Only, Ari’s hand wouldn’t come out of her pocket. A guiding presence stilled her.
Not the book. The sword.
Ari inhaled sharply. She hadn’t heard Arthur’s voice in too long. It gave her hope while at the same time it reminded her how very frail and weak his spirit was becoming. Ari let go of the book and looked at Arthur. At the epic sword in the sheath at his waist.
“I hear that only King Arthur can lift Excalibur.”
Arthur scowled. “You want to try my sword?”
“If I could lift it, you would trust me, wouldn’t you?”
Arthur smiled, but it was a hopeless look, one that bled exasperation. How many other knights had stomped into his kingdom and demanded to try out the legendary sword? He lifted it from his sheath and struck it down hard in the stone floor.
Excalibur sliced through it with ease. Exactly as Ari remembered. Her hands hummed a little as her fingers trailed the hilt, reaching for the familiar handle. And when she lifted the blade free, her relief felt like waves crashing over rock. She’d missed every ounce of Excalibur.
And then she noticed that Arthur was looking at her with fear, and perhaps reverence.
Ari dropped the sword flat on her palms and held it out to him. “Do you trust me now, Arthur? Because Excalibur sure does.”
That evening, Ari returned to the throne room, armor shining. All of Arthur’s knights were there, including a rather red and sweaty-faced Sir Kay. They were seated around a newly rounded table. Merlin had delightedly let them all know that Old Merlin had been—well, delighted—when Arthur asked for his help to change the shape.
Now it was time to give his knights an equal seat in his presence.
Ari sat beside Arthur, eyeing the two free seats across the table. At the same moment, the door opened and all turned. Ari beckoned in Lam, Val… and Gwen.
Arthur looked at all of them, eyes falling on Val last. Val in his corset and kohl-lined eyes. “Who are… you?” Arthur’s voice was entranced, and Ari nearly busted out a laugh.
“I’m about to rock your kingdom, that’s who I am.” He inclined his head toward Lam. “I’m also Lamarack’s brother.”
“I’d like to introduce you to Percival,” Ari said, barely loud enough to cover Val’s predictable growl at his full name. “You will not find a sharper diplomatic mind, my king.”
Arthur’s eyebrow raised. Ari was being respectful for once, and Arthur had noticed. Lam and Val took the open seats while Gwen hung around in the background, fussing over tapestries and trying to blend in with them.
“I’ve called you all here to find out where your loyalties truly lie.”
“With you, Arthur,” Sir Kay said lazily, almost bored.
“Mayhaps.” Arthur opened the small wooden box and there it was, the damn chalice. All bone white and gold-rimmed. “The enchantresses gave me a gift at my celebration. They told me I need only ask a question of this cup. When you drink its water, I will know the truth.” Arthur held up the chalice. “I ask this magical gift, who among me is true to my Camelot?”
Arthur spoke Camelot’s name as if the great city were his lover, and Ari found herself strangely moved by his passion.
“It fills with the Lady of the Lake’s water,” Sir Galahad whispered. “The women of Avalon were proud of this creation.”
“Aye,” Arthur said, handing it to Sir Kay first. “Drink your truth.”
The knight huffed as though it were a ridiculous request, but sipped the liquid and instantly began to choke. He held his hand over his throat and stumbled for the door, colliding with the wall on his way out.
In the silence afterward, Arthur seemed taller, more confident. “From this day forward, Sir Kay is not welcome in this kingdom.” He motioned for the next knight, Gawain, to take a drink. And they all did, the entire round table, and no one but Sir Kay had a bad reaction. The knights watched closely when Val and Lam drank, but Val nearly grinned from whatever the chalice imparted, and Lam took a steadying breath.
Finally, the chalice made it to Ari with only a sliver of liquid left in the bottom. She emptied it into her mouth, finding the water identical to Nin’s lake: sharply chilling all the way down her throat.
Ari’s eyesight went dark, and she gasped. She heard concerned murmurs from around the table, and then she saw a slice of time. A pure moment. Arthur was embracing her… handing her the chalice. He was giving it to her. To take to the future. And then the moment was gone.
