Marian didn’t answer. She was staring around, frowning. “Where are we?”
Robin glanced into the shadows, noting the trees seemed almost uniform in size, shape, and placement. Mistletoe clustered in branches, foliage crowded the ground, but the huge trees took precedence over the rest of the forest.
He felt at his head again. “When I was a child, my mother told me there were oak groves planted by Druids in Sherwood. That they were the oldest part of the forest, and sacred. But she was always telling me stories. I never knew which were true.”
“These are oaks,” Marian said. “And—” She broke off sharply. “Robin…there are faces.” Alarm chilled him. He sat bolt upright, preparing to gather his legs under him until she waved him back down. “No, not Normans—at least, not living ones. Look! Do you see?” She gestured. “Look at the trunks.”
He looked, and saw nothing.
Marian got to her feet and crunched through fallen leaves to the oak closest to the one Robin leaned against. “Look here.” Her blood-smeared hand touched the massive trunk, tracing a shape. “Here are the eyes, the nose—and the mouth. See it?” She looked back at him, waiting expectantly.
He rolled his head in negation. “A trick of light and shadow.”
“On all of them? Look around, Robin.” Marian’s outstretched arm encompassed their surroundings. “This is an oak grove, one far older than you or me…or even, I daresay, our fathers’ fathers. Just as your mother told you.” She moved to the next tree, intent. Once again her hand traced a shape. “Eyes, nose, mouth…and here is the chin.”
He made a noncommittal sound.
Marian’s expression was sympathetic, but clearly she was certain of what she saw. He closed his eyes and rested as she walked from tree to tree, murmuring to herself. He was nearly asleep when she reached his tree, circling it. He heard her stop, heard her startled blurt of sound, and then abruptly she was attempting to haul him to his feet.
“Come and see,” she ordered.
His remonstration made no headway. She dragged him around to the back side of the huge old tree, took his hand in hers, and pressed his fingers against the wood.
“Feel it.” She moved his hand, tracing something. “Here, see? The brow, the bridge of the nose, the cheekbones—this one is much clearer than the others. Do you see it?”
He did. This time, he did. There in the bark, no longer merely a trick of light and shadow, was the shape of a face. It was more defined than those in the other trunks. Sightless eyes stared.
“It’s a man,” Marian said quietly.
And then, beneath their bloodied hands, the wood began to move.
The spell attenuated, began to shred, broke. He felt it fail, felt the last minute particles attempt to bind themselves together once more in order to also bind him, but it was too late. Awareness melded with spirit, merged with comprehension, joined with the power that had been held too long in abeyance. He tapped it, called it, welcomed it; felt it bound joyously back to him like a hound to its hearth. One moment it was absent; the next, present.
With a roar of triumph, he ripped himself free of the tree, wood chips flying, banished the clinging aftermath of the long, dreamless sleep and stepped into life again, into the world again, into his body. Flesh, blood, and bone. And power incarnate.
The empty tree screamed.
As the body tore itself free of the massive trunk, shredding strips and chips of wood, Marian blurted a sound of shock and hastily backed away. A root caught her, and she went down hard. Even as Robin bent to help her up, he halted, arrested in midmotion. Both stared at the stranger who had wrenched himself out of living oak.
He was wild-eyed, breathing hard. From the tree he went to his knees as if in supplication, or perhaps weakness. Splayed hands pressed against the layers of leaves, elbows locked to hold himself upright. Shoulder-length hair, dark save where it was frosted with the first touch of gray, tumbled around his face. Marian could not see his expression now as he knelt, but she heard the rapid, uneven breathing, saw the shuddering in spine and shoulders.
For all she and Robin were stunned, the stranger seemed more so.
She let Robin pull her to her feet. They put a cautious distance between themselves and the man but did not flee. Instead, they stared at each other in blank astonishment, then turned as one to the stranger. Robin’s sword chimed as he unsheathed it.
