Chapter 4: A Wedding Gift
On the last night before the wedding, Merlin could not sleep.
They had moved him into the king's wing that afternoon: three rooms, which was two more than he knew what to do with, tall and cold and hung with tapestries of people being stabbed. Someone had swept the hearth in the bedchamber and nobody had laid a fire in it. He had not liked to ask. He could have lit it with a word, but the king's wing had ears in its walls and the king's guard walked past his door every hour, and he did not dare let his magic out here, not even to find a stocking. He lay in the great cold bed in all his clothes and listened to the guard go by. Then he got up, opened the panel beside the wardrobe onto the old servants' stair, the one he had used a hundred times carrying Arthur's washing, and went down it in the dark.
His feet took him to the armoury without asking him.
There was a candle burning low on the bench, as there always was, and the smell of goose fat and lampblack and cold iron, and on its stand by the wall, laid out for the morning, was Arthur's ceremonial mail. One of the squires had already polished it. It shone like a pond in sunlight. Merlin had never once in two years got it to look like that.
He sat down on the upturned crate with a rag and the pot of polish and began to polish it anyway.
He had been at it perhaps a quarter of an hour when the door banged open so hard it bounced off the wall.
Arthur came in like weather. He was in his shirt and breeches, barefoot on the cold flags, his hair standing up at the back as though he had been dragging his hands through it, and he didn't see Merlin at all. He snatched a gauntlet off the bench and hurled it at the far wall. It hit the shield rack, and two shields came down with a crash they must have heard in the kitchens. Then he stood in the middle of the floor, chest heaving, glaring at the mess.
Merlin put down his rag and waited.
"He called me in," Arthur said to the shields. "Tonight. The night before his wedding, he calls me in to tell me he's heard what I said in the long gallery. That I made his consort a laughing-stock in front of the tailors. That I'm a boy. That he despairs of me. That if I can't behave like a prince for one day he'll find someone who can stand at his right hand." He laughed, and it was a horrible sound. "Twenty-five years, Merlin. Not when I won the tourney. Not when I brought back the wyvern's head. Not once has he ever—"
He picked up a vambrace and drew back his arm, and Merlin said mildly, "You'll miss."
Arthur swung round.
"You always miss when you're cross," Merlin said. "You throw high. Leon says you've done it since you were twelve."
For a moment Arthur only stared at him, wild-eyed. Then something in his face gave way. He laughed again, short and cracked and nearly real, and put the vambrace down, and sat on the bench and dropped his head into his hands.
Merlin wiped his fingers on his knees and got up. He didn't have to think about it. He had done this before, on the bad nights after the bad councils, when Arthur came back to his chambers white and silent and threw his boots at the wall. He went and stood behind the bench and put his hands in Arthur's hair.
Arthur went rigid. "Don't."
"All right." Merlin didn't move his hands. He began to rub, slowly, with the pads of his fingers, small circles at the crown of Arthur's head and out towards the temples, the way, over two years, he had found that Arthur liked best. "I'm not doing anything."
"You're doing that."
"Am I?"
Arthur didn't answer. Under Merlin's fingers the cords at the back of his neck held, and held, and then a little at a time let go. His shoulders came down. His head tipped back, very slightly, into Merlin's hands, as though by accident.
Merlin found he was singing, not loudly: the tune Gaius hummed over the mortar, the one Arthur had asked for in the bath, and tonight the words came with it:
Hush now, my heart, for the tide's running low,
the boats are drawn up where the sea-pinks grow;
the lamp's in the window, the fire's banked deep,
and I'll hold you till morning. Go to sleep, go to sleep.
Arthur had gone very still.
"You know the words," he said.
"Some of them. Gaius says it's old. From the coast somewhere." Merlin's thumbs moved over his temples. "Why?"
"Bethan used to sing it. My nurse." Arthur's voice was thick. "She said it was..." He stopped. "It doesn't matter what she said."
Merlin didn't push. He went on, slow circles, until Arthur's breathing evened out. After a while Arthur said, in an almost ordinary voice, "That mail didn't need polishing."
"I know."
"The squire did it this afternoon. The chamberlain's found me a man for after tomorrow. George. He can fold a shirt into a square you could plumb a wall with. He came to be looked at this morning. He doesn't talk. I asked him whether he thought it would rain, and he said, 'I couldn't presume to say, sire.' His knees have no opinions at all."
