Chapter Text
i
On the river Glein.
Arthur calls a halt just north of where the river splits in two. The two are unequal in quality, Merlin notices, feeling vaguely sick. Looking at their small army, with mud drying on its armor and saddlery too damp to creak, he cannot help but draw unfavourable comparisons.
Even were they not outnumbered - Arthur's experience is in managing skirmishes. In war, he has facilitated the strategies of more senior commanders, if one is being generous. He has not led campaigns.
The faces Merlin sees around him are appropriately grey. Or perhaps it is only that the fog is veiling them, steaming off the water to spread over the banks of the river and under the feet of the men.
Leon's footsteps squelch as he approaches. What he says to Arthur is whispered, which is the first really bad thing. They may all of them die here, perhaps before they sleep another night. Merlin ties a knot in the mane of the horse whose reins he is holding.
"No." Arthur replies to Leon. Like a prat, he is refusing to speak quietly.
"My Lord." Somewhat louder. Then a whisper again, "They are uneasy."
"And what does it help, to polish the bits and pauldrons, except to distract us?"
It is always us, even about the skirmishes, as if Arthur was a knight himself, and not an heir. Arthur claps his left hand over the hilt of his sword. “What does it matter how splendidly we die? That is my father, Leon, and this is not his fight."
Leon's expression is grim. Merlin cannot see Arthur's face, but he knows the tense smile on it without looking.
Arthur takes twenty men, a fifth of their force, over the smaller river to the center of the fork. Merlin is the twenty-first, leading the horses that would not be persuaded to go except by his quiet hands, and quieter whispers.
If Leon had thought the force ragged-looking before, he would despair at the sight of those who had done the crossing. They pitch no tents, at Arthur's direction - their camp is only a cluster of small smoky fires to dry their boots and trouser-legs.
"Can't have the bait be too tempting," Arthur says cheerily, like he is discussing a checkers match.
"Would it tempt you?" Merlin asks. Mostly to hear his voice.
"Sure it would." Arthur turns where he is standing in front of one of the fires, wet to the skin and unlikely to dry. He squints out at the blurred horizon, where Merlin knows there are Saxons, two hundred or more, and properly fed and kitted. "A little troop of damp Britons, penned in like sheep? I would eat us alive."
"Comforting."
"Don't be a wet blanket, Merlin." Arthur squints more tightly at the landscape. "Do you see them?"
Merlin has better vision than Arthur even without the magic, but he uses a little anyway, shading his eyes to hide the glow.
"I see two scouts."
"Then it's time." He raises his voice, only slightly - their troop is too small to get beyond hearing distance. "We arm."
The Saxons, as Arthur had predicted, charge toward them like a single ravenous beast. Merlin calculates they will be outnumbered five to four, and shouts it to Arthur as they mount, the thud of his heart drowning out the hooves of their horses, nervous and skittering.
The beast bears down on them far too slowly, a heaving amalgam of men with raised pikes like needle-sharp teeth. When it is near enough to see the eyes in a Saxon's head, Arthur bellows, "The Fork!" and his twenty men wheel their twenty mounts.
There is the unglamorous scuffle of spurring the horses from trot to gallop, and then they are thundering into the embrace of the river's arms.
Merlin hears the dove-call from the far banks only because he is listening for it. Time catches like a breath in the middle of a yawn, and then there is the sound of the first Briton arrows finding their targets in the pursuit. The shouts come from horrifyingly close behind, but Leon's force has done its work well. The arrows found marks, and there will be time for another volley before Arthur's men are forced to wheel again.
Someone's horse stumbles beside him, and Merlin reaches blindly out to steady it with his magic, feeling the jolt of its weight through the tendons of his wrist. He doesn't know whether it stays up - Arthur bellows again, and they are turning to face death, or victory.
It is victory, but Arthur's twenty are ten by the time Leon's men can cross the arms of the river into the fight. They have been pressed back almost to the bank, and the grass is dark with blood and bodies.
Merlin can repair none of the bodies, even with the magic. The youngest of the company, Alf, is the only fallen man with a pulse, and he gasps his last breath with his hands trembling in Merlin’s own.
No wind comes to disperse the fog, and it settles like a shroud over all: the cold dead spread out over the sedge, the bodies bleeding crimson clouds into the water, Alf's warm corpse in Merlin's lap. The sun is a white ghost through the fabric of it, and the world, for an hour, is papery and unreal.
It is Arthur's voice that rouses Merlin. His legs are numb where Alf is lying across them, and the hands in his have gone stiff.
"Let me, Merlin."
Arthur takes the body to lay it in the grass, and Merlin staggers to his feet, nerves buzzing.
