The Watchtower

apology suffice?
    It did. I saw it first in her eyes—recognition, forgiveness … and then a love so startling in its clarity that the whole grove filled with light. She embraced him, water swirling into water, two streams once divided racing to join one another again. As they merged, I felt my own face grow wet, but then as they began to sink, a fountain in reverse, I collected myself.
    “Wait! You haven’t told me where I’m supposed to go next.”
    “I should think it would be obvious,” Melusine’s voice rilled in the air, its timbre already merging with the rush of the Vonne far below us. “The place where my sister Morgane dwells is protected by an enchanted forest which you have to pass through first. Val sans Retour, they call it. The Valley of No Return.”

20
    Effigy in Stone
    Of all the ways I’d imagined embarking for the Summer Country, speeding down the E50 at 140 kilometers per hour in a Peugeot had not been one of them. But there I was, strapped into the passenger seat, trying not to squeal every time Octavia La Pieuvre used one of her hands to peel a hard-boiled egg or reach in the backseat for the map. She still had two hands on the wheel, after all, and seemed to be an expert driver.
    “I drove an ambulance in both World Wars,” she said when I complimented her. “Nothing like dodging exploding artillery shells to hone one’s reflexes. This”—she gestured at the straight highway running between flat fields—“is child’s play. I want to get to the hotel in Paimpont before dark so we can both get a good night’s sleep. We’ll need it tomorrow.”
    When I’d related to her that Melusine had said we had to go to the Val sans Retour, her pearly skin had turned ashen gray, but she wouldn’t tell me why the place frightened her. I’d looked it up on the Internet and found out that the Val sans Retour in the forest of Brocéliande, the modern forest of Paimpont, was mentioned in Arthurian legend as the place where the enchantress Morgan le Fay had trapped her faithless lovers. Was it just a coincidence, I wondered, that Melusine had said her sister’s name was Morgane?
    “This creature below the lake, Mor—”
    All of Octavia’s hands flew up in the air and the car swerved momentarily into the next lane. “We don’t speak of the Watchtower who betrayed humanity.”
    I clucked my tongue impatiently. “We’re on our way to see her and ask her favors. I should think saying her name was the least of our problems.”
    Octavia’s hands resettled back on the steering wheel, but she still looked inky.
    “And besides,” I added. “It’s not like I’ve never heard the name before. Morgan le Fay, half sister of Arthur, sorceress, is pretty famous. Is this woman under the lake the same person?”
    Octavia sighed, but didn’t answer. She tilted the rearview mirror with one hand and tisked at the inky flush on her face. Only when she had withdrawn a seashell-shaped compact from her purse, administered powder to her face, and clicked shut the compact with a decisive snap did she answer my question.
    “Morgan le Fay,” she declaimed loudly, as if inviting the universe to smite her, “Morrigan, Modron, Muirgen … her names are legion. She is the oldest of the four Watchtowers and the most … elusive. She is the gentle queen who escorts Arthur to Avalon, but also the enchantress who ensnares men in the Valley of No Return. She is Morrigan, the crow queen of war and destruction, and Modron, goddess of fertility and the harvest. She ruled over death and birth and could grant immortality to humans and mortality to the fey. They say she loved humanity best of all, but when her sister Maeve was betrayed and killed by a man, she determined to destroy the whole race. Her sisters Marguerite and Melusine tricked her into the pool at the center of the forest of Brocéliande and trapped her there using her own snares and spells.”
    “The forest of Brocéliande? Okay, here’s something I don’t get. If you already knew that Morgane was trapped in a lake in the forest of Brocéliande, and you know that Brocéliande is the modern-day Paimpont, then why couldn’t you just go to Paimpont, find the lake, and ask Morgane to make you mortal? Why did you need me? And why did I have to sit in a church in Paris for a week and then go to Fontainebleau and Lusignan?”
    “The mythical forest of Brocéliande is not a place of this world. It can’t be found on a map of France. You can’t