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Morgana’s long since learned not to ignore her dreams. Life would be a hundred times easier without them, but as it becomes a hundred times worse if she does ignore them that isn’t an option. She gets by with paying attention and weeding out the essential from the merely urgent, and that’s good enough.
This dream is essential. She doesn’t know why, at first; doesn’t know why she’s having visions of some broken boy – not a boy, not really, but even with all his long angles and scruffy beard he’s not truly a man, either – in the pit of an opium den somewhere, but she takes to walking at night, cloaked against the bitter wind and the gaze of strangers, trying to find him. She never does, but the dreams keep coming, insistent, so she keeps walking, searching.
Arthur would have thirteen kinds of fit if he knew she was wandering around London after nightfall, but she’s not intending for him to ever find out. At least, she isn’t intending for him to find out until he enters the dreams as well, tall and broad and confident as he strides through them down streets and back alleys and leads her mind to exactly the right place.
She doesn’t waste any time after that. The next night, when Arthur is wearing the same clothes as in her dream – the jacket he hates but wears anyway when he’s trying to impress people, his grandfather’s cufflinks – she waits until just after sunset before pulling her hood over her hair and darting out of her father’s house (hers, now, though she thinks she’ll never be used to that thought), following the dream memory deep into the dark, narrow streets of London.
The memory of Arthur leads her straight to the boy, sunk deep into a stupour in the bowels of a den, his eyes golden with reflected candlelight under lazy, half-shut lids. He regards her with a slow, leaden kind of calm when she kneels next to him, the calm of someone who has seen too much to be surprised by the world anymore, and she realizes she doesn’t even know his name, can’t call him back to life with words.
The boy, when she tries to urge him up, merely slumps back and lets his eyes slide closed, and he’s too heavy for her to move alone. She steps back out into the damp night, the air outside only slightly less thick than in the smoking den, and grabs the arm of a thin, ragged urchin, holding a shilling up in front of his face before he can yell. His eyes go wide and greedy at the sight of it, and there’s a moment where she feels a sharp moment of guilt for playing on his circumstances, but she needs Arthur here now.
“There’s another in it for you if you deliver a message for me, fast as you can,” she says, and the boy nods vigourously.
“Yes, mum, quicker’n a...” he begins eagerly, then cuts himself off from whatever vulgar thing he was about to say with a gulp. Morgana gives him a small smile.
“Go to Pendragon House and tell the man on watch the Lady Morgana requires the younger Mr Pendragon immediately. If he doesn’t believe you, give him this.” She takes her bracelet off with only a brief hesitation – it’s made of rough leather and twine, no one would ever think to steal it – and gives it to the boy, who looks at it, puzzled. “Tell Arthur – Mr Pendragon, that is – to come here as fast as possible; only Arthur, understand? Quickly, now.”
The boy touches his smudged forehead in a half-salute and scrambles away, the shilling clutched tight in one hand and her bracelet in the other. Morgana backs herself into a corner where the shadows are thicker than usual and waits, squinting into the cold fog for any sign of Arthur. She’s not worried that he won’t show up, she already knows he will, but she doesn’t know how he’ll react; whether he’ll help her or sling her over his shoulder and drag her home screaming.
She’s almost starting to twist the edges of her cloak between her fingers out of nerves before Arthur’s familiar shape in his greatcoat looms up out of the darkness.
“You’d better have a damned good reason for dragging me out on a night like this,” he growls at her, handing her the bracelet she’d given the boy, and she gives him her brightest, most insufferable smile, just because it’s Arthur and he hasn’t resorted to brute force yet. She can practically feel the disapproval rolling off of him as she leads him into the den and to the boy, who still has his eyes closed and will not rouse.
“He’s a friend,” Morgana tells Arthur firmly, and when he stiffens in outrage next to her she snaps, “Just a friend, for heaven’s sake, Arthur.”
“I can never tell with you; sometimes I think it’s your hobby to go around creating scandals,” Arthur grumbles, but he bends down and hoists the boy over his shoulders with a grunt. “Your friend needs to eat more,” he tells her as she leads the way out of the den and back to her house. “I’ve eaten meals that weighed more than he does.”
They put the boy to bed in the Blue Room – it’ll do him some good to have a view of the gardens when he wakes, she thinks – and she can tell Arthur’s dying with curiosity, but she wants to see what mysteries this boy holds before she lets the world loose on him. She and Arthur sit for a while and watch the fire crackle in the grate, Arthur nursing a small glass of scotch he’d found in a dusty corner somewhere. Arthur isn’t as clever as he thinks he is with his questions, but he is clever enough to figure out in short order that this newest escapade isn’t something she’s willing to talk about, and drops the subject.
