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It smells, in the stables. That’s the thing that really sticks out. It smells, and the smell sinks into Merlin’s cloths, deep enough that he can’t remove it, like a pollution or a brand. This is where he’s stuck, it seems to say. This is where Arthur left him, where Arthur banished him.
That’s not quite right, of course. Arthur banished him from the kingdom, or his sight; it was Merlin’s choice not to go. To stay and rake dung and straw from packhorses’ stables, to be the lowest of the low. To stay and protect Arthur, or the dream of Arthur, which is all the keeps him going. His lovely golden dream of Arthur, so far removed from the arrogant prince who sent him away. That, and anger, and stubborn pride.
Yet still he stays, beds down in the stinking straw, takes the abuse poured upon him when he errs, scrubs and carries and polishes until his hands are scalded red as the Pendragon crest. Look at me, he wants to yell up at the castle walls sometimes, look at me toiling here. Look at what I can do without magic. Look at who I am when am I only what you want me to be.
---
Arthur knows Merlin hasn’t left. He catches sight of him, sometimes, as he walks through the courtyards, a flash of black hair or red scarf. Or maybe most of those are hallucinations, his mind throwing up in front of his eyes what he least wants to see. Or maybe most wants to see. He’s not sure of the difference anymore.
He’s still angry. No, angry is too soft a word. He is furious, with the heavy, blinding Pendragon rage, rage that has started genocides and burned castles. It is the rage with which his ancestors conquered this country, the rage that let them defend it from all comers.
He can do nothing with his rage. He can only look away from the glimpses of Merlin, accept the willing, competent service of his new manservant, and remember the lies. The lies and the magic.
---
Merlin never realized how much he used magic until he stops. Little things, little chores, to ease his way. To cushion his knees, to heal his callouses. It’s hard, to keep it locked away. Painfully hard, to keep it curled inside of him, like furnace held deep within. Yet still,
No, he thinks, when he struggles beneath a too-large bale of hay.
No, he thinks, as the stablemaster’s vitriol lashes out at him for a broken pot.
No, he thinks, as he dives out of the way of a bucking horse and its hooves smash down inches from his ear.
Biting back magic hurts, like bending a joint too far the wrong way. But he does it. He will show Arthur that magic is not all there is of him, that the sorcerer and the man are not the same.
For the first time since coming to Camelot, his hands feel like servant’s hands.
---
Merlin’s loss is a small, niggling thing, one that Arthur doesn’t notice until he thinks about it, but is always present in the back of his mind. George is an impeccable servant, everything a prince could ask for—but when Arthur looks to his side, expecting to find sympathetic laughter or an amusing face or even simple, wise advice, he finds only emptiness. When he holds up his goblet at a banquet, there are no words dropped into his ear to alleviate the boredom. When he sits working in his room in the evening, there is no soft song of a sharpening sword, easy and quiet and domestic, a home like he had never had before.
But none of that had been real, he reminds himself. Sorcerer’s tricks, all of it. The product of magic, which had probably bewitched him. Magic brought nothing but evil, he knows that deep in his bones, in his father’s blood. And so Merlin—bumbling, impudent, wise Merlin, who had snuck into Arthur’s heart without him looking—must be evil too.
He should report that to his father, Arthur knows. Should report the sorcerer, the evil, in their midst.
He does not.
He doesn’t think, even now, he could watch Merlin burn.
---
The stables in which Merlin works are directly on the route to and from the tavern, so he is never surprised by raucous laughter or loud voices walking late at nights. He’s learned to tune it out, in the months he’s spent in the straw. Knights, to the lower servants, are like storms. Most of the time you can ignore them, but occasionally they come, without warning, and the only thing you can do is to keep your head down and hope it passes you by.
This night, however, they do not pass him by. He is sitting in an empty stall, polishing a harness that he had forgotten during the day, when they burst in, a crowd of red and gold and harsh, cold smiles.
“Boy,” one cries, a new one, for Merlin does not know his name. “Come out here. We want some horses.”
Merlin sighs and puts down the harness, but he has learned obedience in the muck if nothing else. He goes, and leans against the stable door. “These horses aren’t for riding.”
“Oh, and you’d know?” another one demands on a laugh. They smell like ale and stale sweat, so much that it overpowers even the baseline stench of the horses. “What do you know, this boy’s got a mouth on him.”
“That he does,” another leers, and Merlin shrinks back almost instinctively, pulling his magic in. No. He does not need it. He won’t need it. “What do you say, pretty boy, want to make some extra coin?”
Merlin breathes, in and out, and settles the flow beneath his skin. “Not particularly, no.”
“Oh really,” the man slinks forward to the hoots of his comrades. “Well I’m afraid that as a knight, I have the power to take anything I want from His Majesty’s stables. Including—” he reaches out, grabs, and he’s quick if nothing else so he gets a hold of Merlin’s arm, and his grip is like hot iron. “You.”
Merlin tugs. “I am a member of the prince’s household—”
“Not anymore, boy,” the knight spits, and in the shadows he looks like nothing more than the form of a knight, cloak and mail and violent grin. “Prince kicked you out, didn’t he? Out all alone. Ripe for the picking,” he adds, and gets more laughter.
Merlin swallows. “I’m still—”
“You aren’t nothing, boy,” The knight says, and shoves him to the floor.
He lands in straw, in the stink of it, and can only scrabble backwards as the knight advances, hand on his belt as he starts to undo the laces. There are no weapons here, nothing to fight with, nothing except the magic and he swore to Arthur and himself he wouldn’t—and then the knight is above him, big hands with sword callouses sliding onto his hips, and he closes his eyes and curls in on himself as best he can while hands are tugging at his clothes and raking into his skin and this can’t be happening, he had been warned, of course, but Arthur had always kept him safe from this before. His breeches are around his ankles and those hands turn him over so he breathes in dung and rot, and he can feel the tears building at the corners of his eyes and—
No, a voice says, deep within him, that sounds almost like his mother. There is always a way to fight.
No, another voice adds, that almost sounds like Arthur. He would die for Arthur, but not this. This is not what destiny demands.
No, and the third voice sounds like the dragon’s roar echoing through him, like the flow of magic in his veins held back too long. He is still himself. All of himself.
He opens his eyes, and they are golden.
---
The explosion sounds like it comes from the courtyard, and the flash of light certainly does, so Arthur is tumbling out of bed and dashing down the stairs before he’s even fully awake. He meets Leon as the other knight stumbles into the hall, pulling his cloak on as he goes.
“Do you know,” Arthur asks, but Leon just shakes his head and paces the prince as they sprint towards the noise. Magic, Arthur thinks, as rage grows within him. Merlin.
There’s a crowd already gathered when Leon and Arthur reach the stables, but no one seems willing to get closer. Arthur growls and shoves his way through the circle—and then he stops. Because the remains of the stable—or are they remains, they are on fire but not, and the horses are rearing and neighing and their hooves make a counterpoint to the murmur of the crowd and the crackle of flames, but they all seem safe, unharmed—are lit gold, gold as the sun, as the dragon on the royal crest.
Someone is backing out of that gold—a knight, Arthur notes. Sir Lionel. He is holding up his breeches with one hand, his cock still hanging loosely. A terrible suspicion begins to form, and these are the stables where Merlin works. Rage builds in Arthur, and he’s not sure where it’s targeted. “I didn’t know,” Lionel gasps, eyes wide with fear. “I didn’t—I wouldn‘t—”
And then Arthur forgets about him, because out of the light, or maybe from it, or maybe simply he is it, walks Merlin. His shirt is ripped open; his breeches loose around his hips, and his eyes—his eyes are as golden as the light, terrible and inhuman. He says some words, and Lionel is slammed into the wall, unconscious. Merlin doesn’t even smile.
