Sword in the Stars Page 16
“When we portal back—” Lam stopped abruptly as Val shot them a dirty look. And then everyone looked at Merlin and away in quick succession. Oh, they didn’t want to even think about going home because they knew what it would currently cost Merlin.
Ouch.
Val cleared his throat, practical to the last. “Gwen, if you don’t believe there’s a way we can stop this, what can we do?”
“I don’t know,” Gwen said. “I already lost my planet. My crown. Any shred of respect that came from living in a time when women are treated equally. I thought that keeping the baby safe from Mercer would be worth all of this. Now… now all I want is five minutes before I have to go back to pretending the best parts of my life don’t even exist.”
Ari moved in, putting her arms around Gwen. She murmured into the queen’s ear, smoothed her hair, turning this into a private moment. Gwen rested her head on Ari’s shoulder, then looked up at her with shimmering eyes. There was so much love between them, so much thwarted happiness.
“Kiss her, for gods’ sake!” Merlin shouted, then clapped a hand over his mouth. Apparently he’d reached the part of being eleven where he blurted out things he was supposed to chant uselessly in his head.
Gwen and Ari broke apart to stare at him.
Merlin—who knew far too much about holding back from a perfectly good love story—wanted to sit them down and give them a stern talking-to. Would Ari take relationship advice from an eleven-year-old? Probably not, and yet he had plenty to give.
It’s not as if Gwen and Ari were aging in opposite directions. They were at the mercy of a political marriage. They were two girls who loved each other in a vicious time. Those were barriers that no love story should have to overcome, and yet Merlin knew Gwen and Ari could. He believed in them as much as he’d ever believed in Arthur, or Camelot, or the magic at his fingertips.
Ari just quietly kissed Gwen’s shoulder, as if that was the most they could have. Maybe hoping for more had finally started to hurt. Maybe being ripped apart from each other so many times had torn something inside. The cycle had stopped them far better than Arthur ever could. Which meant that those tears could be traced directly back to the Lady of the Lake. When he finally broke this fucking cycle, Nin had a great deal of misery to answer for.
A giggle erupted from Merlin.
Val and Lam shot him genetically identical looks of disapproval.
“Fucking cycle,” Merlin whispered—and giggled again.
Oh, this was far too much.
Nin was going down.
An hour later, Merlin was an owl. A baby owl, to be specific.
His feathers puffed out, beady eyes trained on Old Merlin.
“I thought that if I shifted you out of human form, the curse might lose its hold,” the old mage said, by way of explanation. “But you’re just as young as a bird as you were as a human.”
“You think?” Merlin asked. It came out as a series of pitiful, high-pitched screeches.
“He still doesn’t know you two are the same person, does he?” came a rich, hooting voice. Merlin turned to find Archimedes glaring at him. He’d flown over from his perch just to make Merlin’s life worse.
“How did you figure it out, if you’re so smart?” Merlin asked.
Archimedes shrugged with his entire rich, brown-black body. “You’re both ridiculous, and you smell the same.”
Merlin hopped away from the miserable old bird—leaping off the high table and finding, with a series of desperate flaps, that he couldn’t fly.
He hit the floor, stunned but unsurprised.
Of course he couldn’t fly.
He was a mere chick.
Old Merlin picked him up, his tiny owl body encompassed by the hard ridges of those ancient, cold hands. Did the vile old mage ever trim his nails? They were unevenly long, stained various colors by magical concoctions.
Merlin gratefully found himself growing, unfolding back into his eleven-year-old body, then hopping into his clothes. He bent over awkwardly as he slid his pants into place. For some reason, the concept of being naked in front of his old self was more painful than a time paradox.
“All right, carbuncle,” Old Merlin said, not paying a speck of attention to the wretched state of his apprentice. He was too wrapped up in magic. He turned to a dusty red cloth that he’d hung over a portion of the tower, pulling it down with a magical flourish. Behind it was a free-standing copper tub, and a series of buckets flying in through the tower window. “I have another idea. This one took a bit of preparation, but perhaps it will reveal the truth of your condition.”
