You once asked how I, an unwashed peasant, came to write and read as well as a prince. I don’t remember what answer I gave, but I trust you know by now that snotty little brats are doomed to miserable lives full of unsolved mysteries. In respect to lessons hard learned, I’ll write the truth to you now.
The truth is that my mother taught me, and not because she had any great premonition of a future for me where such skills would be necessary. She learned herself in bits and pieces looking over her brothers’ shoulders and sneaking their books away for practice, and despite the hardships of my childhood, she persisted in the notion that, had I a bit more education and a sliver of the opportunity, I could sail it on to any sort of life I desired.
Strange, isn’t it, the hopes parents have for their children and the blood, sweat, and tears that go into building them. You face expectations far loftier than the dreamlike possibility architected for me, as befitting the difference in our stations. I know this. I know how heavily they’ve weighed on you and the strength it’s cost you to put them aside. Thank you for what you did that night. Whatever is to come, I will never forget that, in our darkest moment, you threw off every childhood lesson and acted on your heart alone.
Secretly I always knew you would. Oh how I love to be proven right.
In my lessons as a boy, my mother would read from a book of Greek tales. One of the fables in her book was of a dead king named Sisyphus, who was arrogant enough to trick death, and who was punished in eternity with the task to roll a boulder up a mountain. Only, every time the king approached the summit, the boulder would inevitably roll back down, forcing him to start again.
Sisyphus was doomed. He made his choices long ago, and in the end he toiled not to atone for his mortal sins, but in vain to beat the gods at their own games. ...It’s here my metaphor falls apart. I was moments from suggesting he might have prospered if he was only brave enough to change, to walk away from the fate that bound him, but I’m remembering now that he would have been flayed by winged women wielding whips if he’d tried.
Lucky for us we’re not in Hell, huh? At least not yet.
Writing to you as a free man, I hope you’ll forgive me if I place yet another expectation upon your worthy shoulders.
Write me back. I can’t give you an address—not in writing, you understand—but if you fold your letter into a boat and place it in the stream, the water will know where to go.
The next time we meet, the world may see us as enemies. But even if it makes me as arrogant as a mythological king who earned himself an eternal punishment, I’m not afraid at all.
Hand wrapped around Arthur’s neck, pulse strong and hot in Merlin’s palm, he doesn’t grip down. Arthur’s head falls forward and forces the issue. Crushes his throat and all its fragile cordage into the cradle of Merlin’s finger and thumb.
“What is it? What’s wrong?” Merlin murmurs, cards his other hand through Arthur’s fine hair, so soft to touch, roughened by sweat near the root.
“It’s not—it’s not—”
Arthur pants, struggles. Bracing on either side of Merlin’s head, his arms shake with all the weight of him. There, in the tender crook of his elbow, thin skin, a shade of blue. Merlin pushes up and drags his tongue across that vulnerable point; Arthur cries out, a sound that drags, rough ragged over rocky ground.
“Not enough?” Merlin asks. Lifts his hips, changes the angle, clenches down, and Arthur whines. One arm buckles, but he catches himself before he falls, all his weight on Merlin’s narrow body supple and supine beneath him.
“Sorry. I’m sorry,” Arthur gasps. He shakes his head where still it balances in Merlin’s hand, the aimless back-and-forth of a dog on a familiar leash, long learned his limits, needing only to confirm for himself, now and again, that they still apply. All the burning ache—Merlin’s abs, curled up in the offering; his hip joints, rotated open; and the slick and the friction of tenderer parts inside—hours, he hadn’t kept track, since the spell broke over them both like summer thunder, a hot and reckoning rain. Not enough.
“More, then,” Merlin purrs. His hand possessed of Arthur’s lifeblood, he slides it down, slick and sticky as it goes, between Arthur’s breasts, down his ribcage, to his stomach, to the low and soft just above the groin. Fingers splayed there, Merlin takes of the universe a palmful of gold: and he pushes it in as Arthur pushes into him, clumsy and wild, fucks him so deep he sees the stars.
And Arthur lit among them as magic flashes through his body, tears apart the cruel cage of a spell binding him: as Merlin brands him, he shatters.
“Yeah, I’m still going to stay. Tomorrow’s the day, and—”
“That sounds more like a reason to go.”
“I know, but it’s already well gone midnight, and I’ve been drinking.”
“I’ll come get you. All you have to do is ask.”
“You wouldn’t get here until dawn.”