Instead, he looks right at Arthur, bright against the darkness of the sky, a shining beacon in the night. Arthur doesn’t back away, although he wants to. He hadn’t imagined Merlin was this powerful, could be like this, terrible and glorious and beautiful like the dragon had been beautiful. His hands curl into fists, as if his nails could cut through metal into his skin, for the lies and the beauty and the man now limp against the stable wall.
“Are you happy now, my Lord?” Merlin asks, and it rumbles through him like a thousand people are asking it together. “Finally, you see me for the sorcerer I am.” He raises his hand, and Lionel, who had been struggling back into consciousness, flies the other way, into another wall.
“Merlin—” Arthur snaps, and ignores the gasps from behind him, from those who had not yet realized that the figure in front of them was kind, bumbling Merlin. They should see, now. See the danger of a sorcerer. Or the danger of ignobility. Then he looks, sees the fire, and tries to calm his tone, as if talking down a wild animal, “I—”
“So this is your great dream,” Merlin cuts him off as if he hadn’t heard him speak, “Knights taking what they want from servants. The high abusing the low. The strong taking from the weak. A brilliant dream, Arthur.” And the sarcasm is all Merlin, that bite of guilt like a knife to the gut.
“I didn’t—”
“You did, sire. You did. This is what you did. You are Camelot, and Camelot is you,” and he no longer speaks in the voice of an army but now the voice echoes with power, with something anyone but a Pendragon might call destiny. “And if this is your Camelot, what are you?”
Arthur doesn’t have an answer, but Merlin doesn’t seem to need one. Instead he tips back his head and screams, words like a rip in the sky. How had Arthur not seen this before, the side of Merlin where magic shines through him like it is skin and blood and muscles? This is not mere sorcery, it is something deeper, older, truer. Did Merlin hide it, or was Arthur simply too foolish to look?
There is silence, for a moment, as everyone waits to see what the sorcerer had wrought. Arthur considers ordering the attack, but he looks at Lionel, and waits, fingers tight around his sword.
Then comes the sound of flapping wings, sounds that had haunted Camelot’s dreams, and the screams begin.
Merlin says something else, waves his hand, and people are thrown back, clearing a space as the dragon soars into view, the dragon Arthur was supposed to have killed, and that was another lie and the lie, more than the dragon’s roar, sparks Arthur into action.
It screams, and Arthur cries to his knights to come, at arms, but before they can gather, form their block, the dragon lands beside Merlin, and swivels its head to look at him.
“I’m fine,” Merlin murmurs, almost too soft to hear, and runs a hand fondly over its flank, like he once had over Arthur’s mail. He mounts with ease, as if he spends all his days riding dragons, and for all Arthur knows he does.
Someone throws a spear. Merlin looks back, spits a word, and the spear falls to the ground. Merlin stays twisted, meets Arthur’s eyes. Arthur has never seen Merlin’s eyes like this, like molten gold. Arthur has never seen Merlin’s eyes so empty.
He smiles, almost, something sad and rueful in that gaze, and that look throws water over the fire of Arthur’s rage as it has so many times before, making him freeze. “I would have died for you,” he says, and it’s in Merlin’s voice again. “It was to be my destiny.”
Then the dragon leaps into the sky, and he is gone.
---
Killgarah flies, purposefully. Merlin doesn’t ask where they are going, doesn’t question anything. He simply goes, as he has to. Goes away, from Arthur and the stables and the stench. He breathes in the clean, fresh air of the skies, feels his magic twine around him and keep him warm and safe through the clouds. How could he have ever thought to fetter it, as if it were a sin? How could he have forgotten how it beats through his heart? He inhales magic and exhales it, and lets it blur the memory of rough hands and a knight’s red cloak.
When Killgarah finally lands, Merlin rolls off of him, hits the warm, wet grass. It tastes like the earth and growing things. The dragon nudges him, pushes him up and forward so he stumbles, mindless, into the lake.
It’s only when he’s clean, when he can no longer smell himself, that he curls into the warmth of Killgarah’s side and begins to sob.
---
Uther’s rage is immediate, swift, and targetless. Gaius is exempt because of too many years, too many secrets, so it is decided that he must have been tricked as well by the evil, conniving sorcerer who weaseled his way into the highest of confidences. Looking at the old man, at the way his shoulders slump and his eyebrows droop, Arthur knows otherwise. Gaius had known. Gaius had loved Merlin like a son, and now he is gone.
Arthur too, is above suspicion. His father even smiles at him, proud, for how he suspected something off and sent him out of the royal household. Arthur nods back. He sent him away, out of his protection. And look what happened.
A thorough investigation of the servants must be instigated, of course. Any one of them could be part of the conspiracy. At that, Gwen, standing in the back with a pitcher of wine, draws back, and her eyes widen with fear.
Not her, Arthur swears to himself, with a sudden burst of feeling out from under the numb. For Merlin and Morgana lost, for Lancelot and even for himself—not her. He will keep her safe. He has failed everyone else.
Uther continues talking, planning, raging. They need to find a witch hunter, a real one, and Arthur could almost laugh because Aredian had been right, hadn’t he. He had found all the sorcerers in Camelot.
It is into a lull, into Uther’s inhale, that Arthur speaks before he knows he means to. “What about Sir Lionel?”
Uther pulls back. Then he nods, thoughtfully. “I suppose he does deserve some compensation. Perhaps a few days off, to recover.”
“But Sire,” Arthur hears himself say, and then decides he means it. Decides it’s not just the Merlin-voice whispering in his ear. “He would have raped a servant.”
“A sorcerer,” Uther dismisses, with a wave of his hand, and his face is impassive as iron. “He probably provoked him. Or lied. Sir Lionel is from an old, noble family. They have served us well. There is no reason to suspect him.”
And that is that.
---
Merlin cries for a long time, wrapped in dragon-heat. After he cries, he sleeps. Then he wakes to cry again.
When he wakes for a third time, there are voices around him, soft and gentle. A hand reaches out to touch him—and his eyes fly open and magic rises in them, and he jerks back into Killgarah. He needs to get away needs to leave there’s danger here too.
The hand retreats, and it speaks as if to an animal gone feral, soothing and slow. “Do not fear, Emrys,” the Druid says, and his eyes are kind around his tattoos. “You have been grievous hurt. Let us help.”
Merlin cannot bring himself to care where he goes. He is gone from Camelot, gone from Arthur. Nowhere else matters. So he rises, bids farewell to Killgarah, and follows the Druid back to his camp.
---
Merlin is many things, and a liar is one of them. But still, Arthur cannot believe that he lied about this. Or maybe he has to be sure he did, because Arthur still cannot think of it without his fists clenching, and he cannot look at Sir Lionel without his hand tightening around his sword hilt. Merlin was a sorcerer and a liar and possibly a traitor, but he was Arthur’s, in a way no ever has been before or since, and there are things Arthur cannot let stand.
So he talks to Leon, and he talks to Gwen. He sends them out among the knights and servants. He talks to other stablehands and the carters who used his horses. He even steels himself and talks to Gaius, and takes the old man’s dead gaze as punishment for putting Merlin in harm’s way. Not that he was harmed.
