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In the Land of Stories Old
Uther and Bors made their way to the Royal Bedchamber as soon as the elves let them know that Merlin was awake and able to have visitors other than his wife. He was sitting up and sipping at a steaming mug when they came in, but the minute he saw them his eyes widened and he quickly put the mug to one side. “Oh, I…I’m sorry, I wasn’t expecting you just yet. You…wanted to talk to me, I know.”
The boy looked like he was facing his own execution, and Uther sat down on the side of the bed with a sigh. “Merlin, we’re not angry with you, we’re concerned. Fifty guards, son? What were you thinking?”
“I…I wasn’t,” Merlin answered, fidgeting a little. “I’m not the one who called them all, the captain of the guard did that. I didn’t know how many there were until they were already, well, here.”
“Oh yes, we definitely noticed they were here,” Bors said dryly. “If they’d been any more here they’d have been alive, Merlin.”
“I didn’t actually know I could do that either,” Merlin admitted. The faint blush on his cheeks was highlighting his pallor in a way that made him look altogether too young and fragile. “The captain…I was just trying to get his attention, but he thought it was…something else.”
“A dyin’ wish?” Uther asked. Merlin’s eyes went round again. “I spoke with Arthur when we got here, he told me…that ghost raped you, Merlin.”
Merlin flinched. “I’d prefer not to talk about it, sir.”
“We’re sure you would,” Bors said sympathetically. “But not talkin’ about it won’t make you feel any better about it.”
“I made myself…come to terms with it,” Merlin said. His hands were clenched on the coverlet. “He didn’t mean to do it. He even apologized.”
“And yet he still dragged fifty spirits out of the bloody walls and made you support them,” Uther pointed out. “That’s not how you follow up an apology, son.”
“I…I know. But the dead don’t see things as we do, and we did need them, at that moment in time. The castle had been invaded by raiders, looking to kill the king and…and take Snow. Someone had told them I was here, without the rest of the Seven, and not able to use magic. We never did find out who ‘someone’ was…”
“I did,” Uther told him. “Because Snow’s father can’t hold his beverages.” The shocked betrayal in his boy’s eyes nearly undid him. “Yes, it was him, although he didn’t entirely do it on purpose. He’s…” He disentangled Merlin’s hands from the coverlet and enclosed them in his own, stilling their shaking with his own strength. “Merlin, you can’t trust the man. I got things out of him that made me want to slit his throat. Yes, he loves his daughter,” he said when his son started to open his mouth. “He’s not a monster. But he didn’t save her from the witch on purpose, that happened because he was drunk—he didn’t even remember doin’ it once he’d sobered up, he thought she’d run away and he was angry with her. He ignored what the witch was doin’ here, not because he’s a complete blind idiot, but because he’d had more than one mistress after your girl’s mother died and mostly likely before that as well, and it was his practice to ignore whatever they got up to. He ran this kingdom into the ground out of ignorance and apathy, and almost ended the legacy of generations of his ancestors. Where’s the family magic at, do you know?”
Merlin sighed. “In Snow. All of it. She’s exceptionally strong, she lifted a boulder the size of a house off me…underwater.”
Bors whistled. “Impressive.”
“Very,” Uther agreed. “And that does put one part of my mind at rest, knowin’ that the magic in the family hasn’t been lost or twisted.”
“It’s the former king who’s twisted,” Bors observed. “He’s jealous as hell of you, Merlin, and when he’s not lettin’ that eat him up he’s all eaten up with guilt.”
“I knew about the guilt,” Merlin said. “There’s no missing it. And of course the guards demanding he give his crown to Snow didn’t help, they very openly blamed him for their deaths—even though they quite obviously didn’t all die under his rule. But jealousy? You aren’t saying he wanted…”
“No,” Uther said quickly. “No, we’re not sayin’ that at all. He’s jealous because you’re everything he’s not as a man, Merlin.”