Merlin took his hands away. Arthur made a small sound, which he would certainly have denied, and Merlin went back to the crate and picked up the rag, because his hands needed something to do.
"I thought you'd like that," he said. "A servant who doesn't talk back."
"So did I," said Arthur.
Merlin's rag stopped for a moment, and then went on.
"Are you frightened?" Arthur said.
"Of your father? Sometimes." Merlin rubbed at a link that didn't need it. "Of tomorrow? Not really. I'm frightened I'll trip on the coat. It's very long. It's got a fox in it. Most of a fox."
"You will trip on it."
"Thank you."
"In front of everyone. You'll go down like a felled tree, and the fox will go one way and you'll go the other, and they'll put it in the song."
Merlin laughed, a short helpless sound that surprised him, and looked up. Arthur was smiling down at him. It was not the smile he used at court, or the one he used when he'd won a bout, but a crooked, tired, private one that Merlin had seen perhaps a dozen times in two years and had kept, every time, like a coin in his pocket.
Then the smile went out of Arthur's face, slowly, and he was only looking.
"You've got muck on your face," he said.
Merlin put up the back of his wrist to rub at it, and Arthur said, "No. Here," and got up and crossed the space between them.
His thumb came to rest high on Merlin's cheekbone, just under the eye. It was warm, and rough with sword calluses, and it moved once, slowly, along the bone and took the smear with it, and then it didn't move away. Arthur's palm settled against his jaw. Merlin could feel his own pulse beating up into it.
Neither of them breathed. Arthur's eyes went to his mouth and stayed there. He was close enough that Merlin could see the candle twice over, small and gold, in his eyes, and the stubble along his jaw, and the place where his lower lip was chapped from the wind. Arthur bent his head, an inch, less than an inch, and Merlin's eyes began to close.
Out in the passage, boots rang on stone. A lantern swung past the door, throwing a bar of light across the floor and over the mail and away again, and the guard's voice called the midnight watch, all's well, and went on.
Merlin opened his eyes. He thought, without wanting to, of a dozen servants sweeping a hall at midnight, and a rusty laugh over a chessboard, and a man alone at the head of a long table.
"Tomorrow," he said, very low, "I'm marrying your father."
Arthur's hand stayed where it was for one more heartbeat. Then it dropped.
"I know," he said.
He stepped back. He looked at Merlin for a long moment, sitting there on the crate with the rag in his lap and polish on his cuffs, and whatever he was going to say, he didn't. He went to the door. He stopped with his hand on the frame.
"It didn't need polishing," he said, without turning round.
"I know," said Merlin.
When the footsteps had gone, he sat for a long time without moving. Then he picked up the rag again and polished the breastplate until it shone so that he could see his own face in it, pale and hollow-eyed in the candlelight, with one clean place high on the cheekbone where Arthur's thumb had been.
He put up his own fingers and touched it. It was still warm.
In the morning Gwen came in with the coat over both arms, blew on her fingers at the empty grate, and laid it on the bed, where it took up most of the bed. "Arms out."
The coat was Pendragon red and lined from collar to hem with fox, so that putting it on was like being picked up by a large warm animal. Gwen knelt with a mouthful of pins to take up the cuffs, and Merlin stood with his arms out and looked at the tapestry opposite, where a man in a green hat was being stabbed, with every sign of enjoyment, by a man in a blue one.
"You don't have to do this," Gwen said round the pins.
"Everyone keeps saying that." His mother had written it, in the letter that came back with the grain carts: The girls are mending. You needn't do this, love, not for us. But I know you've already said yes.
Gwen sat back on her heels and looked up at the whole of him.
"It's a great deal of coat," she said.
Merlin laughed, and so did she, two servants giggling at somebody else's clothes. Then she said, "Merlin. Truly."
"He's kind to me, Gwen. In his way." He thought of a dozen servants sweeping the great hall at midnight, and the king's long fingers setting the white king back on its square. "Nobody sees it. I don't think anyone's looked at him properly in twenty years."
Gwen got up and settled the gold circlet in his hair with both hands, as carefully as if it were her own.
"Then I hope he deserves you," she said, which was not at all what Merlin had expected.
