Sword in the Stars

by Cori McCarthy

  “It’s a political match. To make him seem older in the eyes of his people,” Lam said, placing their wrist on Ari’s shoulder.

  “He has his own chambers and sleeps in a pile of hunting dogs,” Jordan admitted.

  “Aw,” Lam said.

  “Okay, but,” Ari said, “this isn’t about Arthur and his adorable dog pile. This is about getting the chalice and getting back to our time without messing up the story. Check that dumb book, Jordan. Are the Lancelot pages still missing?”

  Jordan hiked up her skirts and pulled out the MercersNotes, paging through. “They’ve returned.”

  “See?” Ari asked Merlin. “I fixed it. Time continuum patched.”

  “For now,” he said. “But if we’re not meant to be part of this legend, it will derail.”

  Ari crossed her arms, bristling with challenge. “Wouldn’t it be helpful if one of us knew exactly what was going to happen because he’d lived through it before?”

  “You have to understand,” Merlin wheedled. “This era was horrid, and not just for humans in general. I was new to the world, dropped down here with a fully formed intellect, the selfish emotions of a newborn, and no one to learn from. I spent years in a state of savage enchanted survival. And then Arthur came along. This innocent child. This spark of goodness. I believed my sole purpose was to protect him, and if that meant being the dark so he could be the light, well, I did what I believed I must. But since then—”

  “You’ve grown a conscience?” Lam asked.

  “I’ve blocked most of it out,” he said, head drooping, the rest of his shameful words hitting the floor. “All the pain. The missteps, the cruelty… I banished it from my mind.”

  Merlin looked up to find that Ari had stopped listening. He waggled his fingers and cast a few sparks to get her attention back. Gods, his immature impulses were growing stronger as he aged down.

  Ari didn’t notice. She was staring out an arrow slit. Was more danger approaching the castle, about to scale the walls? Merlin followed her line of sight and found Gwen in the courtyard below, wearing a purple silk dress ringed in fur, Arthur following in her wake.

  “I haven’t seen Gwen since we left the future,” Ari said, her voice somehow both breathy and tight. “I need to talk to her.”

  “Absolutely not!” Merlin yelped.

  “We know what it looks like when you two talk,” Lam said.

  “The kingdom will erupt with adultery fever,” Jordan confirmed. “In one version of these Camelot stories, Gweneviere was beheaded for her interest in Lancelot.”

  “I’ll be discreet.”

  Merlin tried not to laugh. He tried very hard.

  “Fine,” Ari said. “I’ll find a way to be near Gwen that doesn’t look suspicious. Maybe I should get close to Arthur. Lancelot’s supposed to be his best friend, right? His favored knight?”

  “True…” Merlin said. The dark shadow of a memory rose, but he couldn’t quite see what cast it. Merlin hadn’t trusted Gweneviere or Lancelot when they first arrived in Camelot. He’d suspected them of some kind of scheme against Arthur. And then… a shiver raged through him. He pulled his robes tight, as if they could defend him against what came next.

  “I think I remember something,” he whispered.

  “Good,” Lam said, thumping his back like Merlin were a gassy infant instead of a rapidly de-aging mage.

  “What is it, Merlin?” Ari asked.

  “Right after Lancelot and Gweneviere arrived in Camelot… I tried to have them assassinated.”

  A great beast roared past the window.

  “By dragon.”

  The dragon spun around the tower, parts of it visible in every narrow window at once, from its sleek head to its barbed whip of a tail. It was coming for Ari, hunting for Lancelot, because they were one and the same. Merlin felt sick and relieved at the same time. So, they weren’t ruining Arthur’s story and setting their future irrevocably off course!

  “We’ll be okay,” Lam said, clutching Ari’s arm. “You’re a natural with dragons.”

  “Ketchan dragons! Taneens are overgrown desert lizards. That looks like a serious medieval monster.”

  Merlin jumped in, desperate to be helpful. “Dragons were an endangered species by this time period. Surly, yes. With inner fires that warmed their invertebrate bodies in the harsh northern climes? Certainly. Violent against humans? Hardly ever. If we break the enchantment binding the creature to the hunt, we’ll be fine.”

  “Pretty sure it’s not going to wait for that before it attacks,” Lam said.

