Sword in the Stars

by Cori McCarthy

  “I don’t want to fight you, Nimue,” Merlin said.

  A shadow passed over Nin’s calm for a moment so tiny that only another time child would be able to isolate it. It seemed that sticks and stones wouldn’t break Nin’s bones, but that name just might have hurt her.

  “I’m tired of fighting, Nimue,” he said, pressing harder on her past. “But I’ve been caught in a circle of your making with very little choice about it for centuries, and I’ll be damned before I’ll let you start a new one with Ari.”

  “Oh, you’ve already been damned,” Nin said. “By your own choices. You blame me for the universe’s troubles, but are you so sure I’m the author of this sob story? I’ve never once taken dominion over a single mind or a body. I’ve only given people choices, never taken them away.”

  “Like when you kidnapped Val?” Merlin asked, ripping several stalactites from the cave’s ceiling and sending them to impale Nin.

  Nin sighed and blinked out of existence. She came back, glowing and pouring a cold whisper right into his ear. “I saved Percival from the time period you were afraid to lose him to. I kept him away from your twisted old self. I let him watch over you in safety and comfort and I even made snacks. Really, I thought you would thank me.”

  “Should I thank you for nearly drowning him, too?” Merlin asked, turning to Nin only to find that she’d blinked back to Ari’s side.

  Nin shrugged. “You saved him. One of your finer moments, really. You got to play the hero, and it was adorable.” Merlin shuddered from the cold of this place, from the deep freeze of Nin’s soul. “We both know how the stories of heroes end. You won’t be able to save Ari. Back to the safety of being the magical lapdog for you, Merlin. Back to your true place in the cycle.”

  Merlin flinched and unleashed a torrent of magic. Sparks hit the walls of the cave like dynamite, sending rocks in every direction. The water crashed, the lake churning up. But Nin didn’t look a bit worried. She was perfectly implacable. She was winning.

  Merlin should have sacrificed himself to the lake without making a glitter show of saving his family first. Now Ari was dead, because he’d been too human. Because he’d loved them too much. He looked down at Ari’s body. There was still so much color left in her cheeks—was that a side effect of the Mercer pill?

  “She’s gone, Merlin,” Nin said. “Or should I call you Kairos?”

  The hurt of that name—that person he’d never gotten to be—crackled through him. His magic burned, looking for another way to take down this master manipulator. Merlin wasn’t strong enough. No one was.

  No one rivaled Nin. Except… Nin herself.

  Merlin sang a door into existence. A dark, starry portal right in the middle of Nin’s cave. He closed his eyes and fished through the past. Merlin found what he was looking for easily, because he didn’t have to stray from the path of his own history. When he opened his eyes, Arthurs were pouring out of the door. Forty of them, to be exact, stolen from moments when they were doing unimportant things. Sleeping, trimming their beards, training to fight the smaller-but-no-less-evil evils of their day.

  Nin shook her head as her cave filled with manly muscles and varying historical hairstyles. Gods, Merlin had forgotten Arthur 29 had muttonchops.

  “Heroes? I thought you would have learned that lesson by now, Merlin. Heroes are just well-armed boys that everyone uses to make themselves feel better about doing nothing in the face of horrors.”

  “That… can be a painfully accurate description at times!” Merlin shouted. Nin’s eyebrow rose even as she floated softly above the surface of the lake. “But heroes can also give people hope to keep fighting. And these Arthurs aren’t the draw, I’ll admit. If I can’t touch you, maybe forty swords made with your own hopped-up magic can.”

  That was the one thing all forty of these Arthurs had in common—besides the soul of an ancient king and a shared gender, of course. They all carried Excalibur.

  “Arthurs!” he cried to the confused horde of warriors, kings, and celebrities. “It’s me!” They turned to him, and just in case the dislocation of being stolen from time was a little too much for their minds—gods, he’d have to make them all forget this later—he added, “It’s Merlin the mage!”

  There was a strange chorus in which many Arthurs shouted that he looked too young. One tried to fight his way to the front to get closer to him: a dark-haired man who’d clearly been ripped away from a dream, judging by the mussed hair and the sleepy eyes.

