Chapter 1: This One's Mine
Arthur Pendragon had been awake an hour before his manservant arrived, and he had spent most of it composing the insult.
It was a good one. It began with sluggards, moved through pigs, and ended somewhere in the region of Merlin's ears, and Arthur was lying in the great carved bed giving it a last polish when the door banged open and Merlin came in backwards with a tray, kicked the door shut behind him and said, "Before you start, the kitchen's out of eggs, Cook threw a ladle at me, and it's going to rain."
"It isn't raining."
"It's going to. I can feel it in my knees."
"You're twenty-three," Arthur said. "Your knees can't feel anything." He sat up. The insult had gone. They did that around Merlin. Arthur would have them lined up like quintains on the practice field, and then Merlin would walk in already talking and knock them all flat without noticing they were there. "You're late."
"I'm on time. You're early. Again." Merlin set the tray down on the table under the window, between yesterday's maps and a whetstone Arthur had told him three times to put away, and hauled the curtains open. Grey light came in over the roofs of the lower town, with woodsmoke on it and the smell of wet slate. "Sausages. Bread. Something Cook swears is a pear. If you're nice to me I'll warm your wine."
"I'm never nice to you."
"I know. I live in hope."
Arthur rolled out of bed in nothing but his breeches, yawning, scratching his stomach, and let himself be dressed, which was the part of the morning he liked least and thought about most. Merlin had cold hands and no idea how to lace a gambeson. Two years in the post, and every morning he still did it wrong, with the same cheerful concentration and the tip of his tongue caught between his teeth, so that Arthur had to stand with his arms out like a scarecrow in a bean field while Merlin's knuckles bumped down his ribs. It was intolerable. Arthur tolerated it daily.
"You've crossed them."
"I have not."
"Second and third. A child could do it."
"Then hire a child. They'd come cheaper." Merlin pulled the lace free and started again, if anything worse. "Mind you, they'd cry when you shouted. I never cry."
"You cried at the spring tourney."
"I had sand in my eye. Your sand. You kicked it at me because I said Sir Ector's horse had better manners than you."
"It was a stupid horse."
"It was a lovely horse. It bowed to the queen of the tourney. You've never bowed to anyone in your life." Merlin tugged the last lace tight, stood back, and patted Arthur twice on the chest, the way you'd pat a horse that had stood still for the farrier. "There. Fit to frighten the peasantry."
Arthur looked down. The second and third were crossed. He decided not to mention it.
He was twenty-five years old. He was the crown prince of Camelot, and for five years he had commanded its knights, and he had a scar along his ribs from a Saxon axe and another on his thigh from a wyvern that had not cared to be hunted, and there was no reason on God's earth why he should stand in his own bedchamber feeling the two places on his chest where a servant's palm had been. So he picked up the pear, which was not a pear, and threw it at the wall.
It burst against the tapestry. A boar, sewn in brown wool and caught mid-gallop, took most of it in the eye.
"Oh, very grown-up," said Merlin, and went to fetch a cloth.
By noon the rain that Merlin's knees had promised had arrived, a fine cold mist that beaded on mail and turned the training field to porridge. Arthur drilled the knights anyway. Lord Bertrand of Gedref had come for the harvest fair with half his household, and with him a big, laughing, red-bearded knight called Hadric, who fought like a bull at a gate and lost to Arthur three times running with every appearance of enjoying it.
On the fourth bout Hadric's greave came loose. He limped to the fence swearing, and before Arthur had got his helm off, Merlin had put down the waterskins and gone to help. Of course he had. Merlin would help a wolf with a thorn in its paw and then be astonished when it bit him.
Arthur watched him kneel in the mud. He watched Hadric say something that made Merlin laugh, head tipped back, rain on his face. And he watched Hadric's gauntleted hand come down and ruffle that absurd dark hair, the way you'd reward a dog for fetching a stick.
He crossed the field. He did not remember deciding to.
"Merlin."
"Nearly done." Merlin pulled the strap through the buckle. "It's rusted right through. Someone ought to—"
"Someone ought to be fetching my shield." Arthur looked at Hadric over Merlin's bent head. "If your own man can't keep up with your kit, Hadric, the stables are full of boys who'd be glad of the work. This one's mine."
Hadric's grin faltered and then came back wider, the grin of a man who has noticed something and plans to enjoy noticing it at supper. "Of course, Your Highness. I'd not dream of poaching."
Merlin stood. There was mud to his knees, and on his face was a look Arthur had seen before and never cared for: patient, almost fond, as though Arthur were a spell of weather he had decided to wait out. He fetched the shield. When Arthur told him to, he fetched the rest of them as well, all twelve, and carried them two at a time to the armoury, and when Arthur, who had no earthly use for twelve polished practice shields, followed him in and said they wanted polishing, he sat down on an upturned crate in the candle-smoke with a rag and the pot of goose fat and lampblack that smelled of every afternoon of Arthur's adult life, and polished them.
Arthur leaned on the doorframe and watched him work.
"He was only being friendly," Merlin said, without looking up.
