Chapter 8: Gold
By Whitsun the silver belt would not close.
Gwen knelt at his hip with three new links Elyan had made to match, swearing at them under her breath in words Merlin was fairly sure the Lady Morgana had never heard.
"Breathe out."
"This is out."
"Then stop growing for a quarter of an hour." She closed the last link and sat back on her heels. The blue silk had been let out twice since Lady Day, so cleverly you could not see where. It still fell to the floor in the same soft folds, but they fell from higher now, over a curve under the embroidered frost that had not been there at the fitting, and the belt that had once sat low on his hips sat above it like a hoop on a barrel.
"There," said Gwen. "Very holy."
"Is that what I look like?"
"You look like a miracle. Half the lower town's been up since four to see you go by." She began picking threads off his sleeve that did not need picking. Then, in exactly the same voice: "I saw Arthur on the servants' stair."
Merlin went still under her hands.
"In March, at dawn. I was taking up my lady's linen, and he was coming down in his stockings with his boots in his hand. He looked at me as if I were a ghost, and I looked at the wall." She picked off another thread. "I didn't think anything of it, for a while. But I've been letting out these seams since Lady Day, Merlin. I can count."
He opened his mouth, and Gwen put a finger on it.
"Don't tell me anything. Then I won't know it, and nobody can make me say it." She took the finger away. "I'll say one thing, and never again. He looks at you like a man looking at a house on fire. My lady told him the same in the long gallery, the week before your wedding. He said it wasn't his house."
Merlin laughed, and it hurt somewhere under the silver belt.
Gwen settled the circlet in his hair with both hands, as she had on the wedding morning. "Nobody will hear it from me. Not if they put me in the stocks."
The carriage was open, and so hung with ribbons and green birch that it looked like a hedge going to a fair, and the king sat in it beside him, upright as a lance, and they went down through the lower town at a walk. The streets were four deep. Women held up babies to see, and reached out to touch the wheels for luck as they went by, and then touched their own bellies or their daughters'. Somebody had made a new verse of the honey-cake song about the miracle, which did not scan, and a whole street sang it at him anyway.
The king lifted a hand to them now and then, counting. But once, when a little girl threw a fistful of may blossom into the carriage and it landed in Merlin's lap, Merlin turned and caught Uther's face before he could put it away. He was looking at the blossom, and then at Merlin, as though he could not quite believe in either.
Arthur rode ahead with the escort, in red, and did not look round once.
In the courtyard the court had come out onto the steps, and the crowd pushed in at the gate behind. The king got down and handed Merlin down himself, with great care, as though he might spill. Then, on the cobbles, before the court and the crowd and the bishop, he laid his hand flat on the blue silk over Merlin's belly.
The courtyard went quiet.
"My child is strong," said the king, to all of them.
Under his palm, under the silk and the small silver dragons, something turned over, a slow roll like a fish under a boat. Merlin felt it, and saw the king feel it. Uther's hand went still, and for a moment he shut his eyes.
Merlin looked past his shoulder, because he could not look at that.
Arthur had got down at the foot of the steps. He stood with the reins in his fist and his face turned towards them, and he was not angry. Merlin knew all of Arthur's angers, and this was none of them. He looked like a man who has been struck and is waiting, quite politely, to see whether he will fall down.
His father sent Agravaine home on the Tuesday after Whitsun, and Arthur, for the first time in his life, could have kissed him.
Agravaine had come back from the spring campaign with the raiders' quarry camp burned, the very camp Arthur had asked leave to burn in November, and been insufferable about it for a month. At council he mentioned, smiling, that on the march they were asking whether the consort's child was a miracle or a witch's get.
"Then go and ask your sheep," said Uther, without raising his voice. "You will leave court today. You may come back in a month, when you have learned to speak of my child."
Arthur sat on his hands.
Before every vote now his father turned to his left and asked, "And what will the lower town say?" and listened to the answer as he listened to nobody else. Arthur did not mind that. He minded his father's hand, and my child, and the court bowing to the curve under Merlin's robes as if it were a relic in a procession.
And at night the panel was unbolted.