  “Oh, Art,” Merlin whispered. He’d conjured his Arthurian ex-boyfriend into this fight. “Listen to me! Nin is the reason you’ve been trapped in this story. You must use Excalibur to stop her.” The Arthurs looked at one another, and perhaps the spirit inside them recognized each other, because they all stilled and shared a moment before rushing at Nin.

  She was floating above the water, but Merlin could fix that. He pulled more rocks from the cave walls, creating bridges for the Arthurs to rush across. Every time one got close enough to attack her, she flicked a finger and his sword froze. “Merlin, I made those swords. You think I can’t stop them? You think I can’t make them do any little thing I please?”

  All of the Excaliburs rose in the air, danced a little jig, and returned to the hands of their owners.

  Nin sighed heavily and then every Arthur disappeared at once, along with the Lady of the Lake. When she reappeared, she wiped her hands clean as if all of those boy heroes had left a sticky residue on her incorporeal skin.

  “What did you do with them?” Merlin asked, suddenly terrified.

  “Sent them back where they were meant to be and convinced them it was a horrible dream,” she said. “Really, Merlin. Always expecting Arthurs to do your dirty work.” Her glowing face morphed, expression stretching until it took on a familiar cast. A crown rose from her incorporeal brow. “I notice you didn’t include the first Arthur in that little brigade,” Nin said, tugging at one of his wayward golden curls. “Too soon?”

  Merlin’s heart skidded over the next several beats.

  “Oh, you must be rather distraught, having just watched Ari die.”

  Merlin’s heart was no longer rampaging. Now it was on fire. “She wouldn’t be dead if you hadn’t put your hand up Mercer’s rear and used them as your own personal puppet!”

  “I don’t usually have to become so… involved,” she said, sliding back into her original form. “But Ari makes things difficult, doesn’t she? You’re mad at her right now. You’re furious that she killed herself and stopped you from carrying out whatever plan you’d concocted to save the day. People don’t ever listen when you want to save them, do they? They would rather do the same wrong thing, over and over again. They would rather die than let you be right.”

  Nin’s words doubled in intensity. Merlin couldn’t help thinking they weren’t only about him. They were echoes of that day when she’d tried to save her people. The day when she’d been stopped instead of hailed as a hero.

  She changed, skin shading darker and hair growing shorter until it was cropped nearly to her skull. Her smile stretched until it was Merlin’s favorite smile in the universe—stolen right off Val’s face. “You know who’s easy to get along with? Percival. I really did enjoy his company. How long has it been since you’ve seen him?”

  “You know,” Merlin said, hands spitting sparks.

  “I just want to hear you say it,” Nin said, spreading her hands generously wide. “You and I have all the time in all the worlds.”

  “It’s been fifteen years,” he ground out, trying to keep more magic from exploding out in a fireworks display of anger.

  “Such a lovely, round number.” When Nin smirked, she looked exactly like Val. And when she came nearer, Nin’s fingers on his neck felt exactly like his. “If you left now, you’d get a whole mortal lifetime together.”

  The temptation of seeing Val again, of truly having a future with him, was almost too much. “I don’t run away anymore,” Merlin said, clenching so hard he
thought he might break. “And I’ve stopped taking your bargains, remember?”

  Nin changed once again, as it she was rifling through a deck of cards, looking for the ace. She settled on a face that Merlin’s heart had always known—a face that held secret hints of his own. Dark curls tumbled down as Nin grew curves. She adopted a scowl, half serious and half sweet. “What about your lovely mother? Shouldn’t you get back to her? Haven’t you waited all this time to return to her? She would hate to think of you here, watching this new cycle be born.”

  Merlin gasped, terrified at just how good she was at this game.

  “I told you I knew who your parents were,” Nin said. And then her face changed again, and somehow she was Kay, cocky and stalwart and wearing those mythical cargo shorts.

  “Gwen and Ari gave me a great gift when they brought you to my lake to be born. You were the perfect window to watch humanity fail itself. Your dedication to these little Arthurs has been deliciously comical. Your suffering has brought me so much life… such as it is.”