A magical flying bucket tipped over, water hitting the copper tub with a gut-sloshing sound.
“What is this?” Merlin asked. “You’re going to… bathe me? You’re the one who needs a serious drubbing!”
Old Merlin gave him a thunderous glare.
His newly loosened tongue was going to get him killed if he wasn’t careful.
“This water is from the lake near Avalon,” the old mage said. “It has curious time-related properties, which might help us determine what ails you. It seems the way you experience time has been reversed by some great act of magic.” Old Merlin tested the water with his hand, like a nervous parent making sure it wasn’t too hot for their precious child. But Merlin was nothing of the sort. He was an experiment, and he could feel his old self getting testy the farther they went without making any real breakthroughs.
The old man dodged a flying bucket, frowning back at Merlin. “It would help to know your lineage, in the event that one or both of your parents has some kind of time magic. You don’t have even the smallest hint as to how you ended up this way?”
A swallow seized up in his throat.
Merlin thought of the accusations that Val had listed in his driest tone: all the ways that he was like Nin. Their caves, their portals. In the midst of bargaining, she had even offered to reveal the identity of his parents. Had she planned to admit that she was his long-lost mother? A horrific ta-da moment?
“I have no idea how I got like this,” he said weakly.
“Then it’s into the tub,” Old Merlin said, cracking his knuckles.
Merlin couldn’t imagine undressing again, so with his robes still on he stepped into the waters of time, daintily. He didn’t want anything to do with them. These were Nin’s waters, after all.
She was the problem to be solved. The callous enemy to be stopped. The mother of the cycle. Definitely not his mother.
The moment that Merlin had settled against the bumpy copper bottom of the tub, Old Merlin set a palm to his skull and pushed him under the water. The air rushed out of his nose, hard. His ears filled with the strange, stopped-up pressure of being underwater. Beyond that, he heard a faint, sweet laugh.
“You’re finally trying to set yourself forward,” Nin said, her warm voice suffusing the water. “Excellent.”
“Aren’t you… supposed to… thwart me?” Merlin asked, the words mere shapeless bubbles.
Merlin came up spluttering, shaking.
“Once more, carbuncle!” Old Merlin shouted, pushing him back down.
Merlin’s knees jackknifed, folding up somewhere near his nose. His robes fluttered, heavy with water. “You think I’m your enemy?” Nin asked softly as his air slipped away, and everything went darker than the void of space. “You know that’s not true. We’ve always been tied to each other.”
“No,” Merlin said, thrashing.
This couldn’t be the answer. He couldn’t come all the way back here only to find out that he was the son of the vicious magical entity who’d ruined his entire life.
Old Merlin let him up for just a breath. He yowled like a cat. And then—back down, his head aching where Old Merlin pressed.
The light that Merlin associated with Nin, golden and wondrous, lit the tub, and he swore he felt her fingers on his chin. Her kiss on his cheek. Was she trying to tell him that she really was his mother? Or was she messing with him, yet again?
Merlin came back up once more.
“Sparks!” he cried, kicking and grabbing for the edges of the tub.
“What about sparks?” Old Merlin asked, more interrogation.
Merlin leaped out of the tub while he had the chance, pacing the tower and dripping all over the stones. “The magical sparks you make, with your fingers.” Merlin had to find some way to explain his idea to Old Merlin, who lived in a time well before modern physics. They didn’t even know the laws of thermodynamics yet. “Think of it this way. Heat is what drives time forward. Every time it’s released it creates a past and a future—an event that cannot be reversed. What is sparked cannot be unsparked. Once heat is released, time flows onward from there.”
No turning back.
“You’re brighter than you look, carbuncle,” Old Merlin said.
Merlin shivered, twisting out of his robes. He didn’t know if a compliment from Old Merlin was a badge of honor or a mark of shame.