When they gather again in his chambers, bring together the tales, the evidence is damning. It seems this is not the first time Sir Lionel decided he was owed anything he wanted, whether or not the servant wished to give it.
Lionel is from a good, old family. Arthur cannot bring him to the block as he would wish. But he is in charge of the knights and their postings, and he thinks, with a smile like Uther’s on his lips, that some time in the north, under Sir Bors, would be good for him. He will warn the other knight to keep an eye on him.
And maybe then he will be able to sleep at night, without Merlin’s accusing eyes haunting his dreams.
---
The Druids are a simple people, living off and through the land and magic. It’s not an easy life, but it’s a calm one, and it’s one in which Merlin can lose himself. They don’t ask questions, and they don’t demand explanations. They simply soothed his hurts, fed him oats and nuts and honey that could have come from Camelot itself, bathed him and let him sleep. Then when he was done sleeping, and began to wander around, aimless despite himself, they found tasks for him, things he could do with his hands and let his mind rest. He cannot think, not yet. There is too much roiling beneath the surface of his mind, and he is desperately afraid of what he will find there.
The Druids never touch him. He appreciates the tact, the small mercies.
So he lives, hand to mouth in the druids’ nomad way but content, and he breathes the clean, herb-scented air, and thinks that in another life he could have been happy as a druid.
---
Gwen is sitting in Arthur’s room after a long patrol. She leaps to her feet when he walks in, letting whatever she was holding drop the ground. “My lord!” she squeaks, and drops into a curtsey.
“Guinevere,” Arthur replies, and shakes away the lingering regret that it isn’t Merlin waiting for him, as he had so many times before. Merlin is gone. Merlin is a sorcerer. Doubly impossible.
When she doesn’t speak, just continues standing, watching him, he prompts her. “Did you want something…?”
“What? Oh. Yes. I mean, of course.” She swallows, then lifts her head, and Arthur remembers why he loved her. Then he wonders when that was in the past. Too much has happened since then, he decides in the instant before she speaks again. The dragon and Morgana and Lancelot and Merlin. Too much and too much guilt. “I wanted to ask you if you were truly going to protect the castle servants.”
There is something in Guinevere, as there always is, that makes him think before he speaks, to consider how much he means each word. He thinks of Merlin’s face before he flew away, of the anger the still burns in him, targetless but no less powerful for all that. He thinks of Gwen and his fierce vow to save her, and of George and all the other servants whose names he does not know. He thinks of Merlin’s taunts, about his shining dream, and thinks that Merlin always knows where to stab the knife.
“Yes,” he says at last. “Yes, I am.” There is no justice in a world where the strong take from the weak.
“Good,” she replies, and her approving smile feels almost like Merlin’s whenever Arthur made a decision he liked. “Then I want to help you.”
---
Three weeks into Merlin’s stay, he is sitting outside the deerhide tent the druids gifted him with, working on a basket, when a druid approaches him. He is old, though not yet frail; something in his wiry strength reminds Merlin of Gaius. This was the one who found him, Merlin realizes, though he had not known that before.
“Emrys,” the old man says, and nods with a certain degree of respect, though not the awe that others here look upon him with. Merlin always looks away from that awe. Being a servant, being overlooked, was always more to his liking. “You are healing.”
“Yes,” Merlin agrees, though he is still bleeding through his mind, like part of him has been ripped away, and looks down at the basket he has woven. “I am. Thank you.”
“That is good,” the man also looks at the basket. “Do you have plans?”
Merlin blinks, once, twice. He has not had plans for what seems like years. Or at least since Arthur dismissed him. Since he made his worst mistake. “No,” he admits. “I know I need to protect Arthur—that it’s my destiny—but…”
The old man is shaking his head. “You have heard of your destiny too long and too often, young one,” he says, rueful, “and too much of it has come from us. Your destiny is tied to Arthur’s, yes, even now—but remember, boy. It is still your own.”
He turns, starts to hobble away. For the first time in months, Merlin feels a stirring he recognizes as curiosity. “What’s your name?” he calls.
“I am Taliesin,” comes the reply, before the man turns around a tent.
---
That is not the last of the late night meetings between Gwen and Arthur. It is almost amusing, that they have more clandestine meetings now then when they were—whatever they were—but that is what happens. There’s not too much they can do, now; Arthur is prince but Uther is king, and as long as the king sees little wrong with the abuses then Arthur can only lead by example and by the force of his will.
The first time Arthur catches a baron with his arm on a serving girl and glares him away, Gwen puts her hand on his arm and smiles up at him, soft and sweet. “He’d be proud,” she murmurs, so the girl bobbing and curtseying her gratitude won’t hear.
Arthur shrugs off her hand, turns away from the girl. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he snaps, and strides off, right to the practice yard where he can swing at a few dummies. He’s doing this because it is right. The only thing it has to do with Merlin is that he regrets the harm that almost came to him because of Arthur’s neglect. Merlin is still a sorcerer, still a liar.
He sleeps soundly that night, and dreams of being wrapped in golden wings.
---
Merlin asks about the old man, when he next encounters someone who might be a leader—Merlin has not thought to differentiate the druids. She shrugs, and tells him that Taliesin comes by some days, though he is not one of them.
Merlin has met enough mysterious old men not to be alarmed. He has even been one, once or twice. It is no matter.
He goes back to his calm, solitary life. His hands are still rough and cracked, but there is an ointment the druids make, as good as Gaius’s, that soothes the pain, turns them from red to their normal pallor. At the end of the day, he looks at the small things he has made that day and is satisfied. And that is enough.
---
His father notices, of course. He knows more about what is happening in the castle, in the kingdom, then anyone outside of his council suspects. It is one of the things Arthur means to emulate when he is king. One of the increasingly few things.
He keeps Arthur back after a council meeting, asks what he thinks he is doing in a surprisingly unangered tone.
“We have no right to say we are a just land if we just look the other way,” Arthur replies, trying for calm even as anger twists in his stomach. “We are responsible for all the people, not just the rich and noble and strong, and I mean to see that through.”
Once, he might have stormed away after that. Not now. Now he stands and faces his father filled with the force of his belief, and it is Uther who looks down as he nods.
“Very well,” he says, “Continue your crusade.”
Arthur decides he must have imagined the smile on Uther’s face as Arthur leaves.
---
Druids drift in and out of the camp, with different groups leaving and arriving at all times. Merlin doesn’t keep track of them. He has no friends here, and he has no enemies. He lives in his borrowed tent and eats the grains and vegetables left in front of the door, delivered like to a prince. He has moved onto carving now, and he whittles toys and tools and thinks that if he had grief left in him, this would help carry away his grief for the father he barely knew.
Emrys. His knife jerks, nearly cuts him. He sets it down before he looks up into Mordred’s unblinking eyes.
“Mordred,” he says, and wonders idly if he should defend himself. “Are you here to kill me?”
The boy tilts his head. He has grown, in the way of children; he has begun to take on the gangliness of youth. I was, he admits. I don’t think I will anymore.
“Why not?”
It should disturb him that only half the conversation is out loud. It does not. Nothing does.
Because you’ve already been broken, Mordred thinks at him. What’s that?
“What? This?” Merlin holds up the piece of wood he has been carving, all unconscious. “I guess it’s going to be a falcon.”