  Nin gestured down at herself, her true form flickering. “You can’t hurt me, Merlin. You can’t even touch me. You might as well go now, because it’s about to get much sadder. You thought you knew tragedy? Imagine how much worse this will be with a girl like Ari. She’ll pick the strongest, the bravest, the stubbornest as a home for her spirit. She’ll search for her lost love. But it won’t work, Merlin. You know that. Every single one of her would-be heroes will fall.”

  She glanced toward Ari with Kay’s face, but Nin’s terrible calm. The Lady of the Lake was going to take Ari now, claim her.

  Merlin’s throat seized around tears. “Can I… can I say good-bye?”

  Nin shrugged Kay’s shoulders.

  “You know, Kay hates when people borrow his face,” Merlin muttered.

  “You have two minutes,” Nin said, gesturing toward Ari’s prone figure. “Don’t disappoint me. Make them truly awful, Merlin.”

  He nodded, tears blazing down his face. As he passed Nin and she could no longer see his expression, he nearly broke into a dance of glee. He’d time-magicked those tears, stolen them from a moment when he’d been truly sad. Because Merlin had glimpsed the truth behind Nin’s gloating. She would only be messing with him this intently if she were afraid. That meant there was still a way to stop her. He only had to find it.

  Merlin walked to Ari on the bier. He kneeled at her side, blinking at the dried blood on her shirt. Merlin peeked and found that the spot where Ari had stabbed herself had all but healed. The Mercer pill must have worked on her wound. But she still wasn’t breathing.

  And Nin was still a big, immortal problem.

  Merlin laid a hand on Ari’s heart, hummed, and sparked. She jolted up, then quickly went back down. No breath.

  The winds in the cave picked up, blasting Merlin away from Ari. Nin looked furious. Good. He wanted her furious. He wanted her small and petty and fighting and caring and… human.

  Merlin closed his eyes, in the grips of a new idea. He sang as loud as he could, filling up every crevice of Nin’s cave with his deepest contralto, belting out the beginnings of Cher’s masterpiece, “If I Could Turn Back Time.”

  “What are you doing?” Nin seethed, as her glow dimmed and flared.

  Merlin kept singing her backward, the same way he’d brought the tree in the woods to a seed. This whole time he’d been assuming he had to become as powerful as Nin, to step up to her level of existence. But what if he had it all backward, in true Merlin fashion? What if he didn’t need to be less human to fight Nin? What if he needed to bring her down to his size?

  As Merlin hit the chorus, Nin started screaming. Her face contorted, its perfection dropping away. Her golden hair was back to its reedy paleness, her skin the sort of milky blue-white that would have occurred naturally if she’d spent too long in a cave. She dropped out of her gentle float, hitting the rocks. Her hands came up bloody and Merlin gasped.

  Nimue was back.

  But Nin was still fighting to regain every second, every year, every century.

  “You know, this was much easier with Morgana,” he gritted as he fought.

  The cave spat rocks like bloody teeth. The water started to boil.

  Merlin reached the end of the song, and Nimue was still Nimue: the young woman who’d lost herself in her anger, but had not yet given up her humanity.

  “What are you doing?” she asked, looking up at Merlin with a flash of disgust. Her voice was small, a cold drop of water where it used to be a raging tide. “You’ll never be able to keep me like this. You’ll drain your magic and then…”

  “Then what?” Merlin asked. “You’ll be Nin again?”

  He rushed over to her, fingers blazing with the threat of sparks, his hand closing around her startlingly real neck. “I’m afraid you’ll be too dead for that.”

  Nimue laid a hand over her heart. A whirlwind of magic started up, time pushing at Merlin, trying to age him prematurely. He could feel his skin prune, his hair shoot longer. He sang and reversed it; she screeched and he sprouted gray hairs. They were fighting now, but for the first time they were matched. Merlin’s magic was depleted in a way that Nimue’s wasn’t, but she was so out of practice at being in a body that she stumbled like a new colt.

  “Boy,” she spat. “Are you going to kill me? That’s what men do. That’s what men have always done. They kill and burn and take, and they stuff their ears against the screams, but at the end of the day they want to be remembered as good. So they write stories about their shining deeds and all are made to watch and listen and love them.”