From his new vantage the damage becomes comprehensible: Alf's tunic is torn hip to collar with the flesh below, revealing a row of red ribs with entrails gleaming underneath. Arthur covers Alf quickly with his cloak, hiding his pale face and wounded body alike, and takes Merlin by the arm.
They walk, somehow, until they reach the spread bedrolls and stacked pikes that indicate the beginning of a real camp. There is a guard posted, and water boiling on a fire; men are stripping out of armor and leather and linen to wrap their wounds. They do not need Arthur to direct it, or even Leon - they have done it so many times that a layer of blood and shock cannot obscure the habit. Merlin pitches Arthur's tent and rubs off horses, like he always does, and Arthur sits with old Edric in front of one of the fires.
Merlin cannot hear their words, from where he works, but he can see them speaking. Edric’s white head is bowed from age, Arthur’s to hide the raw grief on his face. He has won at cost before, but has never chosen the cost himself.
When the last of the horses has been watered and hobbled Arthur is by the fire alone, wiping his gauntlets with a rag. Merlin gets the other armor in silence. Some of it Arthur has already cleaned, and he takes the pauldron before Merlin can finish the gorget, staying silent as he weaves between the tent and the fire. He remains at a distance - like he is afraid to approach any nearer, and still afraid to be alone with himself.
It is nearly dark when they are done, and Arthur must be cold; their breaths are white on the air, and he is wearing only a shirt. Alf is in his cloak, Merlin remembers, and tries not to think of the cold hands in his as he stumbles to the tent. His own pack is in the corner, damp and blood spattered, but the blanket in it is dry. It is coarse - a peasant's thing - but he puts it on Arthur anyway, resting his hands a moment on the bent shoulders under it. It is all the forgiveness he has to offer, and Arthur holds it tightly in shivering fingers.
They return to Camelot to many accolades, and Arthur still wears the threadbare brown fabric over his shining mail.
ii, iii, iv, v
On the river Dubglas in the region of Linnuis.
It is the fourth battle at the Blackwater where Merlin makes up his mind. It is a calculated decision - he has forsaken the luxury of spontaneity.
At Glein he had broken a man's neck by tearing his saddle-girth with a spell, and split another's skull on a rock, both by accident. He had been acting in self defense, and the killing had not haunted him. In the first battles on the moors he had done the same - discreet kinetic casting, placed to slide below the attention of friends and foes, timed only frequently enough to keep him alive. He has been carrying a long knife to keep up the ruse of capable soldiery; in the chaos of war, no one has noticed it has never been used.
Looking at Arthur is what exposes the need to kill in earnest. The morale among the troops is high, the flush of consecutive victories and generous amounts of ale painting their faces red in the thin sunlight - but they have been battered, and Arthur's body is the evidence. He walks badly, and Merlin knows from dressing it that the wound on his thigh is deep and still oozing. Merlin had put spelled yarrow on it, and still is not confident the infection can be staved off in a tent, where it can’t stay clean. Arthur will not last in battle if he is unhorsed; at least, he will not last alone.
"Merlin." Arthur has found him mulling, and come to interrupt. "Stop staring sadly into the bog."
"Better that than looking at you, Sire." Merlin says, as if Arthur's face, grimy and smiling under an overlong fringe, is not wretchedly appealing.
He would kill to see the smile again, certainly.
"You arse." Arthur buffets Merlin on the shoulder, more gently than he should. His left arm is still stiff (from being torn out of its socket, maybe - his horse had gone down and thrown him, in the last battle, with the reins caught around his gauntlet.)
"When will the fighting be?"
"The chiefs will blow their horns at noon. And if they don't, we will. This will be the end of it."
Merlin swallows hard, looking into the murky water, and says "Yeah."
The Saxon horns blow when the sun is at its peak, and there is a ruffle of action as Arthur's horns blow a response. The men have been waiting on edge all week, arms near at hand, stoking up their bloodlust with ale, and when the horns do not sound, drowning it again with more.
Arthur does not partake of the ale - he is too severe for it. Merlin forces a little bottle of henbane tea down his throat, before he can mount. The leg wound is weeping again, and will be agony when he throws it over the horse.
Arthur grabs Merlin hard by the collarbone to get himself in the saddle, and says, "Christ," through closed teeth when he is up. Then he says, "Be safe," and spurs forward to the field.
Before the horns blow again it is almost quiet - the stamping of horses is muffled on the peat, and the men are subdued - knowing, maybe, what Merlin had heard Arthur say to Leon. The Saxons will not retreat this time, and let them win with slim losses.