I see. Mordred’s eyes narrow. Then he nods, and crossed the distance between them. Show me how, he demands, sitting cross-legged on the dirt in front of Merlin. His chin juts out stubbornly, and his arms are crossed over his chest, and Merlin is smiling before he remembers how.
---
With Uther’s tacit support, things do start to change. The knights, at least, led by Arthur and Leon, mostly begin to realize that if they do not take their oaths seriously, there will be consequences. The other nobles are slower to come to terms with this, but Arthur has been steadily gaining power in his father’s court, and soon they too bow to his rules. He cannot do anything on their fiefs—but in Camelot, there will be no rape without punishment. There will be justice.
“Do you think he knows?” Gwen asks, one night in Arthur’s room. She is still running something between her fingers, like she always does when nervous—some sort of cloth, or string, Arthur has never been sure.
“He has magic.” Arthur is staring out the window, at the courtyard. He can almost see the stables from here. They have been repaired. There had been a lot of structural damage but the horses had all been fine. “He probably knows everything already.”
Gwen snorts between her fingers. “Merlin?”
Arthur smiles, unwilling. “You’re right. An omniscient Merlin is a stretch of the imagination.” He turns from the window, throws himself into the desk chair. He remembers nights like this with Merlin—but that is over. No one talks to him like that anymore. Gwen and Leon both are his friends, might quietly question his decisions or guide him to wisdom, but Merlin had a special brand of challenge, that kept Arthur on his toes, rising ever higher, even as it made him remember his limits.
“Do you miss him?” Gwen asks. Arthur glares at her in response. She smiles, sighs, and looks down at her fingers. “You’re right. Stupid question, I guess.”
“Do you miss Lancelot still?” Her head jerks up.
“Yes,” she says simply. “I think I always will.”
“Even when we—”
Her face is solemn and beautiful and sad. “Yes.”
Arthur wishes that surprised him. But it does not. There is love and there is love, and he misses Merlin still.
---
“Why don’t you speak?” Merlin asks Mordred one day, as they sit side by side and carve their toys in the sun outside of the deerhide tent. He should hate Mordred, should fear him as Arthur’s bane. But he cannot. Hatred is too much for him, and the simple affection the boy shows for him at times is comforting.
I do.
“I meant out loud.”
Why don’t you speak like this?
Merlin considers, shaves off a sliver of wood with the precision he once used to polish his prince’s armor. “Because I’m scared, I guess,” he says at last. “Old habits die hard.”
I have old habits too, Mordred replies. His horse is looking more like a dog, and he scowls at it. His eyes light gold, and some of the shavings fly back up and stick together on its legs.
“That won’t work for long,” Merlin points out. As he finishes speaking, the shavings break, and it’s only the dog-like horse left.
If I knew more, it could. Mordred fixes his uncanny gaze on Merlin. You could do it too, if you learned.
“I already know—”
You know bits and pieces, Mordred interrupts, and it’s an odd feeling, being interrupted in your own head. You are Emrys. You need to learn the whole.
“Even though I’m not whole?”
Because you aren’t whole. It is hard, sometimes, to remember Mordred is only a child. Now fix my horse.
“Yes, your majesty,” Merlin grins at him, and closes his mind against the memory of those word teasing another man.
He fixes the horse as best he can. It still looks more like a dog, but Mordred is satisfied.
---
They find a sorcerer four months after Merlin leaves. He is an older man, and he spits curses as they lead him to the stake. But once he is tied there, he looks up at where Uther and Arthur watch, and his lips curve into a sneer. “You threw away your only chance,” he declares, loud enough for all to hear. “You had Emrys and you lost him. Good luck to Camelot! May your kings not doom you all.”
The fire takes him before he can say more.
Arthur watches until his last scream rings out, until they have put out the fire, until his ashes have been gathered. He listens to his father’s speech about the evil they have fought this day, about magic’ corruption and it’s deadly threat. He wonders when he stopped believing it.
Because even in his rage and pain Merlin had destroyed nothing. Because Merlin had not done all he could do to stop the men who preyed upon him, not until the last, not until much longer that Arthur would have expected anyone to hold out for an oath sworn in anger and desperation. Because Lionel yet lived, and Arthur would have killed him long ago.
He wonders if the sorcerer is right, and his rage has doomed the land he loves.
---
At first, Merlin only goes to listen to the other druids because Mordred drags him along, and the boy is even more stubborn than Arthur. He drifts close to them as they sit on seats of logs, not stools, and listens to them speak of magic, of the power that runs through earth and air and water, and he breathes in and out and feels the truth in their words. He listens and he learns until he can feel the magic pulsing beneath his skin with every breath, until he can hear the song of the sap in the trees and the heart in the bird’s song. If he had joy left, this would bring it; as it is he and Mordred sit together in the tent and listen, and Mordred leans his head against Merlin’s side and he can feel the magic in the boy as well, a wellspring of it still untapped, and he feels something shifting inside of him and wonders if it is healing.
He and Mordred go into the woods, sometimes, and they grow trees with power and call rain from the sky, and they have mock battles, and Merlin teaches Mordred everything he learned from Arthur about swordplay—which is more than he suspected. And when they return to the tent, the two bedrolls and a few rough cabinets the only furniture, not so different after all from his room, Merlin sleeps. There are no nightmare visions of men’s hands looming out of the darkness, of Arthur’s face hard with anger telling him to leave. He dreams of a lake with Freya’s smiling face reflecting in it, and an island that is peace.
---
It is not yet late when Arthur goes to Gaius’s chambers, but it is late enough that hopefully no one will see or follow. The physician looks up from his cauldron, and Arthur is struck by just how old he looks. Is it the work that has aged him, now that his assistant is gone? Or simply grief, and years of pain?
“Your highness,” Gaius says with a nod. He has been civil to Arthur, though not more, since he dismissed Merlin. He blames Arthur, of course. It is his fault. “Is there something you require?”
“Yes. I need—” Arthur stops, gives himself a mental shake, then squares his shoulders. He has never shied away from a duty in his life, and this is not duty. This is want, and need, and a bone-deep exhaustion that comes from guessing. “I want you to tell me about Merlin.”
“I don’t know where he is.” It’s not a lie, either, Arthur thinks, and thinks that is the worst of it.
“I know. I want to know about him. About what I missed.”
“And will you condemn him for that?”
Arthur’s eyes flick to the doorway. But there’s no one there. “I do not plan to condemn him at all.”
For a long moment, Gaius’s eyebrows do complicated maneuvers, and Arthur feels six again, and sure Gaius knew that he actually got a scrape climbing through the crawl spaces in the East Tower even though father expressly told him not to go there. But eventually Gaius stops stirring his pot, steps out from behind it. “He should really tell you this himself.”
“He’s gone.”
Gaius’s chin dips, then rises slowly. “Then I will tell you what you need to know.”
It doesn’t escape Arthur that that is not everything, nor everything he wants to know. But it’s as much as he will get, so he takes the seat Gaius gestures him to, and listens as the man tells him of the life he had not seen.
---
Taliesin appears again six months after he left Camelot. “Come,” he says, and Merlin does, quietly, so as not to wake Mordred sleeping in the bedroll beside him. He should be afraid, or wary, but he’s not. And not only because he has not felt fear for months, but because he knows there is nothing to fear here.
They walk through the haphazard rows of the sleeping camp, nod to the guards on duty, and out into the woods. They walk long and far and neither speak, but Merlin feels the owls hoot overhead, the bats’ screeches and the rustle of the trees, and he does not trip or fall.
