A/N: I mentioned this character briefly in my oneshot, Cripple. Once I gave her a name, she began to grow her own personality and story, and finally demanded to have at least a oneshot to herself. You may see more of her in the future.
It smelled funny there.
As the carriage tumbled over the rutty dirt road, the window let in a breeze that ticked my face. It brought strange smells with it, sweet and overwhelming. I supposed they might come from the many flowers and plants that covered the hills we passed. I had never seen so much green in my life. I was from the rocky north, where plants were sparse and unfragrant. Here, the green hurt my eyes.
I could hear my father and my cousin talking from the other side of the carriage. They spoke of climate, politics, legislation, and other things they thought I couldn't understand. I listened while I looked out the window. Eventually, their conversation turned to our destination.
"I didn't realize it'd be this far south," Duncan said.
"It's just where I showed you on the map," My father told him, "though the journey may feel longer than that." My cousin nodded back at him and looked out the other window. Like me, he had never been in such rich country. It was quiet for a few minutes. I could hear swallows. Then, Duncan asked my father quietly,
"Do you think she'll be able to… you know, handle it?" He was referring to me. I pretended not to notice, because they assumed I wasn't listening anyway.
"She'll have to," father said, "She hasn't got much of a choice."
Which, I knew, really meant that father didn't want to have a choice. There were a myriad of other options open to me, but father had decided upon the one most preferable to him, and then told himself and us all that it was the only option. After months of it, even he believed his own lie.
Still, I didn't know exactly what course of action my father had decided to take. I knew I was being sent away, to somewhere in the south, but I wasn't sure what I was going to do once I got there. Father never told me these things. He didn't think I would understand.
In fact, I understood most, if not more about things than father himself did, but he didn't know that. I had never bothered trying to explain that to him. He wouldn't have understood what I said. Father was far too set in his ignorant ways to listen to anyone but himself, and he'd been telling himself since the day I was born that daughters weren't worth his time.
We weren't royalty, by any means, but father owned enough land to make him a rich, powerful lord in our region. He'd married my mother with the craving for a son, an heir. He'd gotten me instead. The two following times my mother conceived, the child didn't live more than a day. She'd died giving birth to the second, which would have been my younger sister. I was six when my mother died. I was fifteen, now.
In those nine years after my mother passed away, my father made no attempt to remarry and made every attempt to pretend I didn't exist. He put on a show for the court, of course. He gave me expensive gifts and put me in the prettiest dresses, sat beside me at state dinners and called me loved. It didn't change the fact that he was sitting across the carriage talking about me as though I wasn't there.
"I've been told it's the best place for her, now. She can't stay in Dunfold anymore. She needs to be with her kind."
My kind. It was a term I was still getting used to. All my life, 'my kind' had been the inhabitance of Dunfold, up in the north in our stone fortress, surrounded by fields of thick-furred cattle and rocky cliffs. None of the people in Dunfold, I thought, could ever be less like me. And yet, they were 'my kind'. My kin. That had changed four months ago.
I wondered if Duncan was afraid of me, now. Father wasn't. He seemed embarrassed, but not afraid. I didn't know how to control it. It just happened, sometimes. It didn't scare me, but other people watched me with caution. I didn't pay much attention to them. I never had. The only company I'd ever really had was my own, and so I would experiment with my newfound magic by myself, and not heed the suspicions of others.
"Are there any of… her kind, where we're going?" Duncan liked asking stupid questions.
"From what I hear, yes. They've a Court Sorcerer in Camelot – Lord Emrys."
Neither father nor Duncan noticed when I stiffened. From the way they spoke, I realized that they didn't know who Emrys was – but I had read the old texts, and had learned that name from the druids. I'd heard rumors floating around that he had appeared, but I didn't know where. Now, I did. Lord Emrys, one of 'my kind', in Camelot, where I was headed.
I looked out the window again, and wondered if Emrys would smell as strange as the flowers of his homeland.
Camelot was a busy place. It was too cold in Dunfold for the peasants to hold street markets often, but here it seemed to be an everyday event. The buzz of the crowd confused my hearing as we walked toward the castle (our carriage was too bulky to ride through the streets) under the escort of Camelot's knights. I'd seen that their emblem was a dragon. I wondered if they actually had any real dragons in Camelot.
The castle was confusing. Back home, the Dun itself was a block of stone with a wall around it, a simple square keep surrounded by battlements. Here, there were towers and walkways and staircases and turrets. I wondered if the soldiers would get lost during a siege. I thought about commenting on this to father, but didn't. He didn't think I understood how sieges worked.
We went inside to a great hall with high ceilings and windows. It was empty save for two chairs at the front, and I realized it was the throne room. The king must've been busy. One of the knights left to go fetch him.
After a while, a man came in. He walked confidently enough to be a king, and smiled at my father easily enough to be his equal, but everything else about him seemed utterly unkingly. He was scruffy, with a half-crumpled collar, badly worn robes, and ears that stuck out off the side of his head comically. I inspected his muddy boots as my father spoke with him. The man, who had been smiling, began to frown in concentration. He cast a glance at me, and there was a type of recognition in his look that I never got from father or Duncan – this man actually saw me.
My father looked at me as well, but differently, as if I were a thing, a dog or a nice horse to be sold. He took the man a little further away and began talking again. I couldn't hear them, and thought it would be rude to try and eavesdrop. Still, I could tell from their body language that they were negotiating something. For a moment, I thought that father might have been attempting to arrange a marriage for me. I thought about asking Duncan, who stood nearby, but stopped myself. They didn't know that I understood how that worked, either. I grimaced in disgust and hoped that their conversation wasn't actually over marriage. The man seemed nice, in a certain way, but it didn't change the fact that I didn' t know him, not to mention that he looked ridiculous.
Eventually, they came back over to me, and I stiffened, fearing the worst. The man whom father had been talking came first up to me.
"Lady Ilenna," he greeted. I blinked at him. My father looked over the man's shoulder at me with annoyance. The man seemed unfazed. "Do you know who I am?" He asked, not unkind.
"No," I said. He almost looked pleased.
"I'm Merlin," he grinned at me, and for whatever reason, although the urge nearly never overcame me, I almost smiled back. "Your father tells me that you have magic."
"I do. Is that a problem?"
As father's annoyance clearly grew, the man only smiled wider. "None whatever. Do you know, I have magic as well." This time, I didn't say anything. I couldn't. I didn't know what to say – I'd never met anyone else with magic before. He held out a hand and whispered something, and a little flame appeared in his hand. He let me watch it for a moment, then held out his flame to me.
I looked at it, then at him, then at it again. Without a word, he took my hand and let the coal-less fire fall into my own hand. It stayed and burned there, and I could feel something deep inside of me fueling the fire. I lost grasp of it, and the flame dissolved. My hadn't wasn't burned at all. I looked up at the man.
"I can teach you far more than that, if you like."
I blinked. Teach me?
"Ilenna, would you want to be my apprentice?" For some reason, even though Duncan and my father were there, I felt as though the man was, in fact, talking to me, and no one else. I looked him in the eye, and nodded.
I didn't know that it was the nod that would change my life forever, but somehow, this man did.
He smiled.