When the man looked up, Marian saw gray eyes clear as water, black-lashed, and pale, unblemished skin. His beard was short and well-tended. He wore a blue robe of excellent cloth, and pinned to his left shoulder was a red-and-gold enameled brooch, dragon-shaped, of Celtic workmanship. When he brought his hands out of the loose, powdery leaves, she saw he wore a gold ring set with a red cabochon stone she believed might be a ruby.
“Robin.” She kept her tone carefully casual. “Is this a trick of light and shadow?”
Equally casual, he replied, “This appears to be flesh and blood.”
“We are awake, are we not?”
“As far as I can tell, we are awake.” He tugged her litter-strewn braid sharply. “Feel that?”
“Yes,” she said crossly, putting a hand to her scalp.
“And I still bleed a little, so this must be real.” He paused. “My mother apparently told me the truth.”
Marian was amazed at how calm he sounded. She didn’t feel calm. She felt oddly detached. Somehow distant from what she had witnessed, and what she was witnessing now. And yet every noise she heard sounded preternaturally loud.
Should I not be running? Or, if she were a proper woman, fainting?
But then, she had not been proper since meeting Robin. Still, Marian wondered why she felt no urge to run. It wasn’t fear that the stranger might harm her if she tried; she wasn’t certain a man who had been trapped in a tree trunk moments before could harm her. But she found herself immensely curious to know what had happened to him—and to be quite certain she had truly seen him tear himself out of a living tree.
Still on his knees, the man looked over his shoulder at the tree. Except for a hollowed gouge in the trunk, the oak appeared no different. It was simply a tree. But a glance at other oaks still bearing likenesses of other men emphasized the truth of his own presence.
He turned back to face them. With hands now grown steady, he pushed heavy hair away from his face and bared a narrow circlet of beaten gold. He was, Marian realized, only ten or twelve years older than she.
She wondered what Robin was thinking. A quick glance at his face showed grimness, his skin drawn taut beneath the golden stubble and smeared blood. He seemed at ease; but then he always looked relaxed, wholly unprepared to strike when but a moment later the enemy was down. They had lost their bows along the way as they ran but were not unarmed; they had a meat-knife, quiver, and arrows, and Robin the sword.
Oddly, she wanted to say, “Do not harm him,” which made no sense. She knew nothing of the man save he had, to all appearances, been a resident of a tree. A resident in a tree.
The stranger’s eyes fixed themselves on Robin’s sword. A sudden light came into them, an expression of sharpened awareness and understanding. He stood up abruptly. Sharply, he asked something in a language neither of them knew.
Robin said something in fluent Norman French. The stranger frowned, plainly impatient, and tried several different languages in swift succession. In each there were words that sounded vaguely familiar to Marian, but he remained a cipher until a final try.
“Latin!” Marian exclaimed. “Oh, where is Tuck when we need him?”
This time, when the stranger spoke, his words, though twisted, were in an accented English they could understand. “When is it?”
Robin began to ask a question of his own, something to do with a carved man turning into flesh and stepping out of a tree, but the stranger overrode him.
“When is it?”
When. Not where. Perplexed, Marian said, “The Year of Our Lord 1202.”
The gray eyes widened.
“So long? I had not thought so”—his tone took on bitterness—“when I had mind again to think at all.” He looked more closely at Marian, then at Robin, inspecting them.
Marian became aware of her disheveled clothing, her braid half undone, bits of leaf and twigs caught in her hair and the loose weave of her hosen beneath the surcoat. Her chin itched from drying blood, and her face stung from scratches. Then the stranger turned to the tree again and put out a hand, feeling the bark. When he brought it away, smeared streaks of red crossed his palm.
“Blood,” he murmured. “Surely she did not foresee this, or she would have prepared for it. But who would have expected the blood of two Sacrifices to commingle in the Holy Grove, let alone upon the walls of my prison?”
“Sacrifices?” Robin demanded. “Are we meant to die here, when somehow all of your companions are let out of their trees?”
The stranger ignored the question and looked at Marian. “The Year of Our Lord, you said.” She nodded. “You mean the man Christians called the Nazarene?”