Merlin does not know how long it has been when they arrive, but he recognizes the place when they do. The Valley of the Fallen Kings. He is unsurprised, as if a part of him had always known that, had always known he would be here.
Taliesin moves silently through the valley, then rocks move, and the cliff face opens. They enter the cave—and suddenly it is light, as light as day or even brighter, all the light reflected a thousand times by the thousands of crystals lining the walls, so that Merlin almost cries out and covers his eyes.
“Welcome,” Taliesin says, “To the Crystal Cave.” Which is a little bit redundant, in Merlin’s opinion, but he knows better than to voice it.
“This is where the Crystal of Neathid came from,” Merlin states. It is not a question.
“Indeed. It was taken from here many centuries ago, but it is only a portion of the futures here. Would you look?”
“No!” Merlin yelps, covers his eyes. He knows the evils that can come from it, remembers dragonflame and Balinor’s death.
The old man only laughs. “Oh, young warlock,” he chuckles, “The future is not so simple as you thinks. There are as many futures as there are crystals in this cave, and none of them is sure.”
Slowly, Merlin lowers his hand form his eyes. “Then the dragon didn’t have to—”
“The dragon attacked Camelot because he was released, and he was released because you chose to release him. No more, no less.” Taliesin sighs, leans on his stick. “There are always choices, Emrys. No one’s destiny is sure.”
“My destiny was to be with Arthur.”
“Your destiny is what you make of it.” He gestures, waves a hand at the crystals stretching back as far as the eye can see, twinkling lights like the Sidhe. “These are your destinies, Emrys. It is for you to decide which one comes to pass.”
Merlin looks, looks at the millions of millions of crystals, the millions of millions of choices. Wonders how many have Arthur in them. When he looks back, Taliesin is gone.
---
Arthur sits on his father’s throne. He remembers when he was a child, climbing onto the seat and drowning in it, and not believing he would ever grow big enough to fit in it. Now, though, he feels comfortable here. Not too comfortable; it is not built for that, not built for luxurious, sybaritic kingdoms. Uther won Camelot in war and kept it with his armies, and no one ever forgets that. Arthur certainly never does.
But it feels right, sitting here, if only for an hour or two for open court. There is pride that his father entrusted this to him, a contentment that it has come at last. But he feels too the responsibility of sitting here. Gwen looks up at him from her seat in the corner, and her eyes are fierce and proud, but chiding too; a mother’s eyes, glad her son has risen high but warning him against flying into the sun.
She should not worry. He has already flown into the sun, and it was not him who burned.
“Call the first petitioner,” he tells the steward, and the great doors open.
There is still an empty space at his right ear.
---
You’re leaving. Mordred sits up when Merlin returns.
“Yes,” Merlin replies. He does not have much—he left everything he ever valued in Camelot, and he has had little here, all of it borrowed. He needs little. The clothes on his back, food, water. He can survive on his own.
I can’t come?
“I’m sorry,” Merlin leans down, so he can look the boy in the eye. He does look like a boy now, curled in his blankets in the heavy darkness of the night. “I need to be on my own, and you still need to learn more than I can teach.”
I know. The boy shifts, and he bites his lip, then, Will you be back?
“Not here.”
But you’ll be in Camelot.
“Eventually,” Merlin says. That is his choice. Camelot is his home. Arthur is his prince. That is his destiny. He believes in the shining dream, for all it has gone wrong. He knows nothing else. “Not right away. I need to learn more.”
You do, Mordred agrees, and startles a smile out of Merlin. Good-bye, Emrys. We will meet again.
“We will,” Merlin replies, and it is a promise. He has left too many people behind. Has failed this boy too many times. Then, Thank you, Mordred. You brought me back to life.
Mordred reaches out, and Merlin takes his hand, easy with it for the first time. They stand there, flesh against flesh, a connection.
Then Mordred lets go, and Merlin lets the tent flap close as he leaves.
Later, as he goes through his pack, he finds the horse Mordred carved. He grins, and tucks it into his pocket. For luck, he thinks. And magic.
---
“There were no problems with the court today?” Uther asks, as they linger over dinner. There’s still an empty seat where Morgana sat, and it is George who brings him his wine, but it’s a semblance of normality.
“Fine,” Arthur replies, and takes a sip of wine. His father is in a good mood tonight, almost jovial. There will be no better time to ask. “Why is the knight’s code limited to nobles?”
Uther freezes, his knuckles whitening around the stem of his glass. “Because the nobility is the backbone of this land. It is they who have honor. It is they who we can trust.”
“Commoners can have honor too,” Arthur points out, and thinks of Gwen and Lancelot and Merlin. “We can trust them.”
Uther sighs, and rubs at his temples. “Of course we can,” he says, and Arthur’s jaw drops. Is his father admitting he is wrong? “But unfortunately, the nobility have armies and lands. They are the ones who pay taxes and support us. And so we have to keep them happy. And what son of a duke would be happy equal to a farmer’s son?”
“It’s not right,” Arthur protests. Uther’s face hardens, and his lips press together.
“Ruling a kingdom,” he says, and his voice is the steel of his sword, “means that being right is sacrificed for being strong.”
Arthur nods, because he knows his father wants him to, and because his father has a point. His father is a good king because he has lived that mantra, and Camelot is strong for it. But that is not how Arthur will rule. Being a strong kingdom means nothing if it is not also just.
---
The ale does not look promising. Merlin purses his lips at it, tries not to smell it. He had thought being around people would be good, would remind him of what he lost in the isolation of the druid’s camp. He has a few coin, earned from doing odd jobs on farms he passed. But the ale smells like urine.
“It doesn’t taste any better than it looks.” Merlin’s private contemplations are broken when a man plops himself down at the bar next to him. He is not over-tall but broad shouldered, with a trimmed goatee around full lips meant for smiling. His hair is a work of art, and his eyes dance as he raises his glass to Merlin. “But it’s all there is for miles, so…” He takes a long sip, wrinkles his nose as it goes down. “Ah well. Gwaine,” he says and reaches his hand out towards Merlin.
Merlin steels himself, reaches out, and shakes his hand. It’s easier if he is the one to touch. “Merlin,” he replies. Gwaine doesn’t squeeze like he’s asserting dominance. It’s an easy, firm handshake, and then Gwaine lets go and takes another swig.
“Ugh,” he groans, “It doesn’t get any better.”
“Then why do you keep drinking?”
Gwaine widens his eyes in shock. “Because it’s ale!” As if that should be obvious. “Why let that go to waste?”
“Because it tastes like cow urine,” Merlin points out, with indubitable logic.
“Still ale,” Gwaine remarks, and tosses the rest of it down. “Another!” he cries, and the bartender appears to fill him back up. Gwaine tosses him a coin.
“So what brings you to this godforsaken bit of nowhere?” Gwaine asks. “No offense,” he tells the bartender with an easy grin. The bartender shrugs and moves away.
“Nowhere in particular to go,” Merlin replies, which is almost the truth. He had heard of a wisewoman not far from here, but she turned out to be nothing more than an herbalist, and he knew all that from Gaius. He needs to learn new things, needs to remember the magic in his blood.
“Good reason to be places,” Gwaine agrees easily. “Why I’m places.”
“Including here?”
“Including here,” Gwaine agrees, with a rueful look into his glass.