Arthur’s eyes were wide as if he needed to know what had happened to her. What she’d seen. “Sir Lancelot?”
“You have my sword,” Ari said, putting a hand on his shoulder. She was going to help him with his kingdom, and he was going to give her the chalice. “My king.”
Arthur took the chalice back and studied it once again. “I wonder… what is my legacy?”
Gwen’s near-distant gasp was almost a shout. Ari’s arm shot out to stop Arthur, but he tipped the entire chalice back and disappeared into whatever he saw. His blue eyes rolled white and his body began to shake. Ari shouted for Galahad, and the two of them lifted Arthur from his seat, laying him across the table. His limbs jumped and slammed into the hard wood, creating a cacophony of jarring bone sounds, and Lamarack and Val rushed to hold down his legs.
Ari didn’t know if he could hear her through his seizure. She had a terrible flashback to when she’d met Merlin in that alley on the moon. When Morgana had gifted him a few hundred years of human history with a light tap. The way he’d cried out had felt like its own punishment—and yet that empty, whimpering silence was so much worse. The only difference was that Arthur wasn’t seeing the past, he was experiencing his own future.
Did his legacy stop at the battlefield where he died upon his own son’s sword? Or did the chalice show him the other Arthurs, the endless dance of unity and despair, of might and right, equality and hate? The cycle of humanity’s brightest hope ever set against its ceaseless dark?
Arthur stopped flailing, going too still. He looked dead on the crosshatched wood. Far too similar to the corpse king Ari had seen in Nin’s cave. Ari shook Arthur while Gwen held his hand, testing his pulse. She gave Ari a sharp look that seemed to yell do something.
Ari got her hands on the sides of his face and whispered into his ear. “I’m here, Arthur.”
Arthur’s blue eyes shot open, and his head turned slowly toward Ari. “I saw you small and helpless. Floating through blackness.” His voice sounded entire years older. “I think… that’s when I met you.”
“That is the past and the future,” Ari said, surprised by the tears in her eyes.
“Help me to my feet.”
She did, steadying him with an arm around his ribs. Ari found that his hands were shaking, and she placed them on Excalibur’s handle. They stilled at once.
“Arthur?” Gwen asked softly. He shook his head in her direction, wincing, and motioned for everyone to leave. But not Ari. He held on to her. Ari expected a barrage of questions. Demands for explanations. Instead he set his gaze on her.
“We have much to do.”
Merlin couldn’t breathe. It was too beautiful.
He wanted to run his hand along the grain of the dark wood, and quite possibly kiss the smooth surface. The round table here at last, and sitting around it?
Ari, Arthur, Val, Lam, Gwen—his people.
Merlin’s friends had helped spark one of the most hopeful moments of human history. In fact, it looked better in person than it did in the legends, since nobody had gotten their grubby whitewashing hands on it yet. Several of these nobles besides Lam, Val, and Ari were knights of color. Take that, racist revisionists!
Even Gwen had a seat at the table, which of course would be edited out later. The absence of more women rankled, especially when Merlin thought of Jordan. And then there was the matter of letting nonbinary people serve openly as knights and giving more seats to common-born folk and… There was still work to do. But for the first time since they’d arrived i
n Camelot, he felt it could be done. This was why Arthur’s story needed to survive intact. This moment would give birth to so many other moments. And Merlin was right here in the middle of it, even if he’d only gotten into the room by volunteering to serve the mead.
He made a circle around the table, humming in a non-magical way, clanking down cups. He deposited a drink in front of Ari and leaned down when she accepted it with a knightly nod.
“Tell me again that this is real,” he whispered.
“Arthur and I are BFFs now,” she assured him. “Kind of literally on that last F, if you think about it.”
Arthur drinking from the chalice had changed everything. Not just the shape of a table or the composition of the knights sitting around it, but Arthur himself. Ari had told Merlin that he’d seen his future. Not just the glory of Camelot, or even his death at the hands of Mordred, but all of it.
The cycles. Forty-one dead heroes. And then number forty-two, a girl from the future with a mostly broken spaceship, a smelly but lovable brother, and a mega-corporation to slay.
