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“I’m not doing this anymore,” Merlin announced as he wrangled off his armour.
“Doing what?” Arthur asked. He peered thoughtfully at Merlin’s helmet. One day, he thought, it’d be too dented for him to escape from.
“Getting beaten up by Gwen in the name of training.”
“There is no dishonour in losing to the Queen, Merlin.”
“There’s no practical purpose to it, either.”
Arthur rolled his eyes. “You’re a servant of the crown. You have to learn how to fight at some point.”
“I’m a warlock.”
“I’ve seen warlocks fight.”
“I’m extremely powerful,” Merlin insisted, attempting to remove a pauldron which seemed to have been hammered into the exact shape of his shoulder.
“One day you’re going to meet a druid who can parry,” Arthur said, slowly, “and you are going to thank me for this.”
“I am not. How do you get these things off?”
“You really can’t once they’re that dented.”
-
“Arthur. Arthur, this is a stupid idea.” Merlin sounded more panicked than Arthur thought any man who’d just been offered a benevolent magic sword had a right to.
“I think it’s brilliant,” he offered. “You’re magic. It’s magic. You’ll get along.”
“You can’t just give me Excalibur.”
“It’s mine.”
“Exactly.”
During his time as Crown Prince, Arthur had received a great deal of instruction in tact, patience and looking diplomatically blank, though apparently not enough to deal with the amount of whining Merlin could cram into one pre-dawn training session. “I am capable of giving gifts, on occasion.”
“You don’t understand,” said Merlin, his whine reaching the desperate pitch which Arthur had privately noted meant dragon conspiracy. “It was forged for you. It was enchanted for you. If anyone else wields it, things…” he gestured vaguely with the sword. “It gets less selective. Trust me, Arthur, as your advisor and as an incompetent swordsman: giving me a magic sword won’t help.”
Arthur considered this. “What you’re really saying,” he concluded, “is that giving you my magic sword won’t help.”
-
The Lady of the Lake eyed them speculatively. “You shouldn’t be here.”
“No,” Merlin agreed. “We shouldn’t. Sorry to bother you, won’t happen again.”
Arthur tightened his grip on Merlin’s shoulder. “My Lady,” he said, in the most reverential tone he could muster while restraining his chief advisor in a foot of freezing water, “I come before you as a protector of your lands, a humble servant of the Old Religion – ”
The Lady’s eyes narrowed. “What do you want?”
“A sword.”
“If you’ve lost Excalibur –”
“No!” Merlin yelped. “No problems there. Thanks for holding it and all that, we’ll be off now.”
“Merlin.” When they got back to the castle, Arthur planned to give Merlin a very, very long lecture about his attitude to foreign dignitaries. Especially ones who looked like they could kill with a glance. “We have come to ask, my Lady, for an additional sword. For Merlin.”
The Lady raised an eyebrow.
“I don’t need a sword,” Merlin blurted.
“You can’t use a sword,” she pointed out.
“I thought he might be better with an enchanted one.”
The Lady snorted. “I don’t know of any that enchanted.”
Merlin visibly relaxed.
“Although -”
Merlin visibly cringed.
“ – you could try a Vorpal blade. Very intelligent armourers, the Vorps. Managed to make a sword which did the fighting for you.”
“How may we prove our worthiness for such a blade?” Arthur asked.
“I don’t have one. Not as such. I bequeathed it to a man who leant it to a boy who, being unbequothen, was unfit to wield it and who was, consequentially, eaten by a Jabberwock.”
Merlin visibly relaxed. “And the sword?” Arthur asked.
Merlin visibly cringed. He was beginning to think they were doing this on purpose.
“Remains with the Jabberwock, as far as I know. If you can claim it, Emrys, it is yours.”
“I don’t need a sword.”
“Merlin. Thank you, my Lady.” Arthur bowed as low as he could while remaining dry. Magical creatures, he had noticed, set a lot of stock by that kind of thing. “If I may be so bold as to enquire, what is a Vorp?”
“They’re like druids,” the Lady explained, “except they know how to parry.”
-
When they finally arrived at the clearing, the beast was delicately peeling a dead knight out of his armour with one claw.
“What is that?” Arthur breathed.
Parts of it were distinctly lionish. Others seemed to have been stolen from a falcon and then drastically enlarged. The folds of loose, red scales around its head gave the impression of a demonic chicken, while the head itself looked vaguely Jurassic. “Knowing our luck,” Merlin said, “it’s not a Jabberwocky.”
“Explain to me why that would be unlucky?”
“Because we won’t discover it’s not until you’ve charged out there and gotten yourself killed.”
“True,” Arthur admitted, charging.
-
The battle was a long one. It involved a lot of swiping and dodging, which Merlin was beginning to realise was the chivalric equivalent of pre-fight shoving; there was one terrifying instance of the Jabberwocky lurching determinedly toward Merlin, its fiery eye fixed on his throat, followed by an even more terrifying instance of Arthur flying through the air in a graceless, tangled arc; there were a great deal of ineffectual flesh wounds and poorly-aimed blinding spells; a brief interlude during which they hid in a nook near the cave mouth, next to the skeleton of a man who had presumably starved there, while the Jabberwocky gnashed furiously at the gap in the rock, it’s prehistoric jaws too wide to get through (“We will never speak of this,” Arthur informed Merlin. “No,” Merlin told him, “because we are going to die.”) and then, finally, a frantic scramble through the dark toward the creature’s hoard, after which Merlin closed his hands around the hilt of an intricately-carved sword and suddenly, instinctively knew.
-
“That was mostly me,” Arthur announced after, once the Jabberwocky’s vast head was a safe distance from the rest of its body.
“It was not.”
“You did your part, I suppose.”
“I did my part?”
“Yes. Because of an enchanted sword I said you should get. Therefore, it was mostly me.”
“I cut off its head.”
“You helped.”
“I slayed it,” Merlin sing-songed. “Slew it. It was slain by my hand. I’m a hero.”
“You’re a warlock.”
“They’re very similar,” Merlin admitted, “but we heroes know how to parry.” .
-