“I don’t care.”
“I know.”
Forehead pressed to the cool, black window-glass, Arthur closed his eyes and smiled. After the chaos of the evening, the shouting and the accusations and the old familiar wrench of disappointment, his father’s house now was quiet, near to peaceful. He had Merlin’s voice tight and fierce in his ear. Arthur hated to worry him but could revel selfishly in the second-order effects: in being protected, even from afar.
“I’ll be heading back first thing tomorrow. Home before you’ve time to miss me,” Arthur said softly.
Merlin’s sigh came through the phone receiver like the rustling of sheets, like the intimate friction sound of a hand stroking down an arm, like they might be together and touching and not needing to speak at all.
“That’s not possible,” he said.
“It’s only that I don’t feel right leaving without even seeing him tomorrow,” Arthur replied.
“You don’t have to make excuses—not for me, and definitely not for him.”
It might have been a rebuke if it weren’t said so gently, and if they hadn’t had that exact conversation a hundred times before. Arthur nodded, rolling his head against the window where it lay, even though Merlin couldn’t see him.
“I love you,” he said.
“I love you too. Sleep well, okay? Call me back if you need to, whatever time.”
“I will.”
“Okay. Goodnight.”
“Goodnight.”
Still, a heartbeat passed before either of them could stand to hang up; but Arthur steeled himself and did so, bolstered by his commitment to being home again before supper tomorrow. He could stand one more night after all he’d stood before. Whatever Merlin feared, Arthur had changed in many ways, and mostly through him. His father did not hold the same absolute power over Arthur’s head and heart that he once had.
Pushing away from the window, Arthur stowed his phone in his jeans pocket and meandered down the hall. Thick rugs muffled his footsteps, which had always creaked treacherously on the old wood when he was a boy, unable to sleep, sneaking out of bed and across the house to sit below that very window which had the best view of the stars stretching out in a great carpet above the woods behind the house. The rugs had appeared by the time Arthur made his first visit home from uni. This was due to the sudden lack of children one might be tracking by ear throughout the house, ever watchful, in one’s own way.
Arthur came to his childhood bedroom. Lamp-light glowed around the edges of the door, and Arthur pushed it open.
There was his father, sitting on the side of his double bed with dark red covers he had, very solemnly at the age of twelve, exchanged in the place of his old footie sheets. Uther had his hands clasped tightly between his knees, hunched over with his glasses beside him and his head bowed, but when Arthur came in, he straightened up. For a moment, they only stared at each other. Uther’s hair—well thinning at this point, steely gray as long as Arthur could remember it—stuck up in the back as if he’d been running his hand over it non-stop. He looked tired and old.
“Please sit,” Uther said.
Arthur sat with a foot or so between them, Uther towards the foot of the bed, Arthur towards the head. Despite the distance and their rough equivalence in mass, the give of the mattress naturally pulled them toward each other and forced each to sit stiffly to remain apart.
“You know, I blame myself,” said Uther.
“Father—”
“Please, just—listen.”
Arthur folded his arms tightly across his body, so tense in posture it pulled his shoulders inward. He’d been prepared for the both of them to spend a night licking their wounds, to have a grim but cordial breakfast, then depart with only familiar hurts. But if Father insisted on having him sit here and listen while he droned on about how clearly only his parental deficiencies could have produced a son as inadequate as Arthur, well: Merlin might get his deepest desire, and not in the way Arthur had intended to fulfill any of his short-term dreams: but Arthur’s relationship with his father, such as it was, would not survive this.
Uther took his silence for acquiescence, while Arthur only searched for ice to numb what he was sure was coming.
“I blame myself, because it was I who spent every day of your life instilling the values I thought would be important in your life. I molded you into a man who would stand tall, who would carry himself with a pride he deserved, to hold convictions and fight for them against all censure and opposition. Yet I...I have had hours to think, and perhaps all these thoughts I should have had sooner.” He rubbed his palms on the knees of the slacks he still wore at this hour, then took up his glasses and wiped at them, for something to do with his hands. “I was the one who pushed you, yet when confronted with the man you have become—proud and upright and willing to fight for your convictions—I react poorly. And I am sorry, Arthur.”
“Wait—what?”
The tension slipped from Arthur’s shoulders like a too-large coat, the sort a son might throw on to playact at being his father. He leaned across the space he’d put between them.