It was a boon to their quest to have Arthur understand his own story—although it was also a burden for the young king. His expression was covered in worried creases that hadn’t been there at his birthday celebration weeks ago. His hair was still rumpled and blonde, but somehow it looked less like spun gold and more like old straw. And his eyes? They held all the ghosts of the future in two soft blue spheres. It was too much for any person to contain, let alone such a young and tender-hearted one. Arthur looked as if he’d aged as many years overnight as Merlin had, well, de-aged.
But this, too, made a kind of sense. Something had finally happened to change the boy-king into the solemn, tragic figure of Camelot. The legends often pinned the guilt on Gweneviere—because the legends were written by misogynistic tosspots. Arthur’s overnight transformation didn’t come from a broken heart, but an unmoored soul.
Merlin set a cup in front of the king, who rummaged up a small smile for him. “Many thanks, carbuncle.” Merlin felt his face contort at the epithet. Arthur added, “Believe me, I understand. I’m the Wart.”
Merlin broke into a giddy smile. “We have something in common!” he whisper-shouted.
“Indeed we do,” King Arthur whispered back. “Merlin speaks highly of you. Do you think he’ll figure out that you’re one and the same, and he is in fact giving himself a grudging compliment?”
Merlin’s heart nearly stopped in its tracks.
Of course the chalice had showed Arthur what became of his mage, too. Merlin was a sizeable part of his future. The only sidekick that would never leave the king’s spirit behind—mortality be damned.
“May I ask you something?” For a moment, Arthur’s blue eyes had their youthful glow back. The Wart had always been terribly curious. It was one of his best qualities and led to great things. After all, questions and quests had much in common. “What is it like to consort with the person you once were? The rest of us have the mercy of leaving our finished days behind us.”
Merlin took a moment to consider. “Old Me is myopic at best, murdery at worst. But the more I think about it, the more I doubt that I’m the only one keeping bad company with my past self.”
Arthur laughed. “Gods, you really do sound like him.”
And the king of Camelot was starting to sound a bit like Gwen and Ari. This was a very odd sort of time travel exchange program.
“You won’t tell him about me, will you?” Merlin whispered.
“I swear it,” Arthur said, as solemn as a freshly turned grave. “You have more than earned my loyalty, young Merlin.”
The king dove back into the conversation about Camelot–Avalon relations as Merlin brought a very strategic cup to Gwen. Only the finest water for his very pregnant queen, purified in Old Merlin’s tower, tinted amber to resemble the mead everyone else was drinking.
If Arthur wanted to keep ignoring the impending baby storm that was about to touch down in Camelot, Merlin certainly wasn’t going to stop him. Perhaps he was allowing Gwen the space to figure it out on her own. Or perhaps his chalice vision hadn’t included Gwen’s assignation with Kay, also known as The Weirdest Lancelot Situation Ever.
Merlin put Gwen’s cup down, expecting a secret smile or a few coded words. Instead, she grimaced, cutting her eyes toward him and quickly looking straight ahead, as if anything else would be too painful to bear. Was Gwen upset with him? Upset in general? Were Arthur’s tragic feelings rubbing off on her?
Or… was she having labor pains and trying to hide them?
Merlin kept a close eye on her as he plopped down the next cup, where Sir Kay would have been sitting, had he still been welcome in Camelot—and dropped an entire glass of mead into Val’s lap.
He then dove into Val’s lap, trying to clean up the mess.
“Umm…” Val said, as the entire table looked at them. Merlin nearly died. That was part of his looming childhood it seemed; the slightest problem felt like a catastrophe of indescribable proportions.
Val waved the knights along, and the talking continued.
“It’s so good to see you here,” Merlin whispered. “I mean, I’m glad you made it to Arthur’s court, and he so quickly acknowledged your prowess as an advisor.” For some reason, the use of the word prowess made him turn retroactively crimson. Gods damn innocence. At least he wasn’t giggling every time someone swore, right? “Are you dry? I can get you a rag from the kitchens if—”
“Breathe, Merlin,” Val whispered, not unkindly. It wasn’t Val’s flirting voice, though. Merlin would have to figure out how to stop this backward aging once and for all if he wanted Val’s romantic insinuations in his life.