He learned things that summer. He learned that a man carrying a child might want pickled plums at two in the morning and nothing else on God's earth, and that Cook kept them in brown crocks in the cold larder, and that a crown prince could walk in and take one and Cook would only look at him. He lined the crocks up on Merlin's sill like trophies. He learned that Merlin loved cherries and could not be bothered with the stones, so he sat at the table under the window and stoned them one by one with his dagger, red to the second knuckle, and fed them across and called Merlin a spoilt and idle consort with every one.
He learned feet. In the June heat Merlin's ankles swelled until they had no shape at all, and Arthur sat at the end of the bed with them in his lap and rubbed them and swore at them steadily, in the language of the training field, which Merlin said was the most soothing sound he had ever heard.
And he learned the bump, which by midsummer was a great deal more than a bump and had opinions. It woke when Merlin lay down. Arthur would lie with his hand on it in the dark and feel it go, knock, knock, like someone at a door, and speak to it sternly, as to a new squire. "Settle. That's enough. You're keeping your..." He stopped, not knowing what came next. "You're keeping him awake." It kicked his hand. Merlin laughed so hard he had to sit up.
One night Arthur hauled up a bath, fourteen buckets up the servants' stair at an hour when nobody was about but the cats, and set the tub before Merlin's fire, scarlet and blowing. "Fourteen. I counted."
"Eleven," said Merlin. "It took me eleven."
"Your buckets were bigger. In."
He knelt on the hearth behind the tub with his sleeves rolled, and when Merlin had sunk to the shoulders with a groan Arthur would remember for a long time, he said, "Head," and tipped the jug.
He did it badly. He got soap in Merlin's eyes and water down his own front, and he had no idea what to do with so much hair. But he put his fingers in it at the crown, the way Merlin did, and made small slow circles out to the temples, and after a while Merlin's head came back against the rim and his eyes shut.
Arthur did not decide to sing. It only seemed to be the next thing.
"Hush now, my heart, for the tide's going out," he sang, in a voice trained to carry across a battlefield and never asked to do anything else, "the boats are all somewhere, there's something about... a lamp, and some sheep..."
Merlin's shoulders were shaking. "There are no sheep."
"There are always sheep in these things."
"The fire's banked deep. Not sheep. Deep."
"And I'll hold you till morning," Arthur sang, louder, to drown him, because that line he knew; he could not remember a time when he had not known it. "Go to sleep, go to sleep."
When he looked down, Merlin was not laughing any more. Tears were running from the corners of his shut eyes into the bathwater, and he was smiling.
"What? What did I do?"
"Nothing." Merlin found his wet hand and held it against his cheek. "Do it again. Get it wrong again."
He did not get everything right. Out of twenty-five years' habit he still said the wrong thing without thinking, that Merlin waddled like a duck on a towpath, that he'd need a wider chair, and Merlin would say "Arthur," only that, and Arthur would hear it and stop. "Sorry." The first time it took him a whole evening. By midsummer it took no time at all.
He did not notice that night that the bathwater stayed hot the whole hour, steam still curling off it when Merlin climbed out. Or he noticed, and put it down to a good fire, and thought no further.
In February Uther had forbidden him to ride. On the last day of June, because Merlin asked, he let him ride Hawthorn at a walk, with a groom at her bridle and Gaius's opinion of the business following them out of the gate like a smell.
Merlin had asked because the king was hunting the hart with his son for the first time in three years, and he had sat through enough Thursday suppers to know what happened when those two went anywhere with spears and nobody between them. So he rode between them all day like a man carrying two full buckets. He carried their messages back and forth like a dog fetching sticks, and changed every one a little on the way.
At noon the hounds brought a hart of twelve to bay in the shallows under a beech hanger, and Arthur was off his horse and wading in with a boar spear before anyone else had reined up.
"Arthur." The king's voice cracked across the water. "Stand off. Leave him to the hounds until I come up."
Arthur turned his head, knee-deep, and his ears had gone the colour Merlin had learned to dread across two years of suppers. "I've taken a boar on foot—"
"You have taken a great many things on foot," said the king. "One of them put my consort in his bed for three days."
The whole hunt heard it. Arthur's arm came back with the spear in it, not to throw it at anyone, only because his arm did that, and the lords settled in their saddles to enjoy it.