Merlin is a little behind and to the right of Arthur, flexing his hands around the reins. The knife he has left strapped to his saddle - objects snag the magic that flows into the air from his palms, and he cannot take the chance of being impeded.
The horns blow, and the horses charge, and then they are in a heaving ocean of death, and Merlin cannot see Arthur in the waves of it.
His tight grip on the reins is useless - his horse has panicked, and is weaving terrified through the melee, throwing up great clods of peat. Arthur's golden head emerges far to their left; Merlin whispers over the horse’s mane and only then does it slow, turning with the press of his hand on its neck.
There is a man with a leveled pike running hard at Arthur, and Merlin reaches out toward the man's heart. He can feel it, wet and pulsing, in his hand, as he squeezes; he can feel it writhe and spurt as it stops.
Something dark and ecstatic caresses him, and is replaced by a near faint. He twists his hands in the mane of his horse, and breathes through the dizziness. He crushes the lungs of two more men before it has faded.
When the killing stops, Arthur is among those standing, sunk to ankles in the blood and bog, and Merlin cannot repent.
vi
On the river Bassas.
The Saxons fight from greed and mercenary bloodlust; accordingly, Merlin takes their lives in greater number and with less remorse than any of Arthur’s knights. If he is afraid of the black thing that sticks to him like a swarm of leeches afterward, feeding on his power, or feeding it, it is not enough fear to stop him.
With the Picts, it is different. Merlin does not realize it is different until he sees the face of the first one he kills - a boy, or at least a man younger than himself.
He does not grow dizzy in battle, any more - he has refined his methods. He kills with his own hands only when Arthur’s blood might be spilled; otherwise he uses mostly the weapons of others, nudges drooping lances and stray arrows to meet their marks, conserving his power. So he is steady on his feet when he kills the boy, and sees the face clearly. It is narrow, like his own, with a shock of dark hair over it, and there is a triskelion traced in blue under the throat.
It is the painted symbol that stuns him, makes his heart clench silent in his chest.
The boy is his people - or was once. If he had not possessed Merlin’s gifts himself, he had revered them. He had come to battle righteously angry at the fate of the druids. He had come to take their homelands back from the Romans, with their stone roads and shining cavalry, and their disdainful God, who had cruelly died and now cruelly killed.
Or perhaps he had not. But Merlin cannot move from where he stands over the boy, the spear in his chest jutting as if it had come from Merlin’s own hand. He is able to glamour himself before sinking to his knees, and then the battle flows on around them like a river over stone.
He stays until the sun sinks into the horizon. He does not touch the boy, except to close his eyes - he is not worthy to hold him like he holds the other dying.
When he returns to camp, Arthur is sitting at the fire nearest the edge of it with the night watch, and it dawns on Merlin what he has done when Arthur leaps to his feet and jogs to meet him.
He arrives breathless, ready to crush him in an embrace, but Merlin holds his face blank, and the half-outstretched arm is lowered as Arthur nears him, wary. He is looking for where the wound is, and cannot find it.
"You're-" alive, Merlin knows he wants to say - you're back." Arthur's voice is hoarse. He stays at a distance, waiting; when Merlin comes no closer he turns back to the camp without him.
Lancelot is one of the men on watch, and must see the grief on his face. He tries to stand, and Merlin shakes his head minutely. Lancelot would understand, and still the understanding would bring him no comfort.
Merlin brings Arthur a washbasin and a towel, and takes his armor outside to clean, as if the battle had been an ordinary one. It is not ordinary; there is a silence between with no insult to fill it. When he returns to the tent. Arthur is sitting on his cot, having stripped off his shirt and washed, and gestures to Merlin to have his turn.
Merlin should wash in the river, with the squires and servants, but Arthur pretends to have forgotten, usually with rudeness to blunt the affection. This time the gift is offered in silence, and it breaks the resentment Merlin has been holding like a long stave to Arthur's chest.
He swallows down the thing that is bubbling in his throat, and dips his hands in the water. The dirt dried on his knuckles flakes off into the bowl.
"My father was one of the Old People," Merlin says. He fixes his eyes on his own reflection in the dirty water, half-afraid to look at Arthur. "Maybe a druid."
He presses his wet hands to his face and hears Arthur sigh.
"Lancelot said that. When I couldn't find you. I thought - I thought he was trying to keep me from doing something rash."
Merlin blinks the water out of his eyes.
"I'm one of them, Arthur. At least by blood."
"What does it matter?"
"Their language, their gods, their kings-"
"They're not yours.” There is no firmness in the statement - it is spoken with calm certainty.
"Maybe they should be."
Arthur is on his feet, suddenly.
