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In the Land of Stories Old
Merlin might have been somewhat upset if he’d known he was missing a deeply informative discussion about horses, but he had other things on his mind. Getting up the tumbled ruins of what had once apparently been great sheer walls of solid granite required him to keep his attention on where he was putting his hands and feet, but he still made good time and was soon hauling himself up the bowl-like cliff wall until he could see over the top of it. It was, as he’d feared but also somewhat hoped, perhaps only about six inches thick in some places, and the face of the rock was seamed with crisscrossing cracks that wept seawater. This was doubtless the reason the valley was so green and lush, Merlin knew; seawater was trickling in and evaporating against the rocks to form mist and soft rains while leaving its burden of salt behind. He gathered up a handful of the salt for his pouch, in fact, and then took out the tools he’d borrowed from the triplets and got to work chiseling characters into the hard stone. First a line for strength, which once charged covered the cliff face in a fine web of magic, and then one for purity which he enclosed in a rectangle like one of his parchment strips before pulling out a hand-held rock drill and getting to work on making a hole in the stone. A piece of copper pipe went into the hole once it was most of the way through, and he flared the copper on one end with the flat end of a pick before tapping through on the other side and doing the same, albeit with both hand and pick underwater this time.
And then he sat back and watched the water shoot through the pipe in a glittering, magic-infused stream for a moment before packing his things up and starting to make his way down again. It would take some time, of course, but as the water worked its way down and evaporated into mist and rain the valley would be slowly cleansed of curse-magic. And it was probably going to take Jack a while to find enough people to start a kingdom with anyway, so there wasn’t any rush.
He finally made it back down to the ruins, out of breath and quite tired, and he didn’t resist when Arthur made him take his place on the broken wall—not-so-coincidentally putting himself between Merlin and the ghosts. “The rock was…fairly thin in spots,” he told everyone. “Not quite six inches in one place, in fact. But I put a strengthening spell on it, and that should help keep it stabilized for a few years at least.” Adam, not to his surprise, was glaring at him. “Your Majesty?”
“You should have asked me first,” the ghostly king snapped, arms folded across his chest. “This is my kingdom, you can’t just do what you please here, magician!”
“Of course not,” Merlin said, standing back up. He waved away the apologetic looks he was getting from the other three ghosts. “He’s not himself,” he told them, making a face. “Honestly, those aren’t even his words, that’s the curse talking. It sees me as a threat to it, and rightly so. Not to mention, he’s the former king of Valeureux, not the current one.” He looked Adam right in the eye. “I can also tell that the corruption has spread to you,” he said. “Your queen is contagious, and it should have occurred to me that she might be—but in all fairness, no one alive has ever seen this type of magic before, so it wouldn’t have occurred to anyone else either.” He tossed out a glowing tab of parchment which had been concealed in his hand, and a dome of magic rose up around the furious-appearing former king. “I know you were a good man, Adam de Valeureux. It’s time you went to your proper rest and let your descendant take the crown.”
“I don’t have any descendants, the line died with my son!”
“No, it did not,” Jack corrected, sweeping off his cloak. Merlin and Arthur really couldn’t blame the ghosts for staring at him, because he did look somewhat different than he had when they’d been there last. There was a new set to his jaw, a hard, determined look in his blue eyes, and his blond hair was now pulled back with a strip of silk at the nape of his neck instead of being painstakingly coiffed into elegant waves and falls. “And I will thank you to speak to my vassal with the respect he is due. Thanks to the wise and ever-faithful Lumiere, our line survived and prospered in what was once a country called France.” He offered the shocked Lumiere a bow. “Your brave Annette saw the young Crown Prince of Valeureux betrothed to the daughter of a noble family, and after the Cataclysm they became royal in their own right. I will gift your name to my first born—once I find a wife, of course.”
Lumiere wiped a ghostly tear from his eye. “You will find one, young Jacques. My family, do you know…?”
“I believe you have descendants scattered all about the islands,” Jack told him. “Your Annette will no doubt be able to tell you all about them. She waits for you, I am certain of it.”
“I could not leave…”
“She understands. I asked,” he said when the ghost looked unsure about that. “And I was assured that this was the case. You should go to her now, there is nothing more for you here.”
That made Cogsworth speak up. “But the king, and the queen!”
“We’ll be sending them on as well,” Merlin said. With his mage-sight active, he could clearly see the taint licking at the three ghostly servants and the horrible way the corruption had rooted in their king. “Arthur?”