"Sire," said Merlin, loudly and brightly. "May I see it done? I never have. Arthur says nobody in Camelot can take a hart on foot but you, and he only learned it watching you."
Arthur had said no such thing. The king looked at Merlin, and then at his son standing in the river.
"Did he," said the king.
Merlin watched Arthur catch it, the way he caught a ball thrown wide, all at once and without looking. "The white hart at Ascetir. When I was eleven. You went in on foot and told me to stay on the bank."
"And did you?"
"No."
Something went over the king's face that Merlin had seen once before, at a Thursday supper, over the matter of a wyvern. "Then take this one," he said, "and let me see whether you were watching."
Arthur took it cleanly, in one thrust, with the water to his thighs. Then he cut the right forefoot, as the custom was, and waded back and knelt on the bank and held it up to his father, dripping.
The king took it.
They rode home through the long gold evening, Arthur ahead with the hounds. The baby had kicked all afternoon as if Hawthorn's walk were a gallop, and Merlin ached from his shoulders to his knees.
"Twenty-five years," said the king beside him, "and today he and I did not draw steel once." He was watching his son's back. "That is your doing."
Merlin could not answer him.
"When the child is born," the king said, after a while, "I want this kingdom clean."
"Clean of what, sire?"
"You know of what." He was looking at the woods. "They do not come at a man with knives, Merlin. They come with whatever he wants most, and give it to him, and then he is theirs."
That night Merlin was asleep before the guard called eleven, and woke because someone had said his name.
Every candle in the room was in the air. They hung at the height of his head and above it, a dozen of them, still lit, turning slowly, drifting like fireflies over a summer meadow, their light sliding over the stabbed men. On the table the water had risen out of the jug and stood up in a clear trembling column as tall as a man's forearm, with the candlelight caught inside it. And in the open panel by the wardrobe stood Arthur, one hand still on the wood, his face as white as a plate.
Merlin's eyes were hot. He knew what colour they were.
Everything fell. The candles dropped together and went out, all but one that landed upright on the hearth, and the water came down over the table and the floor with a slap. By the one candle Merlin saw Arthur back away until his shoulders met the wardrobe.
"Arthur."
"Don't." It was a stranger's voice. "Don't come near me."
Merlin did not move.
"How long?"
"Always. I was born with it."
"In my bed." Arthur was breathing as though he had run up the stair. "Did you make me want you?"
It was not Arthur's question. Merlin had heard it that evening under the beeches, in another voice: they come with whatever he wants most. Now it came out of his son's mouth.
He sat up with the water soaking into the floor and his hands over the child, who had gone quite still, and found that he was not going to cry. He had imagined this night a hundred times, and in every one of them he was on his knees.
"No," he said. "And I won't say sorry for what I am. Not to you."
Arthur stared at him. Then he turned and went through the panel, and Merlin heard his feet on the stair, fast and uneven, going down.
He did not get up to shoot the bolt. He sat in the smell of snuffed wicks, with the one candle burning on the hearth, and left it open.
For three days Arthur did not go up the stair.
He trained until the squires hid from him. On the Thursday he sat at his father's table and watched Merlin across it, pale, cutting his meat small and not eating it. Merlin looked at him once, a long level look with nothing begging in it, and did not look again. Every candle on the table burned straight and tall all evening, and Arthur could not stop watching them.
On the fourth night he went down to Gaius.
The old man was up, with the brazier lit and two cups out, as though he had been expecting him.
"How long have you known?" said Arthur.
"Long enough." Gaius pushed a cup across the bench. "Sit down. This will take a while, and you won't like most of it."
He told it plainly, the way he set a bone, and did not stop when Arthur flinched. That Merlin had been born with it, as Arthur had been born with his jaw, and had never once asked for it. That at the boar hunt an oak root had come up out of the clay of its own accord, a yard from Arthur's feet, and that Merlin had climbed the ash tree afterwards because his hands were shaking too badly to stand. That the rush-seller's knife had not turned red-hot in the market by chance.
"He has been saving your life with it since the week he came," said Gaius. "He never told you because he thought you would light the pyre yourself. I am not certain he was wrong."