"Don't ever talk that way. Not around me, and especially not around my father."
Merlin chances a look at him - there is a distraught flash in his eyes, like a horse about to panic.
“I should lie.”
“No.”
“Then, I should hide.”
Arthur does not answer, and Merlin leaves before he is able to. He goes to Lancelot at the watch fires, and stays with him there until the sunrise. For days after, he does not sleep well.
vii
In the wood of Celidon
There is the sound of a branch snapping a few furlongs ahead, and Arthur raises his arm for a halt. Behind, Merlin knows that Leon has also raised his arm - there is the creak of twenty bows bending, and the rustle of fern and sedge.
There follows a muggy silence; breaths held in anticipation of the subsequent rustle that would mean a deer, or fox. It does not come, and Arthur's arm stays raised.
More than likely, they had just been spotted. Arthur had hoped to surround the enemy before they were seen - a risk, but the combined numbers of the Angles and the woodcraft of the Picts made open battle risky and endless skirmishes unsustainable. Ambush was the surest win with the fewest men to lose.
Gwaine is at Arthur's right and, and for once, speaks quietly.
“If we fall back now we might make the fort.”
Arthur glances over his shoulder, and Merlin nods. As cavalry, Arthur’s knights are more than themselves. In the forest, on foot, they are only eighty men, with reinforcements two hours away. Surprise had been their only chance.
Arthur is bold, but he is still a tactician. He signals the retreat, and there is an answering crack of bracken as the men fall back.
It is terrifying, to have speed and silence held in tension. They cannot afford to slow, if they are being pursued, but even at a walking pace they are loud. They would be easy quarry for a Saxon, let alone a Pictish scout. Gwaine has fallen to the back of the company, behind Arthur, and glances back often over his shoulder. Merlin stays with him, his palms thrumming like a taut bowstring.
There is a clarity to his senses when he holds the magic so close, and it is sharper still in the woods, where the same power as his own runs through veins of the trees and the moss. He can hear it like a second heartbeat, pulsing under the bark of the oaks, and oozing from the mosses they crush underfoot. It is how he knows, when the others have begun to relax, that they are being followed.
He touches Gwaine's shoulder first, and then strides ahead to Arthur and does the same. Arthur nods, and whispers without turning.
"When we reach a rise, we will face them." Merlin watches him jog away toward the front of the company with the unfamiliar sting of fear in his throat.
The rise where Arthur signals the halt is not much of one; except for the leafy ditch in front of it, it has nothing to rise above. They fall into a loose formation, since the geography is ill-suited to a strict one: staggered rows with archers to either flank, and pikes in front. The forest goes on beautifully around them, with yellow leaf-light dappling on mail and naked steel.
Merlin is ready when the first bowstring sings from the forest ahead of them; a gust of wind pushes it off its mark. He is not ready for the answering hiss of arrows at their flank. One is in Gwaine's sword arm; a man is ready as the arm sinks to hack at the shoulder above it, and then the neck. His sword meets mail, but Gwaine goes down on one knee, splintering the line at Arthur's right. There is the sudden ring of steel against Lancelot's shield, his sword, his helm, and then he is also overwhelmed, and there are three men at Arthur like rats at a corpse. One of the swords finds his hip and he staggers forward into a blow that should have glanced on his shield, and lands hard on his collarbone.
There are no Briton arrows nearby to guide or spears to steady. Merlin kneels near the foot of an oak and sinks his fingers into the carpet of fallen leaves.
The earth underneath is old, neither friend nor enemy, and must be bargained with. Merlin presses his other hand against the tree beside him until the crooked bark draws blood, and only then does the forest bend in his hands.
Yards away, Arthur is on the ground, his shield trembling under the weight of a blade, his temple exposed for a killing stroke. Merlin whispers and the sword slides over the curve of the shield and into the earth. Its owner cannot withdraw it, and Arthur dispatches him quickly, blood spattering down on his face. Merlin whispers again and the undergrowth locks gnarled knuckles around the feet of the men who have backed Lancelot into a knot of birches - Arthur falls on them like a wolf, blood bright in his nostrils and bared teeth.
Gwaine is Merlin's next concern - if he and Lancelot are on their feet, Arthur is safe, and the fight will turn. He is leaning against a boulder, right arm dangling with the arrow gone fully through, and the left pressed to his stomach. Merlin goes to him carefully, staying half-crouched in the thickets.
"Merlin!" Gwaine says cheerily, as if he had not recently been shot. "Help a chap out, why don't you?"
"Look me in the eye," Merlin says, and cracks the end off the arrow.
