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"The only sense of adventure I associate with Merlin," Arthur was saying, "is never knowing whether he's accidentally mixed up the honey with the saddle polish and fed me poison for breakfast."
The ogre had turned out to be a pack of wild dogs, the villagers' traps had done their work, and the warmth of the sun on their backs was knocking the urgency out of Arthur's usual gruelling pace of travel on the return journey. There was no mistaking Arthur's gentle pressure on the reins, slowing them all down on the open stretches and the panoramic descents, only kicking his heels now as they swept back into a cool stretch of woods.
"You think it would be an accident, do you?" Merlin said.
The stiffening of Elyan's back was a reminder that, technically, the treason laws still applied to everyone, including the knights, and including Merlin.
But Arthur was wearing a smug sort of smile as he turned back over his shoulder to reply, "You're about as devious as a jug of milk. If you ever plotted against me, I'd know it before you did."
And then a bird startled out of the undergrowth, and Arthur's horse reared, and even the lightning speed of Arthur's reflexes could not keep him in his seat from that unbalanced position.
Two mounted knights between them and another one behind, Merlin could only watch the awful aftermath as Arthur fell, foot twisted in one stirrup, with a snapping sound that made Merlin sick. This much he could do: a pile of leaves swept across the path just in time to cushion Arthur's shoulders and head as they struck the ground.
Gwaine was the one who kept his wits, taking a firm grip on Arthur's calf and dispensing a tirade of insolent patter by way of blatant distraction, while Merlin knelt by Arthur's shoulder and listened to himself saying, "It's all right, it's all right," and watching the queasy pallor of Arthur's face because he could not make himself look at the flowing blood and the spikes of exposed bone up his shin.
The hand he had taken hold of was Arthur's sword hand, the one he was training to bend the shafts of the gatehouse keys like Percival could do. Merlin remembered that at the moment when Gwaine gave a vicious jerk to reconnect the broken bone, and Arthur roared helplessly, the single convulsion of pain wracking the whole length of his body, and Merlin's knuckles ground together then went mercifully numb.
Arthur was delirious all the way as they backtracked to the cluster of cottages they'd caught sight of from the last crest, Percival and Elyan riding on either side of him as he slumped in the saddle. Delirious but alive. Merlin cradled his aching hand against his chest and rode behind them, thinking how strange it was that his pulse was hammering in his ears now, when the worst of it was over.
**
The best bed in the hamlet looked ridiculously small with Arthur in it. It was hard to imagine two people fitting into the space which his shoulders alone spanned. The whole room felt shrunken – low ceilinged and smoky like Merlin remembered from his childhood, with only one tiny window. What space wasn't occupied by his body, Arthur filled with his frustration. It had been four days.
"You'll be abed a while yet," said Hilde, grimly refastening the bindings on Arthur's leg.
She settled the blanket back over him and collected the chamber pot from under the chair beside the bed, hesitating.
"Go and see your family," Merlin said, because while her husband and two sons slept on the floor at her sister's house in order to free this room, Hilde spent the nights here in case Arthur should need anything. "I'll stay with him."
Mornings were hardest for Arthur, when his muscles itched for the challenge of the saddle or a skirmish on the training field.
"At least open the shutters," Arthur said, although they had already been open for some time. "It's like a crypt in here."
Merlin had run out of distractions after the second day. There wasn't a single book in the house, even if Arthur's literacy and patience had been equal to it. With Elyan and Percival gone ahead to Camelot with the news, there was little enough variety of company.
By the sixth day, Arthur had grown irritable with a wound that seemed to get worse when it should have got better; by the ninth he was surly and spoke to Merlin only when he needed a distraction from struggling to settle his leg in a position that made the swollen, infected flesh ache least. Then the next day he woke up full of furious energy and, ignoring Hidle's pleas, got up and dragged himself haltingly to the well and back, which he spent the afternoon paying for in pain.
**
It was not long afterwards that he mentioned magic for the first time.
"Only you," Merlin reproached him lightly, "would turn to sorcery just to get out of a bit of bed rest. Any normal person would be enjoying every moment."
Then he noticed that Arthur's jaw was set in the way that meant he was committing to something unpleasant and making sure to leave himself no way to back out.
