The Old Magic

by James Mallory

  It was true that her allies had betrayed her—like Vortigern—or disappointed her—like the priestess Ambrosia—but Merlin was different. Or at least he had been, assuming he was still the boy who had left here, and not a stag or a tree or an owl or something even worse. Mab’s magic couldn’t kill, but it could make you wish it had, and when she lost her temper she could be quite, quite unreasonable. Bearing that in mind, Frik did his very best to become invisible and immaterial.

  “Frik!”

  It didn’t work, of course.

  Mab appeared abruptly in the cavern where Frik had done his best to transform himself into a limestone pillar. With a sweep of her fingers she dispelled the illusion, leaving Frik standing there in a crouch, feeling faintly ridiculous and very apprehensive. He’d been wearing a horned headdress and a lot of animal skins, hoping to be mistaken for a cave painting if all else failed. With a sigh, he banished the clothing, lest it provoke her further, and returned to his plain black garb.

  “You let him defy me!” Mab raged.

  Not only furious, but petty-minded. Always blaming others even when—if—there was no one really to blame.

  “Well to be perfectly accurate, he couldn’t have gotten anywhere without the help of your dear sister,” Frik said recklessly. “If I may say so, Madame, it really would help matters if you two could agree to—”

  “When I want your advice, Frik, I’ll ask for it!” Mab snapped, interrupting him. “He thinks he can defeat me—Merlin—but he’s wrong. He’ll use his magic—I’ll force him to!”

  There was no safe answer to make to Queen Mab when she was in this mood, but for the first time, Frik began to really doubt her superior leadership. She’d plotted and planned for as long as Frik could remember and every single one of her plans had come to nothing—including the creation of Merlin, the champion of the Old Ways whom she’d had such hopes for. Even the least suspicious-minded person might begin to wonder whether Mab actually deserved to succeed after so many failures, all of which were at least partially caused by herself.

  Mab’s head whipped around and she glared at Frik as though she could hear his thoughts. Frik assumed his most servile posture. This constant abuse had gotten to be very wearing, and he found that now that the boy was gone he missed Merlin’s company more than he would have expected. Even when the lad was in a temper, he’d never taken it out on Frik. Now Merlin had defied Mab to her face—and about time, too, after all she’d put him through, if you asked Frik—and of course Mab wasn’t taking it at all well.

  “What are you going to do, Madame?” he asked nervously.

  “Come and see!”

  She vanished, leaving Frik to guess where she’d gone and find his own way there. The gnome squared his shoulders self-consciously. It was too much to hope for that the worst was over. Whatever was about to happen, it wasn’t going to be pleasant.

  Mab barely acknowledged the arrival of her servant when Frik reached her Sanctum Sanctorum. She was gazing into her scrying crystal, fury fuelling her power.

  How dare Merlin place his petty concerns ahead of her own! She was fighting for the survival of an entire race—what could one old woman’s life matter against that? Selfish, cruel, obstinate … the boy was a catalogue of the worst human traits! She’d been a fool to hope that something like Frik could rouse in him a proper appreciation of fairy virtues or make him understand the nobility of the battle Mab fought. No, Merlin took after his mortal half, short-sighted and petty.

  If you want something done right, do it yourself, Mab fumed bitterly. She’d paid too much attention to Ambrosia’s prattling about love and compassion—she’d tried to be kind to Merlin, and only see how well that had worked out! The Fairy Folk were not kind. Kindness was no part of Mab’s nature. It shouldn’t be part of Merlin’s, either.

  Now she would do what she should have done from the very beginning. She would show Merlin the full extent of her power, prove to him that his rebellion was foolish—and more than foolish: impossible. She would make him understand that the human world held nothing for him, that she, Queen Mab, was his natural ally, and the reinstatement of the Old Ways was his ultimate destiny. Uther—Vortigern—she would sweep them both away and bring Merlin back to serve her, if she had to drown all of Britain in mortal blood.