Marian blinked. “Of course.”
“Of course.” He sounded rueful. Then his expression altered. His eyes were once again fixed on Robin’s sword. “There is a task before me. It was mine to do before the enchantment, and no less mine to do now that I am free of it, regardless of how long it has been. Will you aid me?”
“Aid you?” Robin echoed. “Perhaps you should aid us by explaining what just happened.”
The stranger smiled. “I see power is no more understood now—whenever this time may be—than it was then.” Absently, he touched the brooch on his left shoulder. “Vortigern meant me to be the Sacrifice when his walls would not stand; instead, I gave him news of the dragons under the water. When the red defeated the white.” His pupils had swollen, turning eyes from gray to black. “He is dead. The red dragon of Wales. And so the task lies before me.” His eyes cleared, and he looked at them both as if seeing them for the first time. “Forgive me. Perhaps it will all explain itself upon introductions. I am Myrddyn Emrys.” He gave it the Welsh pronunciation, tongue-tip against upper teeth. “Men call me Merlin.”
“Merlin!” Robin blurted.
The stranger nodded. “The task is to find a sword, and give it back to the lake.”
“Merlin,” Robin repeated, and this time Marian heard adult disbelief colored by a young boy’s burgeoning hope.
Merlin had spent his entire life being—different. People feared him for it, distrusted, disbelieved; some of them were convinced he should be killed outright, lest he prove a danger to them. But that life, that time, was done. He faced a new world now, a different world, and far more difficult challenges. In his time, magic at least had been acknowledged if often distrusted; here, clearly, no one believed in it at all. Which somewhat explained the inability of the young man and young woman to accept what had happened.
An enchantment, he had told them as they knelt to wash their bloodied faces at a trickle of a stream, a spell wrought by Nimüe, the great sorceress. He did not tell them his own part in the spell, that he had allowed himself for the first time in his life to be blinded by a woman’s beauty and allure, to permit her into his heart. Once she had learned enough of him, enough of his power, she had revealed her true goal: to imprison him for all time and thus remove the impediment he represented to the new power in Britain.
A Britain without Arthur.
He grieved privately, letting no one, not even Nimüe, recognize the depth of his pain. Arthur he had wrought out of the flesh of Britain herself, a man destined to unite a world torn awry against the threat of the Saxon hordes. And so he had for a time; but then other forces took advantage of a childless king and a queen in disrepute, dividing Arthur’s attention when it was most needed to settle an uneasy court. By the time the Saxon threat became immediate, Arthur had lost too many supporters among the noblemen—and too many knights. The advent of a bastard got unknowingly on his own sister had sealed his fate. Merlin, in retirement, had done what he could, but Arthur died and Britain was left defenseless.
A Britain without Arthur could not survive as Merlin had meant her to, safeguarded by the one man empowered with the natural ability to keep her whole. Hundreds of years had passed since Arthur’s death, and even now Merlin had only to look at the man kneeling at stream’s edge, with his fall of white-blond hair and pale greenish-brown eyes, his height, to see that the Saxons had triumphed. And so the man agreed when asked, explaining that Britain’s people were now called “English,” born of “England,” that once had been “Angle-land.” The land of Angles and Saxons.
Marian, however, was not. It was clear when Merlin looked upon her. She was small, slight, and black-haired, bearing more resemblance to the people of his time in her features, despite the blue of her eyes. She called herself English, but her blood was older than Robin’s.
And now England—Britain—had fallen again. To a people called the Normans, Robin explained, who refused even to learn the language of the people they conquered. A people who had a king whose excess of temper was legendary, along with the greed and turbulence of his reign.
“Then we should waste no more time,” Merlin told them. “Arthur is dead, but his legacy may yet be realized.”
“By finding the sword,” Marian said dubiously, rebraiding her hair.
Robin’s smile, even as he felt at the clotted slice in his head, was very nearly fatuous. “Excalibur.”