Arthur drew his sword, and moved back into the remains of the antechamber where the ruby had been placed. “You will not be forgotten,” Jack told them. “Go to your well-deserved rest with my thanks for safeguarding my family’s legacy for so long.” There was a small ringing sound as Excalibur shattered the ruby, and the three ghosts wavered and then dissipated on the breeze like dust.
Arthur came back out, still carrying his sword in his hand, and stood beside Jack. “Let it be known that Avalon has allied itself with Valeureux,” he declared. “My sword is yours, brother.”
“And mine yours,” Jack replied. He pulled the cord over his head and held the old gold medallion out so Adam could see it. “Do you recognize this?”
The ghost looked shaken. “It’s…it’s the mark of King Sel, Lord of the Northern Waters. But they said Arendelle was gone!”
“It is,” Merlin told him. “But there was a ghost there as well, a very old one. And he was able to tell us a lot about what had happened.”
“He told me how to begin the process of freeing my kingdom, and claiming the legacy of my ancestors as well,” Jack added. “Although in all honesty, I might have thought twice about retrieving it had I known how cold the water was. I will be lucky if I can still have children, after that.” He walked to the place where his ancestor’s tethered ruby had been concealed and thrust the medallion into thin air.
And thin air became a golden-barked tree, first ghostly and wavering against an equally ghostly marble wall, but soon firm and solid and real. It was just taller than a tall man, with leaves like polished jade on one side and mother-of-pearl on the other, and the apples hanging from it were as big as a porridge bowl and red as the finest rubies. Jack pulled his hand back and returned the medallion to its place around his neck, although he didn’t tuck it back into his shirt. “King Adam, Valeureux has accepted my claim. Do you?”
Adam was just staring at the tree, and while he was distracted Merlin put his hand through the magical shield he’d created and shut his eyes, concentrating. A ball of light grew and then flared brightly, it looked as though the light were fighting with something rotten and oozing within the ghostly form, and then with a bright burst both disappeared and Merlin sank to one knee, bowing his head. Adam didn’t seem to have noticed. He shook his head once, then again, and looked from his descendant to the tree and back with tear-filled eyes. “Of course I do.”
Jack stepped forward and took his hands. This close to each other, their resemblance was nearly that of father and son. “Then go to your rest,” he ordered gently. “You have more than earned it. My eventual descendants and I will take things from here—and I will have my younger brother Jules stand as my heir until I have children of my own, so you need not be concerned. Our kingdom, our family, shall not perish.”
Adam actually pulled him in for a hug. “Take care of yourselves,” he said. “Quests are dangerous business.” And then Merlin let the containing spell go and the ghost whispered away with a sigh.
A faint shudder ran through the ruins, through the valley. “One more to go,” Jack said, wiping his eyes with a lace-edged handkerchief as Merlin climbed back to his feet. “Can you do it?”
“I hope so,” Merlin told him. He pulled a corked bottle out of his pocket and handed it to Jack. “Blessed seawater. We’ll have to get quite close so you can splash her with it while Arthur calls forth the power of Excalibur to repel evil and I perform the spell to release her. I just hope the tower doesn’t fall down on top of us.”
“Don’t give her ideas,” Arthur scolded. The ghost of the cursed queen could actually be heard from outside the door now; probably she was reacting to her husband’s passing. “So how should we do this?”
“The simple way, I think,” Jack said, pushing the door open and just walking straight into the room. He bowed to the raging ghost. “Your Majesty. I, your descendant, bring you news of your husband.”
The words made her still, hands tangled in her hair as though she’d been trying to pull it out. “My…no! No, our son is dead! He died, like his father, as it should be!”
“He died an old man in what was once France,” Jack told her. “He wed a lord’s daughter, and their grandson became a king. I am the many-times great grandson of that king, newly returned to see the home of my ancestors.”
She drifted down toward him, the curse and the corruption writhing around and through her in a horrible miasma of sickness and evil. “I can see…you do look like Adam and his sisters. I’ll need to write your family line down in the book. You have news of my husband?”
“Yes, he has passed. Peacefully. And you are to join him now as you should have before.”
The water hit her at the same time Excalibur did, and Merlin’s spell was a heartbeat behind. The ghost screamed and fought, howling like a wild animal, but finally she began to break apart and Merlin staggered over to the wall and slammed his hand against the shaking stones. The room shimmered, the remains of the queen’s spirit flowed up and out the highest window, and everything was still. Merlin crumpled where he stood, but he still had his hand on the wall and a blue glow swept upward and quickly covered the entire room. “This…library is part of your legacy, King of Valeureux,” he whispered, loud in the still room. “It will remain safe as I can make it until you are able to return.”
Arthur sighed, sheathing his sword. “Can you even walk, after all that?”