They married him at noon in the great hall, with the doors open so that the lower town could crowd in under the arch, and three hundred people's breath went up into the first frost like smoke from a village of chimneys. Nobody looked twice at the consort for being a man; lords married men every year, and Merlin had served at three such weddings and fallen asleep at one. What the front benches looked at was his hands and his ears and his resoled boots, and he heard it go along the rows like a draught under a door: the servant. He used to empty the prince's chamber pot.
He walked the length of the hall in the coat and did not trip, and was so pleased with himself that he nearly smiled at the bishop.
The king held out his left hand, and Merlin put his right into it. Uther's hand was dry and cool and very careful, the hand of a man given something he has been told is breakable and does not quite believe it. The bishop bound their wrists with red silk cord, round once, and again, and a third time, and Merlin felt the king's pulse against his own, slow and even as a horse at a walk. The ring was heavy gold with the Pendragon dragon cut into its face, made for some other finger, because it slid straight to his knuckle and would have gone on to the floor if he had not closed his hand. The king kissed him on the brow, his lips as dry as paper, and the hall cheered, and out in the courtyard somebody started the honey-cake song and was hushed.
Arthur stood at his father's right hand through all of it, in the ceremonial mail. The breastplate Merlin had polished at midnight shone so that when the king turned him to face the hall he caught himself in it, small and red and wavering, with a ring of gold on his head. Arthur kept his face turned to the doors, as if something out in the courtyard wanted watching, and did not look at Merlin once.
"Your father," said Lord Agravaine, "has married a song." He leaned across to fill Arthur's cup himself, which he had never done in his life. "Your mother's chair, Arthur. I find I can't stop looking at it."
Arthur couldn't either. He drank.
At the high table his father sat with his consort at his left hand, and Merlin, very straight in the red coat, smiled at the lords who came up to bow to him with the faces of men made to bow to a prize pig.
The fiddlers in the gallery finished a galliard. The leader looked down, and Arthur saw his father lift one finger from the cloth, so slightly that nobody who had not watched that hand for twenty-five years would have seen it move. The fiddlers struck up the honey-cake song.
Half the hall was singing by the second line. Merlin's head came up, startled; then he laughed out loud and turned in his chair to the king. Arthur's father did not smile. But he looked at his consort laughing, and the lines beside his mouth loosened, the way ice lets go of a riverbank in March.
Arthur sat with his cup halfway to his mouth. He had told Merlin he would be a coat for feasts. And all the while his father had been sitting among his ledgers thinking he will like that, and sending down a purse.
His father was fond of him.
Arthur emptied the cup and filled it. When Leon came up behind his chair and closed a hand round it, Arthur looked at the hand until it let go.
That was when the candles went out.
Every one at once, and the torches with them, and the fires in both hearths sank to a red glow as if something were sitting on them. Then the cold came in along the floor with a crackle like fat in a pan. Frost ran over the flags in white feathers and climbed the guards' boots at the doors, and they shouted and could not move. At the foot of the dais it stopped, as neatly as a tide.
A woman walked up the hall between the frozen guards, pale and dark-haired, the frost silvering ahead of her feet.
"Uther," she said. "I hear you've married."
His father had risen, his face a white mask in the red glow. "Nimueh."
"A husband, this time. How careful. Nobody dies in childbed for you if you marry a boy. You always did hate paying for what you'd bought." Her eyes came down the table to Arthur, and she smiled. "And there it sits. You thought your line was safe in that, I suppose."
Arthur didn't remember standing. He would remember only that he had been drunk and wretched and wanting all night to hit something, and here at last was something that deserved it, a witch in his father's hall talking about his mother as though she had been a debt. He pulled the carving knife out of the goose and went over the table, scattering plates, and behind him his father's voice cracked down the hall like a whip, Arthur, stay where you are, and he did not.
He got four strides. Then she flicked two fingers, the way you'd flick a fly off your sleeve, and the frost came up his legs and held him like a wall.
"The boy himself," said Nimueh. "Well. Then let it end in you." The air before her palm twisted and brightened, like heat over a road in August. "You'll father no child, Arthur Pendragon."
He saw it come, a knot of white light the size of a fist, and thought, very clearly and stupidly, Merlin will be furious.
Then Merlin hit him.