"What you don't seem to understand," Arthur replied, "is that Camelot needs a prince. The kingdom has to have someone defending it until my father is – is himself again. And that means a man with a sword arm, Merlin, not some useless lump of bandages who has to be carried around in a chair." Arthur wouldn't look at him then, but he swallowed and added, "And if it takes magic to give Camelot what it needs, then that's what has to be done."
The thing about Arthur was that when he was wrong, he was utterly wrong, and always about the biggest things, the huge things that were impossible to explain to him calmly in the heat of an argument.
"You think that's all a prince is, do you? A strong sword arm and legs that can ride all day?"
The slight withdrawing in Arthur's eyes confirmed that had not come out how he meant it, when what he'd meant Arthur to understand was that when people talked about him, in the markets or in the taverns, they talked about a blocked drain he'd got fixed or a sick child he'd carried up to see Gaius, and took his battlefield prowess for something that even a second-rate prince might be trained up to.
"I think," Arthur said, retreating into haughtiness, "that if I were the king of Mercia, I'd know that a castle defended by a prince who can't even sit in a saddle to command his own soldiers is as good as surrendered already."
"But your uncle-"
"Has leagues of treacherous country to cover before he gets to Camelot. If our messenger reached him at all."
Hilde's eldest boy had come in then, carrying fresh straw for Arthur's pillow, and they had to shift their unhappy patient around so the new could be changed for the old.
"If you're too noble to do it yourself," was all Arthur muttered bitterly while Merlin, kneeling by the low bed, helped him keep his balance, "then find one of my knights who isn't and send him in."
**
Although Merlin had promised to look into it, he kept an eye out instead for any opportunity to use his own magic on whatever was sabotaging Arthur's usually impressive healing process. None came. Hilde hovered by his doorway as if terrified by the prospect of having the crown prince die in her house if she were not there at all times to prevent it. And when she was absent, Arthur, whose injuries, it was apparent from his haggard face, were keeping him from sleep, barked out increasingly bad-tempered orders and never once closed his eyes long enough for Merlin to do what he needed to.
One evening, at his fiercest after struggling to keep his face stoical through another changing of the dressings on his ugly wound, Arthur stuck him with an accusing look the moment Hilde had left the room.
He said, "If I ask her to do it, she'll be guilty of a crime. Is that what you want?"
"Of course not."
"Then bring me the person I need. You've got sympathies with those people – you're an even bigger idiot than I thought if you imagine you've been hiding it – so I know you can do it. Sun-down tomorrow, Merlin. Or you're making someone else risk a death sentence in your place."
While he liked to see obedience, Arthur never, without exception, played off another person's sense of guilt to get it. Perhaps he knew the weight of that burden too well. It was only powerlessness and pain, Merlin thought, that made him talk that way now. Still, the imputation of weakness stung him.
"You know what your father would say."
Arthur struck his fist against the wall by his bed, hard enough to rattle the stonework.
"Yes, thank you," he said, one hand shielding his face from the shower of dust he'd brought down.
Before Merlin could take it back, he went on. "My father would do what was right, no matter what it cost him. My father would never betray his principles. My father would never corrupt himself with sorcery. But here's the thing – I'm not my father, and Camelot needs a leader, and when I think about an army burning my people out of their homes, all because I was too puffed up with pride to do what needed to be done – My honour isn't worth that." Reaching that unequivocal conclusion seemed to calm him, taking the anger out of his words. He rubbed dust off his forehead. "And I'm sorry Merlin, neither is yours."
One chance was all Merlin needed. A few moments alone with him asleep, and Arthur wouldn't have to contemplate a transaction in which he thought the purchase price was his integrity. The right touch of Merlin's hand could return to him the physical ease without which he seemed half naked.
"Everything all right?" Gwaine said from the doorway, glancing at Merlin as if he might be the one needing rescue.
Arthur turned his face to the wall and said, "Never better."
**
Every village had misfits who, by force or by choice, lived on the fringes, making less and less frequent appearances for emergency supplies until they lost the knack for human interaction and acquired, through long isolation, an aura of the uncanny. The old woman Merlin tracked down was certainly no sorceress.