Merlin rolled his eyes and started doing his best to stand back up. “With help, yes. I may need a short rest before we head back to our camp, but not in this room.”
“No, that would probably not be a good idea. And you said before that we should not stay in the valley for long either.”
“We won’t have to.” Merlin got his feet under him with Arthur’s help and started making tracks for the door. “You should…get the crown.”
“It is in the treasury with the king’s seal. Do you have more of the water?”
“Two more vials.” By the time Jack returned from the old treasury with a poorly-carved wooden box, Arthur had a glimmering vial in hand and Merlin was asleep on the ground near the tree. Jack placed the box—he thought the carving was supposed to be an apple tree, but he wasn’t sure—under the tree and removed its contents, which consisted of a gold circlet in a leaf-and-branch design, a gold crown set with rubies which also had that motif, and a heavy gold signet ring bearing a similar design. He applied some of the water to all four objects, and then hung the crowns and ring from a golden branch. The branch glowed, a sickly shadow fell off of the three items, and three jade and alabaster leaves withered and fell to the ground. “Thank you,” Jack said, returning the crowns and ring to the box. “I will return, and the glorious kingdom of Valeureux will be renewed.” A branch wiggled rather imperiously at him, and then pointed. “What…oh, that does make sense.” He dragged Merlin under the tree, and the magician was at once covered with a golden glow. Some color came back into his face, and his shallow breathing deepened a bit. Jack felt a stab of alarm. He can’t help himself, he remembered Lady Agatha saying, and the ghost from the shores of Old Arendelle had said much the same thing. How much power…he dropped to one knee beside Merlin and shook him, only partially waking him up, then propped the confused magician up against the tree’s golden trunk. “This man is my trusted friend, and at this time serves as my Royal Magician,” he declared. “Restore his strength, please, that he may continue to serve me.”
There was a golden flash, and Merlin came all the way awake with a near-scream as it washed over him and then slumped over, catching himself on one elbow, panting. “What in…”
“No vulgarity under my tree,” Jack scolded, and pulled him back onto the cracked tile. “And what have we said to you about almost dying?!”
His friend rolled his eyes. “I did not ‘almost die’,” he corrected. “I think I would have noticed, don’t you? I was just tired out from all the magic on top of all the climbing.” He finally caught his breath and sat up, then rather shakily climbed to his feet. “Oh, everything’s glowing.”
“Of course it is,” Arthur dropped a steadying hand on Merlin’s shoulder and gestured to Jack with the other. “After you, Your Majesty. And isn’t my father going to have a whole litter of kittens when he finds out about the royal alliances Avalon has acquired on this trip.”
“That’s nothing compared to what it will do to Kai,” Merlin pointed out, following Jack down out of the ruins with his brother close behind.
Arthur considered that, and then he grinned. “True. Maybe I should take the news home in person, do you think? We could all go, it will be a party.”
“It will be a party when you marry my sister, you can tell him then,” Jack corrected. “Perhaps having multiple things to sulk about will subdue your cousin enough that I will not need to call him out.”
“I only wish you’d been able to call him out at my wedding,” Merlin said, somewhat wistfully. “I’d have loved to see him get soundly trounced in front of everyone.”
“That would have been incredibly rude,” Jack replied primly, slapping down his hand when it drifted toward a shining green apple. “I think we shall have to wait until tomorrow to return with the others, Arthur. The power of my family line seems to have made our magician a bit giddy.”
“I noticed. Better this than the other, though.”
“True.” The old taint from the fairy curse-magic was still present, but now Jack could feel it sort of bending away from him. He looked back. Far up the cliff wall, a flash of silver and a faint cloud of mist marked the place where Merlin had pierced the rock, and he shook his head. “He made very good time climbing.”
“It wasn’t that difficult,” Merlin admitted absently; he was watching the patterns the sunlight made on the leaves. “It’s only steep once you get up near the top, although the rocks are a bit fiddly if you’re not careful where you put your feet.”
“I will have to go up there myself some day to see your handiwork.” Jack had to admit he was enjoying this. “And you will come visit to see the library, of course.”
“I would like to, sire,” Merlin agreed. “I want to make one in the Black Castle. I suppose we sort of have one already in the study, but if I were able to get more books…I think that was a very nice room, once, and probably an excellent place to do research.”
“Undoubtedly.” Jack frowned. “Perhaps that is what drove Lady Belle to retreat there in the first place? She may have been attempting to find a solution in the books—to her own dilemma or to the plague.”
Arthur shook his head. “I doubt there was a solution in there. To that problem, anyway. The fairy that did it…well, it seems she’d have been the type to remove a book that could have told someone how to undo what she’d done.”