Merlin couldn’t help but snort. “I hardly feel manly these days, Dad. I spend half my time in bed trying to sleep my way back into having enough energy to make it through the other half, and I’ve fainted enough times that I probably qualify as a princess now.” Uther wiped a tear from his eye, and Bors was grinning from ear to ear. “What?”
“It’s been a while since I’ve heard you call me Dad, that’s all.” Uther pulled him into a hug and held on fiercely. “You’ve been my son since the day I found you, Merlin. Don’t you ever, ever forget that.”
“No matter how stupid your brother is bein’,” Bors tacked on as he sat down and joined the hug. “We’ve missed you, Merlin. Are you sure you don’t want to bring your girl home for a while?”
“I wish I could, but I can’t.” Merlin pulled back a bit, wiping his own eyes with the back of his hand. “Help me get dressed, and Snow and I will show you why. There’s…a lot more going on here than you think, and honestly? I could use your advice. About all of it, including Snow’s father. Rose?”
A very old elf appeared beside the bed, nodding approvingly. “Good, a boy need his fathers. You want wife too now?”
“Please, if you would—no one else for now, though, just Snow. And I need my clothes…”
“Ha!” The old elf patted the bed, and a thick robe appeared folded under her hand, a pair of soft slippers on top of it. “You no get dressed until tomorrow, we already tell you that! I only let you go to picture room because fathers need to know about stupid magic legacy.”
She disappeared again, and Bors burst out laughing. Uther just rolled his eyes. “Well son, I can already tell you’re not goin’ to be gettin’ away with anything around here.” He pulled him back into the hug again. “I’m glad to see it, too.”
Snow came hurrying in not ten minutes later. “Merlin…oh, King Uther, Sir Bors. Is something…wrong?”
Merlin held out his hand to her, and she came to him and took it. “I want to show them the portrait, Snow.”
That got him a very arch look. “I don’t object to showing it to them, but how exactly do you think you’re going to do it? I know for a fact the elves hid your clothes.”
Uther smiled. “The one called Rose brought him a robe and slippers. If you’ll show us the way, I’ll carry my son. We all know there’s no way he’ll manage the stairs.” That made Merlin pout. “Son, that might work on your wife, but it won’t work on me and you know it.”
“It doesn’t work on his wife either,” Snow said. She helped Merlin put on his robe, then scooped him up in her arms with what looked like no effort at all and kissed his cheek before handing him to Uther. “We’ll go the back way, so we don’t run into anyone. They’re mostly all down in the garden right now, but my father tends to wander.” She saw the look the two older men exchanged and sighed. “I know, really I do. The guards told me. They kept appearing and sort of running him out of places, and I finally got one of them to tell me why: they wanted him to know he was being watched, and they were keeping him away from Merlin. And before Merlin released them they told the elves, and now the elves are watching him. So he’s…he’s harmless now. I think he mostly was before, but I’ve also come to the conclusion that I never really knew him.”
Merlin looked stricken. “Snow, why didn’t you tell me?”
“I told the guards not to tell you, Merlin,” was her reply. She stroked his cheek. “There wasn’t anything you could have done, and you already had enough to worry about.” She went to the door and looked out. “All right, let’s go.”
Uther followed her, letting Bors close the door behind them. “She’s right, son,” he murmured. “One more thing to worry about wouldn’t have helped you or her or anyone.”
Merlin let his head fall against Uther’s broad shoulder with a sigh. “I know. I just…I want to be everything she needs, Dad.”
“Pretty sure you already are,” Uther assured him. He followed his daughter-in-law down several narrow flights of stairs—old servants’ stairs, he was certain of it—and then into a long corridor that led into a gallery full of portraits. He put Merlin down, even though part of him didn’t want to, and smiled to see his boy at once move to his wife’s side and take her hand.
