Chapter 3: One Reason
Gaius was waiting up for him, as Merlin had known he would be, with a pot of nettle tea going stewed on the brazier and the eyebrow already halfway to his hairline.
"Well?"
Merlin told him. He told it badly, out of order, standing in the middle of the workshop with his coat still on, and when he had finished Gaius sat down on the stool by the leech jars as though somebody had cut his strings.
"Merlin," he said. "You need not do this."
"Two children, Gaius. Elsa and Mair. Did Mum tell you their names?" Merlin sat down on the bench opposite. The leeches moved slowly in their water, black ribbons, patient. "I carried Mair round on my shoulders the whole summer before I left."
"You would be sleeping two corridors from the most dangerous man in five kingdoms, with a secret that would put you on a pyre."
"I've been sleeping one floor under that secret for two years." He tried to smile. "This one's got better curtains."
Gaius did not smile back. He poured the stewed tea into two cups, and Merlin wrapped his hands round one and didn't drink.
"He doesn't want anything from me," Merlin said. "He told me. He wants a coat to wear at feasts. I stand where he puts me and smile, and the grain goes over the ridge, and there are soldiers on the road so nobody burns the new barn. That's all."
"That is never all, with Uther." Gaius set his cup down. "Think what he has bought. A company of Camelot's soldiers standing on Cenred's side of the border, with a reason no king alive could object to. The lower town singing his name through a hungry winter. Agravaine and every lord like him checked in a single move. And a consort who can never give his son a rival." He shook his head slowly. "He has wanted a garrison in Essetir for ten years. He has got one for the price of a wedding. You are the cheapest bargain he has ever struck."
Merlin turned his cup round in his hands. "He looked lonely," he said. "When he talked about having had affection once. Just for a moment. He looked like..."
"He is lonely. He has been lonely for twenty-five years." Gaius's voice was gentle. "It has not made him less dangerous. And Arthur?"
Merlin looked down into his tea. There was a fleck of nettle floating in it, turning slowly.
"Arthur will get a new manservant," he said, "who knows how to lace a gambeson."
He didn't sleep. He lay under the eaves listening to the bells and the rain, and when the grey came up in the window he washed his face and went to the king.
Uther was in his study, a narrow room lined with ledgers. He did not look up.
"Well?"
"Yes," said Merlin. His voice came out steadier than he'd expected. "On two conditions."
That made the king look up.
"The grain goes before the wedding. Not after. They're hungry now. And Gaius stays my physician, and I can go down to his workshop whenever I like, without asking anyone."
Uther regarded him for a long moment, with the faint surprise of a man whose dog has offered him terms. "You bargain."
"I'm from Ealdor, sire. We bargain over eggs."
Something happened at one corner of the king's mouth. It was not a smile; Merlin was not sure Uther's face still knew how to make one. But it was close to one, the way frost is close to water.
"Agreed. The carts leave on Monday. The betrothal will be proclaimed at noon tomorrow." He drew a ledger towards him. "Until the wedding you will go on serving my son exactly as before. The lower town likes a servant who becomes a consort. Let them see you carrying his boots until the day." He dipped his pen. "And you will dine with me on Thursdays. I should know something of the man I am marrying beyond the state of his barrels."
His father told him over supper, in the king's chambers, between the venison and the cheese.
Arthur laughed, the way you laugh at a joke you haven't understood yet. Then he looked at his father's face and put down his knife.
"He's my servant."
"He will remain so until first frost. After that the chamberlain will find you another." Uther cut a piece of cheese into exact quarters. "You will stand at my right hand at the wedding, Arthur, and you will look pleased. The lower town has taken to the boy. It would be unwise to look otherwise."
"He's a servant. The lords will laugh at you."
"The lords will be furious," said his father, "which is a different thing, and a great deal more useful." He ate a quarter of his cheese. "No lord's daughter. No lord's sons. No lord at all standing behind my chair counting the years until I die. Agravaine will choke on it. I look forward to watching." He glanced up. "And do try not to sulk at the wedding. You are not twelve, whatever your manners suggest."
"And what does Merlin say?"