"Nnng," Gwaine says, and then, "Holy God," when Merlin slides it out of his bicep.
Merlin clamps his hand around the hole where the arrow had been before Gwaine can shake him off. He sets his other palm down on the mossy top of the rock (it squelches, since Gwaine's side has bled on it). The power that shocks into him is enough to knit the wound fully closed, and he is hardly dizzy with the effort. It might have killed him on the heath.
Gwaine picks up the broken haft of a spear and is away without a look back, and that is when Merlin runs the knife across his palm.
Where he goes, the earth shifts and sinks under Saxon feet, and his blood leaks out onto the leaves.
viii
At castle Guinnion.
There is a church beside the keep, and Arthur has the priest say Mass for them in it.
Lancelot, who is serious about God, kneels on the stone for another hour after it is done. Gwaine complains that it is only a Tuesday, and that there is no need for Mass on Tuesdays. Merlin stays silent on the matter.
Arthur would admit that he brings Merlin to battle less as a squire than as a healer - because Gaius is old, and they have no other. If he notices that the knights whisper about his holy hands and witch’s herbs, or that Merlin does not cross himself in church, he too is silent. It is an agreement between them.
It is why, when Merlin finds Arthur in the praetorium with the priest, he stays outside the doorway, waiting.
He is standing in the center of it alone when the priest goes out and Merlin goes in, and is holding a tapestry in his hands. There is a portrait of a woman with a red halo done on it, in beautiful stitches; there are even little gold stars on her dark mantle.
"Father Athanasius says that a dragon is not a good symbol for a Christian king," Arthur says, without looking up from the woman's face. "That I must wear the Blessed Mother, to win the victory.
"And will you?"
Arthur nods. Because they have agreed, he says no more.
Because they have agreed, Merlin sits at the foot of his bunk and talks about the horses they had seen fighting in the yard, and Perceval getting drunk at supper. He does not mention the red cloak in his lap, or the tapestry that he is stitching over the golden sigil on the shoulder.
The Saxons arrive the next day at dawn; crawling up the horizon like a dark tide on white sand.
"They have the numbers," Lancelot says quietly, watching them from the battlement at Arthur's left hand.
"They always do," says Gwaine, at his right, and nudges Merlin in the ribs.
Arthur looks grimly out at the landscape. "Merlin?"
"One hundred horse, two hundred infantry," Merlin says. Arthur's eyes flick to the walls. "And a thousand paces around."
It is not Merlin's first fort, nor his first siege.
Arthur hums.
"Better to meet them in the field, and then fall back. We will not manage a siege for long here, and they will not expect an assault."
Arthur is right - the Britons are outnumbered, but they are cavalry, and kill with hoof, blade, and spear alike. The first charge carves a bloody furrow through the field, and when they rally again the enemy scatters.
Arthur pursues the retreat into the foothills, and does not fall back until the slaughter is complete. The setting sun wears a red halo like the Virgin on his arm, and the crows circle under it, greedy for the raw flesh spread out on the grass. Were Arthur a poorer commander they all might be besieged, or dead, and Merlin does not look back at the field.
Arthur’s rooms at the fort, after the road, are a luxury. Merlin can heat water in the wide fireplace, and there is a square window to clear the steam. It is a nice place, as places go, to clean the filth out of their wounds.
Arthur finishes first, and stands at the window with his cloak draped over the edge, tracing the little red mouth of the lady.
"I wore it because I think I must be damned," he says. "Perhaps the Blessed Mother will speak for my soul."
"The Saxons will be damned," Merlin says, stripping gingerly out of his trousers. A spear had gored his thigh, and been torn out as he rode - the fabric has dried into the wound. “Aaa-hh-ow. And if you are damned, then so are we all."
Merlin sits cautiously on the edge of the bed and dips a cloth in hot water. The mangled flesh is ugly, but not deep, and he thinks it may heal promisingly.
"I could have called the retreat."
"Hm.” Merlin dabs and winces, in cycles. “You did do that once, at the Linnuis. And they ambushed us in the morning."
“Showing mercy once doesn’t make me righteous.”
Merlin huffs a laugh, to distract himself from the agony of knotting the bandage around his thigh, and from the deeper wound conversation prods at: he can slaughter Saxons thoughtlessly, for Arthur, and Arthur cannot even do it for himself.
"I've been at your side for eight campaigns and I've never known you to drink, or gamble, or buy a woman's company. Righteous is exactly what I would call you." He prods viciously at his leg. The clean wrapping has already gone crimson. "Sire."
"I have other vices."
Arthur turns to look at him, and then glances away quickly, as if they have not seen each other in a hundred states of gore and misery and undress. As if there is anything there except Merlin in his braies, bleeding on the bed.
