woke up. Sleeping pills, she'd found, didn't help with the dreams at all, but at least kept her from waking from them, so at least she wasn't falling asleep at work the day after. But it was a half-hearted solution.

Her days off, her evenings... they'd become full of futile attempts to distract herself. This evening, she gives up on her book and goes on a walk. It seemed as good (or bad) as anything else, and the park will at least be pretty in the evening.

( Near to you, I am healing/But it's taking so long/'Cause though he's gone/And you are wonderful/It's hard to move on/Yet, I'm better near to you./You and I have something different/And I'm enjoying it cautiously/I'm battle scarred, I am working oh so hard/To get back to who I used to be/He's disappearing/Fading subtly/I'm so close to being yours/Won't you stay with me/Please )

( 'The time has come,' the Walrus said,/'To talk of many things:/Of shoes--and ships--and sealing-wax--/Of cabbages--and kings--/And why the sea is boiling hot--/And whether pigs have wings.' )

Jim is back to Albany to see the neurologist for what's really a routine procedure: more phenol injections. He waits quietly in the curtained off room, wearing a hospital gown over his legs (he gets to keep his shirt on for this) and looking mildly bored if anything. He brought some of the student midterms to work on while he waits, although he's been doing less of that and more reassuring Nathan that nothing is wrong and this happens all the time.

The doctor has already been in to do the evaluation and she'll be back for the injections any time now, but she's out right now speaking with Nathan, and Jim is just hoping she doesn't stick him hard to punish him for the trial that will probably be.

( I can't believe/in you I stay destined,/I can't believe/I know you're still here/once you are seen/it all becomes mystic/the lightning of love/in full form appears/on my hands/on my knees/I've buried my burden/up the stairs/unlock the door/to the suffocation keep. )

The conversation with Enfys has left Jim with the distinct feeling that despite everything he has been majorly played, and he goes on home with a heavy step, smacking acorns and large pieces of gravel aggressively with his cane.

When he gets in the door he hangs up his coat and goes to the cupboard to get himself a drink, frowning darkly.

It's five o'clock, and Ivy locks up her office on Sagamore Street and heads down the sidewalk towards Cup o' Tom, shouldering her tote bag full of legal work.

It's a windy day, the kind of day she loves, and she's humming to herself, her long blue skirt blowing around her ankles. It's nice to be able to get off work and go home without clocking out to anybody, nice to have picked her own hours, nice to have the kind of clients she has out here instead of the hectic inner-city cases. She likes feeling ordinary.

Maybe she'll run by the liquor store and get a bottle of wine to have with dinner. True, Ken is better at picking out wines than she is, but she knows enough, and it would be nice. Ivy taps her fingers with her pen and tries to decide whether it should be red wine or white wine, and then heads into the cafe instead.

( I'll be your liquor bathing your soul/Juice that's pure/And I'll be your anchor you'll never leave/Shores that cure/Well I've seen you suffer/I've seen you cry for days and days/So I'll be your liquor/Demons will drown/And float away )

Because Nathan honestly believed that keyboards were invented by the devil (he was the king of the one-fingered typing, when he was forced around the demon machines) and didn't even remotely know how to work email, when he decided it was time to reach out to certain key players, he turned to an old-fashioned form of communication.

Some letters, then, written in a slightly shaky left-handed scrawl on parchment and sealed with wax (the Lady thrilled in that little touch; so much of the old elegance was lost, now, in the age of electronic ones and zeros and soulless typed correspondence) in what might be a familiar symbol. The water lily, after all, had once covered the Lady's lake. It was fitting that it should now seal Nathan's letters.

---

( Letter to Mike )

---

( Letter to Arthur )

---

( Letter to Cecilia )

---

And the last letter had no address. No real way Nathan could expect it to reach the intended party. But Nathan put it in the mailbox, stamp placed firmly on with more than a little bit of optimistic hope, believing absolutely in fate to have it find its way.

( Letter to Morgan le Fay )