  She gazed into the crystal. It showed her the image of the Great Dragon: Draco Magnus Maleficarum, last of his kind. He had been born and bred for war, and today at last she would awaken him. She had been tapping the power of her realm for months, siphoning it into his inert body to slowly rouse him to consciousness and purpose, and now her labors would bear fruit.

  Mab clutched a fresh and potent crystal in each hand, willing all the chthonic power of the earth into Maleficarum’s sleeping body. The great form reflected in her crystal began to shudder, its ribs rising as it took first one laboring breath, then another.

  “Madame, are you quite certain this is wise?” Frik asked, very softly.

  “Oh, yes …” Mab purred.

  Suddenly, within the crystal, Maleficarum raised its head. The ancient yellow eyes snapped open, blazing with fury, and the long triangular head on its snakelike neck whipped around as it gazed about its cave. It tried to rise to its feet, only to be balked by the walls of the cave. For an instant it seemed baffled by its confinement, then suddenly it gave a furious roar, a sound that echoed from the sides of the cavern with force enough to dislodge stalactites from the ceiling.

  But Maleficarum was not done. It roared again, and this time the sound was accompanied by a rush of corrosive flame. The stream of fire met the wall of the grotto, and the rock seemed to shrivel out of its path, leaving a smoking blackened passage through the rock. Determinedly, Maleficarum began worming its serpentine body through the tunnel, toward freedom … and prey.

  It had slept for a long time, and it was hungry.

  “The Great Dragon will ravage the land,” Mab gloated. “Vortigern will build strongholds against its power in vain—Uther will think him weak and distracted, and plan his own attack in turn. And Merlin will be caught between them, a pawn that each side will claim as its own weapon. He will not be content to pretend to be a mere mortal—not when he can be a wizard. …”

  Frik regarded the crystal-sent image of the monster burrowing through the rock with professional distaste. There was no illusion to it, no subtlety—nothing but a brute hunger for destruction. Frik’s artistic soul rebelled against the very notion. Where was the challenge, the skill in winning through brute force?

  It didn’t seem fair, somehow.

  Not that he would be foolish enough to say any such thing to Mab.

  After a few hours of work Merlin realized that there was little he could do to repair Mab’s damage to the forest cottage in a single day or even a single week. And there were more pressing priorities before him than tidying up his home.

  At last he steeled himself to search through the debris until he found a spade. The winter air was biting as he left the cottage, and the friendly forest around the cottage, trees and woodlands that he had known all his life, now somehow looked oppressive and alien. He tried to shut out the lostness he felt, searching for the landmarks that would lead him to his destination.

  He’d first stumbled over Elissa’s grave as a child, long before he’d understood that Ambrosia somehow wasn’t his real mother. When he’d asked Ambrosia about the grave, she’d explained about Elissa and why his real mother had to go away. She’d done the best she could, but the child Merlin hadn’t been able to grasp the idea of death: For weeks afterward he’d come here to sit atop the grave-mound and tell Elissa the things he did with his day, imagining her living just as he did, only in a house far beneath the surface of the earth. Eventually he’d lost interest, as children do, in what had been little more than a new game to him, but the idea of Elissa had always retained a sort of determined reality in his imagination, as though she were present and living but just out of reach.

  Later, when Merlin better
understood what Death was, Elissa had not lost that kind of material existence in his imagination, for even before his training as a wizard and his visit to Anoeth, Merlin had known that Death was simply another land to which everyone emigrated in the end.

  And now both his dearest loved ones would be there.

  After a short walk he reached the forest clearing where Elissa was buried, and for a moment he simply gazed at her grave, sobered by the enormity of what he must do. Then he marked out the dimensions of Ambrosia’s grave beside Elissa’s, scoring the snow-dusted earth with the edge of his spade, and began to dig.

  Magic would have made everything easy, but Merlin had sworn to renounce all the magic he’d learned in Mab’s kingdom and he meant to keep his vow. He knew he had been created to become Mab’s champion. He wished he could forget it. Her blood ran in his veins, and each time he gave in to the temptation to use the magic he’d learned, Merlin knew he would become a little more like Queen Mab, until in the end there would be no difference between them and he would do everything she wanted without a single qualm.

