Once & Future

by Cori McCarthy

  The taneen backed off, cowering oddly before it shook like it was ridding itself of rain. Ari watched with a sort of horror as Morgana seeped out of its scales, shaking her bluish body, straightening her ethereal dress. “What a creature,” she whispered, seemingly enamored. “Powerful, savage, like the wolves of Earth. Hard to convince. She very much needs to eat you.”

  “Were you… inside of it? Controlling it?” Ari asked, still breathing hard.

  Morgana held her palms up. “You asked for my help. Are you, or are you not still dangling from the ledge of certain death?”

  Ari scrambled to her feet, backing toward a doorway as the taneen regained its sense of self. Its scales lifted high, a hissing breath making it bare fine, sharp teeth.

  “She’s in a mood, desperate to mate. Only there aren’t many of her kind left. She’s rather lonely, truth be told. Her last few hatchlings have died of hunger.”

  “While that’s fascinating, Morgana, right now she looks pissed.”

  “Not pissed. Starving.”

  “Why didn’t you take her out of the city before you let go of her? She’s going to attack me any second!”

  “Because you need to prove yourself. I’m not Merlin, who’ll give you chance after chance to fail on your way to success. With me, you lose once, and then it’s game over.” She laughed as if she’d finally, in all her long years, started to have fun. “Go on, Ari, King of Your Own Fate. Slay a dragon. Let’s see it.”

  Ari gaped. This was like training with Merlin, only completely bonkers and deadly. “What do I get if I win?”

  Morgana ticked her answers off on her fingers. “One, you survive. Two, you earn my help, and three, I’ll give you all the truths you crave. Every detail. All the foul answers and dark paths of your predecessors that Merlin is too scared to reveal.”

  The taneen was taking Ari in, tasting the air with a forked tongue.

  “Deal.” Ari searched out Excalibur, finding the blade lodged in a notch on the stone balcony—on the other side of the dragon. Because, holy shit, Kay was right; taneens were totally dragons. Ari called for help again and rattled the doorknob, but it was locked tight. Where is everyone? Did they go into hiding when I broke the barrier? Is Mercer on its way?

  Ari made the terrible choice to glance at the sky. The taneen shot toward her and snapped its powerful jaws at her left leg. She jolted sideways, leaping onto the rim of the tower edge, only to reel backward from vertigo. Jumping down, the taneen twisted around itself in the tight space, trying to reach her, and she used its momentarily knotted limbs to climb over its back and dive for Excalibur.

  She grabbed the handle and tugged—and nothing happened.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me! You don’t budge now?” Ari yelled, yanking harder. The taneen took that moment to bite her shoulder. Luckily, it was the shoulder bearing the pauldron. The leather held back the sting of sharp teeth, but not the immense pressure of those powerful jaws. Ari howled with pain as Excalibur released from the stone.

  She whipped the sword around with one hand, smacking the taneen on the large plated head. The top scale cracked, and the dragon gave a loud howling moan. She backed up, shaking her long neck while blood seeped out from the crack and down her wide face. Backing up, the creature lowered her whole body, crouched, eyeing Ari with those blue-red irises, almost… affronted. Sad.

  Ari didn’t know what to do with the wildness in that expression. She wondered if she’d had that same overwhelmed, neglected look in her eyes when Kay’s family had found her in that junked bit of ship, starving. “Did you honestly think I’d let you eat me?”

  Her mouth opened wide, and she licked the blood dripping down her snout. Then the great lizard shook her head as if ridding herself of a thought, leaped over the edge of the tower and sailed down through the city, four legs splayed, revealing webbed skin between her limbs and body that was, Ari had to admit, more practical than dragon wings.

  Ari stared at the gliding taneen, amused to have won, and yet troubled. From beneath the barrier, Omaira didn’t seem as colorful or lively as she remembered. It was also silent. Maybe everyone had gone into hiding, fearing Mercer. She didn’t blame them.

  “I have to explain how I broke the barrier. How I can help,” Ari said, mostly to herself, although she knew that Morgana was still listening. Ari used Excalibur to pop open the door to the balcony, then sheathed the mighty blade at her back. “This tower is Ras Almal. The Maj, the elder council, meets here. My family was one of the founding families.”