It’s hard not to like Gwaine, and he knows it. But it’s not an overwhelming sort of charm, and he doesn’t seem to want anything from Merlin, so it’s easy to sit at the bar and chat with him, from a few feet away. Gwaine, it seems, has been everywhere, and doesn’t want to go anywhere, and can tell a story like nobody’s business. He doesn’t take offense at the fact that Merlin isn’t sharing equally, or that he flinches every time someone brushes past him.
But he does pause in the middle of a story about three goats, an apple, and two irate farmers. “Oh. Uh oh,” he says, softly. “You might want to move away from me.”
Merlin spins away from the bar, casually as he learned in Camelot’s court. There are three very large men walking in, and their frowns say everything necessary.
“What did you do?” he asks, because he has already figured out that it’s probably Gwaine’s fault.
“There was a misunderstanding about some lucky cards,” Gwaine replies. He shifts his weight, very slightly, and Merlin realizes that this is a swordsman, a fighter. He has seen enough to know the naturals. Gwaine’s stance is like Arthur’s. “I didn’t think they would remember. Probably.”
“You just didn’t care,” Merlin retorts, because he remembers this, and it feels good, the feeling of an adventure about to happen, a fighter beside him.
“Guilty as charged,” Gwaine agrees, “You gonna go?”
Merlin shrugs. “I’m good.”
“Well then,” Gwaine rises and bows to the men with a flourish and a grin. “Beedle! How good to see you again.”
After, once they escaped from the men through a series of maneuvers that involved some surreptitious magic, Gwaine’s frankly impressive right hook, and scampering over six roofs, Merlin collapses next to Gwaine in an empty wagon. “Bloody hell,” he swears, but Gwaine is grinning, and the blood is singing in his veins, and he’s laughing, laughing, laughing.
---
“Do you think my father is a good king?” Arthur asks Gwen, one evening after dinner.
Her back straightens, her eyes widen. “Yes! I mean, of course, King Uther is—”
“I want your honest answer,” Arthur cuts her off. He needs someone who he can trust for that, now that Merlin is gone.
Gwen swallows, and relaxes. She chews briefly on her lower lip. “I think,” she says slowly, “he is the best king he knows how to be.”
“That’s not an answer,” Arthur points out, turning to look out the window. Camelot’s lands stretch out in front of him, lands and the people on them. People who his father would have let starve, sometimes, who he would have let die.
“No, it’s not,” Gwen agrees. She rises too, so she stands beside him. She is Camelot to him in so many ways, he thinks, the emblem of the people he cares for. He wishes he could love her again. But that time has passed, and they both know it.
Together, they watch the sun set. She’s probably thinking of Lancelot, wondering where he is, Arthur muses, looking down at her dark locks. He wonders where Merlin is, and hopes his eyes are no longer empty.
---
Merlin doesn’t travel long with Gwaine, just a few weeks. The other man rides and Merlin can’t bring himself to be near horses for long, and anyway, he’s still wary about mentioning his magic, and so when he catches wind of a sorcerer a few days off, just on the other side of the Caerleon border from Camelot, he splits off from the other man with a grin, a wave, and a demand that if he’s ever in Camelot, he look Merlin up.
But those weeks have changed Merlin, or changed him back, he thinks. Gwaine has no connection to who he was, but the man could talk as much as Merlin could, and that helped. Made him remember how to talk, how to laugh. For that he’ll be forever grateful, the memory of laughter. He slipped a charm into Gwaine’s bag for that, nothing the other man will find incriminating or anyone could identify as magical, just a luck charm, but it should help.
Gwaine had slapped him on the back when they parted ways. He hadn’t flinched from it.
He is congratulating himself on that victory when he catches sight of a red and gold cloak, and he freezes against a tree, heart pounding in his ears.
---
Arthur protests when his father sends him one of the farther patrols, almost on the borders of Caerleon. He thinks Uther is almost taken aback by that, as he always wanted to get out of Camelot, to fight, before, but he is learning so much in Camelot these days, he is doing so much good.
But where the king orders, a knight must go, and so Arthur is in the middle of complaining to Sir Bedivere—complaining, not whining, he tells the Merlin in his head, a true prince doesn’t whine—when his horse whinnies and stamps the ground. “Llamrei?” he murmurs, breaking himself off, and leans down to pat her neck. She doesn’t seem alarmed. If anything, it’s the kind of noise she makes when she sees him, happy and excited. Or smells him. Or those whom she knows well.
No. He refuses to hope. To even think it.
And yet….
“Go ahead,” he says, waving the patrol on. “I’ll catch up in a moment. Just want to check Llamrei’s hoof.”
They’re good men, don’t even mention him being a prince and so ought to be protected. They just go.
Arthur waits until he’s alone before he dismounts and says, not yells but says, on a hope and a wish and a whisper, “Merlin?”
There’s no answer. He tries one more time, because Merlin could be as stubborn as he. “Merlin?”
Still nothing. Even if he was there, he isn’t coming out. Arthur doesn’t blame him. Arthur wouldn’t want to see him either, wouldn’t want to see the man who had failed him so completely in so many ways. Arthur is being selfish to wish he would, to wish he could tell Merlin about everything he has done, everything he is planning to do. Everything he wishes they could do together.
He’s about to remount when Llamrei neighs again, and there’s a whisper of a grass crunching. Arthur spins, hand on his sword hilt.
Merlin stands across the path from him, not five feet away. He is skinnier than he was, but he looks older. Something in his eyes, or the way he holds himself, or the set of his mouth. It still sends a pang through Arthur to see him again, to see him alive and well.
“Merlin,” he breathes a third time, in shock and gratitude.
“Going to use that on me?” Merlin asks, nodding towards the sword. Arthur immediately opens his hand, brings it up and out, so Merlin can see how unarmed he is. More unarmed than Merlin, whose very thought is a weapon.
“You’re all right,” he says at last, as the silence threatens to twist between them forever. “I hoped—but there was no way of checking.”
“I healed. I am healing,” Merlin corrects himself. He is still poised on the balls of his feet, like a deer about to bolt. “Why aren’t you attacking me?”
“Because I don’t want to,” Arthur shoots back, and feels young again.
“You wanted to before.”
“That was a long time ago.”
“Yes,” Merlin agrees, with a sigh that carries the weight of the world. “It was.”
Muscles shift in his throat, his legs, and Arthur knows he means to leave, so, “Gwen and Gaius both miss you. Can I tell them I saw you?”
He tilts his head, considering, and Arthur wonders how he forgot just how blue his eyes were, not Arthur’s sky blue but a blue of a lake, of a jewel. Not golden, not always. “Yes,” he says at last. “Yes. Tell them I miss them too.”
Arthur moves slowly. He is a good hunter, and a good falconer, and this feels like both. “You could tell them yourself. Come home.”
Merlin’s laugh rings out, and it is surprisingly true, not bitter or pained. “Come home?” he asks, “To have Uther burn me?”
“I’d protect you,” Arthur swears, fierce and quick, and he could hit himself even as he says it, but it’s true. He failed him once. He wouldn’t again.
“From the full might of Uther?”
“From anything.” It is frighteningly true, how much he means that. He wanted to protect Merlin when he was just his servant, and his friend. He wants to protect Merlin even now he knows he doesn’t need it. He wants to make sure nothing hurts Merlin ever again. Not now he’s found him.
The mirth fades from Merlin’s face, and it is replaced by something that could almost be happiness. “You mean that, don’t you?”
“With every breath in my body.” Arthur inches forward, slowly, slowly.