“These are my ancestors,” Snow told them. “But not all of them.” She pulled a hidden lever, and a door in the stone wall swung open. She and Merlin stepped through first, and Uther and Bors followed. It was a smallish stone room with a series of portraits along the curved wall—it was most likely built under stairs, he thought—and Snow immediately started naming the people pictured. “King Nicholas and his sister, Princess Snow,” she said. “And this one was painted around ten years later.”
Uther stared in horror. “He…”
“Used the family magic to save his people,” Merlin said. “It was in his blood, and his sister’s, and it gave them the power to heal almost any wound or illness. His journals are still here. He died shortly after, giving up what was left of his life to provide his sister with a husband.”
“He re-embodied the spirit of a prince who had been trapped in the Black Wood that surrounded the castle, this castle, for at least a hundred years,” Snow said. “That man married Queen Snow, and helped her continue the line of what was then called Metra. Around three hundred years before the Cataclysm. I’m directly descended from them.”
“And I’m descended from her husband’s father’s family line,” Merlin added, going to stand by the last picture. “We think he must have fallen afoul of a witch, originally. And then another witch came, re-enslaved his trapped spirit and tricked the father of Nicholas and Snow into marrying her, and then she started killing off the people in the kingdom to serve her own needs. Eventually she had the prince sent off in near exile and his father killed, and the princess only survived because the huntsman’s son hid her with a family who’d been cursed to take the form of dwarfs.” He cocked an eyebrow. “Sound familiar?”
“Holy hells, it’s a family legacy,” Bors breathed. “So the trapped prince…”
“My mother is a descendant of that emperor,” Merlin said. “The story of the lost prince…she used to tell it to my siblings and I when I was small, she said it had been told in her family since before the Cataclysm. The prince was the son of an emperor in a far away land, and when he couldn’t find a bride who suited him he left home to look for one farther abroad. He was gone one year, then two, and it was halfway to a third when the emperor came to the servants pale as a ghost and demanded a length of thick black silk, and ever after that day the portrait of the lost prince remained covered by the emperor’s order. But the servants were curious, and one day one of them pulled the silk aside and saw that the portrait of the prince now showed only a deep, dark wood of black-bolled trees and the frame looked to be covered with dried blood. That servant went insane and took his own life, but not before he’d told the others what he’d seen.”
“And so the story continued to be told,” Uther mused. “And the legacy lay in wait until now?”
“Not exactly,” Snow told him. “Several of my ancestors out in the main gallery had…questionable taste in wives and lovers. It’s the reason they changed the law so that marrying the king didn’t make a woman the queen, just the queen-consort—and vice-versa.” She made a face. “I’d love for Merlin to be king to my queen, Your Majesty, but if I change the law our descendants will end up paying for it in horrible ways.”
“They would,” Merlin agreed. “And I’ve already told you multiple times that I don’t care about the title, my love—I’m your husband first and foremost, and my royal job is the same no matter what I’m called.”
“It still bothers me that some people won’t treat you with the respect you deserve,” Snow told him. “The guildmaster being afraid of you isn’t the same thing.”
That made Merlin grin. “I can’t wait ‘til he comes up to the castle again. Intimidating that overinflated little pissant into behaving himself in your presence is one of the highlights of my week.”
Bors nudged Uther. “That right there is your fault, you know.”
“Oh, I know. And I’m quite proud of myself—overinflated little pissants need to be kept in their place somehow.” He moved closer to the painting, taking in the details. It had been very well done. “Snow the First must have looked like her mother.”
“No, she was a child of wish magic,” Merlin told him. “Her mother accidentally called upon the spirit in the wood; Nicholas suspected she’d cut her hand or a finger somehow and her blood had gotten on the window frame in her chambers that was made of wood from the cursed forest. She was apparently a melancholy sort of woman, and prone to flights of fancy—harmless ones, until that day. She wished for a child with hair as black as the ebon wood, lips as red as blood, and skin as white as snow, and the spirit gave her what she asked for but took her life in exchange.”