  Jordan’s skirts flew up, and she started handing out a small arsenal that she’d strapped to herself. At least someone here was in their element.

  Lam took a throwing knife to the arrow slits, hunting for weaknesses on the dragon while Merlin spun a quick, coarse plan. “All I have to do is get to my tower and break the enchantment Old Merlin cast before the dragon gets a chance to, you know…”

  “Swallow us whole?” Ari provided.

  “Oh no, there’s an obscene amount of crunching,” Merlin said.

  “You remember that detail, of course.”

  “Just keep it busy for ten minutes,” Merlin said, running for the stairs. “And draw Old Merlin away from the tower!”

  “You want us to lure out the guy who’s trying to murder us,” Ari said, voice flat.

  “I would never have killed you outright,” Merlin promised. “In fact, I believe I even pretended to fight the dragon so Arthur would think I was protecting his bride and his new knight.” Merlin winced. His crimes just kept getting worse.

  “We have to get to Gwen.” Ari drew her not-even-remotely enchanted sword. “It’s going to attack her, too.” She gave him a dirty look that could never compete with how soiled he felt.

  The dragon perched on the side of the castle, talons digging between the stones with a heart-crumbling sound. A second later, its tail made contact with the top of the tower. Stones flew in every direction, the roof now exposed to the sky.

  Merlin stared up at the looming, green-black body. It took to the air, hovering. “I know this move,” he whispered. “It’s about to swoop down and snatch.”

  Lam and Jordan drew back.

  “I can work with that,” Ari muttered. When the dragon dropped toward them, claws opening like a vile black flower, Ari leaped onto the dragon’s outstretched leg. She climbed the thing like a gangplank, reaching the beast’s massive head and straddling its neck.

  “Go!” she yelled at Merlin as the dragon reared into the sky, Ari on its back.

  The sounds of catastrophe followed Merlin as he flew down the corkscrew of the stairs, watching snippets of the battle through each window as he went, always afraid to see that the story had ended prematurely with Lam pitched from the tower, or the dragon snatching up Gwen, or Ari gushing blood.

  Instead Ari got a crude sort of control over the dragon by wrestling with the scale-ridge that crested its head. It pitched wildly as she rode it toward the courtyard, crashing it in a way that skidded the stones up like a bunched rug.

  “No wonder Lancelot gets a reputation so quickly,” Merlin said on a half-breath.

  He bolted across the castle, toward his old tower. Guards and knights were running, a flurry of confusion as they tried to figure out what was attacking this time—and why. He caught a brief and yet heart-chilling glance of his old self headed toward the courtyard.

  “Douchebag!” he sang.

  At the very back of the castle, by the kitchens and the cold cellars, he found the door of his tower: a hearty concoction of wood, metal latches, and magic. He pushed, banged, hit the thing with a flare of blue sparks. But as he flailed, the truth came back in a slow-developing Polaroid sort of way. He’d infused the oil in the hinge with a spell. There was a magical password, one he changed every fortnight. If someone caught him before he guessed it, Ari would be killed and Merlin would be thrown to the dragon as a palate cleanser before he could say…

  “Persnickety!
”

  He tried the door. It didn’t budge.

  “I really thought that would work,” he said. “Fewmets! Paragon! Ensorcelled! Ovate! Scale-rot! Mange!” When none of his favorite words worked, he dumped out everything in the two-thousand-year-old junk drawer of his mind. One word shone in the midst of the mess, like a coin he’d lost long ago.

  “Kairos.”

  The door pushed itself open.

  He tossed himself into a darkness that felt as familiar as an old coat. He lit his fingertips with magic; they shone white like a string of holiday lights as he ran up a treacherous staircase, riddled with switchbacks. He’d designed it long ago to stop people from bothering him before they’d even started.

  He reached the steepest bit of the stairs—nearly vertical—and scrambled upward, the word kairos fuel to his fires. It meant that all stars had aligned, and now was the time to act. “This is our moment,” he’d said, giving that word to Arthur, a birthday gift for a young king to explain why he was fated to lead Camelot out of the Dark Ages. He was the right person, at the right time.

  Just like Ari was in her age.