“Oh, Arthur,” Merlin sighs again, but it is a different sigh, something happy in it. “That—that means a lot, it really does, I mean, it means everything.” There’s the babble again, the babble Arthur has missed so much, however much it occasionally annoyed him. The babble and the glint in Merlin’s eyes. “But I can’t go yet.”
“What?”
“Not yet,” Merlin says again, and seems to agree with himself as he says it. “Yes, not yet. Sometime. Soon. But not while it will make your father disown you. Not while—” Arthur is within a foot of him now, and Merlin jerks back, into the tree, and his eyes are wide and panicked. “Not while I still can’t—it’s the cloak, the colors—I can’t—don’t touch me!”
Arthur lurches backwards, cursing himself, Lionel, and himself again. “Sorry. I didn’t—”
“I know,” Merlin hisses out between his teeth. He is pressed against the tree, fingers digging into the bark like he is drawing strength from it. “But—I can’t—soon, Arthur.” He pulls himself straight, and he looks like a dryad, like a part of the tree. His face is fierce and solemn, and how could Arthur have forgotten how it felt to have all of that faith centered on him, the belief that he was worth anything? How had he thrown that away? “Soon. Once I’ve healed.”
“I’ll hold you to that,” Arthur says, strictly. “Or it’ll be the stocks for you.”
Merlin chokes out a laugh that is near a sob. “Gods, I’ve missed you,” he mutters, and grins, “You clotpole.”
He turns into the woods, and his back is straight and his steps sure as he walks. Arthur watches him go.
“Merlin,” he calls at last, when Merlin is almost out of earshot. “I’m sorry.” There, he said it, but it was the last word.
I know, you prat, comes Merlin’s voice in his head, and that’s just cheating, is what that is. That’s why I’ll be home soon.
---
Merlin waits until he gets a good ways away from the path, until he has left Arthur and his knights far behind, before he collapses onto the ground. He curls himself into a ball, and shakes and shakes and shakes, and thinks about Arthur’s face in a red and gold cloak and not the knight’s, thinks of Arthur’s hands and eyes and the passion in his voice as he swore to protect him. Thinks of an apology, too late but true. Of acceptance.
Then he uncurls, gets up, and starts to walk again. He has much to learn before he goes home.
---
Gaius collapses into a chair when Arthur tells him about Merlin, and starts murmuring something under his breath that sounds like prayers. “He looked alright?” he demands of Arthur, who answers him as best he can, and then answers the dozen other questions Gaius fires off.
“I have to write his mother,” Gaius says, once the questions have been answered, and shoos Arthur out the door with a final “thank you.”
Gwen takes it much more quietly, just presses her hand to her lips and breathes, her eyes growing bright with tears. “I’m so glad,” she sighs, and smiles. “He said he’ll be home soon?”
“Though who knows what that means,” Arthur points out, but he’s grinning too. Merlin will be home.
“Now,” Arthur says, and pulls the reports towards him on his desk, “What happened in the courts while I saw gone?”
Merlin will not be disappointed in Camelot when he returns.
---
Merlin wanders. He meets hedgewitches and professional wizards, evil sorcerers and good ones. He learns from all who can teach, defeats the evil ones with more ease than he expected, and always moves on. He can feel magic growing in him, can feel it twining in his veins, becoming a part of him in a way it always was supposed to be. This is him, he thinks, and purses his lips to whistle up a wind. There is nothing Uther or Arthur can say that would make him change. He wonders if ever he would have learned that in Camelot, where he thought to stop.
He makes it to the next place he has heard of by mid-morning. He can feel it before he sees it, a shifting beneath the earth, a crackle in the air. Whoever lives here is powerful, he knows, can tell.
The cottage is a plain, well-kept place, neat and tidy but not rich. There is wash hanging on the lawn. There are also wards surrounding the place a foot thick. Merlin narrows his eyes. He could pick them apart, or he could brute force his way through. But that would be impolite.
Instead, he knocks on the gate of the fence. When no one answers, he knocks again. He is about to consider going in anyway, when an old woman hobbles out, leaning heavily on a staff. Her eyes are rheumy pale, and Merlin immediately prescribes herbs for arthritis, cataracts, and a number of other age-worn diseases. But when she speaks, her voice is clear as a bell.
“Emrys,” she says, “Well it’s about time. Come in, come in.” She waves her hands, and the wards shift. So he goes in.
She serves him tea in a mug decorated with ivy, with a crack down one side. He can’t see any poisons in it, so he drinks. “So, my lad,” she begins as she sits down across from him at the table. Then she pauses, corrects herself. “No, you’re no lad anymore. So, Emrys,” she starts again, “Have you learned much?”
“Yes. Do you have anything to teach me?”
“Oh, I have much to teach you, but nothing you can learn,” she says, and chuckles, “You haven’t the seer’s gift, not like the other one. You can look into your crystals all you want, like Taliesin says, that old fraud, but he has nothing on me.”
“And what do you see?” Merlin asks, because for all the talk of choices he thinks still of a coin with two sides, and Arthur golden upon his throne.
“I see pain and death and despair,” she says frankly, “And I see life and laughter and love. I see all, and all will be. But let’s talk about you,” and she laughs again, low and easy. “You’re better, aren’t you?”
“I am,” Merlin replies, because he is. Or almost, at least, the bleeding in his mind almost stitched shut. He remembers laughter and smiles and joy, and the numbness has faded. He sleeps through the night, usually. He can even ride horses, though he prefers not to, and he won’t go into stables.
“Then why are you still here? Lancelot’s going to pass you, if you don’t hurry. And don’t even get me started about Morgause. Oh, and,” she reaches over, slaps Merlin on the back of the head. He is too startled even to flinch. “That’s for poisoning the poor girl. Have some creativity, next time, no?”
“What are you talking about?” he asks, but he has to laugh, too, because she is powerful and ridiculous and he kind of wants to be her.
“Camelot will be overrun in days. Weeks. Years. Soon, anyway. You need to get back.”
Merlin stops laughing. That’s the one thing he’s not sure he can do. He still shies away from a flicker of red and gold, still freezes under a man’s touch. He doesn’t—he can’t see Arthur, can’t see any of them, until he’s done. Until he’s put this behind him. “I can’t.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, you always can, you were always going to be in Camelot, how else would Arthur find the sword in the stone?” She rises again, whisks his cup away. “So what are you doing here? Go away! Get gone!”
He does as she says, and watches the wards close behind him. Then he sighs again. Home, she says. Home, like it’s that easy.
---
He and Gwen are sitting in his room, both working, when someone knocks on the door, and a page enters to summon Gwen to the kitchens. Arthur’s not entirely sure when she started running the castle, but he knows it runs better now, so he’s not worried about it. In her hurry, though, she left something on the desk—the thing she’s been playing with for so long.
Arthur is a good man, a noble man. But he still picks it up. And nearly drops it again.
It’s a braided band, stitched into a circle. He knows Morgana’s hair band, recognizes with a pang the red of Merlin’s scarf. Guesses the last is something of Lancelot’s.
How has she held on this long, he wonders, gripping all that Gwen loves and lost in his hands. How have they all? His finger runs up and down Merlin’s scarf, remembers the feel of it from all the times he used it to drag Merlin places. Remembers the warmth of Merlin’s neck when he did that, how his pulse had beat wildly against Arthur’s fingers. Remembers the cloth stark against his pale skin when he had told Arthur the truth at last, and how it had been the color of Arthur’s rage in the betrayal.