“And then he married that child…the same sort of bargain with her dyin’ brother, I assume?”
“Yes, Nicholas wrote about it in his journals,” Snow said. “I don’t mind if you want to look at them, King Uther. Merlin and I…we’re kind of in over our heads here.”
“From what I’ve seen you’re doin’ fine, Snow,” he corrected her. “And it’s just Uther and Bors now we’re officially family, or Dads if you like.” It hurt him to see the tears that brought to her eyes, and he at once moved to draw her into a hug. “Oh, little girl, how could we not love you when our son loves you so much himself? That weddin’ vow was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”
“It was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen too,” she said. “Merlin told me there would be magic, but I couldn’t even have imagined how amazing it was actually going to be.”
“I couldn’t either,” Merlin admitted. “But I hope it put to rest your father’s…insinuations about what our married life was going to be like.”
Snow pulled away from Uther—just a bit reluctantly, he thought, and wondered how much of her father’s love had stayed inside her father and not been given to the daughter it was meant for—and went to her husband, who at once put his arm around her. “Merlin, he didn’t insinuate, he flat-out said it.”
Bors stiffened, and so did Uther. “Wait, he told you that, Snow?”
“At length,” she admitted. “I was…really upset. Merlin was upstairs sleeping off the last raider attack the guards had had to fight, but Elana and Hans and Rose dragged me into the kitchen and all but stuffed me with cake and cocoa while telling me exactly what kind of man would even think such a thing, and Captain Gerard went to talk to my father. He…he didn’t speak to me again until the day of the wedding, and then only to tell me I looked pretty in my dress.”
Merlin’s arm around her shoulders became a very tender hug, and he wiped her eyes with the sleeve of his robe. “The captain told me what had gone on when I woke up,” he said. “He said I really needed to think about killing the king, and he offered to make it look like an accident. I was almost furious enough to tell him yes…but I told him no, that I’d find a way to deal with your father that didn’t involve regicide.” He shrugged one-sidedly. “My use of the word appeared to remind him of exactly what he was asking permission to do, and he apologized. I told him not to worry about it. Just because I was able to give him autonomy doesn’t mean I was able to undo the damage a violent death brought about by betrayal had done to him.”
Snow’s sharp little intake of breath made him tighten his arm around her, and Uther nodded slowly. “The fact he was still here, that they all were…from my understandin’ of the way shades work, it was most likely anger keepin’ them here, watchin’ from the walls. Your father was already seein’ them before Merlin called them out, Snow. They were lettin’ him feel their presence, glimpse them out of the corner of his eye, hear echoes of their boots walkin’ the floors. Don’t ever feel bad about them forcin’ him to step down; those shades bein’ forced to choose between him and you most likely saved him from a long descent into utter insanity.”
She blinked up at him. “And now?”
He shrugged. “He is what he is. I won’t deny I’d rather have you and Merlin and the rest of the boys well away from him…but you’re right that he’s not a threat to anyone at this point so long as the elves are here.”
“Rose said so to me as well,” Bors added. “Pino warned her not to underestimate him, he said insanity only creeps until it runs. Which made me wonder what’d been goin’ on in Vinci before it sank.”
Merlin made a face. “Oh, that’s…that didn’t have anything to do with Vinci. There was a duke’s daughter we rescued from kidnappers who…hadn’t been very nice to her. We warned her parents that she’d need careful handling for a while, and there wasn’t any indication that she was anything but glad to be home. She was apparently quiet and biddable for near to a month, and then she got hold of a sword and killed three servants and her mother, and she would have had her father too if one of his men hadn’t heard the commotion come to his aid. They said she kept screaming about not being sold again, and before anyone could stop her she threw herself out the nearest window. Her kidnappers had apparently told her repeatedly that they’d been offered gold to take her as part of a scheme to lure in a heroic noble husband, but that as the payment hadn’t been forthcoming they’d decided to…well, take it in trade. We weren’t able to find any evidence of such an arrangement, and from what the servants told us she’d been increasingly nervous and suspicious leading up to that night. They suspected that her parents deciding she’d had enough time to recover and letting her know they were ready to start looking for a suitable match again was what had set her off.”