"Well?" Arthur demanded not long before his deadline was up. "Have you done it?"
"Yes."
There was disappointment in his eyes after all, and quickly conquered fear.
"She'll come tomorrow," Merlin told him.
Arthur said, "Good then," and threw off the blanket as if sweltering all of a sudden.
He fidgeted with the damp linen of his shirt, restless like he always got when he needed something that he couldn't put his finger on, or didn't know how to ask for. He had been alternating all day between the built-up tension of the bed-bound, and a deep fatigue that was slowly overcoming the alertness that all his military years had trained into his bones.
"I could-" Merlin began. It was the time of day when the sun was fading but the candles were not yet lit, when Arthur's eyes sometimes started to close of their own accord, so that he had to wield the full force of his determination to keep them open. "I could tell you a story."
Merlin had in mind something about magic, something that ended well, something slow to tell, so that Arthur might doze long enough for him to heal the mess of bone splinters under his scabbed wound. But Arthur, gritting his teeth as he shifted his bad leg off its stand to roll onto his side, said, "That's the most useless idea you've ever had. If that's the best you can do, get out."
Merlin left him to his miserable temper and went to seek out the ingredients he would need.
**
The next morning, Arthur demanded a knife and some scraps of wood and set about whittling some abstract form out of the grain. By midday, one of them resembled a battleshield, palm-sized, with Uther's coat of arms scratched into it, and on the reverse a passable version of the letter A. Merlin took this for a good sign until Arthur held it out to him.
"Take this back to my father," he said. "If it goes badly today."
Merlin pocketed the carving and mocked him for getting worked up over a little bit of magic.
"Use your head, Merlin," Arthur snapped back. "There's a price for using magic. You've seen yourself what happens to the people who get too close to it. It leaves a shadow in them. They destroy everything they touch."
It might have been Morgana he was thinking of, but it still hurt Merlin to hear. He answered flippantly, "Well if you end up corrupted by magic, there probably won't be much us mortals can do about it, will there?"
Arthur's silence quenched Merlin's humour. He was staring at the wall with stony determination.
"There's one thing," he said eventually. "And if I come out of this changed, I expect you to do it."
Merlin's horror must have shown on his face, because he added, "If I went back to Camelot under the power of a sorcerer, think about all the harm I could do. To people you know. I could burn the city to the ground and not even care."
Because he couldn't tell Arthur how benign magic had been around him all these years, how it had protected him countless times, how it had shielded Camelot from ruin every day they had known each other, Merlin gave him a defiantly bright smile and said,
"Not a chance."
**
The old woman did not come that afternoon as arranged. The draught Merlin had brewed for her to give Arthur sat on a stool outside the door as night started to fall. Arthur was doing an increasingly poor job of hiding his agitation when Merlin went in to him.
"She doesn't even keep the time she promised," Arthur said. "I don't trust her on the rest either." His words were coming out a bit fast, his cheeks clammy from the infected wound and his lips, after the last few meals he had not wanted to eat, starting to peel.
There had been fog over the valley all day and, without real magic, it would be pretty hard going on the rocky path that came down from the old woman's tiny cabin. Merlin knelt by the bed to adjust the folded blanket that cushioned Arthur's back against the wall and did not reply.
"Tell Gwaine to keep his sword about him," Arthur went on with the urgency of the moments before an attack. "She can do us a lot of damage in the dark."
Merlin kept his attention carefully on his task. "You could call it off."
"There's no other way." Arthur's urgency was infectious – even though he knew the woman's threat was imaginary, Merlin felt his own heart quickening. "It's getting worse. I have to take this chance."
"Gaius can-"
Arthur snatched his wrist hard enough to hurt. "Say it." His fatigue washed away by adrenalin, he wore the complete focus that had got them both out of mortal peril so many times before, and Merlin knew this was not a time to brush off his concerns with a joke. "If it goes wrong, tell me you can do what you have to do."
The easy lie was tempting, but Merlin couldn't make himself utter it.
"Like I said, not a chance."
When he tried to pull away, Arthur's grip tightened. " Cowardice after all? I'm not giving you a choice, Merlin. You will do this. You have to."