This whole time, the two men had picked their own spots on the walls to stare at instead of each other: old rugby trophies, a bookshelf that was half suspiciously-pristine textbooks and half well-thumbed mystery novels, tape-marks on the paint where Arthur had pulled down his childhood posters and left imperfects Uther had never even tried to smooth over. But their eyes met now, and if either had a wetness that perhaps exceeded the norm, well, they were both upright and proud and all the rest, and like gentlemen, would let it go unremarked.
“You are my son,” Uther said. “If a vulgar, communistic Welshman is going to make you happy, of course I ought to give my blessing. Of course. I hope one day you may forgive me for ever acting otherwise.”
And what was Arthur supposed to do with that, other than grab his father by the shoulder and pull him into a rough hug, and perhaps drip a tear or two on his expensive businesslike sweater, under circumstances where he wouldn’t see it? Uther’s hands came up to pat his back, at first almost delicately, but then firm, clutching, a man who had seen something irreplaceable and vital nearly crushed by his own carelessness.
“He will. He already has,” Arthur swore damply, with a manly sort of sniffle. “And I will. Too. I promise.”
“Good. That’s good.”
They disentangled themselves with much dignity, then assumed identical postures alike to the one Uther had worn when Arthur came in: leant forward, hands clasped, elbows on their knees. Done with the business of emotions, they once more ceased to make eye contact, which was right, and good.
“Of course, you will have the wedding here at the house,” said Uther briskly. “You young people are prone to desiring a more modern venue, but the gardens have been recently profiled, and even if tradition is to be eschewed the historical value…”
Arthur would not be needing to call Merlin again that night. His phone could stay in his pocket, the one opposite the ring box he’d been carrying for weeks. Tomorrow was Arthur’s birthday, and for the first time in his memory, his father had gotten him something he truly wanted.
They had been riding for 5 hours in silence. 5 hours since Arthur had been exiled, and Merlin had followed him without a word.
5 hours since Merlin had stopped a dagger with magic in front of the court. 5 hours since Uther had ordered Merlin's execution. 5 hours since Arthur had taken the blame instead.
5 hours since Arthur had claimed he had been the one to make the dagger freeze in mid-air.
5 hours since Arthur claimed he'd been practicing magic.
And now they were here.
It was getting almost too dark to see. Merlin couldn't bring himself to say they should stop.
He felt like his whole world had come crashing down.
He had no idea how much worse it must be for Arthur. Arthur who had protected him without a second thought.
Yet he'd taken the blame, rather than let Merlin go to the pyre. He couldn't have even been sure Merlin was loyal. He didn't even have a second to think it through. He just acted.
Even though from the brief microsecond before Arthur had decided on his course of action, Merlin had seen a world of betrayal on his face.
Arthur hadn't known Merlin had magic.
He'd done it anyway. That was who Arthur was. Passion. Acting in the heat of the moment. It was part of what Merlin adored about him, even when it gave him headaches at the same time.
The prince couldn't have known exactly how Uther would react. Was the exile worse than he imagined? Or, gods, did he expect he would have ended up on the pyre himself?
Merlin wondered if he regretted it.
He must.
Arthur had been born a prince, and fought with everything he had to be a good one. It was his life.
And now it was gone.
Merlin wished with everything he had that he could turn back time, to before the feast when Arthur had thrown a sock at his head in anger, and Merlin had burst out laughing at the weakest threat he'd ever received - and Arthur had twitched his lips in response.
What would happen now?
"Let's make camp here, Merlin." Arthur suddenly cut through their silence, making Merlin jump. His voice was sure. Not afraid.
It only made Merlin more confused.
"As you say, Sire." He said unsurely, so unlike his usual self, as he got off his horse.
"Just Arthur. I no longer have that title, after all." Arthur said. He sounded tired, but accepting. Merlin wanted to shake him, ask why the hell he wasn't more upset about this when Merlin was breaking into pieces.
"Arthur. I'm - you can't know how sorry-"
"You saved my life, Merlin." Arthur interrupted him, looking away from his ex-manservant, now purely friend, as he tied his horse to a tree.
"I never wanted this." Merlin trembled. Why wasn't Arthur angry? Could it be... might Arthur actually understand? Even if he didn't know the facts? Might he know Merlin's nature, his loyalty - his love for his prince?
Arthur turned to face him. Even in the darkness, his eyes burned bright with emotion he rarely let show. "I don't regret it, Merlin. Even if you hadn't used it to save me, I could never abide you dying."