"He said yes," said Uther, "this morning. He did not wait for noon."
Arthur's chair went over behind him. He did not remember the stairs. He was in his father's chamber and then he was in the corridor and then he was in Gaius's workshop, with the door banging back against the wall, and Gaius looked up from the bench, took in his face, picked up a basket, and announced that he needed hellebore from the far end of the herb garden. At night. In the rain. Arthur went past him and up the six narrow steps to the room under the eaves and opened the door without knocking.
Merlin was sitting on the bed with a pile of shirts on his knee. Arthur's shirts. He had a needle in his hand and was finishing a darn in the elbow of one Arthur had torn on a hawthorn hedge in August.
"Tell me it isn't true."
Merlin put the needle down. "It's true."
"You'll refuse him."
"I've already said yes."
"Then go back and unsay it." Arthur heard his own voice climbing and didn't stop it. "Was it the crown? Did you look at my father and think, there's a man who'll let me sleep till noon? I didn't know you were ambitious, Merlin. I'd have said you hadn't the brains."
"Ealdor's starving."
"Then you should have told me. I'd have sent grain."
"Would you?" Merlin set the shirts aside and stood. The room was so small that standing put them nearly chest to chest, and he had to tip his head back to meet Arthur's eyes. "If I'd come to you and said, please, sire, my village is hungry, what would you have said? Truly. You'd have called me a squirrel in front of Leon and told me to fetch the salt."
It landed. It landed because it was true, and because four days ago Arthur had asked his father in open council for thirty men for the villages over that very ridge, and been refused and laughed at, and had never told Merlin, and could not tell him now without explaining why he'd asked, which he could not have explained to himself. So he did what he always did when something landed. He snatched up the nearest thing, which was the shirt with the new darn in its elbow, and flung it at the wall. It hit the beam and slid down behind the bed.
"You can't," he said. It came out high and stupid, a boy's voice. "You can't just go and marry my father. You're mine. I had you first."
Merlin looked at the shirt behind the bed, and then at him.
"You don't get to be angry," he said quietly. "I'm your servant, Arthur. You pay me, badly, to fetch things. That's not the same as being yours."
"You are mine."
"Then give me a reason." Merlin's voice cracked down the middle. "One. Tell me not to marry him, and give me a reason that isn't about who'll muck out your horse. I'll go down those stairs this minute and tell him no and let him do what he likes about it. Just give me one."
Arthur opened his mouth. There was a reason. He could feel it somewhere under his breastbone, large and hot and shapeless, like a word in a language he had never learned, and he groped for it and came up with nothing but the same word as before, which he knew even as he grabbed it was no reason at all. Mine. He did not know what else to call it. Nobody had ever taught him another word.
"He'll never look at you," he said instead. "You know that? Not once. You'll be a coat he puts on for feasts."
Merlin flinched. It was a small thing, just at the eyes, and Arthur saw it and would have given his sword arm to unsay the words, and did not unsay them.
Merlin stepped back. He picked up the rest of the shirts and held them against his chest.
"Then I'll be in good practice," he said.
Arthur went out and shut the door and stood on the top step in the dark with his hand flat against the wall. The stone was cold and gritty and very old. Behind the door he heard Merlin sit back down on the bed, and then nothing. Not a sound. He would have preferred anything Merlin could have said to that silence.
He did not go back in.
They proclaimed it in the square at noon the next day, and the lower town went wild. Merlin stood on the citadel steps at the king's left hand in a borrowed blue coat, and smiled until his face ached, and on the king's other side Arthur stood with his arms folded and looked at the rooftops and did not look at Merlin once.
Then Merlin went back to work.
It was the strangest three weeks of his life. In the mornings he was the king's betrothed, and men from the treasury came to measure his finger for a ring and call him my lord. In the afternoons and evenings he was still Arthur's manservant, by the king's own order, and Arthur made him pay for it.