Merlin studies him. There is a bandage from chest to shoulder where a blow had split his skin through the mail, but he is otherwise bare to the waist, and tawny in the candlelight. His profile, still bent over the cloak in the window, is beautifully Roman, and sad.
Merlin stands, wincing, and puts his hand against Arthur's arm, where it would be easy to see him flinch away. When he does not flinch away, Merlin kisses him. He does it carefully enough that it might still be noble and brotherly, if Arthur needed it to be.
There is the obstacle that Arthur takes him by the hip, and kisses him back, unchastely. Also, that they are each half unclothed, and that when he feels Arthur get hard it is far too easy to untie the laces and take him in hand. Then they are caught, and since the snare is pleasant, they accept it as inevitable.
It is a mistake, Arthur informs Merlin in the morning, that will not be repeated - and for a while, it is not.
ix
In the city of the Legion.
Caerleon is Arthur's city. It is the jewel of Albion, and shines the more beautifully for the Saxon blood spilled on its fine marble and shimmering mosaics.
Merlin does not help to win it. He stays with Gauis in the valetudinarium, to carry in the wounded. The black part of him has grown with the light, and he is no longer sure that he can stop killing once he has started.
Arthur collects him when the fighting is done. His war-horse huffs at Merlin as he clambers up behind the saddle, and he has to grip Arthur by the bicep to stay on as it sidesteps across the crimson flagstones. Arthur only sighs and clicks at the beast, and it steps out with a violent bob of its head that smashes Merlin's nose into Arthur’s neck.
They do not linger in the stable, or the yard, although there already are the beginnings of merriment, and wine is being poured liberally at anyone who pauses momentarily. Arthur is king now, more legend than man, and must leave the men to drink and fuck with their own kind.
In his rooms, Merlin takes the cloak off him, like in the old days, and puts it over the table. Arthur had worn both sigils to the field - Our Lady on his left, where Lancelot rode, and the dragon with Gwaine on his right - both are now red as the cloak, and the metal underneath is slippery with gore. Merlin stands against Arthur to unbuckle the gorget, and even his quick physician's fingers fumble.
Arthur, ever impatient, struggles at the pauldron straps against his chest. His hand is shaky - he is all of him shaky, trembling under adrenaline and shock, and his overall contributions are negative.
Merlin manages nonetheless to untangle him from the plates and the mail. He is left in his shift, sticky with sweat and filth, and shivering.
"Don't - yet.”
Arthur pauses at the washbasin. He did not have to pause, and he will emphasize this later, Merlin knows.
Merlin wets a rag and lifts it to Arthur’s neck to take away the dark streak from jaw to collar; also, to feel Arthur’s pulse shuddering under his hand. Next to his temple, where his hair has dried in a curl against it. Then his lip, where the victory is smeared like a prostitute's paint, red and enticing.
“Merlin.” It is a warning, or a plea.
Merlin pretends he has not heard and unties the lace at the neck of Arthur’s shirt. Arthur will squirm out of seductions at the last minute, if he is not given the freedom to entangle himself.
Merlin daubs artistically at dirt that might be in the hollow of Arthur’s throat - there is none, but the bronze mirror on the wall is too small for Arthur to know this with certainty.
“Merlin.” Now, only a plea.
He snatches Merlin’s wrist before he can enact further damage, and Merlin lets him hold it, eyes downcast and docile.
“No,” Arthur says, sensing the snare, and releases it. A rivulet of blood from a puncture on the inside of his forearm has stained his fingers; they have left a mocking mark behind on the innocent wrist.
Merlin says only, “Sire,” and leans to collect the armor.
Arthur is still there when he returns, and has not washed.
“I think you should re-consider what I’m offering,” Merlin says, and situates himself in front of the basin.
Arthur, obstinately, will not ask what he is offering. Merlin whispers it into his ear, in the most blunt phrasing he can manage.
Arthur presses his lips together.
“Or not.” Merlin shrugs. “Perhaps you’d rather have a drink, and go to bed.”
Arthur does have the drink, and the bed, but not before he has had Merlin, over the table, with a fervor that approaches brutality. Merlin pants at him for faster and harder - because he wants it, and because Arthur needs it.
Then Arthur kneels on the floor with Merlin in his mouth, and Merlin cannot say anything except, "Fuck," and come, with the king's palm gripping a bloody smear down his hipbone.
After all of it, they agree, that like Arthur’s God and Merlin’s father, they will not acknowledge it after the morning.