They sit in silence, comfortable with just the two of them and the soft tick-tock of the clock on the mantle. She knows Arthur never looks forward to going home, hates the cold emptiness of Pendragon House, and so she lets him stay as long as he wants, waiting patiently and talking softly about nothing in particular until he stretches the stiffness out of his back and rises, making his excuses.
He bids her goodnight with a wry peck on the cheek, invites her to their customary Sunday dinner with his father, and shows himself out. She watches him go with something like fondness – there was a time when they were both young and foolish when Morgana had been sure they’d marry and go off to have great adventures, when they’d fenced with sticks up and down the corridors of Pendragon house until her governess discovered them and lectured Morgana on the evils of men for nigh on a year.
She’d wanted to go to the Amazon, to Canton, to Tripoli, wanted to fight privateers and explore the American wilderness, but life never took them farther than a single trip to Paris and holidays to Bath. Arthur had found Vivian and lost her, and had to be pulled out of his own destructive spiral while Vivian ran off to a new glittering home in Moscow, and Morgana had... that is, she’d lost love as well, and that’s all the thought she’ll spare for that hurt anymore. There are other adventures to be had, even in London, and she waits until she hears the front door close before padding quietly down the hall to the Blue Room.
The boy is still unconscious, stretched on top of the fine sheets and twitching a little in a dream, his brow creased. She sinks into the armchair at the foot of the bed and watches him, observes him from crown to toe with a critical eye. His dark hair desperately needs a trim and a good scrubbing, he needs a barber in an immediately sort of way, and his clothes will have to be burned at the soonest possible opportunity. She studies him closely, looking for answers to the question of her dreams: he’s too thin, narrow in his bones and face, and there are soft violet shadows under his eyes. He’s older than she first thought, with fine, delicate creases at the corners of his eyes and his full-lipped mouth.
He looks peaceful enough now, though she knows that won’t last long, not with every fibre of his being screaming for a return to oblivion; he’ll spend months sweating through the bedclothes and screaming into his pillow because he’s too proud to let anyone know something is wrong. She’s seen it all already, seen herself standing with an ear at the door to his room to make sure he hasn’t done himself the most foolish kind of mischief.
She falls asleep there in the familiar room as she listens to unfamiliar breathing, and dreams.
Her dreams are full of Arthur and the man he calls Merlin – a man in the prime of life who bears only the slightest of passing resemblances to the man Arthur had once carried slung over his shoulders. He and Merlin are walking down a street, through a park, are sharing a flask of gin in an opera box. Arthur watches Merlin give speeches and brandish papers with a bewildered kind of pride, as if he can’t quite put his finger on whatever he’s feeling but feels it to his gut regardless. She sees Merlin bent low over a book, quiet and intent in his study until Arthur comes up behind him, and a bright, helpless smile breaks out across Merlin’s face before he smoothes it away with a hand and turns to speak.
The answers come easily now, flying fast and thick as if seeing Merlin in the flesh were the key to the riddle, and it’s difficult to sort through them all. This boy, this man, Merlin, will be brilliant, Morgana knows; he’ll have all of London dancing to his tune, bending to his whim. She sees it, sees all of it and more, sees Arthur bending him over backwards and kissing him deeply by the bank of a river, shaded by an overhanging tree, sees Merlin pulling Arthur into a shadowy corner for one more embrace, Arthur’s face lighter than it’s been in years.
She wakes with the image of their heads bent close together still floating in front of her, and has to blink it away, surprised at the dampness caught in her lashes and the ache high in her chest. Merlin is waking too, groggy confusion giving way to suspicion as he looks around and catches sight of her in the thin light of the winter morning.
“Hello, Merlin,” she says. There’s a moment where she thinks he’s going to bolt, run back to the impossible maze of London streets to be lost forever, but then he sits up, slowly, every muscle tense, watching her with clear, wary eyes.
“Hello,” he ventures, his voice light and melodic beneath the harsh scrape of smoke and the streets.
Morgana ignores the other futures flickering in the back of her mind’s eye, glimpses of a world gone wrong: where cities are burning or Merlin is somewhere with a blindfold over his head, bound and being led up the steps of a gallows, where Arthur is in chains in a prison somewhere or killing himself with his Colt because Merlin is gone, where Arthur leaves and Merlin wastes away into nothing, just fades away into the air. She ignores them because she knows this will be good, whatever happens, knows nothing will ever be this good again.
Merlin doesn’t look away, meets her gaze steadily, and Morgana smiles.