“The sword belongs to the lake,” Merlin said, “now that Arthur cannot wield it. Britain’s welfare resides in it. Arthur, with Excalibur, drove away the Saxons once, but Mordred and his faction kept him from completing his task. You have told me of other invasions. To keep Britain from ever being invaded again, we must find the sword and return it to the lake.”
“That will be enough?” Marian asked. “No one ever again shall invade England?”
“No one.”
“You are Merlin the Enchanter,” Robin said. “What use would we be to you?”
“You will recall it was you who got me out of the tree,” he reminded them dryly.
They exchanged glances, still perplexed.
“You are the Sacrifices,” Merlin explained gently. “Just as Arthur himself was.”
And as he saw the confusion deepening in their eyes, he realized that with the years had disappeared the knowledge that was beginning to die out even in his time.
He gestured back toward the way they had come. “That was a Holy Grove, sacred to the Druids. It was Nimüe’s conceit to imprison me there—and, apparently, others as well.” His expression reflected regret that he, Marian, and Robin had been unable to free the others. “There are men and women born into the world who are meant to be Sacrifices for their people, for their times, to keep the land strong and whole. They need not be killed upon an altar, though that was done once, but merely die in defense of their land and ideals. To die serving the greater whole.”
“We are outlaws,” Robin said. “We are fortunate if we can feed ourselves each day; what service can we offer England?”
“Hope,” Merlin answered. “Have you not told me you give over most of what you take to peasants?”
“Because the king is taxing the poor to death,” Marian declared.
Merlin nodded. “And so you steal from those who have wealth to spare, and divide it fairly among those who have none.” His eyes were unwavering. “At the risk of your own lives.”
He had made them uncomfortable. Neither of them fully understood what they represented to the folk they aided. Perhaps they never would. It was the nature of Sacrifices to do what was required without acknowledging the self-lessness of it, because they saw only the need and simply acted. Arthur had not been raised to be a king per se, but to be a decent, honest, fair man of great ability, capable of leading others to the goal he perceived as worthy, because it served the people.
Arthur had come into privilege and kingship because it was the position needed to guide Britain. Robert of Locksley and Mari
an of Ravenskeep had been stripped of their privilege because that loss led them to the position of aiding the poor, when no one else in England appeared willing to do so.
Who else was worthy of aiding him in his task?
“We had better go,” Merlin said.
“Wait.” Robin’s brows were knit beneath raggedly cut hair. “Do you even know where the sword is?”
Merlin smiled. “Do you expect a quest? To be a knight of the Round Table, searching for the Grail? But the answer is disappointing, I fear: Nimüe told me, as my body was turned to wood.”
Robert of Locksley, born the son of an earl—albeit last, and thus inconsequential—wanted very much to say he disbelieved the nonsense the stranger told them. He recalled too vividly the beatings meted out by his father, wishing to purge what remained in his sons of anything fanciful, such as stories of Arthur and his enchanter, Merlin. But Robin’s mother had told him to believe as he wished, that stories were good for the soul as well as the heart. And so he had learned the stories, and loved them, and believed them, until he grew up and joined a Crusade that took the lives of innocents as well as warriors. He could not say when he had come to understand that there were stories and there were truths, with a vast gulf between the two, but he knew that Merlin, Arthur, and all the others of the legend were not real.
Except that Merlin was—here.
The part of him that wished to believe wondered why Merlin did not simply conjure a spell that would move them to wherever it was he wanted to go, without benefit of walking. The rational part of him believed in no such ability, that the stranger was nothing but a madman. But he remembered all too well the sight of the tree disgorging a man. Still, Merlin did not do so; he said he could not.
They slept little, ate less, and followed whatever it was that guided Merlin. The enchanter pronounced himself stunned by the changes that had overtaken England—no, Britain—and yet admitted there was much that had not altered. He seemed unimpressed by the fact that he had been entrapped in a tree for hundreds of years; if anything, he considered it quite natural. Such things as sorcery were expected by Merlin, while Robin found it impossible to accept that fanciful stories, no matter how beautiful, no matter how entrancing, were grounded in fact.
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