Or at least, after they have woken, and Merlin has rolled to Arthur’s side and bitten his chin a little, and Arthur has called him an insufferable torment and gone to sleep again for a minute, with Merlin’s heartbeat against his ear, and their calves tangled together.
x
On the river Tribruit.
The river Tribruit runs slowly, with hardly a rock or branch to split the surface. Merlin thinks that it slinks along after them like a street-dog, smelling of rot.
They are close enough behind the Saxons to see the marks they had left on the land. Marks like a disease - green-gray smoke hanging low over fields and farmyards, bodies floating pale and bloated in stagnant water. It contaminates Arthur’s army, and they travel sluggishly and in silence.
There is something wrong about Arthur's expression, and Merlin cannot tell what. It is not fear - that look Merlin knows, though he sees it rarely. Something on his brow - or beside his mouth - is entirely unfamiliar.
It is there the next day as he paces his snorting stallion down the front line, just before the charge. Merlin makes the mistake of looking too long at the solemn face and feels the sudden terror of loss like a noose on his throat.
It is still there when the same horse goes down thrashing in the muck, a spear buried to the haft in its heaving barrel, and Arthur tosses away his shattered shield. There is no one to lend him another, no one to give him a horse or guard his flank - only Merlin, already on foot with his useless knife.
This is how Merlin knows the look at last: when Arthur is forced to his knees, his face does not change. He is fated to die, and has learned it.
The golden head tips back, and Merlin can see the killing stroke before it lands in his spine, spilling his blood out on the black earth he had bled for enough.
Had he not bled for it enough?
He watches Arthur die; because he watches it, he speaks in the Old language out loud.
Across from him, the man at Arthur's throat sinks down, bleeding from his eyes. Merlin crushes another two soldiers entirely, their shattered ribs protruding like teeth from their bellies. Then he turns into the fray, and speaks again.
Around him there are more men. The men die, and his vision fogs with the effort, but the swath always widens, as men scatter away from him, or he cuts them down. Something with a raised axe comes at him, and he splinters it against the ground. Something else he crushes to ashes, and throws it into the wind. Something shouts at him through the fog, too hoarsely for him to hear.
The shouts are muffled and then silenced, and he hears only the scrape of the knife between his ribs. No one has touched his organs before, and the steel is cold.
He opens his eyes, and is still cold.
Someone says, “How dare you let them fucking kill you.”
Merlin says, “Sorry.”
The bed he is in is Arthur's, by the smell of it, and the fineness of the cover. Merlin knows it well enough.
“What in Christ's name were you thinking?”
“I’ve been using it since I fought you in the marketplace.”
“You didn’t fight me in a marketplace, you embarrassed yourself in a marketplace.”
"As you say." Merlin does not quite have the energy to argue, and can tell Arthur is disappointed. He adds, "Sire," as contemptuously as he can manage.
Arthur's lips lift a little, and he leans forward with his elbows on his knees. He is pale and unshaven - had not slept the previous night, maybe. It is dusk now outside, and his hair is colored pink where it curls over his brow. He is holding his gold circlet in his hands, tilting and tracing it like it is a novel object.
For a while they are quiet.
"You should have told me."
"You wouldn't have heard it."
"I might have."
Merlin sighs, and closes his eyes.
"As you say."
"You frightened me." It is the most honest Arthur has ever been. "You were…"
"A monster."
Arthur says nothing.
"And what will you do with me, then?"
"I don't know."
He has set the crown back on his head, and rises to go - Merlin is not sure where, since it is night, and they are in Arthur’s own room, but he does not see him again before he sleeps.
xi.
On Mount Breguoin
Gaius is too frail to travel, but still more than capable of giving Merlin his weight in herbs, and twice that in admonishments, warnings, and instructions. It busies him enough doling the supply out to his assistants and badgering metalworkers about new surgical instruments that he cannot think too much of Arthur’s deliberate absence.
And perhaps it is not so deliberate as it is necessary. Arthur had galloped away to Gwynedd to negotiate an alliance with Alined while the stitches along Merlin’s ribs were still fresh, and it was good he had done. Alined’s troops were well stocked and better armed, and since they were prevented from menacing Gawant, Godwyn’s knights had come into the bargain. He had gone next to ask Annis for her army, and Bayard had come from Ergyng persuaded only by messengers, or likelier, by the threats to his own border. The camp is sprawled nearly to the horizon with the swell of their combined force.
Even though he is no longer at Arthur's side, Merlin is well liked by the riders, and hears the reports before they are distorted by gossip. He knows that Rodor is still a night’s ride away with his men, that it is rumored even Lot may join them, tempted by blood and glory. He knows that Lot will be too late - the Saxon are marching inexorably toward them, and will not pause. He knows the sum of Britain’s might may still fall short - or so the scouts say.