  He had not chosen to be born a child of the Old Ways—his bloodline was no fault of his—but still the knowledge of his heritage gnawed at him as if it were a guilty secret, something wicked of which he should be ashamed.

  At last the grave was dug. His hands and shoulders ached from the labor of digging in the half-frozen ground. Now all that remained was to lay Ambrosia to rest. He knew that her friends would wish to be there when she was placed in the earth, and he went in search of them.

  He knew somehow before he reached the hermit’s hut that it would be empty, but Merlin went to see what was there anyway. An early storm had carried away many of the twigs that had made up its walls, and Merlin could see inside to the one tiny room. It was empty of all possessions, even Blaise’s few beloved books.

  The whole area had an air of long desertion. The clearing was full of windblown trash, the fire-pit filled with autumn leaves. No one had lived here for a long time.

  Merlin shook his head, unable to believe it. Where had the old hermit gone—and when? Had Blaise been forced to leave the forest against his will? How long had Merlin been absent from the mortal world, learning Mab’s tainted magic?

  There were no answers to his questions, and Merlin knew there never would be.

  With a growing sense of despair, he next searched for Herne. Though he did not know where the huntsman lived, he knew that Herne would never abandon his beloved forest, or any of his favorite places in it. But though Merlin searched until the light became too dim for him to see his way, he could not find Herne either.

  A terrible suspicion began to grow in his mind, that somehow with a wave of her hand, Mab had erased everyone Merlin had ever known, so that he would be utterly alone and lonely. I won’t let you defeat me, Merlin vowed silently. Wearily he returned to the cottage in the forest that he’d shared with his foster-mother.

  The next day, when the sun rose, he laid Ambrosia to rest beside his true mother, Elissa.

  There was a small cross such as the Christians used over his birth-mother’s grave, but over Ambrosia’s grave Merlin set no marker, only a border of white stones around the carefully smoothed and snow-dusted earth. In death as in life, Ambrosia would pay homage to no god.

  The forest around him was stark and still with winter. Snow had fallen again the night before, and now there was a light sprinkling of white upon the bare black branches. Spring would not come for many months, and for Merlin they would be cold and hungry months, with Ambrosia’s larder gone and her supplies scattered by Mab’s attack.

  But he would survive. The forest was his home.

  If Mab thought that either hunger or cold would drive Merlin back to her, she was wrong. There was one last piece of magic he would perform, to seal his decision for all time.

  He knelt at the head of the twin graves and took a small flint knife from the pocket of his coat. He’d found it in the ruin of the hut, and recognized it as the one Ambrosia used in gathering herbs for her magic, for iron disrupted the life energies that gave many plants their magical virtue. It would serve as well for this purpose as it had for hers.

  He held out his right hand over the fresh grave-earth, and with the knife in his left hand, cut a deep wound in the palm of his right hand. The pain burned harder than frostbite, but Merlin did not flinch. Blood was magic, words were magic: To swear in blood was a binding thing, that even the Old Ones must listen to.

  “I swear,” Merlin said in a level voice, as his blood dripped to the earth, “I swear on Ambrosia’s grave and on the grave of my mother, that I will only ever use my powers to defeat Queen Mab. This I swear.”

  He swept his hand outward, sprinkling the earth with drops of blood. At the place each drop of blood had fallen, tiny scarlet pimpernels sprang up out of season, blooming for a moment before they withered away again with the cold.

  So. The earth accepts my vow.

  And Mab, Merlin knew, had heard him, but Mab had created him as her tool, and Merlin knew that she would do anything to reclaim his loyalty, try any trick, take any hostage.

  That was why no action was safe.