He didn't shout. Merlin would have known what to do with shouting. Instead Arthur, who had once taken two days to notice that Merlin had polished only one of his boots, became the most exacting master in five kingdoms. Every piece of armour in the armoury wanted oiling, by morning. The hounds wanted bathing. The royal stables wanted mucking out, all twenty-two stalls, because the grooms, Arthur said, had grown slack. And on the Tuesday of the second week, at the end of a day that had begun before dawn, Arthur looked down the length of the great hall at supper, at the rushes on its floor, which were not fresh but not foul either, and said pleasantly that they wanted changing. All of them. Tonight.
The great hall's floor was the size of a field. Merlin went down at midnight with a broom and a barrow and his eyes closing, and found the doors already open and the hall full of light. A dozen servants were sweeping out the old rushes and strewing fresh, and the steward was standing in the middle of it all with a list.
"Chamberlain's orders, my lord," the steward said, and bowed, which no steward had ever done to Merlin in his life. "We're to have it finished by dawn. And we're not to mention it to anyone."
The chamberlain had never in his life given an order the king had not given first. Merlin stood in the doorway with his useless broom and felt something go warm and complicated in his chest.
The stables were done the same way the week after. So were the hounds.
He went to supper with the king on Thursdays, as he'd been told. The first was terrible: Uther asked him three questions about Ealdor's harvest and then said nothing at all for the length of a roast, and Merlin dropped a knife. For the second, the king commanded Arthur to join them. "He should grow used to the sight of you at my table," Uther said, "and so should you."
Arthur came in late, with his hair still wet from the training field and his shirt open at the throat, and sat down without a word and stabbed a potato.
It went badly at once. Uther asked about the new squires, and Arthur answered shortly, and Uther said that he had watched the squires that afternoon and found them slovenly, and wondered aloud whether that was the fault of the squires or of the man who trained them. Arthur's knife stopped. Merlin, who had served him at table for two years and knew the exact shade of red his ears went a moment before he threw something, saw them go that shade now.
"Sire," Merlin said brightly, to the king, before Arthur could open his mouth. "Is it true about the wyvern? The one at Ascetir, last spring? Arthur won't tell me a thing about it. He's too modest."
There was a short, incredulous silence. Arthur had told Merlin about the wyvern at least forty times, the wyvern growing larger with every telling. He stared at Merlin as though he'd sprouted a second head.
Uther frowned. "Modest."
"Terribly. I've asked and asked. The kitchens say it was the size of a barn, but the kitchens say that about everything."
The king put down his cup. He was silent for a moment, and then, seemingly against his will, he said, "It was the largest taken in Camelot in twenty years. I had the skull measured. Eleven feet." He looked down the table at his son, a strange considering look, as though he'd noticed something about a horse he had owned for years. "He went in on foot. I told him not to. He has never once in his life done a thing because I told him to."
"No, sire," Merlin agreed sadly, and filled the king's cup, and then Arthur's.
Arthur said almost nothing for the rest of the meal. But his ears went back to their proper colour, and once, when his father wasn't looking, he looked at Merlin across the candles with an expression Merlin couldn't read at all, and when he left he did not slam the door.
Afterwards the king had a board brought, an old one with squares of pale wood and dark, the pieces carved from bone and worn smooth with handling. "My wife's," Uther said, setting out the white. "She played badly and cheated worse. Do you play?"
"Badly," said Merlin. "And I cheat worse."
He did. He lost the first game in a dozen moves, and in the second, when Uther rose to see to the fire, he moved his king two squares to the left and sat back studying the ceiling. Uther came back and looked at the board for a long time. Then he made a sound Merlin had never heard from him: short and rusty and astonished, like a door that had not been opened in years.
He was laughing.
It didn't last. It went out of his face almost at once, and he sat down and moved the king back where it belonged without a word. But Merlin had seen it.
"Thank you," he said at the door, when the game was done. "For the rushes."
The king did not look up from the board. "I have no idea what you mean," he said. "Thursday."
Merlin walked back down the stairs to Arthur's chambers with his hands in his sleeves, and found that he couldn't stop seeing it, that rusty, startled laugh. Twenty-five years. Arthur's whole life. He wondered how long it had been since anybody had made the king of Camelot laugh, and whether anybody had even tried.