  Now she was stuck here, about to be crisped like a marshmallow set too close to the fire. And it was his fault. Arthur might have tempted Ari back to this time with visions of the chalice, but Merlin was the one who had to keep his friends from being killed by his wicked old self. Proving they were part of the original cycle meant one thing: their problems had gotten much bigger than stealing from the Arthurian legend.

  Now they had to survive it.

  He burst into the room at the top of the tower and ran to the single porthole of a window to check on Ari. She was still fighting, her arms starting to wilt with the effort of striking endless blows. The dragon had left scorch lines in the ground, great black gouts. A crowd had gathered, but Merlin couldn’t tell if they were cheering on Ari or the dragon.

  He turned back to his tower. Spell ingredients covered every inch of the room and were stacked upon each other. Back in the olden days, he’d hoarded as much magic as he could, testing how it worked and if he could use it. This wasn’t the cozy home of an eccentric old man. It was an arsenal.

  Merlin tossed aside books and stones, mortars and pestles, a set of magic-binding manacles that made him shiver. No sign of dragon-based enchantments. Outside, the cheers flared—which meant someone had gotten wounded. Judging by the size of the cheer, it wasn’t mortal. He kept looking, pitching around enchanted jewelry and ogham stones.

  Another cheer. More bloodthirsty, this time.

  He ran to the window. Ari was on her knees, head bowed, as the dragon lorded over her. Its open jaws revealed rows of teeth. A few knights had rushed to Ari’s side, but the dragon ignored them as they hacked uselessly at its ankles. The beast was on a mission.

  Arthur dithered, his hand at Excalibur’s hilt. “Pull the sword, you fool!” Merlin shouted. Of course, Old Merlin was right at the king’s side, whispering poisoned nothings in his ear; he couldn’t have Arthur dying because of his own plan to remove Gweneviere and Lancelot. Merlin’s brain trembled. How could he be both trying to kill Gwen and Ari, and trying to save them at the same time? Was he the true bad guy of Camelot? The hidden good guy? The about-to-split-apart-from-time-paradox guy?

  A figure burst through the crowd from the castle. Jordan pelted into the courtyard, red-faced from running all the way down from the tower, her sword brandished, hacking at the dragon with an unrestrained fury—every unspent iota of rage she must have built up over months as a handmaiden came out now, her sword hitting the scales so hard the metal sparked. The dragon finally swiped at her with a lazy talon, but Jordan ducked, stabbing the dragon’s leg.

  It turned to her with sudden interest.

  “Jordan, you fool!” Merlin whisper-shouted. She was going to get herself killed, and she didn’t even like Ari. She pitched her sword and it stuck in the dragon’s thigh, lodged in a paper-thin slit in the armor of scales. The dragon roared flame, forcing the crowd back.

  Jordan tried to borrow a sword from a nearby knight, and when he wouldn’t give it to her, she stole it and knocked him out with a swift roundhouse kick.

  “Oh dear,” he muttered. Jordan would pay for that one. Merlin hoped the embarrassed knights would wait until the dragon was defeated before tackling Jordan, but they seemed to find her a much more compelling foe. Half a dozen of them wrestled her to the ground and grabbed the sword, while Ari baited the dragon farther from the crowd.

  Merlin hummed, raining sparks from the window, hitting Ari’s sword with a bit of magic that would make it easier to wield. Quicker, smarter, able to find the chinks in the dragon’s armor. Ari had a soft spot for a good enchanted sword. The blade glowed with a rainbow sheen for a moment, and Ari looked up to the tower. He awaited her signature smile, but she only gave him a heavy nod and got on with the fight.

  Old Merlin looked up, too, as if he’d felt the first ominous drops of rain.

  Had he seen the sparks of Merlin’s magic? Had he noticed the change in the sword? Merlin had to hurry, returning to his ransacking.

  “Damn dragons!” he whispered fiercely.

  “Dragons!” came a screeching echo.

  He looked around and saw a dark cloth rustling. He rushed to the end of a large table and whipped away the scrap of dusty old tapestry, revealing a large brown owl.

  “Archimedes!” The bird looked far meaner than he remembered, with a harshly hooked beak and an uninviting gleam in his eyes. Even so, Merlin was delighted to find his old friend. “Do you know where the enchantment is to control the dragon?”

  “Dragon!”