“You mean they just waited to make sure she wasn’t with child, and then back on the marriage market she went,” Bors growled. “Fools.”
Snow looked up at her husband, then turned her eyes to Uther. “Fools…like the kind who’d exile a seven-year-old.”
Uther snorted. “Foolish and stupid, that one was. You don’t know how many people decided the idiot had killed his own son after Merlin was born, and then again seven years hence.”
Merlin’s mouth dropped open. “They did?”
“Some of them still do,” his father told him. “Because he was twice-over stupid and forbade anyone in the kingdom from sayin’ a word about his thirteenth-born child, and too stubborn to rescind his own law so that he could tell people he’d done no such thing. I’m not the only one who sticks it to him when we trade, and he must know that’s why. Because even though his people who came to negotiate over the years have seen you, Merlin, and doubtless knew exactly who you were once upon a time, by that very same law they can’t say a damned word.” He half-smiled. “But every time one of them saw you, they looked relieved. Bad enough knowin’ your king is an idiot without thinkin’ he’s a murderer as well.”
“Are you sure?” Snow blurted out, and winced under her husband’s wide-eyed stare. “I just mean…Merlin, you told me your teacher would have gone with you if he hadn’t died just a few months before you were exiled. And that he’d never had much use for the king.”
Merlin did not seem to know what to make of that. “I…well, I can honestly say I never even considered that. Master Ang supposedly died in his sleep, and my mother told me it happened because he was a very old man.” He pulled her back into his arms. “I’m so sorry, my love, I had no idea you’d come to that conclusion after I told you about…my birth parents. I’m not saying my mother mightn’t have lied to me, because at that young age she most certainly would have, but I can’t imagine she’d have…well, Master Ang was a renowned elemental mage from the West, and I know she’d told the king and more than one of his advisors that having him come to take me on as his final student was a great honor for not just the family but also the kingdom.”
“Except no one knew he’d done that, Merlin,” Uther told him. “I’m sure among his own people it was known, or somethin’ was, but no one anywhere else knew a thing about you. Your birth wasn’t even announced, but a year and a half later your sisters’ births were and then the gossip started up again even more vicious than it had been the first time. The only reason I even knew what day you’d been born was because you’d been tryin’ to keep track of where you went in a little notebook after you left the island, and I counted back through the days.”
Snow looked horrified. “How long…”
“Near to a month, all on his own,” Bors told her. “I took his notes and followed them backwards, we wanted to know where he’d been and…follow up with a few folks.” He raised an eyebrow at Merlin. “That widow woman with all the roses was a witch who had a habit of keepin’ stray children in her garden. As in under it. Thanks to you bein’ the cutest little log-keeper ever, we were able to find her and put a stop to it before any more kids were turned into rose-food.”
Merlin nodded slowly. “I remember that garden. She seemed so kind, and she wanted me to stay, but when she went into her cottage a breeze blew through the roses and they started to whisper that I needed to run before she killed me. I ran until I couldn’t run anymore, and then I hid in a tree that night and didn’t make a fire. She didn’t come after me, though. When I was older and knew more about that type of magic I realized she probably hadn’t been able to stray that far from her house and couldn’t have chased me, but at seven I didn’t know that. I looked over my shoulder for days after I got away from her.”
Snow’s hold on him tightened. “You were on your own for a month?”
He shrugged. “I honestly don’t remember most of it very clearly. I ran across the rose cottage early on, and avoided people as much as possible after that.” He made a face. “That’s…odd, though, isn’t it? You’d think people would have taken more interest in a small child out on the road by himself, but they mostly stayed away from me.” Uther and Bors looked at each other. “He didn’t…did he mark me somehow? So they knew?”