  Once he’d dreamed of being a knight, doing good works and winning the love of fair ladies through his heroism. Today, Merlin put those dreams aside forever. His only safety from Mab lay in being more cunning than she was, more clever. He would not follow the path she had set out for him. Instead he would follow the way the Lady of the Lake had unfolded to him. He would learn wisdom, not magic. He would gather knowledge from every source in the natural world to surpass Mab’s cunning, and he would win the war he fought against her, because in the end he had to do nothing at all to triumph. He simply had to remain here, safe in his forest, and let the world pass him by.

  That was all.

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE COURTS OF CRUELTY

  How terrible can it be?

  Lady Nimue told herself that going to see the King could not be very terrible at all, and tried to make herself believe it. She paced between table and chair and brazier, ignoring the winejug and goblets set out on the table and the warm bed filled with goose-down in the inner chamber. Though it was late, she could not sleep when tomorrow would bring an audience with Vortigern.

  Outside, the wind of the moors moaned against the sturdy canvas walls of Lord Ardent’s campaigning tent. Inside, the thick woven tapestries hanging from the heavy ashwood tent frame hardly moved, and Nimue was as warm as if she were still home in her father’s northern castle … though she wasn’t nearly as safe. For Lord Ardent’s tent was pitched on the vast open heaths of Cornwall, and over everyone in the camp towered the great granite ridge upon which Vortigern meant to build his castle, the natural barrier whose broad flat top had been used as a thoroughfare by invading armies from the Tuatha de Danaan to the Saxon usurpers.

  Atop its sturdy length Vortigern was building a great castle, so that no one after him would be able to use this route to conquer Britain, and the construction was not going well. It was autumn once again; the building of Pendragon Castle had begun years before, and no architect in all of Britain had been able to make the walls stand upon their foundations. The heads of the failed architects were on spikes surrounding the ruined foundations; Her father said that rumor had it that Gwennius, the latest one, would be joining his predecessors soon.

  For Gwennius’s sake Nimue hoped that rumor lied. She had talked with the worried little man a few times since Ardent had been commanded to bring her to court. All the good architects were dead, and Gwennius was the unluckiest of what was left; a thin, fussy, grey-haired man who drank too much and who had been afflicted with a perpetual stammer since he’d taken this new job. It was no sinecure being Vortigern’s architect, and no long-lasting position, either. Nimue only hoped her own future would be brighter than Gwennius’s. She did not know what the king wanted of her, and neither did Lord Ardent. Both of them would have to wait and see, as Nimue had waited these past sev
eral years for her future to begin.

  Nothing in Nimue’s life had gone as she had anticipated on that last night she had spent within Avalon walls. Her father had not married her off to the son of a fellow noble as she had feared and expected—though years had passed, the king had refused to give his permission for any marriage, for Nimue’s marriage would bring an alliance between Ardent, one of Vortigern’s most powerful barons, and whomever Nimue married. And—as anyone who had spent any time at court realized—even after so many years on the throne of Britain, Vortigern still saw enemies in every shadow and planned accordingly.

  In one way he was right, as he was universally hated. But in another he was wrong, for Vortigern had long since crushed the rebellion from every heart but one.

  Prince Uther’s.

  Constant’s golden crown sat easily upon the long blond hair of the man who sat in the main room of the elaborate campaign tent, and his red cape was lined in costly ermine, but beneath these regal trappings King Vortigern wore full battle armor, his great sword belted at his hip. Even now, at night, safe in his tent, ringed around by guards who were either loyal or watching one another too closely to dare any treason, Vortigern did not feel secure.

  He’d come from holding court in Londinium—another round of dissidents to execute, the only thing that Britain apparently had an endless supply of—to see how the building of his castle was progressing. If he did not have sons to leave behind him when he died, at least he would leave monuments. The people would remember him, whether they liked it or not.

  Unfortunately, Gwennius was doing no better than his predecessors; he’d have to execute the man soon, Vortigern thought. Not so much because of his string of repeated failures, but simply because he was tired of looking at him.

  It’s more work being a tyrannical despot than most people think.

  The years that had passed since he’d seized Britain for his own had not been kind to him. The leonine young king had been replaced by an aging and suspicious ruler; a king without an heir, whose lands were not at peace.