"I don't pay you to be friendly to visiting knights."
"You barely pay me at all."
"And yet here you are."
The rag stopped. Merlin looked up, and Arthur saw that there was a smear of black just under his eye, high on the cheekbone, and that the candlelight had caught in his lashes. It would take one step to reach him. One step and the pad of a thumb, and the smear would be gone.
"You've got muck on your face," Arthur said. "It's an improvement."
He left. He thought about the smear through the whole of supper, and Hadric, three places down the table, watched him think about it and smiled into his wine.
Lord Bertrand wanted a boar, so on the second day of the fair Arthur gave him one.
They went out at dawn into the Darkling Woods with the hounds and a dozen riders, and Merlin went with them on a borrowed mule, carrying the spare spears and the wineskins and Arthur's opinion of the mule, which was low. The woods were dripping and gold. Beech mast cracked under the hooves. Hadric rode beside Merlin for the first mile, telling him a long and very funny story about a nun and a goose, until Arthur dropped back without a word and put his horse between them, and Hadric, grinning, went on ahead.
"He's harmless," Merlin said.
"He's an idiot."
"You like idiots. You keep me."
"I keep you," said Arthur, "out of charity," and kicked his horse on.
The hounds found the boar in a hollow full of bracken, an old tusker as big as a cart pony and grey about the snout, and after that there was no more talking. Merlin had been on enough hunts to know where to be, which was behind something solid with the spears to hand. He watched the riders crash after it through the bracken. He watched Arthur get down to take it on foot, the way Arthur always did, because a boar killed from the saddle didn't count in the stories the knights told afterwards in the tavern, and Arthur cared about those stories a good deal more than he would ever admit.
He also watched the ground under Arthur's boots, which was a slope of wet black leaves over clay.
It all happened at once. The boar turned. Arthur set his spear. His heel went out from under him on the leaves and he came down hard on one hip, and the spear butt, jammed against a stone, snapped in the middle with a sound like a knuckle cracking. The boar put its head down. Somebody shouted. Arthur was on his back in the mud with half a spear and nowhere to go, there were twenty yards of bracken between him and the nearest rider, and the boar was already moving.
Merlin did not think. Thinking would have been too slow.
The word came up out of him like a hiccup, old and warm, and his eyes went hot. Under the bracken, an oak root as thick as his wrist tore itself out of the clay and rose a foot into the air.
The boar hit it at full gallop. It went over snout first in a somersault of mud and bristle and landed on its back with its legs going, a yard from Arthur's feet. Arthur came up off the ground with the broken spear in both hands and drove it down. It was over quickly after that.
When the riders came crashing up, Arthur was standing over the carcass, filthy to the eyebrows and breathing hard. Merlin was halfway up an ash tree. He did not remember climbing it.
"Merlin," said Arthur, looking up. "What are you doing in that tree?"
"Hiding?"
"While I was nearly killed."
"Well, I wasn't going to be much use on the ground, was I?"
The riders laughed. Lord Bertrand laughed loudest of all, and clapped Arthur on his muddy shoulder, and declared he'd never seen the like, the beast tripping over its own feet at the last like that, God must love a Pendragon. Arthur said lightly that God had very little to do with it and footwork a great deal, and everyone laughed again. Nobody looked at the root. It lay in the bracken with clay still clinging to it, an ordinary root, the kind any animal might trip on.
Merlin climbed down. His hands were shaking so badly that he scraped both palms raw on the bark. He gathered up the spare spears and carried them back to the mule, and on the long ride home through the dripping woods he listened to Arthur tell the story over and over, a little better each time, until by the castle gates the boar was the size of an ox and Merlin had been up the tree for a quarter of an hour, eating an apple.
"Hold still."
"I am holding still."
"You are twitching like a hare." Gaius bent closer with the tweezers, drew another sliver of ash bark out of the heel of Merlin's left hand, and dropped it in the dish with the others. The workshop smelled the way it always did, of camomile and sulphur and tallow and the faint burnt-sugar sweetness of whatever Gaius had let boil over at breakfast. On the far bench something green bubbled to itself in a glass retort. "A root, you say."
"An oak root. Only a small one."
"Rising up out of the earth of its own accord. In front of a dozen of the king's riders and a lord of Gedref."
"Nobody saw."
"Nobody saw this time." Gaius lifted one eyebrow, slowly, to a height Merlin had only ever seen it reach in the presence of very stupid questions.
"Don't do the eyebrow."
"Merlin. One day someone will be looking at precisely the right moment. And it will not be a lord from Gedref, and it will not be a root."
"He'd have died."
"I know."
"I couldn't just stand there and—"
"I know." Gaius's voice gentled. He took a pot of comfrey salve down from the shelf and began working it into Merlin's palms with his old, dry, careful fingers, and for a while neither of them said anything. "You keep him alive," Gaius said at last, "and he thanks you by telling the whole court you were up a tree."
"I was up a tree."
"Eating an apple, I'm told."
"That was later. That isn't even... I didn't have an apple." Merlin looked down at his shining palms. "It doesn't matter. It's not as if he can ever know."