He came over the corner of the high table with the fox fur flying and struck Arthur in the chest with his whole weight, and the frost let go with a crack, and they went down together. Merlin's face was jammed against the mail over Arthur's heart, his eyes screwed shut, his arms locked round Arthur's ribs, and the light came down on them both and the whole hall went white.
Arthur felt him jerk, and go rigid, and then shake, a deep hard shaking like a rope pulled taut in a gale. And he was hot. Merlin, who was always cold, was as hot through all that fox and silk as a brick out of the bread oven.
The white went out of the air. Nimueh was staring at Merlin's back, first in astonishment and then with a slow, furious understanding. She laughed, low in her throat.
"Well," she said softly. "Then you'll carry the Pendragon blood, little consort." She lifted her eyes to the high table. "Keep him close, Uther. He'll cost you more than I ever did."
And there was nobody there. Every candle leapt alight at once, and the frost went to water and ran.
Arthur was on his knees with Merlin across his lap in the wet, Merlin's fingers knotted in the mail and the shaking not stopping. "Merlin. Open your eyes." They opened, blue and swimming and entirely Merlin's own. "You don't jump in front of witches either, you complete—" His voice was doing something he could not control. He had never in his life been so sober. "Where did it hit you?"
"I don't know. You're squashing me."
His father came down the hall through the melting frost and stopped a yard away. He did not look at Merlin first. He looked at the carving knife on the wet flags, with goose fat still on the blade, and then at his son, once, the way a man looks over a horse that has thrown its rider; and Arthur read in it, as plainly as if it had been sealed, whose fault his father thought this was.
"Give me my consort," said the king.
Arthur's arms did not want to open. He made them.
Gaius came shoving through the knights and laid a hand under Merlin's breastbone while the hall watched, then knelt and did the same to Arthur, and pressed, and frowned. "Nothing," he said. "Nothing I can find, in either of you."
"Then it failed. Her spell."
Gaius was looking past him, at Merlin going slowly up the hall on the king's arm. "So it would seem."
Arthur found the circlet under a bench and stood holding it while the servants went round with cloths. The mail on his chest, where Merlin's face had been, was warm. It stayed warm a long time, as if it had been lying out in the sun.
The king walked him to his door himself, slowly, because Merlin could go no faster. Under his breastbone there was a heat like a swallowed coal, and every few steps it turned over.
"Thank you for the fiddlers," Merlin said.
"It is a very bad song."
"It's got six verses. One of them's rude."
"I am aware," said the king. "I was obliged to hear all six." At the door he let go of Merlin's arm. "Twice now you have put yourself between my house and a blade. Tonight the blade was my son's folly."
"He was drunk, sire. She was talking about the queen. Anyone would have done the same."
"My son is not anyone. He is the only son I have." The king's voice did not rise; it grew thinner, like wire being drawn. "Don't defend him to me tonight."
He touched Merlin's cheek with the backs of his fingers, high on the bone, the way a man might touch a sleeping child, and it was gone almost before Merlin had felt it. It had landed exactly where Arthur's thumb had been the night before.
"Goodnight, Merlin."
He went away to his own rooms, and far off a door closed, and a bolt went home.
Somebody had laid a fire in Merlin's bedchamber, high and bright, and the room that had been so cold the night before was warm right up into the corners where the stabbed men hung. Nobody in this wing laid so much as a twig without an order, and only one man in it gave them.
He sat on the hearthstone in his shirt and wound Agnes's grey thread, the thread he darned Arthur's elbows with, round the inside of the ring. His hands shook. He was on the fifth try when someone knocked on the panel.
Gaius came up the servants' stair with a candle and knelt beside him on the stone, which Merlin had never seen him do, and laid a hand over the place under Merlin's ribs and shut his eyes.
"Did anyone see your eyes?"
"My face was in his chest."
"Thank God for small mercies, and large princes." Gaius sat back. In the firelight he looked very old. "Her spell went into you, Merlin, and something in you took hold of it. I can feel it now. Do you know what you did?"
"No." It came out small. "I couldn't let it touch him. I don't know what I did."
"Nor do I," said Gaius. "Not yet."
When he had gone, Merlin shot the bolt and finished the ring. It sat snug now, too heavy, the dragon turned in against his palm. He lay down on the rug before the king's fire with his hand over the warm place under his ribs. It had stopped turning over. It lay quiet, banked, like a fire waiting for morning.