With a burst of speed that defied his illness, Arthur jerked the carving knife from yesterday out from the bedclothes and shoved the hilt into Merlin's grasp. His own larger hand closed over the top.
He forced the knife point into the open neck of his shirt, to the heart side of his breast bone, impressing into his flesh. "No time to be faint-hearted. It's only a knife. Now show me you can use it."
Horrified, Merlin fought to let the weapon go, but his strength was no match for Arthur's.
"Don't do this."
He'd poisoned Morgana for Camelot. He'd have done worse if fate took all his other choices away. But he knew he could not force the knife down, not even far enough to provide the proof that Arthur wanted. Even, he realised guiltily, if Arthur's worst fears had been true, he could not have done it. And especially not now, when Arthur was talking about his own death like the cool-headed commander he was, as if his loss would be no more than one man down on a field of hundreds, when he needed Merlin to keep him from spending his life recklessly.
"Come on," Arthur said, goading. "This must be your dream come true."
The shock of that made Merlin's resistance falter, and the knife point jerked over Arthur's flesh, slicing a short incision that quickly welled up, releasing a trickle of blood.
"What would you know?"
The pressure of Arthur's hand over his was slowly winning out. A little red blotch soaked through the shirt over Arthur's stomach.
"Go on, Merlin. Think of all the times you've hated me. Some of them I probably even deserved it. Think about revenge. Think about whatever you need to."
For a moment Merlin admired this clever piece of manipulation. Then he remembered that Arthur was exhausted after days of pain, and was usually oblivious to emotional subtlety at the best of times. His words could be no more than what he thought to be true.
"I said no."
The shine in Arthur's eyes was a bit feverish, lit up with frustrated anger. Merlin could feel his own arm muscles reaching the end of their resistance.
"I thought you knew how to be a man when Camelot needed you."
"I'm not here for Camelot," he said in a voice that had got strained and desperate. "I wasn't even born there."
He twisted awkwardly to put his other hand onto Arthur's chest, splaying his fingers to either side of the knife so that it would cut him if it moved.
"I'm not afraid," he said as they both watched the blade crease the webbing between his fingers, wavering. "You've seen me go up against a dragon. But I won't hurt you."
Abruptly, Arthur's pressure on the knife stilled.
"What's that supposed to mean?" he demanded, sounding hurt. "I've never had a moment's respect out of you. You'd go to the ends of the earth for a commoner like Gwaine, but you can't even hand me a pair of boots without smirking."
He was always so wrong about the big things. The things that were hardest to talk about. There was something betrayed in his expression, as if he suspected Merlin of making fun of him. Their hands were still cupped together, over the hilt.
"Why do you think I stay?" Merlin said quietly. "I don't owe Camelot anything."
Arthur looked thoroughly at sea. "You're fond of Gaius, obviously."
His face was angled very slightly away, evasive, as if he knew his own theory was inadequate.
"Not like that. It's not Gaius I stay for." Arthur made a small noise of disbelief, and Merlin nearly left it at that. But the knife was still there between them, and the echo of what Arthur thought of Merlin, and of himself. "Gaius isn't the one I stay for. Or Gwaine either. If it's respect you want, you're aiming too low, because you've got a lot more than my respect."
Too tired to hide his astonishment, Arthur released the knife as Merlin took it from him and tossed it away. He frowned at the room in general, avoiding Merlin's gaze, as if the way Merlin felt about him was treachery of the highest order. As if he might have preferred the simplicity of thinking there was nothing between them but resentment and duty and the occasional moment of trust in the face of mortal danger.
"Merlin," Arthur breathed out finally. "You're more devious than I gave you credit for."
Tentatively, Merlin slipped off his neck cloth and found a clean fold of it to put over the shallow gash.
"I'd have told you any time over the last two years, only it never really came up. You should've asked me to stab you earlier."
Arthur held the cloth in place, watching as the bleeding quickly stemmed.
"Two years?"
Merlin thought about it, and realised there was no way to date a feeling that had become an unquestioned constant in his every day. He busied himself in straightening the blankets over Arthur's legs. "Oh, maybe longer."
