Chapter Text
The first time it happened, Merlin hadn’t thought anything of it.
Well.
Not really.
He had thought about it, obviously, but in the ordinary sort of way, which ran something along the lines of 'Arthur draws trouble the way his white tunic draws dirt,' or maybe 'this clotpole would wind up worse than dead if it weren’t for me, and then what would the kingdom do,' and then he’d consigned it to the same place in his mind that stored every other oddity he’d encountered in Camelot, and then he’d imagined that soon enough that place would become so very large that he’d run out of room for any other thoughts.
Anyways, yes, he had thought it was strange, but not unbearably so, given that they had been hunting quite close to the edge of the Darkling Woods, and that was the sort of place Merlin would expect this sort of thing to go off.
What had happened was this: Merlin had just managed to scare off a pretty magnificent stag, and what’s more, he’d done it with a really surreptitious bit of magic that caused a noise behind the beast, which wasn’t the sort of thing Arthur could have blamed him for— though the Prince had still glared at Merlin, because he’d assumed, and rightly so, that Merlin was pleased about him losing out on the trophy. Arthur, when he was done sulking, had called for a spot of rest, and lunch, and told the hunting party that they’d circle back away from the border of the Woods and towards Camelot’s Forest proper, because even Arthur didn’t fancy taking his chances with any game he’d find inside the Woods; whatever they found there was just as likely to turn into something truly nasty when shot at as not, after all, so there really wasn’t any point at all in hunting past that bit of tree line.
Merlin had managed to roll a few logs closer to the center of the clearing so they could all sit for a moment, finished passing out the trail bread and salted pork, and was just about to sit down on his own log— and he was really looking forward to it, because the one he’d kept for himself might have been the smallest, but it was also the driest, and that was the sort of subtle one-upping he only rarely got past Arthur, but he had, and he was feeling really satisfied by it— when a twig had snapped, and Merlin had looked up at what was, without a doubt, the strangest person he’d ever seen.
She had hair like a bird’s nest in at least six different shades of grey, skin as pale as Morgana’s apart from a reddish patch just over her chin that wasn’t a wart, but seemed like it ought to have been, somehow, and stood and walked in a way that heavily suggested that one of her legs was shorter than the other, though you couldn’t exactly tell for sure, because it seemed as though she was wearing the equivalent of an average peasant family’s entire wardrobe, or maybe even an entire village’s wardrobe, all at once.
She squinted at them for a moment— Merlin became aware that one of the eyes was a bit larger than the other, too, so maybe it was all of her that was lopsided— and then she said, in a very lovely high voice and courtly tones, like a trained minstrel, “Have you a morsel to spare for a fair maiden traveling on her own, then?” and Merlin went cold all over, and he felt like he’d suddenly become a seer several orders of magnitude higher even than Morgana, because he knew exactly what would happen next.
It would go something like this: Arthur, who was not nearly so arrogant as he once was, but who could be relied upon to show a trace of his old ill humor at the absolute worst of times, would snicker; Gwaine, who could be relied upon to show more than a trace of his ill humor, no “old” or “new” about it, would crack a joke about the woman’s loveliness or lack thereof, possibly something in the order of 'my lady, your beauty is such that it’s left me reeling, I’ve hardly any balance left,' with a significant sort of emphasis on the word balance; Percival would probably just cough and maybe offer her a corner of his bread out of politeness and misplaced guilt— guilt from what, exactly, Merlin would never know, but it’d be there, plain as day— and Leon— and this was absolutely the most frightening and horrible bit— Leon would be practical about it, and realize that 'hey, there’s a barmy strange woman who’s got no business being alone in a forest, particularly here, next to an incredibly dangerous cursed Wood, maybe she’s a bit magic,' because he didn’t just think he was clever, the way Arthur did, he actually was clever, and it made him reliably suspicious.
And then she’d take offense to one or all of those little slights, and there’d be something like a whizz, which would probably be followed by a bang, or maybe a boom; there’d definitely be smoke, and lights, and then, when all was said and done, there’d be the sort of raging unpleasantness that would leave Merlin sore and aching and tired for days or even weeks once he’d finally managed to clear it all up and put them all to rights, and Merlin was absolutely not in the mood for any of that, thank you very much, so he did the only thing he could think of under the circumstances, by way of standing up very quickly and talking very fast and very loud.
“Oh, naturally, naturally! Delighted for the company, you know, simply delighted,” he said rapidly, aiming for excitement and probably landing somewhere closer to panicked, but he could only manage so much under pressure. He strode to her side, politely offered her his arm, and guided her to his own— dry, drat it! — log, and sat her down gently, offering her his own share of bread, saying, “It gets ever so dull with these lot, hardly anything interesting about any of them, even shared between them, and I can see at once you’ve got the sort of wit that wise men would pay to hear! Oh, here, it’s a bit dry, have some wine to go with your bread,” and passed her the skin. “And I’ll offer a bit of salt, here, that’s the thing!” He scattered a quick pinch on the edge of the bread, right near the crust, so she could eat nearly all of the loaf without tasting the salt, if she chose, because he wasn’t really sure which sort she was, them as likes salt, or them as burns at its touch.