  “Can you do nothing but repeat me?” he asked. “Gods, were you just a glorified parrot?”

  Archimedes squinted and motioned his hooked beak across the room at a dusty little cupboard. Merlin rushed over and flung the thing open. Inside was an animated scene. It looked, for all the universe, like a child’s primary school diorama, though it was a complicated bit of magic with several pieces in motion. Stick figures represented Lancelot and Gweneviere, one adorned with a scrap of Gwen’s handkerchief and the other with a lock of Ari’s short, dark hair.

  “When did he even have a chance to cut that off?” Merlin asked with a shudder.

  The dragon was animated by a single scale, still bloody on the underside.

  He shuddered harder.

  There, looking on, was a tiny wooden falcon. That piece represented Merlin, and seeing it was like being hit with a sledgehammer of déjà vu. He reached in the pocket of his robes. His own wooden merlin figurine from the market on Lionel was still there.

  He threw the scene to the ground, raised his foot and tried to stomp the enchantment apart, but only ended up yowling in pain. This called for magic. He summoned everything he could and sang an old battle song. When he flung his hands apart, the diorama split, stick figures blasting to pieces and the dragon scale shattering. Only the little wooden bird remained unharmed, tottering in the wake of the tiny explosion.

  He hadn’t the heart to destroy it. When his life started in the crystal cave, it was the only thing he’d had to his name. The only piece left of whoever gave him up.

  He doubled over, exhausted. “Too much magic,” he muttered, stumbling to the window just in time to see the dragon lift heavily on its wings, dripping blood in several places, and fly off toward the hills in the distance. Arthur grinned and lifted Ari’s arm in triumph as the crowd went mad. So much for Old Merlin’s plan to rid Camelot of Arthur’s favorite new knight, he thought smugly. If anything, this had cemented Lancelot’s place at Arthur’s side.

  Ari looked more destroyed than triumphant. She was on her feet, though, and that would have to be enough for now. Some days were for saving the universe. Some days, still breathing was all one could hope for.

  “Merlin!” the bird cried. “Merlin!”

  “Archimedes, do you recognize me?” He flushed with delight. It couldn’t hurt if a bird knew his true identity, could it?r />
  Archimedes screeched and extended a talon toward the stairs. Hollow footsteps sounded, and then dark-blue robes appeared, stitched with stars and moons.

  “Oh,” he squeaked. “That Merlin.”

  After all this time, he was facing himself. Pale skin riddled with wrinkles and liver spots. Deep, intent frown lines. Bright brown eyes. And over them, epically bushy eyebrows, overgrown and gray, which now thanks to Val had been tamed into two robust lines that had infinite character. Merlin knew that face from the inside—seeing it from this angle gave him a case of existential vertigo.

  Did Old Merlin feel it, too? A deep sense of recognition? The old mage moved his jaw back and forth, as if chewing on week-old bread. Every moment spent waiting was a stone, weighing on Merlin’s nerves. “Please say something,” he found himself blurting.

  “How did you get in my tower, you little carbuncle?” Old Merlin asked.

  “Someone must have left the door ajar in all the dragon fuss,” he said, suddenly very happy that he wasn’t Ari and that lies did, in fact, become him. But his old self didn’t seem convinced. He took in the destroyed diorama, the look in his eyes a shade darker than curiosity.

  A hum started so low that by the time Merlin heard it, sparks were already headed toward his face.

  So, this was what it felt like to be knocked out by his own magic.

  When he woke, a rope was thrust into his hands, and he was lowered through a hole in the ground. He looked up, but his evil old doppelmage was nowhere to be seen—only the receding face of a castle guard. Merlin hollered, but it was no use. He was in the bowels of the castle. No one would hear him.

  The narrow circle of dirt opened up slightly, and he hit solid ground. The rope was tugged back up, leaving him in a small, smothering pit that made a dungeon seem like a four-star hotel. “Oubliette!” he cried, remembering the word the French had given it much later in history. “My gods, you’ve put me in an oubliette.”

  “Hello, mage,” came a voice near his elbow.

  He scrambled and lit his fingers with magic, revealing several things he wished he hadn’t. Sewage ran freely along one wall. Human bones were half-embedded in the dirt floor. Jordan was in her undergarments.