  Ari didn’t know why she was spouting facts except that they steadied her. And she needed it. It felt like something far worse than falling from the heavens, battling an ancient enchantress or even a dragon, was waiting for her in the city.

  So she didn’t wait.

  Ari flung the door wide and flew down the ornate, spiral steps of the tower. Her feet slipped several times. The stones were coated in sand, as if the wind had swept it inside over many years and no one had swept it back out.

  Ras Almal… unkempt? Abandoned?

  At the bottom of the tower, she rushed into the street, only to find more sand shifting out of open doorways, coating everything. Shutters were torn, speckled with taneen teeth marks. Ari rubbed her aching shoulder. “Marhabaan!”

  There was no answer; and Ari was wrong. The people hadn’t hidden at the sight of the barrier’s destruction. They hadn’t been here for a very long time.

  “What has happened? Where is everyone?”

  Morgana appeared beside her, nearly opaque for once. “You know. You’ve seen this before. You’ve chosen not to remember.”

  Ari stared at her. “I know what happened here?”

  “Human minds are delicate, and yet complicated. Like trees. I was an oak when you first met me, remember? Pinned by Excalibur since the last Arthur ran me through. In the centuries I spent there, I learned that whole branches can be cut off when the trunk is in crisis. A necessary dismemberment.” Morgana glanced around. “What you know about this place might stop you from being Ari altogether. Would you risk it?”

  “I faced the dragon. I won. You promised to give me all the hard truths.” Ari stared Morgana down. “I’m not afraid. I need to remember! If I know what—”

  Morgana tapped the side of Ari’s head.

  And Ari was lost.

  She was small again, skinny, tiny, enamored with twin brass racehorses, one for each hand. Her family had been off-planet, speaking out against Mercer’s blatantly higher taxation on the poorer planets, while all the economic incentives were heaped on places like Troy. Ari understood more than her parents thought she did when it came to Mercer, but she pretended not to. It wasn’t any fun to feel sick about the cancer of unchecked capitalism.

  But then her family returned to Ketch, Ari running to show her cousin Yasmeen her new horses—only to find the entire city silent.

  And there were… sleeping figures in the streets.

  Ari’s parents screamed at her to stay on the ship while they ran from body to body, crying out. Crying for help. Ari thought they wanted her to help, to do something, and she took light steps away from the empty space docks, toward the small figure of a boy younger than her. Ari told herself she didn’t know him, but the lie made her stomach knot.

  He played down by the mosaic fountain sometimes, the one with the jeweled camels. Yasmeen probably knew his name. Ari would ask her cousin when they met up again, and his name would most likely wake him. That always worked in the best stories.

  But when she was only a few steps away, she let go of the dream that he was sleeping. His green eyes were thrown open at the sky. Green and gone.

  And yet she swore she saw movement in him. A sign of life. A twitch in his throat that might be a held breath. She knelt beside him and shook his shoulder with a careful hand. His mouth dropped open, pouring black flies into the desert air, into Ari’s eyes and hair.

  She screamed and screamed, her father swooping her up as they ran back to the space
docks. Ari dropped the racehorses. Maybe they were the bad luck. Maybe they’d caused this to happen. It was the only thought that made sense.

  Ari’s parents’ ship took off moments later, running from the sight of Mercer bots in the sky, building something, while a Mercer patrol screeched after them, sounding alarms in the ship that made Ari hide beneath the control panel and bite her knuckle until it bled.

  Ari lifted her head. She was on her knees, alone. Morgana was gone. The sun was setting, blue-and-orange fiery light lining the horizon. Even the siren birds were lilting through the air. It was a familiar nightmare that had masqueraded through her hopes as a dream.

  Ketch, the entire planet, was a tomb.

  She had to get out of here.

  She ran first to the space docks, but they were stripped bare. Mercer had poisoned the population somehow and then taken every conceivable ship in case there were survivors. Then they’d sealed the planet away, and when her parents had tried to tell the galaxy of Mercer’s massacre, they’d been murdered.

