Out of doors, the wind blew wild across a frozen landscape, the birch and alder with branches bare and quaking against the gale, below them, drifts upon drifts of snow, a world etched in white and silver, stinging with penetrating cold.
Sighting ghosts of her breath in the air, Morgana hurried onward into the winter wood, wrapping her wolf fur tighter about her, whispering words of prayer that the Cailleach spare she and her sister on this the longest night of the year before the sun’s rebirth come the dawn.
It had been an uncharacteristically cold winter this season for Camelot, with days of sleet and snow, as opposed to the onslaught of rain, and a dampness that set into the bones, which only a warm fire burning in the hearth of the ramshackle hovel both she and Morgause occupied could possibly offset.
It was for that very reason, she had headed deep into the forest, in search of wood to stoke that very fire, that must never go out for her ailing sister’s sake, or so Morgana ruminated in her desperation to see Morgause restored to her former health the summer past when they, the two of them in their prime, had succeeded in usurping the throne from her tyrannous father and ruling the kingdom for a smattering of days before everything—their dreams, their cause—came crashing down asunder, and Morgause had nearly died.
Was dying, Morgana reflected as she collected her bundle of wood, and there was nothing she could do to stop the slow encroach of death, so akin to the onslaught of winter when it comes. As a child, she had seen this season as a time of joy, a festivity of light in the months of darkness, as they welcomed the solstice and the newborn sun with drink and merriment and candles in every window. Now though, the beeswax tapers she took for granted back in Camelot were few to come by and ever precious in the hovel of their making, and there was little to revel about; they had lost the battle, though the war still raged on, howling like the wind without.
Nothing she could do except on this night forage the wood for a charm to safeguard the life remaining in Morgause’s body. She thought to do so by hanging a branch of evergreen upon the few windows and single door, the entry points to the hovel, a means in the days of the Old Religion to ward off evil and illness.
Thus, as she approached the heart of the wood, sighting with awe the towering stature of the pine, and slipping her boline out of her skirt, she sliced open a nick upon her palm, giving to the tree her blood, as she intended to retrieve from the tree its essence in return; in such a manner, she collected its sacred branches, breathing in their earthly scent with relish, and then, her task done, turned toward the wind and home.