There were other, deeper fears, too. Nin had pushed him to this revelation with her carefully chosen words. Why? Was she the kind of parent who gave him gifts and punished him on an epic scale? It hardly mattered now. Nothing could change the bedrock fact that Merlin couldn’t break Nin’s cycle until he was able to use his magic fully, and without fear of skipping backward over another birthday.
“Hit me with enough sparks to put the stars to shame,” Merlin said, tilting his chin up at what felt like a brave angle.
“All right, then,” Old Merlin said, pulling up his sleeves as though he relished the challenge. “… and if you’re wrong, and you end up nothing but a burnt stick of an apprentice?”
“I accept that risk,” Merlin said, taking a deep breath and hoarding it in his lungs.
Old Merlin sang in his harsh tenor, a Welsh song that Merlin didn’t remember strictly, and yet the sound of it sank deep into his bones. The old mage’s hands lit with a hundred points of light, and then they connected, a fireball headed straight for his chest.
And then there were steps on the stairs, and a voice so terrified it ripped a hole through the singing.
“Merlin!” Arthur cried.
“Yes?” they both responded, swiveling to face him. The fireball missed, crashing into a cupboard of magical ingredients and setting it on fire. Smoke poured out in several unexpected colors.
“Merlin, I need your help,” Arthur said as the old mage quenched the fire with a quick counterspell. “Gweneviere has been taken!”
“Gwen?” Merlin cried.
“They raided her chambers,” Arthur said. “I knew we should be sleeping together so I might defend her.” Merlin tried not to scoff. Arthur’s intentions were in the right place, but Jordan was the one who would have stopped any threat to Gwen—and they’d lost the black knight to the future.
“These villains left a message,” Arthur said, holding up the torn scrap of a note. Merlin snatched at it, but Old Merlin got there first.
“Curious that such crude thieves would know how to write,” Old Merlin said. “They must have employed someone to do this.” Merlin tried to catch a glimpse of the rag that had been written on, but Old Merlin put it right under his nose, squinting and even sniffing. “I can use this to find where she’s gone…” Arthur’s expression tilted toward hope. “But only if you promise not to go after her yourself.”
“I must,” Arthur said. “I no longer ask my knights to do the hardest work in this kingdom without putting myself in the same danger. There is no honor in such inequality.” Merlin could hear the echoes of Gwen and Ari in those words. He would have been proud of Arthur’s evolution if there had been room in his body for anything other than fear.
“This is undoubtedly a trap to draw you in, Arthur,” Old Merlin said. “If you go, your reign will end before your round table is given a chance to thrive. Don’t give these petty villains what they’re after. Send someone who wishes to save Gweneviere as much as you do.”
“Lancelot,” Merlin and his old self chorused.
They’d come up with the same answer to the equation, but they’d done different work to get there. Merlin wanted to send Ari because she would never stop until Gwen was safe. Old Merlin didn’t mind tossing Lancelot straight into the maw of danger.
“Fine,” Arthur said, with an even-dealing tone that matched the new maturity the chalice had brought. “But I have a condition of my own. This is the last time you dictate my actions.”
Old Merlin turned away from Arthur, perhaps hiding the wince of hurt that Merlin caught. “We are in agreement.”
He tossed the ransom note into a mortar and pestle, grinding it with a few black sprinkles from one of his jars. The note crumbled into a dark dust before Merlin had a chance to see it. Old Merlin ran his finger through the gritty coating on the bowl, touching it to his tongue. He closed his eyes and meditated on whatever he’d tasted before snapping them back open. Grabbing up an old map, he plopped a withered finger down on a hill in the middle of nowhere.
Arthur took the map and ran, shouting thanks over his shoulder.
“No need to thank me,” Old Merlin said darkly as Arthur disappeared down the stairs, no doubt to fetch Lancelot.
Merlin tried to force himself back to a state resembling calm, but then he saw the thorny delight on Old Merlin’s face. “This is our opportunity, carbuncle. We know where Gweneviere is, and we can rid the kingdom of all threats before she returns to Camelot.”
“We… can do what?” Merlin asked.
