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The explosion wasn't much of a surprise. Merlin's eyes flashing gold, on the other hand--
A long minute after the billowing smoke, Arthur lowered his sword.
“I’m sorry, sire,” said Merlin eventually, hand still outstretched, chest heaving, eyes still yellow. “Couldn’t let them do that.”
Arthur wanted to throw him into a well, or a fire, or his chambers to shout at Merlin until his hair stood on end. “Get out,” he said between his teeth, then immediately, “wait! No. Stay here. Don’t go anywhere.”
“Okay,” said Merlin, then, “I’m sorry,” again.
“Be quiet.” Arthur found he didn’t know what to say, or where to look. It was hard to know where to direct his gaze when too many men lay dead around his feast table, blood spilling across the stone floor.
Yesterday Merlin had stubbed his toe on Arthur’s bedpost and complained about it for half an hour while Arthur tried to read the day’s reports.
Arthur looked at his boots while he thought. There were scuff marks on the toes. His lip curled. “Guards. Take him to the dungeons.”
He supposed it shouldn’t be a surprise when nothing happened. Nothing usually happened when he gave an order about Merlin, or to him for that matter. “Guards!”
When he turned he found that actually, there was only one man still alive, struggling to sheath his sword as he took a step forward. Arthur realised he was the new boy, the one Arthur hadn’t liked at first. He chewed on his lip furiously before saying, “You’re going to be needing that.”
“Yes, sire,” said the boy, and pulled his sword out again. “Sire—Merlin?” and when Arthur flinched, “—the sorcerer I mean. Shouldn’t we deal with the rest first?”
Arthur glanced up at the four people caught stiffly in the air above him, all frozen in positions of protest or attack. “Are they dead?”
Merlin said, “No.”
Arthur couldn't look at him. “Then release them."
“Sire, couldn't we let him deal with them?” said the boy again, proving Arthur's initial opinion of him, at the same time as Merlin said, “If I release them they’ll—” in the tone he used when he wanted Arthur to be reasonable.
“Merlin!” said Arthur. “Nothing they do could be—” He snapped his mouth shut. Then shortly, to the boy, “Take him.”
“No,” said Merlin. He looked at the people above them, all casting deep shadows on the floor where he and Arthur still stood. “You can’t stay here with them. Not without me.”
Arthur shut his eyes momentarily. “Better take them with you then, hadn’t you? Release the sorcerers or kill them or take them to the dungeons with you, I don’t care. But you, guard—take him.”
The room brightened when Merlin let the rest of the sorcerers drop to the ground with a series of thuds. They began groaning one after the other; Arthur turned in disgust and horror, and had to twist on his heel to avoid seeing Merlin next to them.
“Come on, Arthur—"
“I told you to be quiet." Arthur looked down at his table laden with food, and found his cup of wine still full next to the lifeless body of Lady Enid who had only stopped through Camelot for a fortnight with her entourage. All of them were now dead. “Everything I do from this moment forth will be without you.”
His skin was warming with the sun through the windows, or fury. Arthur picked up an apple and pressed it to his face, rolling it a little over his cheek while the guard pulled Merlin away. Merlin didn’t resist, he let himself be walked to the door without pulling his arms out of the guard’s hold or making a bolt for the door, except at the door he just stopped to look behind him before making an odd gesture with his hand. His eyes glowed yellow again.
A moment later, all the folded up sorcerers on the floor picked themselves up in unison and turned to face the same way as Merlin. The door that led towards the dungeons, as it happened, so it wasn’t really a surprise when they walked themselves after Merlin like puppets, feet tripping over themselves and heads and arms lolling.
Arthur looked away, heart beating slow and sorrowful in his chest.
He was down in the dungeons the next morning before the sun made it into his room. It was summer, so it was early. Very early. The kind of morning where he'd usually ask Merlin to ready his horse. Anyway it didn’t matter, because Arthur hadn’t slept and he doubted Merlin had either. Arthur wanted to shake Merlin until his teeth rattled on the granite floor, no reason than just because, and because then Merlin wouldn’t be able to talk back. Arthur made his way down the stone stairway and swore very loudly when he tripped over an overturned gauntlet at the last step because he didn’t have the time or inclination to train new guards let alone a new manservant or a new friend.
“M’lord,” said the guard quickest to the punch, managing to shuffle in front of last night’s goblets even amidst what had to be a miserable hangover, judging by the array of jugs and empty bottles beneath the draughts board. The other guard groaned into his arms, folded on the table. Many of their friends had died in the attack.
“Tomas,” Arthur said in return, eyes on the window while Tomas got himself together because the window was, after all, a part of the cells that invited danger. “How are the prisoners?”
“Fine, sire,” mumbled Tomas, and did something that made the other guard yelp. “Hasn’t gone anywhere.”
“Right,” said the other one, a bit of a slur to it. “Couldn’t even if he wanted to, and he really …”
“… didn’t want to,” finished Tomas. He waved Arthur towards Merlin’s cell with a somewhat belated attempt at deference. “He’s over there, my lord.”
It seemed Merlin had been getting some sleep after all, lying under his thin, ratty jacket on the wooden cot. Arthur settled himself down on the floor on the other side of the bars and waited for him to wake up.