  Ari’s thoughts skittered back to the conversation about Lionel’s treatment with the Administrator. How close was Mercer to repeating its genocidal history?

  “Morgana!” Ari swung around, yelling at the skies. “Get me out of here!”

  Morgana didn’t appear, the coward, but her voice slid along the wind. “I’d need Merlin’s blood to make another portal to push you through. Why don’t you call your friends?”

  Ari looked at her blank wrist again, missing her watch, her only direct com link with Error. Now that the barrier was broken, she should be able to get a message out, but how? She ran back to Ras Almal, up the stairs to the balcony where she’d battled the taneen. She swept the sand off the stone and pressed the hidden buttons, bringing the system online. It still worked. She typed in the fourteen-digit strand of Error’s call codes—the only number she’d memorized in the whole universe. Kay would answer. And Merlin and Gwen would bring them here. They’d pick her up. Save her from this dead place…

  Ari pressed Enter. The signal spun and spun until it ended, cut off. THE SHIP YOU ARE TRYING TO LOCATE IS OUT OF RANGE OR NO LONGER IN SERVICE, the system told her.

  Ari turned, her back sliding down the console until her butt hit the hard stone. She looked at her hands, stained red from the gritty sand. She’d dreamed of this moment so many times, the blood desert of Ketch coating her skin once again. Now this red seemed to symbolize the heights to which Mercer would rise to wipe out rebellion.

  The color of cost.

  “They’ll answer,” Ari said, her voice unrecognizable in her own ears. “My friends will be looking for me. They’re safe somewhere. I’ll keep calling until they answer.”

  “How could you know that?” Morgana said, sitting beside her. She was not so all-powerful for once, as lost as Ari in her own ways. “They might think you’re dead. I might have—”

  “Arthur wanted me to see this place, so this is part of it.” Ari covered her face with her hands. You wanted me to know what Mercer is truly capable of. Is that it, Arthur?

  No answer.

  “You are an admirable creature,” Morgana said, clearly against her will. “Your entire planet is lost, your people extinct, and you are scratching around for hope like that ravenous dragon, as if perhaps one more meal will make a difference in your starvation.”

  “You’re insufferable.” Ari felt herself crumbling in. Morgana had been right; Ari was not the same person, not with these memories unlocked. This truth unfurled her fury. A woken dragon. “Morgana?”

  “Yes?”

  “Show me everything. Everything Merlin doesn’t want me to know.”

  Merlin was awake in the middle of the night again, walking the ramparts of the castle, checking his magical barrier for weaknesses.

  The web of energy lines he’d created to keep Lionel safe from the Mercer ships required constant upkeep, and a year of staring at the sky had left his face permanently pinched, his neck aching, his eyesight worse than ever. His magic was always on the verge of being drained. But he did what was needed. He hummed and sent up a few crackling threads to repair a small breach—not big enough for a ship to fit through, but he couldn’t let it grow.

  “Nicely done,” Gwen said, her voice bleary. She patted Merlin’s shoulder. “Lionel thanks you for your service.” Gwen rarely slept, always afraid that the next day would bring doom to her people. Merlin worried that the ever-glowing lights of his barrier wasn’t helping, but at least Gwen and Merlin had found common ground on their nocturnal castle-walks. She was the first Gweneviere he had ever befriended. She had even named him Lionel’s official mage.

  Of course, not everyone was delighted with Merlin’s barrier.

  “Do you think the tourists will ever forgive me for sealing them in?” Merlin asked, as the energy lines reconnected in the night sky, the glowing cage repaired, and Lionel safe—or trapped.

  “There are worse places to be stuck than Lionel,” Gwen said, her brown eyes brightening with argument. “Even when it’s under siege.”

  “They burned me in effigy. They even put a scruffy little red beard on the thing.”

  “It was strikingly accurate,” Gwen agreed.

  Merlin didn’t know why it bothered him so much. He wasn’t used to being popular. That was Arthur’s job. But for some reason he wanted these people to understand he was on their side—maybe because he’d cast his lot with them in a way that he never truly had before.