“Or to leave the book but erase the contents, or perhaps change the language to one no one there could read,” Merlin mused. “I’m glad Elana isn’t that kind of fairy.”
“I think we all are.” This time Arthur kept a curious hand from picking one of the apples. “Merlin, stop that! You know they’re poisonous.”
“I do?” He visibly thought about it. “Oh yes, I suppose I do. The magic swirling in them is so interesting, though. I’d really love to study it while I still have the chance.”
“If you’d stop almost dyin’ we could’ve stayed for a bit longer. But we’ll come back…” Arthur began, but stopped when Merlin shook his head rather forcefully. “Please tell me that was ‘no, we can’t come back for some magical reason’?”
“I can’t, that would be a lie—although it wouldn’t be good to spend too much time here until the water starts to do its work.”
Jack frowned. The magic was trying to tell him something, he just couldn’t quite understand it. “So you are saying you cannot stop almost killing yourself?”
“Oh no, that’s not me,” Merlin said, blinking at an errant ray of sunlight that was falling on a wind-twisted leaf. “That’s the curse.”
Jack and Arthur both stopped walking. “The which now?” Arthur asked.
Merlin turned around and sighed in a slightly put-upon way. “The curse that’s on the Black Castle, it’s tied to the men in the royal line. It will eventually manage to kill me, and I can’t do anything about it.”
“Why didn’t you tell us?!”
Merlin shrugged. “The curse protects itself—most of them do, you know. I can’t talk about it, I can’t even properly think about it.”
“But you are telling us now?”
“Because you claimed me as your Royal Magician with the magic of your family line, and we are within the borders of your kingdom,” Merlin explained. “If you ask me something, I have to tell you the truth, Your Majesty.” He got a wistful sort of look on his face. “I wish there hadn’t been a curse. I wanted to grow old with Snow, with our children and grandchildren all around us and all of our friends…I’d really rather not die young and leave her all alone.”
Jack felt like his heart was being ripped right out of his chest, and he could tell Arthur felt the same. He found a rock and sat Merlin down on it. “Merlin,” he said. “What you are telling us is that the curse on the Black Castle is killing you.”
“It’s trying to,” Merlin corrected. “I have a LOT of magic, you know, and my magic doesn’t want me to die. But I can only hold out so long. The longer it goes on, the more magically expensive everything I do becomes.”
It explained so much. “What’s going to happen when we leave the valley,” Arthur asked.
His brother shrugged, already distracted by the leaves again. “I won’t be able to talk about it or think about it. And I’ll probably have an awful headache. It’s going to hurt a lot.”
“No,” Jack told him. He made Merlin look him in the eye again. “No, Merlin, that is not what is going to happen, because for the time being I am your king and you have to do what I say, right?” Merlin nodded very seriously. “So therefore what you are going to do is this: Once we leave the valley and enter our camp, you will go to sleep and you will sleep until morning. I am ordering you to do this.”
Merlin shivered. “I felt that,” he said, wide-eyed. “I think you’re going to be very good at being a magical king, sire.”
Jack just nodded, not trusting his voice. “Come on, let’s get going,” Arthur said. “We shouldn’t stay here, remember?”
“Right,” Merlin agreed, bouncing up off the rock. “I want to get back to my wife. I don’t like being apart from her.”
They had only walked a little farther when there was movement in the trees, and then a very large creature that was something like a deer only much thicker and stronger-looking was standing there. It looked at them from one side, then the other, and then it made a strange high-pitched noise that vibrated out of its throat and past large, blunt teeth as it pawed one hoofed foot against the ground. Merlin’s eyes widened. “It’s corrupted.”
“Yes, obviously.” The taint of the bad magic was visible in the animal’s eyes, tendrils and sparks of green and yellow-gray drifting through the brown depths. “So this is a horse?”
“I believe so,” Arthur said. “I should have thought…Adam was visitin’ them almost daily while we were gone. He spread it to the herd.”
“Maybe, maybe not.” Merlin shook his head. “I’m sure his presence helped, especially if he was touching them or trying to get them to come to him, but just eating the grass from a particularly contaminated spot could have done it as well.” He cocked his head. “Sire, I can cleanse this animal for you, if you like. Possibly the whole herd as well.”
Jack wasn’t sure what to do with the way Merlin had started referring to him by title; he suspected the vow of fealty coupled with the large infusion of family magic was to blame. “Should you do that?”