"Nothing can change," Arthur said a bit later, in the same gentle voice he used to break the news of a bereavement to a soldier's wife or mother, a voice that was so unlike the disdainful note he usually kept for Merlin alone. "Ever. If you can't accept that, you had better go back to Ealdor with my blessing."
"I'm sticking around," Merlin said immediately. "And if you're worried I'm going to start singing you ballads or slaying dragons to win over your cold heart, then you really need to get a grip on your vanity."
"Small mercies, Merlin." There was humour in Arthur's eyes. The way he watched Merlin was merely puzzled now.
After a while, he took a deep breath and added, "When your witch comes, send Gwaine in. You can-" He ran an assessing glance over Merlin, as if struggling to find him a place in a battlefield strategy. "Find something to do that keeps you well away," he finished. "Take someone for company and don't come back until sunrise."
As they sat in the half-dark, waiting, Merlin thought it over. He had no faith in Arthur's assumption that Gwaine would be any more capable of doing what Merlin could not. But there was something else to be learned from Arthur's certainty that he would.
**
Although of all people, Merlin should not have been anxious, he could not stop himself pacing under the fine rain. All the woman had to do was give Arthur the draught. All Gwaine had to do was keep his head. Inside, it was silent.
The woman slipped out and, with an inexpressive glance in Merlin's direction, turned on her homeward path. In the space of a few moments, she had vanished into the shadow of the trees.
Gwaine, when he emerged, looked troubled.
"He's asking for you."
"What for?" Merlin asked. "I told him I won't do it."
Gwaine's shrug could have been just weary, could have had something melancholy in it. "Well, he's asking for you." He handed Merlin the knife. "Take this, but keep it out of his reach. He's a bit-"
Merlin saw for himself. Arthur's eyes were rolling back in his head as he fought a doomed battle with the draught's soporific properties.
"Merlin-" Arthur was murmuring before he'd even knelt down beside where he lay. "Wake me up. If I can't-" For a moment his eyes nearly closed, just a sliver of white between them, but he prised them back open. "Can't- if I'm asleep, can't tell what she's-"
"You're just tired."
Arthur writhed on the bed, hands flexing irregularly as if he couldn't quite make them obey his mind. "Where's the knife? Give it to me. Promise-" His voice faded to nothing, then he wrenched his head to one side and groaned. "Your oath. Have to- "
When he jerked his foot off the low stool it was raised onto, the spike of pain brought him fully awake.
Before he could do any more damage, Merlin wrapped the hilt of the knife in Arthur's left hand, closed the fingers over it where it rested on his chest. "Here."
Possessing a weapon seemed to centre him, and already the draught was dragging him back towards sleep. His breathing calmed and his face turned to Merlin, struggling to focus.
"Sleep," Merlin told him, keeping his hand on top of Arthur's to make sure the knife did no harm. "I saw what she gave you. It's just a sleeping draught. Gaius makes them all the time. The woman's no more a sorcerer than I am."
Arthur smiled faintly. Under Merlin's palm, his grip on the knife grew loose. "You had better be right."
His eyelids drooped and he forced them open one last time.
"I'm not going anywhere," Merlin told him. "That's an oath if you want one. It's going to be all right."
The last struggle went out of him with one long, laboured breath. And, in the space of a few more moments, the potion had completed its work.
He should have known better than to think Arthur would submit without a fight. He brushed his fingers over the worried lines that still creased Arthur's brow. Then he put the knife on the shelf where Arthur could see it when he woke, and he went to work.
Under the bindings, Arthur's shin was a mess, the skin tight and irregular. It was the bone that had failed to heal, he could see without touching it. The break had not fitted back together as it should have. He felt queasy to think about what it must have been like to walk on. He thought of a new leaf, with its veins fanning out in clean, precise lines, each curve in its place. The spell he used was one of the first he ever learned, four simple syllables for bringing broken edges together, making shattered pieces whole again. There was a hitch in Arthur's breathing and his hand clenched in on itself on top of the blanket.
After that, Arthur slept, and Merlin leaned back on the wall beside him and waited out the night.
**
It took two days for the colour to come back into Arthur's face, and even less time for him to regain his usual blithe confidence and forget the dark choices he had contemplated in the grip of infirmity.