Which meant enduring more time with Old Merlin.
They’d tried a few spells together the day before, but nothing had taken root. “You really are a conundrum, nothing like you in any of the books,” he’d admitted, sending Merlin away so he could do more research and devise new tests.
He’d told Merlin not to return to the tower until he was called for, which meant that once the meeting dispersed and Gwen slipped him a whisper that they needed to talk, he had the freedom to do it without fear that his old self would punish him with more peat duty.
They gathered in Ari and Lam’s room in the servants’ quarters, a narrow slot of a space that was hardly large enough to hold Val, Lam, Merlin, Ari, and a very round Gwen. Merlin found himself smushed between the door and a concerned Lam. Apparently Merlin hadn’t been the only one to pick up on Gwen’s distress during the round table meeting.
“I need to talk to all of you,” Gwen said. “Last night, I went to Arthur and… I asked him to let me drink from the chalice.”
“And?” Lam asked, pushing with the gentlest tone.
“I asked about the baby,” Gwen said. “I saw myself holding them. I felt them in my arms. So tiny, and beautiful, and…” They were all holding their breath now, because it felt obvious that Gwen wasn’t done.
“What happened?” Val asked.
Merlin found himself upset on a level that he couldn’t even fathom.
“Someone took the baby from me. Not just to hold, but… to keep. I don’t get to keep this baby after they’re born.”
“That’s not going to happen,” Ari said staunchly.
“But it is!” Gwen said, strange iron in her voice. “That’s how the stupid fucking chalice works. We already know that Arthur saw the truth of his tragic future. Why should I be any different?”
“Doesn’t the chalice have Nin’s water in it?” Val asked, casting around for reasons this abominable news could somehow be untrue. “How do we know that she’s not just doing her best to fuck with you? Like she did with me, and Ari?”
“Arthur’s spirit sent us back for the chalice,” Gwen argued. “He trusts it, doesn’t he?”
Val pursed his lips. A small sign, but Merlin knew it didn’t bode well.
Gwen sat down on the tiny bed that Ari and Lam, the two tallest knights in
Camelot, had somehow been sharing. “This feels like another horrible, unbreakable circle. My parents didn’t keep me and then Mercer demanded my baby and… now this vision? It just keeps happening. This moment has always been coming for me.” She whipped around to Merlin, hair straying from its elaborate knot, eyes wild. “It makes sense, doesn’t it? Gweneviere doesn’t have a baby in any of the legends, does she?”
Merlin might’ve had a dark haze where most of this time period should be, but he couldn’t lie to Gwen about something that was so clear. “No.”
“Unless it turns out to be Mordred,” Gwen muttered.
“Mordred?” Merlin choked on the name. It was bile in his mouth.
He pitched back to the worst day in his long existence, watching from Nin’s cave as Arthur lost his life to a self-righteous son he hadn’t raised as his own. Each of the legends told a slightly different version of Mordred’s origins, his upbringing. What if they were all hiding the same fact—that he was Gwen’s love child?
Well… perhaps love child was a bit strong, when Merlin thought about it. He could almost picture Kay balking.
Lam enclosed Gwen in a soft, strong hug. “We’re going to be with you when you give birth. You won’t have to do anything you don’t wish.”
“The prophecies disagree with you,” Gwen said, unwilling to give any ground to Lam’s comfort. “And hope is only going to make this worse. What did you tell me, Ara? Hope is a lie that wants to be true.”
Ari shook her head viciously, like she was arguing with her past self and losing. “Some things come true because we make them. We’re here, aren’t we? Making this story happen?”
“Yes, and I hate it,” Gwen said. “Jordan rushed out to save me that day in the street because she knew the story. She wanted to protect me from being kidnapped, because that’s what happens to Gweneviere… and she ended up with an arrow in the neck. And I haven’t been kidnapped yet. So I still have that to look forward to.”
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