"No," said Gaius. "Which is rather my point." He wiped his fingers on his apron, and then, as if he'd only just remembered, reached into its pocket and took out a square of folded paper, soft with handling, sealed with a blob of tallow. "This came for you with the carter on the east road. I'm afraid it travelled in his saddlebag with a cheese."
Merlin knew the hand before he'd broken the seal. He had learned his letters over it at the kitchen table in Ealdor, by rushlight, with his mother's finger moving under the words.
My dear boy, Hunith had written. I don't want you to fret, so I'll tell it plainly and then you're to put it out of your head.
Raiders out of the east, she wrote, had come through the valley at the end of August. Nobody had been killed. They had driven off the sheep from the high pasture and burned the barn where the whole village kept its grain, and with the barley already thin from the wet, there was little enough left in anyone's crocks. Old Matthew's grandson had the flux. So did the miller's two little girls. Cenred's reeve had ridden out to look at the ashes and ridden away again. We'll manage, she wrote. We always have. Don't you dare send your wages, you'll need them. Eat properly. Is the prince kinder to you yet? Your loving mother.
Merlin read it twice. Then he folded it very small and put it inside his shirt, against his skin.
"Merlin?"
"The barn," he said. "They burned the barn." His voice had gone strange; he cleared his throat. "It's fine. It's Ealdor. She says they'll manage."
Gaius looked at him for a long moment. "You might ask him," he said quietly.
"Ask who?"
"You know very well who. Camelot has grain. There's more in the king's storehouses than Ealdor will see in ten years."
"It's not Camelot's village."
"It lies three miles over the border, and the prince of Camelot is not without influence." Gaius turned the tweezers over in his fingers. "He might surprise you."
Merlin went up that evening with Arthur's supper and the letter still crackling inside his shirt. He had the words ready. He'd practised them all the way up the stairs: Sire, my village has had a bad year, and I wondered whether... He came through the door with the tray, and Arthur, at the table with a cup of wine and three of his knights, glanced up and said, "Ah. The squirrel. Leon, did I tell you about my squirrel? Climbs trees in a crisis. Invaluable in a siege, I should think. Merlin, where's the salt?"
The knights laughed. Merlin set down the tray and went to fetch the salt, and when he came back he put it at Arthur's elbow and said nothing at all.
Later, in the little room above the workshop, he took the letter out and read it again by a candle he lit with a word instead of a flint, because he was tired and nobody was looking. Then he lay on his back on the narrow bed, listening to the fiddlers tuning up down in the lower town for the fair's third night, and counted the miller's girls on his fingers, Elsa and Mair, five and seven, until he fell asleep.
The harvest fair came at the end of a bad year, and everyone in Camelot knew it.
The barley had blighted in the wet. The raiders who had burned Ealdor's barn had burned two villages on Camelot's own eastern road as well, and the lower town had spent the summer paying more for bread and getting less of it. Gaius said the council had argued for a week over whether the king should show himself at the fair at all. In the end somebody had pointed out that hungry people who never saw their king tended to start imagining him, and Uther had agreed, with no very good grace, to walk the stalls for an hour on the last afternoon, with his son at his shoulder and twelve guards at his back, and be seen.
It was a fine afternoon for it, at least. The rain had blown away east in the night and left the sky rinsed and pale, and the square smelled of trodden apples and woodsmoke and hot fat from the pie stalls. There were fewer stalls than last year, and what was on them was thinner. But the fiddlers had come, and the man from Mercia with the bear that danced, more or less, and someone had tied ribbons to the old stump by the well, and the children at least seemed to think it was a fair like any other.
Arthur, in a fit of princely generosity, had bought a tray of honey cakes for the guildmasters' children. Then he had decided it was beneath him to carry them.
The king came down through the market at a walk. He wore grey, and nodded to the stallholders one by one as he passed, the way a steward counts sacks. Arthur walked half a pace behind him in red, looking bored and golden and far too pleased with himself, and Merlin watched him stop at the potter's stall and slip a coin to a little girl when he thought no one was looking. Then Arthur glanced up and caught him at it. He raised his eyebrows at the honey cakes, and at the children hanging off Merlin's arms, and mouthed something across the square that was almost certainly squirrel.
Merlin stuck his tongue out at him. Arthur's mouth twitched, and he looked away.
So Merlin was standing by the cooper's stall at the bottom of the market, sticky to the wrists, with a dozen small children eating honey cakes out of his hands and the king's procession coming down the row between the apple-sellers, when he saw the knife.
It was a small knife, the kind you'd gut a fish with. The man holding it was thin and grey-faced, and Merlin knew him. He had sold rushes in the market every Thursday until the spring, when his brother was burned in the square for keeping a book of charms under the floor. He stood half-hidden behind a rack of barrel staves ten feet from the path, watching Uther come, and his lips were moving.
He was crying. He didn't seem to know it. The tears ran down into his beard and he didn't wipe them, and his knuckles on the hilt of the knife were as white as bone.