Merlin snorted. “I’m absolutely bursting with magic right now—you think I don’t realize that I’m effectively drunk with it? I can start the process, just to force out whatever may have come from King Adam, and then the rest of it will gradually leach out of them as the valley is cleansed. It would actually help me to drain some of this off, and I’m sure we’d all prefer it if everyone didn’t have to deal with me in this state.”
“Yeah, you’re adorable like this, but it would get kind of annoying,” Arthur teased him, and laughed when Merlin stuck his tongue out. “If you don’t drain it off, how long…”
Merlin shrugged. “A few days, at least. It’s better if I do something about it now, and leave the magic of the valley in the valley as much as possible. Your Majesty?”
“Yes, do it,” Jack told him. “Do not drain yourself more than halfway, I need you functional.”
“Of course, sire.” Merlin at once called a web of gold magic into his hands, and then very slowly pushed it onto the horse’s head. It wrapped around the long muzzle and over the short, tense ears, curving down around the animal’s neck and then wrapping over its broad back and down over its haunches. The horse’s tail twitched, and it made the sound again. “It’s all right,” Merlin crooned. “Just a little cleanup. You’ll feel much better after this, I promise.”
Very slowly, the gold web sank into the horse, and then with equal slowness a certain darkness was pushed out and began to puddle like a liquid shadow on the ground beneath its hooves. The horse stamped its feet, and a flick of Merlin’s hand saw the shadow descended on by golden fireflies of magic that broke it apart until it vanished. Once more the horse made his sound, and then he pushed his large head toward Jack and made a different, more inquiring noise. Jack lifted one hand and very gently touched the animal’s face, stroking between its eyes. He could see the faint gold sparkle on his own hands, and realized the horse was reacting to the family magic. “What a magnificent creature you are,” he said. “I wish I had something to give you…”
“Allow me, sire.” Merlin picked a green apple off the nearest branch before Arthur could stop him, and a little pop of golden power forced the taint out of it and swelled it into a very pretty red piece of fruit. He cut it in half with one of his daggers and gave half to Jack. “This should be to his liking, I think.”
It was indeed to the horse’s liking, and he headbutted Jack until the other half was also given to him before wandering off again, chewing contentedly. More horses appeared, a great many more, and Merlin quickly cast nets around all of them and then made a pile of cleansed apples for the ones which didn’t come close. Jack fed four more of them with his own hands, and was honestly sad to move away once the entire herd had been cleansed. “What lovely, graceful creatures they are.”
Arthur nodded from where he was hovering over Merlin, who seemed to have regained at least some of his equilibrium and in fact was looking a little tired now. “I can’t imagine what it must have been like when they were everywhere—so many that people used them to pull and plow and ride.”
“Yes, it seems quite strange to think of,” Jack agreed. He looked his magician—his magician, he needed to remind himself not to get used to that—over with a critical eye. “Are you back to normal, or do we need to do something else?”
Merlin blew out a breath. “I’m feeling much more like myself,” he said, stretching. “The magic is…pushing me to address you as my king, by the way, but I don’t mind if you don’t.”
“I will explain it to everyone,” Jack told him. “You will still go to sleep when we get back to camp.”
“I won’t be able not to,” Merlin admitted. “You made it an order, sire.” He gave Jack a look. “Hopefully nothing will attack us tonight, because I won’t be available to help.”
“You need the rest.” Jack started walking towards the pass again, herding them along with him. “Now that we know why it keeps happening, we can take more care with you than the curse will allow you to take with yourself.”
“I appreciate that, but do be prepared for me to fight you on it,” Merlin warned them. “I won’t be able to even think of the curse once we leave your lands, so I apologize in advance for all of the arguing and sulking you’re going to be subjected to.”
“We’re gonna warn everyone about that, too,” Arthur assured him. “What if we tell you about the curse?”
Merlin considered that. “You can try,” he finally said, shrugging. “I don’t know if I’ll be able to remember it for very long, but it can’t hurt to try. And maybe while I can remember we’ll be able to work on a solution together.”
“Oh, we are most certainly going to do that,” Jack muttered. He had a thought. “This curse, it would not affect Elana?”
“I don’t think so, sire, as it seems to be bloodline based,” Merlin told him. “But if we get back and she’s planting magic trees indoors and my father-in-law is back to being a giant wooden rabbit, then we’ll know I thought wrong.”
“Do you think she knows it’s there, even?” Arthur wanted to know.
Merlin shrugged. “It’s very old magic, so I’m not sure she’d be able to tell it apart from the general air of…well, dark shite that permeates the castle.” He pursed his lips. “I really do need to think of a way to cleanse that taint as well…”
Jack and Arthur looked at each other. They weren’t sure if that was the curse talking or not.
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