Merlin sucked in a deep breath. He felt a tear roll down his cheek. Arthur looked softly at him.
"Ever since you barged your way into my life, it's been you and me. And it always will be. I won't have it any other way." Arthur said, and it sounded like a promise. It sounded even more like an unspoken 'I love you' that Merlin had always longed to hear.
"I'll always be yours, Arthur." Merlin replied, even as another tear escaped, and his heart pounced in his chest.
Arthur smiled. "Then tomorrow you'll tell me everything. Including why on earth you'd come to Camelot in the first place. We'll plan from there. It will be okay, Merlin. I promise."
“It is strange,” Arthur admitted. They were lying on their backs, a thick, soft blanket beneath them, on a grassy hillside. The city was far behind them; miles and miles they’d gone in just an afternoon, into the setting sun as far from any settlement as Merlin’s roaring metal carriage could take them; and the sky stretched wide and cloudless up above, aglimmer with stars in the way water caught even the tiniest speck of light and reflected it a thousand times.
And it was darker, even here, even so, than it used to be.
“I’m sorry,” Merlin said. Or, rather, he more like choked it, a horrible noise like his throat was closing up. Arthur whipped his head around to see Merlin staring straight up, his every muscle locked in place like a body on a bier, his eyes, too, swimming with stars.
And Merlin said, “It’s the lights. The electric. They’re so bright, and even when there’s no clouds, the light bounces off water and dust in the air and makes a sort of cloud itself that we can’t see past. I—didn’t even notice, you know? When it was getting so bad, I—couldn’t stop it. So now it’s—ruined.”
“That’s enough,” Arthur said sternly. He rolled onto his side to face Merlin, propped up on one elbow. “What would you have done? Stopped the invention of electricity to preserve the night sky the way it was in the time of Camelot? Such a thing would be impossible, even for you, and even if it was possible, you wouldn’t.”
Merlin stayed silent, his lips pressed into a thin line.
Arthur shifted closer. He would force Merlin to look at him if he had to. “To read your books long into the night; to speak to people instantly across incredible distances; to power all the magnificent inventions of these past centuries: tell me it isn’t worth it, and I’ll call you a liar.”
Shaking his head, Merlin started to tremble, a minute shivering Arthur never would have noticed if he hadn’t come so very close.
These centuries had, among their other miracles, offered Arthur an endless wealth of books through which he learned about the world and all that had been discovered in his absence. Within their pages he learned of the Sun, the Moon, the Earth, all between them and all beyond. He learned of the great knowledge which had been unfurling even in his own time in another part of the world, which he would never have reached in life: but now Merlin would take him. They would see the world together, in all its splendor. Arthur had been learning about atoms of late; with infinite time he would take the world by particulates. As king, he had been a big picture sort of man. Now, he was something else: transformed.
Arthur took Merlin’s hand, pried it from his side. He wove their fingers together, then he cupped Merlin’s cheek and turned it towards him.
“Merlin,” he said, as kindly as he could, “The sky would have changed anyway.”
For a few seconds, Merlin only stared at him, shock keeping all other feelings at bay. Then, he crumbled. A rippling breeze across still water broke into a storm; the smallest tremor broke into shaking shoulders, shaking hands, great wracking sobs that Arthur bore upon his shoulders.
Above them, the North Star twinkled on, at the crown of Ursa Major.
At every step of Merlin’s education, Gaius told him, a staunch believer in Hippocrates’s old philosophy, his purpose was to ease the pain and never to be the cause of it. To Gaius it was a kind of atonement, and maybe he hoped for Merlin it would be the same: enough good works on one side of the light to balance out things done for hope and duty in the dark.
Doing no harm was easier some days than others.
Arthur’s back flexed as he shifted around on the bench, powerful muscle under pale skin: and mottled everwhere, deltoid, oblique, latissimus dorsi, with deepening bruises, purple and black. Too impatient to wait for Merlin to armor him—he’d been delayed by a courtier with a pedestrian plot to enchant Arthur to fall in love with his daughter, who would no longer be an issue—he’d marched onto the training field in only his leather vest and let a crowd of trainee knights use him as a dummy in the guise of teaching them how to take a blow and keep fighting.
Head full of straw, indeed.
“Tell me if this hurts,” Merlin seethed, rubbing his hands in ointment and sinking them down Arthur’s ribs.
thanks @diaryofatrekker for all the inspiring conversations 🙂↕️
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“What was that? I can’t hear you,” Merlin said, unable to keep the grin out of his own voice.