Uther nodded. “The cloak you were given to wear was of a…particular design. What most probably thought was that you were the child of someone who’d earned his exile, and they feared you were runnin’ errands for a desperate man who might come lookin’ for them if they got too curious with you.”
“Yeah, a few of ‘em thought that desperate man was me,” Bors said with a chuckle that wasn’t quite forced. “I set them straight, though. Most of ‘em couldn’t believe you’d made it all the way to Avalon on your own.”
“I only found him because he’d set up his camp for the night and I saw his fire,” Uther told Snow, not wanting to get into some of the other things Bors had found out when he’d followed Merlin’s trail. “Thought it was some rover and went over there to move them along before they could get too comfortable, but when I got close I saw it was this tiny little child and a tiny little fire made oh-so nicely so it wouldn’t spread into the meadow-grass, and when he bowed like a little lord and invited me to share his camp I sat down and tried to find out what was goin’ on. And what was goin’ on was that he’d been exiled and didn’t even have a name to give me since his father had taken his away, and while I was thinkin’ that over—and thinkin’ of all the ways I could track down the bastard father and let him know what I thought of him—some raiders came upon us and I found out the boy was a magician to boot. So I named him after a magician of legend and his magic accepted that—seems that so far as the magic had been concerned someone else had to give him a new name before it would stick—and then I gathered him up and took him home.”
“Arthur was delighted to have a little brother,” Bors said with a smile. “We had some problems ‘cause of that later on, the boy got it into his head that if you wanted a siblin’ your dad just went out for a walk and hunted one up.”
“I do remember him asking you if next time you went out you could bring back a little sister,” Merlin said. “He thought he should have one of each, to make things even.”
“I can only imagine Arthur with a baby sister,” Uther snorted. “He’d have been like a bear with one cub, no man would’ve ever been able to get near her. He was bad enough that way with you.”
“He eventually outgrew it with me.”
His tone wasn’t quite as light as he’d probably meant it to be, and Bors shook his head. “No, he just grew into indulgin’ his temper more than he should’ve,” he corrected. He put his hands on Merlin’s shoulders, making their boy look at him. “Merlin, it wasn’t your fault.”
“But…”
“You were in charge, yes,” Uther said, drawing in close himself to put a steadying hand on his son’s back. “You think I’d have done any different, if it had been me? I’ve never seen a green woman who wasn’t…that sort of witch before either.” Snow blushed, and he raised an eyebrow. “He told you?”
She shook her head. “I looked it up in his books. And then Elana and I were talking about it and Serena asked and…well, Elana couldn’t bring herself to explain it out loud either, so we just got the book and let Serena read that passage herself.”
Merlin dropped his head against Bors’ broad chest. “Dear god, Jack is going to kill me.”
“No, he won’t, because there’s no way he would have wanted to explain that to her himself,” Snow told him. “Now if Arthur had explained it to her, then Jack might have gotten upset.”
“Arthur would have blushed himself to death if she’d even asked him,” Merlin told her. He hadn’t lifted his head. “He went as red as a rose when I found out and told he and Jack how…well, that worked.”
Bors chuckled. “Your brother’s feelin’s tend to run close to the surface,” he said, and then without warning he scooped Merlin up in his arms; the fact that the boy huffed but didn’t resist told him all he needed to know. “I think this one’s had enough of an outin’ for today,” he told Uther. “Tomorrow we can talk about it all some more.”
Merlin huffed again, holding back a yawn. “I’m so tired of this.”
“Of course you are, you’re used to bein’ active and in the thick of things.” Uther ruffled his hair, then offered Snow his arm. “Let’s get your husband back up to his bed, and then we can go see what everyone else has gotten up to.”
He did cast one look back over his shoulder as they left the little room, though, wanting one last look at the age-ravaged face of the long-dead king of Old Metra. The family legacy was more of a family curse, one he sincerely hoped had finally run its course.
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