Merlin watches the thick blue of dusk drip down over the sunset beyond the hill and tries to put it out of his mind.
“Merlin.”
Arthur is there so suddenly that he starts, and nearly loses his grip on the herbs he is mixing.
Merlin sets the mortar and pestle in the grass, and tries to straighten his face. Arthur helps him up briskly, and then seems to regret it.
"Your ribs?"
“Fine, My Lord.”
“Good. I want you with me.”
Before Merlin can absorb the words they are hurrying through the camp. A horse recognizes Merlin, and jerks the lead out of it’s groom’s hand; Arthur shoulders past it without pausing. They are forced to slow as they weave closer to the center, hindered by the shards of the army drinking, dicing, and gossiping in the narrow gaps between the tents - though these scatter out of Arthur’s way when he is close enough to recognize. Gwaine is standing with Elyan at one of the fires and Arthur pulls him aside to remove his cloak without even a word of explanation.
He throws the fine material over Merlin’s shoulders and pauses to fasten the pin at his left collarbone.
“You’re my advisor.”
“Thanks.” The sarcasm is instinctual.
‘Shut up, Merlin.”
Arthur throws back the flap of the nearest tent, and Merlin follows him under it.
"Lancelot."
"My Lord?"
"Come with me."
They walk on, the three of them, until they reach a large white pavilion. There are sentries with pikes stationed outside it, and one of them lifts the fabric for Arthur to enter.
“-out of the question,” Annis is saying, in a tone like drawn steel.
Alined is leaned over the table across from her, hands spread across scattered parchment. Bayard is sunk in a chair beside him, hand stretched across his temples. Godwyn and Leon are speaking quietly at another table with a man in a black breastplate, and another is handing his dusty gloves and cloak to a servant - the head of Rodor’s vanguard, probably.
Merlin goes to stand near Leon, and pours himself a cup of wine. He has not been a servant properly for some time, but he has not forgotten how to blend into the setting.
“Friends,” Arthur says.
"Ha," Bayard says.
Alined laughs. “My Lady the Queen seems little inclined to friendship.”
“Without a unified strategy we will have lost before the first arrow flies.” Annis says darkly.
“Fuck the archers,” growls the armored man. “Waste of our cavalry.”
“Friends,” Arthur says again, and this time there is a stifling quiet. The candlelight flashes white against the circlet on his brow. It is not a common authority that commands kings, and the others there know it, though perhaps are not so affected as Merlin by the visceral appeal.
“Without this alliance these lands would have already fallen. They still may if it fails. I will happily follow the command of any here, but we must choose that leader now.”
There is another silence. Annis uncrosses her arms.
“It’s your army,” Bayard says.
Arthur looks around the room, meeting each pair of eyes for a moment, daring the objection. It does not come.
“Then we are agreed. I will ask for your counsel at dawn."
It is cleverly done, Merlin thinks - a subtle dismissal for a proud audience.
Arthur takes off his circlet once they are alone, and sits on the table beside it. Merlin settles in Bayard's chair and looks at him. He is less regal than he is pretty, with his gold hair ruffled up and a border of flowers stitched around the throat of his fine tunic.
"So why am I here? To reduce the King of Gwynedd to a handful of ash if he stepped out of line?"
"No. I don't know. Christ."
“Well, I would have asked to be your advisor earlier, if I knew it came with Gwaine’s clothes." Merlin taps thoughtfully on the curve of the chair. "This went much better than you expected."
"Since no one was killed, yes." Arthur scrubs a hand over his face.
"Hey." Merlin waits for Arthur to meet his eyes. "You're passable as High King, for a prat."
"And you're rotten as an advisor."
"You're lucky that arrogance looks good on you." Merlin stands, in order to crowd Arthur into the table. He chases the golden embroidery around the exquisite collar with his index finger. "You think the sentries would let anyone in?"
Arthur pretends obliviousness, almost convincingly. "Maybe."
"Guards!"
Someone in a dark cloak looks into the tent.
"Don't let anyone in," Merlin says.
"Sir."
Then the hooded head disappears, and Merlin fixes Arthur with a look of increased significance.
"I'm not sleeping with you."
"Because I'm a sorcerer?"
"Because you're a liar." There is stiff anguish in Arthur's voice.
"Yes." Merlin finds he cannot look him in the face. "To save my life, at first."
"And after?"
"Because I thought you might have loved me."
For a time, they are quiet, together. Afterward they fall on each other, ravenous for flesh against their teeth, knowing, like the wolves, that they may die.