“Do you love him?” He hadn’t heard Gwen coming back in.
It should be hard to admit, to her of all people. It isn’t, to her of all people. “I think so,” he says, and hands her back her keepsake. “Yes.”
She smiles, wraps her arms around his waist in a sisterly embrace. “I’m glad,” she whispers into his ear. “I’m glad you have somebody.”
“I don’t have him yet.”
“You will.” Her hand circles comfortingly on his back. “He’ll be home soon.”
---
Merlin wishes he could be surprised when he happens upon Lancelot in the middle of a forest, but he isn’t. The old witch might have been insane, but she was a powerful seer.
“Merlin!” Lancelot cries, and his face lights up. He lunges forward for a hug—and Merlin pulls back, away, because he can’t not. Lancelot frowns, drops his arms. “Merlin?”
“Yes, no, it’s fine. I just—no touching, not right now, okay?” Merlin says, then he grins. “How have you been?”
“Fine,” Lancelot says. Then he purses his lips, and Merlin takes pity on him.
“Last I heard, Gwen was fine as well.”
“Oh. That’s good.” Lancelot swallows his smile, moves to reach out, then grabs his hand back again. “Do you want dinner?”
Merlin does. They talk about inconsequential things during dinner, about Lancelot’s travels, and about Merlin’s. It’s not until they’ve cleaned, until full dark has fallen and they are lit only by firelight, that Lancelot asks, in his soft, undemanding voice.
“What happened to you, Merlin? You look…different.”
Merlin shakes his head. “A lot has happened since I last saw you.”
Lancelot’s eyes are gentle. “I know your secret, Merlin. You don’t have to pretend.”
“Everyone knows my secret now,” Merlin says, and then, because it’s Lancelot, who is in so many ways the most good person he knows, and because he had known his secret, and because he has never said it before, he tells him. Everything, from the start to the finish, from Arthur’s banishment to the mad witch in the cottage.
Lancelot’s lips thin as he talks, but he waits until he is done. “This knight—is he still in Camelot? I can return, challenge him—”
Merlin has to smile for the friendship in it. “I don’t know. But you don’t—it won’t help. I don’t know what happened to him and I don’t want to. I don’t want to think about him.”
That gets a nod, and they stare into the fire together. It helps, have told somebody. Everyone else had either already known or not asked.
“I think, my friend,” Lancelot says at last, into the darkness, as the fire dies down to ashes, “You are the bravest person I know.”
Merlin watches the ashes glow red and wishes that were true.
---
They find Morgana on a random patrol. It takes everyone by surprise—Uther was the only one still believing, Arthur thinks, as he pulls Morgana into a hug. The unrelenting pain of losing Merlin had almost overwhelmed the sorrow of her loss, for all that shames him. But it is so, so good to have her back, to have the woman he loves as a sister back with him. Someone to share his burden, someone other than Gwen to speak to, about Merlin and loss and love.
But then Uther falls ill, and any contentment is gone.
He sits at Uther’s bedside, wondering if magic could save him. And if soon will be soon enough.
---
“So why are you not going back to Camelot?” Lancelot asks the next morning, once Merlin has slept away the tears.
“You know why.”
Lancelot shakes his head, brushes his hair out of his eyes. Merlin thinks momentarily of Gwaine, and of how well the two of them would get along, despite it all. “You’re scared, I understand. But that’s your place, Merlin. It always has been.”
“That’s what she said too. The crazy witch.”
“She’s right.” Lancelot kicks dirt over the fire; Merlin buries the trash with a thought. “And fear has never kept you back before.”
Merlin looks down, at his hands. They are smooth again now, but for the callouses of a man who walks and works. Not servant’s hands anymore. He has bathed a thousand times, has learned smells to make him odorless. And yet still, unexpectedly, he smells the stench of the stables on him, the thick sweet scent of straw.
“The knight said I was nothing,” Merlin says, quiet, for the first time since it had happened, and the morning birds chirp their cheerful hellos. “What if I am?” The secret fear, the one not even Mordred plucked out of his head.
“Merlin,” Lancelot says, and Merlin can hear him approaching. He looks up, and he is staring into the darkness of Lancelot’s eyes, the crystal truth in them. “You are someone. You always have been. What one…cretin says cannot change that.” Slowly, carefully, he puts a hand on Merlin’s shoulder, then on the other. “And Arthur believes it as well.”
Merlin takes a deep breath, lets the shudders die down. He can feel the earth beneath his feet, the wind wrapping around him. His magic sings underneath his skin. These are things he did not have when he left Camelot, a boy on a dragon’s back. He can feel the wound closing, the last few stitches set.
“Thank you,” he whispers, knowing Lancelot will not acknowledge what he does not want acknowledged. Then he steps back, and grins. “Would you care to accompany me to Camelot? It sounds as if a sword hand might be needed.”
“Merlin, there’s no way we can make it back in time—”
Even Lancelot is taken aback by the dragon.
---
There are skeletons in the castle and Cenred’s men at the gates and his father is dying in his bed, and still Arthur fights, his muscles singing with the pain of his sword and the wound in his side. Gwen and Gaius are in the infirmary, they should be safe enough there, but the rest of them—there is no way to hold the walls, not inside and out, not when the soldiers will not die, and Arthur spares a thought as he parries and jabs for Merlin, safe outside of Camelot’s reach. A blessing out of it all, that Merlin will survive.
There is another cry from the courtyard, and Arthur slashes through his opponent’s neck to look, because they cannot handle another enemy, not now—and then he hears the rush of a dragon’s wings, and he remembers when that would bring fear but now hope gives him a new wind, hope and joy and relief. And fire rains from the sky on Cenred’s army, and there is gold, gold everywhere, and Arthur is laughing even as he charges back into the fray because Merlin; Merlin has come home.
---
There is carnage everywhere. Cenred’s men and Camelot’s, the bones of men long dead who walked again tonight.
Merlin ignores them as he lands. There is one man he needs to find, one man in all this crowd who pull away as he passes. The stones of Camelot are familiar beneath his feet, Lancelot’s tread easy a pace behind. He breathes in and out, fire and smoke but Camelot’s air, air he has missed despite it all. He glances left—there are the stables. There were the stables, rather, destroyed in the fighting. He is glad, though he mourns for the horses within.
Then he is in the castle, pacing through the halls, and he must look terrifying because people pull back, eyes wide. Or maybe they simply remember him, remember the boy who knocked down a knight and flew away on the back of a monster. No matter. They can think what they will.
He finds Arthur in the throne room, one hand on his sword, the other on his throne. “Arthur,” Merlin says from the doorway. His prince is blood-stained and weary, and beautiful beyond compare, and his magic twines around him and out into the floor and the doors shut behind them of their own accord. “Sire.”
---
Merlin stands in the doorway, wreathed in the gold of his magic, and his eyes are golden with it. He looks uncanny, magical, inhuman as when he left.
Arthur doesn’t hesitate. He nearly sprints across the room—then pulls up short in front of Merlin, arms held out awkwardly. “Are you,” he asks, “Is it—”
Merlin laughs, and pulls him into a hug, and Arthur can feel Merlin tremble beneath his hands. It is not okay, he knows, there are still scars that magic cannot heal, still lies that have not been told.
But for now, he holds Merlin tight in a circle made of magic, and Merlin smells like freshness and rebirth and a dream on the brink of shining.