The knights were all looking at him like he’d gone completely off his rocker, but suddenly the woman gave a silvery, tinkling laugh that made the sunlight in the clearing splinter off like it’d gone through a prism, casting colors all about them, and stood abruptly, letting the bread fall to the ground. She raised the wineskin and took a great unladylike swig, and when the woman lowered it again, she was suddenly taller, fairer, and absolutely without flaw. She was so pale she actually glowed, her features were perfectly symmetrical, like a Roman sculpture come to life, her hair was piled up in an extremely noble manner, with jeweled hairpins and suchlike, and her overdress was fine velvet with what looked like silk underneath.
Merlin hastily threw back his hands, motioning down and stay at the rest of the hunting party in a desperate sort of way without actually looking back at the knights, or Arthur, because he definitely wasn’t going to take his eyes off the likes of her, and hoped they’d take the hint and leave their weapons put away where they wouldn’t do any harm; luckily, they were in such a state of shock that they did stay put, though probably it wasn’t at all due to his efforts.
“You, my dear, are more than just polite; you’re clever, too! I didn’t fool you an instant,” said the Lady, and her voice echoed oddly, like she was speaking her words three times over, in harmony with herself, all in the same breath. “And you gave me wine, along with bread and hospitality, so I should think you’ll do well with two presents, for kindness and cunning both.”
She held out her hand for Merlin to kiss, and he did, in an unthinking, automatic sort of way, then she pressed her forefinger to his head, just between his brows. “For cleverness, may you always see and find the truth as clearly as you did with me, in all things, even yourself,” and a delightfully cool sensation passed all through Merlin’s body.
“And for kindness, I’ll tell one and all here today that should you circle back now, you’ll run into a boar and her young, and you’d do better by far to move west first, and then south when the sun begins to set, because then you’ll find a den of rabbits, and they will be all the sweeter for you, since they will come without your blood and tears to season them, as the boar-meat would.”
Then there came a whizz and a bang and a great deal of choking smoke as she vanished, because naturally, Merlin couldn’t win for losing, and that was the plain truth.
When the smoke finally cleared, Merlin almost wished it hadn’t, because there were several sets of crossed arms and glowers facing him.
“Err,” he said. “That went well, I thought. Could have been worse, definitely.”
And then he had to field several rather awkward questions that mostly made out to be “Did you really know, before she changed? And if you did, how?” and he didn’t really have an answer other than “Well why the bloody hell else would there be the strangest woman any of us had ever come across right near a haunted wood if it weren’t magic,” which went absolutely nowhere towards cooling Arthur’s temper, since it heavily implied that it was obvious and Arthur should have figured it out when Merlin did.
Luckily, though, just then Gwaine took that as a cue and said, “Oh, that’s nowhere near the strangest woman I’ve ever come across,” and launched into an elaborate and filthy tale involving a case of mistaken identity, a ball, several mice, a walnut that held an improbably large load of laundry inside it, and several root vegetables and gourds, not to mention some really questionable nighttime stream-side activities, and everyone sort of put it behind them in favor of alternately glaring at Gwaine and looking at each other in baffled amazement as they tried to work out just how some of said activities could actually occur without permanently straining the sort of muscles that were best not mentioned in front of Royalty of any sort, for all that Arthur liked to pretend himself as being “amongst his men” while hunting.
* * *
“Gaius,” Merlin started to ask, a bit hesitantly, when he finally reached the tower, late that evening. “What all do you know about faeries?”
Gaius dropped a half-finished potion, turned several fascinating shades of red and pink before moving on to near-purple, and yelled at Merlin for being irreparably foolish for quite a long while before Merlin was able to get a word in edgewise and was allowed to tell him anything more about the afternoon.
Eventually, though, after he’d calmed down and Merlin told him that “Of course I’m not going to try to find any,” and “No, no, not the sidhe, a different sort,” and finally managed to explain what had actually happened that afternoon, Gaius congratulated Merlin’s quick thinking— though he didn’t apologize for jumping to conclusions and yelling at Merlin before hearing the full story— and pressed a thin, old book into Merlin’s hands, saying, quite firmly, “But I’ll have no more talk of them by name, you hear me?”
Then Gaius went off into the shelves at the corner of the infirmary that Merlin strongly suspected carried bottles of things that were no more medicinal than your average jug of brandy, mumbling all the while about years off my life and be losing what’s left of my hair soon, I suspect, and Merlin decided a retreat was in order, so he fled to his bedroom before Gaius could work up to another, louder, lecture.
* * *
If that had been the end of it, Merlin might have gone on not thinking much of the strange woman from the Darkling Woods.
Unfortunately, it was not the end of it.