Arthur held the cup so hard his knuckles hurt. "Did he—"
"Make you love him?" The eyebrow went up. "Arthur. If Merlin could make people do things, do you suppose you'd have spent two years with your laces crossed?"
Arthur laughed. He had not meant to; it came out of him like something breaking.
"There is more," said Gaius, and the laugh went. "Your father will never forgive me for it."
He told him how Ygraine had wanted a child and could not carry one, and how the king had gone in secret to a priestess of the old religion named Nimueh and asked her for a son. How the old religion gives nothing without a price, a life for a life. How the price had been the queen's.
You always did hate paying for what you'd bought. Arthur heard it as plainly as if she stood among the leech jars. He had taken it for a slander on his mother, and gone over a table at her with a knife. She had been telling the truth about his father, in front of three hundred people, and his father had stood and let her.
"And at the wedding she came to finish it," Gaius said. "Then let it end in you. Not your death. Your line. You would have been the last Pendragon there ever was." He set his cup down. "Merlin's body would not have stopped a spell like that for a heartbeat. His magic did. It caught her curse and turned it inside out. There is a child at all because he would not let her touch you."
Arthur put his cup down, because his hand would no longer hold it.
Gaius went on, more quietly. "He tells me you sang to him. Did Bethan never say whose song that was?" His face had gone soft and old. "It was your mother's. A cradle song from the coast where she grew up. She sang it to you every night for months before you were born, with her hand where Merlin keeps his. I used to hear her through the door."
Arthur stood up. The pestle was in his fist and his arm drawn back before he knew it, and there was nowhere in that small room to throw it that was not a jar or a book or an old man.
"He'd tell you you'll miss," said Gaius.
Arthur set the pestle down on the bench, very carefully, and went out, and up the stair.
He knocked twice. The bolt was not shot. It had not been shot, he understood, in four nights.
Merlin was in the chair by the fire with his feet on the stool and his hands folded over the child. The candles burned low and ordinary on the table. He looked round and did not get up, and did not say it was fine.
Arthur crossed the room and knelt on the hearth in front of him.
"I'm sorry," he said. "What I said was my father's. I've had it in my mouth my whole life, and I didn't know until it came out." He swallowed. "Show me."
Merlin looked at him a long time. Then he held out one hand, palm up, the way Arthur had held out both of his at Midwinter, and said a word Arthur did not know, low and warm, and his eyes went gold.
Out of his palm rose a small dragon made of light, no bigger than a sparrow. It shook out wings like gold leaf held up to a candle and flew once round the room, over the stabbed men and the man in the green hat and the old oak cradle, so close past Arthur's face that he felt it warm on his cheek. Then it came back and settled on the curve of Merlin's belly and folded its wings.
Under it the silk jumped. The baby kicked, hard, right where the little dragon sat, as if she had felt it there and wanted it.
Arthur heard himself laugh, and it came out wet. He put his hand on the silk, and the dragon walked onto his fingers, weightless and warm as a coal, and under his palm his daughter kicked again.
He looked up into Merlin's face, gold-eyed in the firelight, and found he was not afraid of it at all.
"I love you," he said.
On the first day of August, at council, Arthur's father announced that he had sent for the witchfinder.
"Aredian," said the king. "He will be here within the week. He will search this citadel and the lower town, and he will not stop until Camelot is clean." He laid his hand flat on the table. "My queen died in childbed. The woman who killed her walked into my hall on my wedding night and walked out again, and nobody in this kingdom could lay a hand on her. She will not walk in again when my child is born."
The lords murmured their approval.
"Sire," said Merlin. "The lower town has had a hard year. If they see the pyres lit again..."
"Not in this, Merlin." The king laid his hand over Merlin's on the cloth, gently, as he had at Midwinter, and did not look round. "Not in this."
Across the table Arthur sat very still and looked at his father: who had bought him from a witch, and was frightened, and loved the man beside him, and would burn him. Merlin's free hand had gone to the curve under his robe and lay there, flat.
On the table in front of Merlin a candle was burning, and as Arthur watched, its flame leaned slowly towards him and began to grow.
Arthur reached across and pinched it out between finger and thumb. It burned him. Nobody saw.