Six days before the wedding, Arthur went looking for Merlin to tell him the tack room wanted sorting, and found him in the long gallery with the tailors.
He had meant to say it from the door. He had the words ready, and a good many more after them about the state of his boots. Then he came round the screen at the gallery's end and stopped.
Merlin was standing on a stool by the tall window with his arms held a little out from his sides, while three tailors knelt at his hem with pins in their mouths. They had put him in the feast robes. Arthur had heard about the feast robes; everyone had, because the treasury had complained about the silk for a week. It was a deep, soft blue, the blue of the sky just after the sun has gone, and it had been cut close: close at the shoulders and close at the waist, where a belt of fine silver links sat low on his hips, and long below, falling to the floor in folds that moved when he breathed. The sleeves were slit to the elbow and lined with silver. Across the breast ran embroidery so fine it looked like frost on a window, hawthorn and tiny silver dragons. Somebody had combed his hair. And in it, catching the grey light from the window, sat a circlet, a thin plain band of gold no thicker than a ring.
He looked like nobody Arthur knew. He looked like something out of one of the old songs, the ones about hollow hills and people who went in and did not come back. And he looked like Merlin, which was worse, because it was Merlin's face under the gold, and Merlin's ears sticking out under it, and Merlin's mouth caught between his teeth as a tailor tugged at his sleeve, and Arthur had looked at that face every day for two years and had somehow never once seen it.
Something went through him like a blade through cloth.
He knew what anger felt like, and jealousy; he had been feeling them for weeks, and had put them down to his father taking a thing that was his. This was neither. It went down through his chest into his stomach and lodged there, low and hot and helpless, and he stood very still behind the screen with his mouth a little open and understood, all at once and far too late, what he had been feeling since a wet morning on the training field when Hadric ruffled Merlin's hair. Since before that. Since a spring morning and a window seat, and ink on Merlin's fingers, and the bells ringing twice while Arthur stood in the doorway and did not know why he couldn't move.
Oh, he thought. Oh, no.
Merlin looked up and saw him.
For a moment neither of them moved. Merlin's face did something complicated: surprise first, then wariness, and then, very faintly, something that might have been hope, as though he were waiting for Arthur to say one particular thing. The tailors looked from one of them to the other.
Arthur said the first thing that came into his head, which was the worst thing he could have said.
He swept Merlin a bow so low and so elaborate that his hair nearly brushed the boards. "My lord," he said, far too loudly. "Or should I say Stepmother?"
One of the tailors snorted. Merlin went white, then red, and the hope, or whatever it had been, went out of his face like a pinched candle. He didn't answer. The tailors had stopped pinning.
Arthur turned and walked back down the gallery. It was very long, and he felt every yard of it.
Morgana caught him at the far end, coming out of her rooms with Gwen behind her carrying a stack of linen. She took one look at him and put her hand on his arm, and Gwen, who had heard everything, went past them with her chin up and did not look at Arthur at all.
"Walk with me," said Morgana.
"I'm busy."
"You're sulking. It isn't the same." She steered him to the window and studied him with her head on one side. Morgana was a year younger than Arthur and had been his father's ward since she was a child, and in all that time she had never once been afraid of him. "You look," she said, "like a man watching his house burn."
"It isn't my house."
"No," said Morgana. "That's rather the trouble, isn't it?"
He pulled his arm free. She let him. She went on looking at him in the way she had, as though she could see something just behind his left shoulder that he couldn't.
"I dreamed about him," she said. "The night after the fair. He was standing in a ploughed field with a great oak leaning over him, and he was laughing at someone. I couldn't see who." She frowned faintly. "It was such a peaceful dream. I don't often have peaceful ones."
"Then I'm glad for you," said Arthur, "and for him, and for the tree," and went down the stairs before she could say anything else.
He went to the training field, and set up the quintain, and hit it until his arms shook. By full dark he had a name for what had gone through him in the gallery. He went on hitting the quintain, harder, because the name was no use to him at all, and from the courtyard over the wall came the sound of the carpenters building the dais for the wedding, still hammering long after he had stopped.