He got the sense that the horrors were only about to deepen as Old Merlin pulled open a drawer in one of his magical inventory cupboards.
“I’ve been conducting an augury,” he said, waving Merlin forward. He found three birds with their wings pinned to the wood, stomachs slit open. Their innards had been taken out and scattered in random-looking patterns.
Not just any birds. Baby birds.
Merlin wanted to vomit. Middle Ages magic was disgusting. He was disgusting.
Old Merlin pointed at the organs. “The signs point to a baby that will grow up to be Arthur’s great downfall.”
“Not Gwen’s baby!” Merlin shouted before he could stop himself.
Old Merlin folded his hands over his stomach as if that settled things. “If there was a sliver of a question that the queen carried another man’s child, you’ve just eclipsed it. Thank you, carbuncle.”
Merlin crouched down, head in his hands, stomach suddenly tight. He’d made it worse. He was always making things worse. He was Arthur’s downfall.
“What are you going to do?” he asked, dreading the answer more than Nin’s voice.
“Stealing children is one of my specialties,” Old Merlin said with a dry, horrible twist of humor. He’d taken Arthur—but that was to save him. That was an act of mercy. Merlin had been telling himself for centuries that he’d done a good thing on that day he found a squalling infant in the fields.
This was different. Dark and unrepentant. “You can’t just grab a baby and toss it wherever you please.”
Old Merlin huffed dryly, dismissing the whole argument. “I’ll kill the child if I must. Whatever must be done to protect Arthur.”
Merlin closed his eyes against the words, but they were still true in the dark. His old self didn’t believe in any goodness but Arthur’s. Still, if Merlin needed a sign that he was no longer this horrible wretch, he had it. He would never, ever think of killing a child, even if he believed it would save Ari someday.
“We’re not the same person,” Merlin whispered, a revelation that hit him with all the subtlety of a power cord. “We’re not.”
He raised his hands, and the element of surprise gave him a slight edge. Old Merlin had never seen his apprentice work magic; Merlin had been trying to keep his identity secret. But now kee
ping Gwen and the baby safe from this monster was all that mattered. Merlin didn’t need to make peace with his past. He needed to stop the person he used to be from harming his future. He released a pent-up burst of magic at the exact moment that Old Merlin flicked his fingers.
Merlin felt every muscle in his body go stiff. His mouth was dry, propped open; his eyes couldn’t force a blink. Across from him, Old Merlin had frozen as well, down to the wispiest hairs on his beard.
They were in a stand-off, and whoever managed to break it first would have a head start in the battle over Gwen’s baby.
Ari tore across the landscape, swearing and steering her horse around the worst of the overgrown wood. The sunset dropped an ominous orange light on almost everything, suiting Ari’s fraught imagination a little too nicely.
Gwen kidnapped.
By who? And for what purpose except to hurt the young king? Would they realize that Gwen was pregnant? What if the baby was harmed? Ari cursed the needs of the Arthurian canon. No wonder Jordan hadn’t let Gwen out of her sight.
“You wouldn’t be happy with me now, black knight,” Ari muttered. She almost smiled, thinking of Jordan pushing her out of the way, beating Lancelot to the place where Gwen was being held captive. Ari tried to focus on the other part of the story she’d read in the Arthurian notes—that Lancelot saved Gweneviere, and that they returned newly inseparable—but the sweetness didn’t match the reality. And some of those legends bore whispers of terrible things done to Gweneviere by her captors.
Ari broke out of the edge of the wood, eyeing a thoroughly deforested landscape. It was somewhat reminiscent of Mercer’s leveling of Old Earth, down to the bedrock. Here the trees had been stolen, used for timber or fire, and the ground had turned to slipping soil. In the far distance, upon a worn mound, a tower stood. Dismal and crooked—that had to be the bald spot Arthur had pointed to on the roughly drawn map.
She kicked her horse into a gallop, racing up the landscape, leaning forward to push the stallion when the terrain became muddy and steep. Finally, at the base of the forgotten tower, she jumped down and lashed her horse to a stone marker.