Arthur blinked up at him, his pupils huge, under the gloss of tears his eyes that perfect reflective lake-blue. Though his throat and jaw flexed around an answer, he made no sound. Gold glittered a seal across his lips, forbidding him even the slightest whisper. Merlin ran his thumb roughly across Arthur’s mouth, along the seam, his little embellishment. He loved all the ways he was still discovering to make Arthur an even prettier treasure than he already was.
When he reached the corner of Arthur’s mouth he trailed past and cupped his cheek. Silly untrue words were the only way Arthur ever resisted anyway, and denied them he was biddable to Merlin’s every desire.
Unfortunately for him, and for the hazy sweetness already overtaken his face, and the honey-warm lassitude of his muscles that left his shoulders slump and his thighs spread, on his knees, what Merlin desired most right now was to finish his book.
With a condescending pat to Arthur’s cheek, Merlin straightened up and pulled away. Arthur strained to follow his touch, but with a flick of Merlin’s wrist, his hands and feet were bound as tightly as his voice, and he was consigned to the hearth rug, or wherever else Merlin saw fit to put him. He did tie the room together. Merlin’s tower study still lacked somewhat for personal effects compared to the bedchamber, decorated for two. With another wave, Merlin summoned his chair closer to the fire and sat, close enough that Arthur could rest his head on his thigh, as soon as he felt bold enough again to beg for Merlin’s attention the way he had when he interrupted Merlin’s very important work.
Settling in, Merlin opened his book to where he’d left it, page marked by a loose-leaf full of his notes on rune configurations and astrological confluences.
“You can be mad at me later,” he told Arthur, loftily, “But I can’t afford distractions right now. Fertility rituals, such delicate timing.”
The next page of his book detailed a spell for bonding ink to skin, making body and magic as one in a very literal way. Fascinating stuff. Merlin read the page three times while, in the corner of his eye, a pink flush crept up Arthur’s chest, to his throat, to his cheeks.
He shuffled closer on the rug.
Smug and triumphant, Merlin flipped to the next page.
blame @julia-with-luv. cw descriptions of blood and violence
--
Gwaine hands him the axe, and Arthur breaks the door down.
Sir Ortolf’s keep sits squat and ugly over the River Gwydd, most of his income butchered from the side of anything which might flow down those waters—fish and furs and lumber. His lands are small, his garrison paltry. They have archers, but Lancelot has proven himself a dab hand with shield spells. If Ortolf thought to leave Camelot undefended with his actions, he will soon find himself sorely mistaken.
The guards who mass in the front hall to defend their lord are easily dispatched. Two to one odds mean nothing to Arthur’s men, who are more skilled and better trained than any other fighters in the land, and who are fighting for a cause each values beyond his own life. Nearly too quick to see, Elyan thrusts his sword through the slit in his foe’s helmet. Percival rakes his blade across the throat of another man, deep enough his head is nearly severed. Arthur doesn’t even have to slow his stride across the sticky, blooded floor.
In the chamber beyond is Ortolf, cowering behind his two sons. Both the sons were too stupid to make it as knights under Arthur’s standard, but the smarter of the two steps forward, hands raised in surrender. His face pearls with sweat, his eyes wide and darting, hunted.
“Sire. King. Your Majesty—” he goes stiffly to his knees as his father and brother fill the room with the sound and smell of each panting breath. “—We beg, we beg your mercy—”
With a final slumping thud, the battle outside falls silent. Lancelot and Leon flank the door at Arthur’s back, while Gwaine circles the room with slow, casual stride. There is nowhere to run. There is nowhere to hide.
Arthur holds up his hand. “Rise. Your begging is unnecessary and pathetic. You already have my mercy.”
Ortolf’s son climbs to his feet; before his knees can lock, his brother seizes his arm and pulls him back, until the family is a tight knot in the center of the room. It is merciful that Arthur allows all three of them to live until they give him what he wants. It is merciful that Ortolf’s nephews and daughter-in-law are this moment safe in Camelot cells.
“Th-thank you, thank you, my lord—”
Those fumbling, whining words, wobbling with relief as they imagine they are safe, will remain safe, might even be forgiven. And still Arthur is kept waiting? Still the fools cling together and their own skins?
“Silence!” Arthur roars, lunging forward. Elyan catches his arm and steadies him.