"Make the most of this idleness," he said as Merlin shook out his freshly washed shirt and helped him get his arms into it. "We're leaving tomorrow, and you don't want to think about the mess there'll be to clean up when we get back."
His skin has lost its feverish sheen. But the change was more than that. It was as if a shadow had lifted behind his eyes. In Arthur, there was no separation between body and mind. He had a unique contiguity of thought and action which made him the masterful soldier that he was. What he thought and felt was transparent in what he did. But this was also his greatest vulnerability, and it was only now he was coming back to himself that Merlin could see how the physical injury had crippled his spirits too.
"It will be good to see you back on your feet," Merlin told him.
There was a moment's silence, in which he remembered that he had to be careful about sincerity, because it was pretty clear that Arthur sometimes mistook it for an oblique form of mocking or a joke that went over his head.
Then Arthur grinned and said, "Rubbish. Think of all the boots you haven't had to clean."
**
Back at Camelot, not much changed. Arthur was insufferably presumptuous. He presumed when he had Merlin rearrange the entire stables to accommodate the new mare he'd acquired on the return journey. Presumed when Merlin had to walk miles to get a good bit of wood for the walking stick he threw away as soon as he could hobble without it, or offered his shoulder when the wound seized up half-way down a flight of stairs, or brought him warm wine with honey on the long evenings sitting with his father, or stayed up all night to write him a speech. The presumption was nothing new, but its quality had changed. As if it made him easier to know that what he presumed upon was something more than the duty of a servant to his prince.
Arthur's flesh healed around the mended bone and by the end of the month he was back on the training field, waving off Merlin's cautions. His uncle arrived and they spent a whole day in grave discussion in Arthur's room, not bothering to lower their voices or switch the discussion to something neutral when Merlin came in with ale or refreshments.
They hadn't ever talked about what Merlin had let slip that night. It was too much to hope that Arthur would forget it. But he seemed – from the half-hidden smile he indulged in when Merlin had let him get away with something especially provoking, Merlin wondered if he didn't mind knowing just how far he could push before he risked pushing too far.
Life went on. Arthur gave Gwen a pearl hairpin at New Year. He gave Merlin a list of outstanding repairs to his wardrobe, chambers and armoury.
"Now don't go getting ideas because your list is longer than anyone else's," Arthur had warned him sternly. "It just means that you have far too much leisure time and I don't trust you to spend it wisely."
Merlin had gone calmly on with brushing the dried blood from yesterday's ambush out of Arthur's chain mail.
"Just following your royal example," Merlin had grinned back, and only realised much later that not only had Arthur let Merlin have the last insulting word but, at some unthinking level, Merlin had not been surprised.
Uther had a bad winter, and they walked around on eggshells as if the slightest cold breeze might see Arthur reluctantly receive the crown. By spring he was sitting by his window once more, glancing unseeingly at the papers his son occasionally put before him. Sometimes Merlin felt Arthur looking at him when there was no reason to be; other times he thought it was his own imagination. A pair of robins moved onto the ledge outside Gaius's workroom and produced two thriving chicks. Gwaine bested Arthur in a tourney and, once rescued from a tavern where celebratory bravado was teetering on incipient riot, curled up on the foot of Merlin's bed and passed out, impossible to prise off.
Yes, life went on, but not exactly as it had before, and Merlin held his tiny thread of hope close to himself, wound it quietly through his fingers. Without ever losing sight of all the metaphorical mountains they had to cross before they got there, he let himself start to wonder what it might be like to know that Arthur put him first, before everything and everyone else, as well.
The window in the throne room developed a leak. Arthur volunteered himself as a blood sacrifice and told Merlin, in a tone that was yet another kind of presumption, that he could remain behind if he wished. Gaius continued his longstanding debate with the cook about whether chicken's or duck's eggs imparted more stamina on a long horseback ride. Merlin packed what they would both need for the Isle of the Blessed, acutely conscious of Arthur leaning against the window ledge and watching him laying in supplies.
Life went on, but something had changed in it. Something as subtle as a leaf coming off an autumn oak, or as enormous as south trading places with east. Merlin waited to find out what it was.
**
end