  “You saved all of us from death at Mercer’s hands,” Gwen pushed on. “Including me, and for that I will always be grateful.”

  “Saving people is woefully temporary,” Merlin muttered. Mercer was still up there. And Ari was still dead in the hold of Error. Now that they were planet-bound, the ship had become a sort of tomb. Merlin could barely see it, docked past the edge of the city, a dark lump in the desert, glowing softly with reflected light.

  Lam spent hours kneeling at the side of Ari’s plastic coffin, filling her in on what was happening with her friends. Kay swore he visited so often to keep the ship in flying order, but he always came back with a red, puffy face. The Lionelians went to have their hope brought back to life after long days of dehydration, exhaustion, and fear. Even in death, Ari was a symbol of pushing back against Mercer’s tide.

  Gwen and Merlin didn’t visit.

  Merlin couldn’t face his longing to have Ari back at his side. Every time he saw her lying in that Mercer box, the sensation felt ineffably wrong. It was even worse for Gwen, he suspected. Her wedding ring never budged from her finger. She still wore Ari’s watch, and she lit the thing up now, staring at one of the pictures she often returned to. As far as Merlin could tell, it was a pile of laundry.

  He wanted to comfort Gwen—but what did he know about love?

  “I’m going to bed,” Gwen announced. The old Merlin would have muttered, Whose bed? But he kept his mouth shut. It was none of his business, even if this truth would have made Ari’s heart split into mismatched pieces.

  “Good night,” Gwen whispered. She seemed to be saying it to her watch. Perhaps to Ari herself. Gwen cut off the display and padded down the stone hallway.

  Merlin’s fingers roamed over a small wooden falcon in his pocket. He’d found it in the abandoned marketplace, half finished. It reminded him a little of the one he’d had when he was very, very old. The one he’d woken up with in the crystal cave, clasping as if it were a lifeline to an unknowable home. And that really was the problem, wasn’t it? Merlin had begun to think of Lionel as his home. He looked out over the tournament rings and the marketplace, the houses and the shops. He loved this place in a way he’d never dared to love anything in ages.

  Merlin turned his attention back to the skies. Barrier maintenance was never-ending, and if he wanted to keep this place, he could not falter. He could not fail his friends the way he’d failed Ari. When he felt like his neck was going to snap, he sang every Earth song he could remember, not for magical purposes, just to keep
himself awake. The truth was that his mind clung to the catchiest tunes, which meant a disproportionate number of nursery rhymes and pop songs. After bumbling his way through a few half-remembered K-pop hits, Merlin heard soft footsteps behind him.

  “Up again, your majesty?” he asked.

  Long, strong fingers settled on the back of his neck, rubbing at the sore muscles. Merlin melted into the feeling.

  “I am not the Queen of Lionel,” Val said. “Though I do look good in her clothes.”

  “Yes,” Merlin said. “Yes, I can confirm that you do.”

  Merlin had seen Val dressed up in Gwen’s clothes more than once and found it distractingly exquisite. Everything about Val delighted him. He calmly organized, keeping everyone alive in the face of this painful, drawn-out siege, and yet he also insisted on beauty. He planned little picnic dinners out of the meager portions of food, making a show of the last of the Lionelian mead. Merlin was also in love with that burning, bold way Val stared across a crowded room. And the times when the weight of the siege was too much, and Merlin’s hand found a home on Val’s arm, or the small of his lower back, and Val murmured in appreciation of the touch.

  They had been flirting mercilessly with each other for months. But there was absolutely nothing more that Merlin could do about it unless he wanted a heartbreak as grand as anything on the Arthurian scale.

  “You have a nice singing voice, have I ever told you that?” Val asked, his hands still searching out the tension in Merlin’s neck.

  “No one’s ever told me that,” Merlin said. People were often awed by his magic—never by him. “I do have quite a bit of practice at singing.”

  “Should we practice other things?” Val asked.

  Merlin looked down, abruptly taking his eyes off the barrier and finding Val’s glowing brighter than the magic overhead. “I’ve told you all of the reasons why I keep my distance,” Merlin said, his voice perilously thin.