  “You’re right!” Merlin said, tossing boulders from the cave into Nimue’s whirlwind so she had to evade them, throwing off her attack. “Everything you’re saying is spot-on! You could actually go further with it!” He nodded at Ari’s body, nearly forgotten on the bier. “Humanity is trying to get better, though, and this time you’re the one holding it back.”

  Nimue faltered—which gave Merlin the perfect opportunity to push her down, pinning her to the rocks of this odious cave with a blast of light and heat so fierce it shone like a sword, ready to slice.

  Nimue closed her eyes.

  But for some reason, Merlin wasn’t magically stabbing her.

  He would have taken out Nin, destroyed her. But this wasn’t Nin.

  “Heroes aren’t what you think,” he said. “It’s… it’s not just one boy and his pride against the world. Or it doesn’t have to be. If we give more people a chance, if we give them each a moment, those moments will add up.”

  Merlin stepped back. He’d finally stumbled over the answer, after all of these centuries. “That’s why you’re going to be the hero this time, Nimue.”

  “What kind of trick is this?” she asked flatly, still lying on the rocks.

  “No trick,” he said, holding up his magical fingers to prove they weren’t about to spark her into nothingness.

  Nimue had done terrible things. So had Merlin. But he’d been given a chance to get better—a chance that she was never given.

  To change this story, really change it, he had to finally break this cycle.

  The only catch being that if he was wrong, Nin would come back and they would all be doomed. But he was no longer the mage with a gnarled heart who would do any dark deed for a moment of safety.

  He hummed the tones of a song that Morgana had always liked, and a dark doorway lit up with glowing white runes.

  “What are you going to do?” Nimue asked roughly, getting to her feet. “Let the enchantresses of Avalon finish your job for you? They hate me as much as you do.”

  “They feared you, Nimue. You never let yourself be truly one of them. You stood off to the side, powerful and alone.” He winced. “I know what that’s like.”

  “You don’t let me go,” she said faintly, as Nin’s glow fought its way through her pale, ordinary skin. “That’s not how this story ends.”

  “You can’t see the future anymore,” Merlin rem
inded her. Nimue blinked hard, and Nin’s glow receded. She was no longer fighting Merlin. It looked more like she was fighting herself. “This door is your second chance,” he rushed, needing to convince her before Nin came rushing back. “Leave this future. Use your magic to live in this body. Live out your life as an enchantress, powerful and respected, as you always should have been.”

  The Lady of the Lake’s warm, round tones slipped out of Nimue’s thin lips. “There’s always a price. What is yours?”

  “That’s a very Nin question, and I don’t appreciate it,” Merlin said. “The only thing I want, in this exhausted universe, is a guarantee that your eternal counterpart won’t come back.”

  “Getting rid of one powerful spirit won’t make all people good,” Nimue said.

  Merlin sighed. “I’ve lived through enough of humanity to see the stunning range of mistakes that we can make. At least without Nin, we can make some new ones.”

  Nimue looked from the doorway to Merlin, and back again. “When I died, I bound the waters of time. Unbind them, and Nin will never be able to return.” She looked around the cave as if it were a nightmare trying to sneak up on her. “She wants to come back. Do it quickly.”

  “Motherfucking assballs of unrelenting space whores!” Ari yelled and jumped to her feet. She leaped down from the stone pyre and started kicking and punching it until her knuckles bloodied and feeling returned to her legs in the form of new bruises.

  “Ari?”

  She swung around and found Merlin staring at her. “Hey, old man,” she managed through the pounding of her pulse, the racing of veins. “Thanks for the jump start.”

  “You… you’re alive again.”

  “Have been for a few minutes. I was trying not to interrupt your victory there. Do you know how hard it is to lie still when your heart is on fire?” She spun in a full circle, unable to stop herself. She really needed to beat the tar out of something. “Didn’t that less salty version of Nin tell you to hurry?”

  Merlin nodded, beckoning her closer, but also seemingly wary of her adrenaline-fueled state. “We have to destroy the lake, so Nin can never return.” His finger cut the air, opening a portal that looked like an oily curtain.