The mission. All that matters is the mission. Grounded, Arthur nods and Elyan and is released. He clenches his fists, leather creaking under the force, and stops their shaking.
“You will tell me.” Arthur speaks slowly enough to taste each syllable, to roll it over his tongue. “What you have done with Lord Merlin.”
For the first time, Sir Ortolf himself speaks up. “I am a loyal man of Camelot! What was I to think when the sorcerer clawed at power year after year—when he came to my door claiming he was on king’s business! A liar and a snake, like all his kind—”
“Father,” Ortolf’s son whimpers. His legs give up on him and pull him back to ground, but for his brother’s grip like iron on his arm.
“You fool,” says Lancelot softly.
Arthur has been king for ten years, and magic has been legal for seven. Merlin has walked by his side for every single day of them, and for all the days before, since the very first he spent in Camelot. And still, in dank corners, under stones where the lowest creatures lurk, they are turning up the rotting remains of Uther’s crusade, those who cling to hate and mistrust and persecute sorcerers wherever they’re found.
Perhaps it is fitting that this man, ossified in his hate, would bring Arthur closer to his father than he’d been in over ten years.
Arthur rests his hand on Excalibur’s pommel and says, “Let us be perfectly clear. You have already been stripped of your titles and holdings. Your household guard is either dead or under my control. If you attempt to flee by water, I will torch your boat and let you drown, and if you attempt to flee over land, you will be hunted like the animals you are. Every door will be closed to you, from the holdfasts of your closest allies to the meanest poacher’s hut, for anyone who gives you shelter will face my wrath in equal measure. Now. Where is Merlin.”
“I’ll take you to him,” the smarter son says before his father or brother can speak.
Gwaine groans from the back of the room. “Finally.”
“Gwaine, Elyan, with me. Leon, Percival, Lancelot, stay here and watch these traitors.”
Ortolf’s son leads them, single file, through a hidden door and down a narrow staircase, into the belly of the keep. This passageway was not fashioned to be walked by kings or outsiders. The walls and floor scrape at every movement, raw stone, unworn by travel and clean of soot where torches might light the way.
“It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” the man pants out with Gwaine’s knife between his shoulder blades, both hands on the walls with every step to keep himself upright.
“And how was it supposed to be, exactly?” Gwaine growls.
“Even though Camelot’s at peace with magic, there may still come a day when magic is our enemy again. If that day comes, we need ways to fight them, to defend ourselves.” He stumbles; Gwaine pushes him. Arthur says nothing. “It was meant to be a precaution! But when Lord Merlin appeared—”
“On king’s business. Bearing the king’s seal,” says Elyan.
“I know! I know! I told Father it was madness, but he wouldn’t listen!”
The tomblike passageway ends at a thick iron door. Ortolf’s son fumbles in his jacket for the key, which settles into its lock with a click.
“He said this was the best chance he’d get to really test what he created.”
The door swings open.
At first, all Arthur sees in the flickering light of their torches is a spidery black shape. But as he, Elyan, and Gwaine creep closer, the jutting black legs, prickling to the eye, arrange themselves in a familiar form: a cage. Thin iron bars, approximately the width of an arrow shaft, crisscross through the space, not in a logical grid but in a sort of web—in some places forming gaps large enough for a man’s head, in others, coming so close together there’s barely a gap to see. All the strands weave together as they approach the floor, attached at nine thick anchor-points.
And there, at the center. A pale hand, stretching toward the bars; a pale face, turned toward the door; pale eyes, dull and glassy, like doll’s eyes. Merlin’s mouth hangs open, chest rising and falling with each rattling breath, otherwise motionless, as if pinned by some immense weight.
“Mercy,” whispers Ortolf’s son.
His answer hits him in the face, a meaty, alive sort of pain in this hole of stone and iron. Gwaine hits him again. Ignoring them, Arthur throws himself toward the bars, as if he could tear them apart with his bare hands. The instant he touches the metal, a wave of despair crashes over him. He’s too late. Merlin is beyond saving. He’ll stand here on the other side of the bars going mad as he watches his beloved wither and die, and when all of Ortolf’s house is dead, Arthur will still have to rule over a rotten country where any of his lords might have committed the same sin.
His hands fall away, grown too heavy to hold up. Arthur stumbles back, shaking his head to clear it.
“The anchors are carved with runes,” Elyan says shakily. “My tools might not—”
Before he can finish the words, with a hoarse scream Arthur swings Excalibur over his head and brings it down on one of the runes. The anchor shatters at the touch of Excalibur’s edge. The entire web shudders, creaks, and starts to fall apart.