Because Merlin broke all the rules, it was several hours before he thrashed his way to wakefulness, his jacket sliding to the floor, and opened his eyes. Arthur watched him stare up at the ceiling for a long time before he folded himself upright and rubbed his face. Then he looked through the bars. When his gaze briefly met Arthur’s, his eyes were their normal colour. Not, Arthur thought, that he knew what colour Merlin’s eyes normally were. Gold could be the usual for all he knew.
He cleared his throat. “It’s me,” he said stupidly, and, “hello.” Not that there was really anyone else allowed down here with a sorcerer, but really Merlin had no reason to expect Arthur to visit him either.
He watched as Merlin considered this, staring at some fixed point below the floor, and then looked back down at where he’d been sleeping. Obviously it wasn’t very comfortable, this was where felons and sorcerers—like Merlin—came to spend their last night before they were killed. It was a small comfort that Merlin had come to these cells many times and hadn’t died yet.
“Hello,” said Merlin. Then, because despite his many years as Arthur’s manservant he really was horrible at small talk, he said, “Arthur, I didn’t want to keep it secret from you. But I didn’t want to die. Or you to die.”
Arthur nodded. Then he gave Merlin a sideways look. “You do know I’m the king.”
Merlin stared at him, lots of impossible to miss and with that great bit of jewellery on your head? No flashing across his face before he said, “And who was the king before you? Because—”
“Merlin—”
“—your father had all sorts of ideas about sorcerers that usually ended in—”
“I mean it Merlin, another word and I’ll have you hanged.”
“You’re already going to have to have me hanged,” snapped Merlin in reply. He gave Arthur that serious look. “Or burned alive.”
“Stop it.” Arthur really was very tired. He rubbed the grit out of his eyes. None of the many things Arthur thought or felt about Merlin had any grounding in Merlin being a sorcerer. Still. “I don’t want to hear it.”
“Oh, well then, in that case—"
“Just once, you could learn when to keep your mouth shut.”
“No fun in that,” said Merlin, and for a moment it was just like normal. Arthur shut his eyes for a moment. His stomach hurt.
When he looked up again, Merlin smiled a bit. “Easier when you weren’t the king, wasn’t it?”
“Lots,” Arthur muttered. “For one thing, you weren’t a sorcerer then.”
For a moment Arthur thought Merlin was going to hit him but there was unbreakable iron between them and he found himself, rather confusingly, moving two steps closer to wrap a hand around one of the bars of the cell. But then he caught Merlin’s eye and realised that he was inviting Arthur to sit next to him on the bench. The bed. Whatever it was that Merlin had slept on all those times through the years.
Arthur beckoned the one guard still awake to open the lock and then sent him out and away—which he did with undue relief, Arthur noted, and found Merlin raising an eyebrow at the same time.
Arthur sat beside Merlin and slumped back against the wall. It was very uncomfortable, and the eyes of the sorcerers in the next cells over were boring into him. He paid them no mind. “What do I do now?” he asked, staring up at the rain clouds running by the small window. They could have been having this conversation in his chambers, where they were safe from prying eyes, the only place where Arthur could be just as honest as he liked. From his own bed, which was soft and warm and where none of their conversations involved him sentencing Merlin to death.
Merlin shrugged.
“It’s just,” said Arthur a moment later, because that was a wholly unhelpful reaction and he’d be having words with Merlin about it later—“somehow, despite the number of sorcerers in my cells—and the fact that you increase their numbers, although I suppose that I should add one sorcerer to my jail cells for every time you’ve ever been down here—despite that, I still don’t like the thought of executing you.”
“You could send me away,” suggested Merlin. “I’m quite powerful, actually. I can go and fight all the other sorcerers from somewhere outside of the kingdom. No one would have to know, you’d just enjoy the benefits of no sorcerers in Camelot. And I’d get to enjoy not being dead.”
Arthur thought about this. “No…no, I already tried that with Guinevere and look how that turned out. Another time might be the death of me.” He wondered if that was too telling.
“The alternative is the death of me,” Merlin pointed out, and held up his hand when Arthur frowned. “I know, yes, you’re very important. But you brought Gwen back,” he said reasonably. “And married her.”
“Yes,” said Arthur, and kicked his heels against the bed. Bench. The whatever it was. Why were there beds in the cells anyway? Well-rested or not, Merlin was still going to have to die. “I married her. I can’t marry you, too.”
“Oh,” murmured Merlin after a moment.
Something occurred to him. He glanced at Merlin. “Does Gaius know?”
Merlin looked at the ground and didn’t say anything.
Arthur sighed. He would think about that later. It was cold and miserable in here, and Merlin still bore the rancid smoke smell from the night before. Arthur rubbed his hands over his arms, wishing again that this conversation had happened on his terms, somewhere warmer. Honestly that didn’t seem like too much to ask. He was the king, after all.
A moment later, a fire appeared out of nowhere in the corner of the cell where it blazed cheerfully, feeding on nothing. It was nice. Arthur had been a bit too cold for weeks.
He looked at Merlin’s face, now flickering in the firelight, and felt that same shudder in his chest as normal. “You should have left,” he said. “Or stayed far away from me. God, Merlin, why did you come here at all? You have magic. Of all the lands in Albion, you picked—” Arthur was suddenly very aware of the eyes of the other sorcerers and his words echoing up to the guards. He drew a breath. “You should have told me.”
His fingers twitched towards Merlin's on the bench.
Merlin looked down at their hands and back. “You should have told me.”