Arthur forces his way through, punching apart iron that’s gone as brittle as charcoal, until he can fling himself to the hard ground at Merlin’s side.
“Merlin!” he cries. He should—he has to check for injuries first, in case—but unthinking, uncontrollable, he pulls Merlin into his arms—so light, like birds’ bones—cradles Merlin’s head on his shoulder, lays a palm on his cheek, a kiss on his brow, curls over him like a dying animal hiding a fatal wound, shielding his exposed insides like it might save him.
Merlin’s hair is greasy, his clothes filthy, his skin cold to the touch. The only sign he lives is the tickle of breath against Arthur’s strangled, aching throat. With a low moan, Arthur rocks them both together.
“I’m sorry. I should have been faster, I should never have sent you alone, this is all my fault—”
But then, so faint but growing brighter, sunshine blooms everywhere Merlin and Arthur touch skin to skin--the golden glow of Merlin's magic calling to the part of him that lives in Arthur.
“Yes,” Arthur breathes, clutching Merlin tighter so his face presses against his neck, fumbling with the laces of Merlin’s tunic to spread his palm across his chest, over his heart. “That’s it, love, you can do it, take whatever you need.”
The light swells, fresh air and birdsong and the taste of honey; all pain, all sadness only a distant memory, as the magic woven through Arthur’s blood and bone flows into Merlin and brings him back to life.
Merlin stirs. Arthur feels his eyelashes blinking against his skin. He starts to squirm in Arthur’s hold, pushes away just enough to sit, and rubs his eyes as if just waking from a long nap.
Then he freezes. This close, Arthur can see his pupils dilate enormously in the darkness. Then he bursts into action, leaping to his feet and pushing Arthur behind him, hands splayed and eyes glowing, ready to burn any enemy that might challenge them.
“We’ve been betrayed,” he hisses. “Ortolf’s planning something bad—abducting mages in secret to test some new weapon on them. It’s not safe here, you shouldn’t have come—”
“Merlin.”
“Wait, if you’re down here, you must have been captured too. Are you hurt? I’ll kill them—”
“Merlin!”
Arthur takes his face in his palms and shakes him, then pulls him in, pressing their brows together. Merlin clings to him just as tightly, but Arthur can still feel his confusion, tense in the body in his arms.
“It’s over. You’re safe now. We both are,” Arthur says.
On the other side of the room, Gwaine and Elyan hold Ortolf’s son sagging between them. The man has gone limp, utterly without hope now that Arthur has seen what was done to his envoy, his right hand, his other half. His nose is broken, lip bloody, both eyes black from Gwaine’s fists. He twitches as Arthur approaches, Merlin at his side.
“Good to see you in one piece, mate,” Gwaine says to Merlin in a watery sort of voice.
“What is going on?”
“Sire,” says Ortolf’s son. Arthur reevaluates the man on both his intelligence and his bravery. “I accept my fate for the grave crime we have committed. I only...I ask...my wife, she left for Camelot a week ago to visit her mother. Does she...is she…”
There is a lesson Arthur learned at his father’s knee. After what was done in this place, by Ortolf and Arthur both, he should heed it well. An enemy, once defeated, must be utterly crushed, or else it spreads its evil in the wind and the water and will rise again one day to strike you down. Ortolf’s second son might reject him, but what of his brothers? What of his grandchildren, one day to be born?
With Merlin at his side, alive, radiant in the hollow dark, and watching him, the decision comes easily, and from his heart.
“Your wife is safe. In a cell where she has food and water, a bed, and sunlight,” Arthur says.
The man closes his eyes, shudders, and nods, so low his neck is stretched out, ready for a blade.
Arthur says, “Let us return to Camelot and release her. What happens after that is a road yet unbuilt.”
“S-Sire?”
“Get up. Let’s go,” Elyan tells him, but in softened tones. He and Gwaine go ahead with their prisoner, but Merlin stops Arthur before they leave. The dark has no fear for them now, lit by magic, blue and gold.
“What happened?” Merlin asks.
Arthur cradles his face again and kisses him, and kisses him again, and breathes him in for a long moment before he can answer.
“I will tell you everything. But now all I can do is say—you have once again reminded me the sort of king Camelot needs.”
Not a tyrant who allows love and grief to sow the earth with blood, but a man who remembers what his love was built for.
