“What’s the magic word?” Merlin muttered—and then everything stopped.
From all directions, women flowed in, like cold streams moving through warm water. They had Merlin’s full attention, and he wasn’t the only one.
The enchantresses of Avalon commanded the crowd more fully than the king of Camelot had. Most probably feared them, but Merlin was struck with awe at the sight of these magical women. There was an untamed pride in their gazes, their bodies. They ranged in age from early teens to the most wizened eldress, and while some were as white as a stereotypical unicorn, light browns and dark skin tones were also present. Magical ladies had been known to come from all over the world to gather in Avalon. Merlin was surprised—and yet not surprised—to see that a few of them might not have been assigned female at birth. Avalon always had been ahead of its time.
Why hadn’t he remembered that when he thought back on this closeminded past?
The enchantress at the forefront went to the fire, knelt by it, and whispered a few words that made it claw toward the sky.
Merlin tugged at the neck of his robes as heat flared, muttering, “Nice pyrotechnics.”
The young woman who’d caused the conflagration stood tall. Her name wafted to Merlin on a wind from the past. Morgause. He hadn’t seen her in literal ages. Crashing hair, eyes dark as omens. She was vibrantly powerful and wondrously beautiful, and the firelight sang on her soft brown skin. Still, Merlin couldn’t help but feel the pinch of loss. Some small part of him had been hoping to see Morgana.
But she wasn’t part of Arthur’s story yet.
And in the future, she was finally dead. For the first time, Merlin’s stubborn heart admitted that he might never see her again. They’d been bound together for so long that he’d taken for granted that she was part of his story. Maybe this was just one more sign that it was coming to an end.
No. Morgana had fought to send him back here for the chalice. And he was going to take it—for her as much as anyone else—the second it was out of Arthur’s hands.
“Where is Arthur?” Morgause asked, and the people of Camelot gasped. Some of them shouted, “King Arthur!” But the enchantresses of Avalon recognized no king. Their power came straight from the earth. The pure stuff.
Arthur stepped forward from his pack of uneasy guards, Gweneviere on his arm.
“We are honored by your presence,” he told the enchantresses.
“And we are intrigued by your notion of peace. Here, an offering to guide your venture.” Morgause held out a cup. It was a small thing in life, smaller than Merlin had made it in memory. Dirty white, not the pure cream he remembered. Lined with gold, a temptation to the lips of anyone who held it. This was the chalice Arthur had sent them back to find.
This was the key to taking down Mercer. To ending the cycle.
“For a man who visited our shores without pretense,” Morgause said. “A vessel made of the bones of a dragon who was slain in an attack on his city. We tracked the creature back to its cave, where it died. There are so few left, and it is deeply wrong to let such a being pass out of the world without honoring its life and preserving its magic.”
Old Merlin harrumphed loudly from the back of the crowd. “You want the beast to keep attacking us from beyond the grave?”
“I’m not convinced that dragon was acting of its own free will,” Morgause said. “Arthur might have enemies who spurred it on. Enemies who are here now.”
Which shut Old Merlin right up.
Arthur accepted the cup. The moment seemed to stretch, nearly to the point of tearing. Merlin wondered if the old animosity between Camelot and these magical women was about to heat back up.
Then Gwen stepped forward, bowed to Morgause as a man would, and said, “Camelot and Avalon are more alike than they are different. Our lands are one land. So may our people become one people.”
Morgause gave her a hard-won smile, and the enchantresses dissolved into the crowd. The music started up again. The party returned to full volume.
Lamarack entered the melee of bodies as dance patterns formed. Soon everyone was coupled off—and Lam had somehow maneuvered into a spot right across from Morgause.
“It seems I’m not the only one on a mission tonight.” Merlin remembered how they’d nursed a crush on Morgana in the future. Enchantresses seemed to be their cup of tea. With just the right amount of milk and sugar.
Merlin found Arthur again, standing off to one side of the dancers, handing off the chalice with the timeless awkwardness of someone who’s been given a gift they have no idea what to do with. The cup went straight into Old Merlin’s hands. He turned away from the bonfire and the festivities, heading toward the castle. The chalice was in motion.
It was time.
Merlin stepped forward, so intent on the chalice that he ran directly into a little girl. She was no older than ten. She didn’t back away, just smiled with a shyness that made him distinctly nervous. “Would you dance?” she asked.
“No! For several reasons!” Merlin shouted. The girl drew back as if a spark from the bonfire had landed on her skin. “I’m sorry. I’m…” But she was already running away. Merlin had gotten upset and taken it out on a child. He truly was as bad as his old self.
He ran away from the moment, trying to leave it behind. But it stuck to his skin. Sweat slid off him, and the dancers were everywhere, jostling him as he tried to catch a glimpse of Old Merlin with the chalice. All he saw was Lam moving in on Morgause. They broke the pattern of the polite dancing. Their bodies slid together. Enchantress and future knight had no use for the rules of this place, and together they started to—Merlin could conjure up only one word for it—grind. Merlin sparked with jealousy. He would never dance like that with Val again.
Would he even see Val again? How could they possibly get him back from Nin?
“The plan,” he muttered. “Stick to the plan.”
There was Old Merlin—already halfway to the castle gate. Merlin pelted across the party. He’d come back to this ruinous place, risked everything worthwhile he’d found in the future for that dead dragon cup. He chased it through the fug of bonfire smoke and the rude press of bodies. His vision blistered with heat spots as Old Merlin entered the castle. The chalice went with him.
And in that moment, the skies ripped open.
Rain hit Merlin hard.
Every shard of water that broke over him was a memory. No—Morgana had showed him memories. These were moments of time, full and warm and real. He lived through meeting Val again, on Lionel. Val asking if Merlin’s sudden appearance was a set-up. Val smiling at him in Error’s tiny kitchen, that I ♥ NEW NEW NEW YORK T-shirt. Val staying up with him all night during the siege, not touching, the space between them deeper than dark water. Val kissing him so deeply that Merlin dissolved. Val dissolving in the time portal, right out of his hands.
He needs you, Merlin, Nin said. Now Merlin lived a different moment. Not an old piece of time. Something terrifyingly new. Val drowning in dark water. He grew up on a planet without water, poor thing. He doesn’t know how to swim. I thought I was setting him free, but he’s running out of time.
Merlin stopped. He spun away from the castle, the chalice. His heart pounded in his increasingly smaller chest, and he let out a small scream. Nin was either messing with him or Val was dying. Or most likely both. And he couldn’t let that happen.
Nobody noticed him sprinting for the city gates. They were too busy dancing and carousing and eating Old Merlin’s flying pies. The rain didn’t seem to bother anyone else, and Lam and Ari and Gwen remained fully focused on the party, as if Nin’s voice were only in his head.
Merlin ran deep into the ancient woods of Camelot, a place as twisted as every thought of Val’s death. The colors of oak and ash and birch blended into a lifeless gray as Merlin reached out with his magic—to do what? He closed his eyes, branches reaching out and roots tripping him. He went back to the year on Lionel he’d spent staring at Val’s dimples instead of dati
ng him recklessly.
“Never enough time,” he muttered. They’d barely gotten together when the story cracked them apart. Now there wasn’t enough time for Merlin to save him. He’d never run all the way to the lake before Val stopped fighting and filled his lungs with water. Merlin clutched at his chest. His heartbeat seemed to blur at the edges. The feeling radiated outward, cold and blank. Was this what death felt like? He opened his eyes, but he wasn’t in the forest anymore. He was falling through darkness. Through absence.
With a solid splash, he found himself in the shallows of a darkly glittering lake.
The lake.
Merlin didn’t have time to contemplate how he’d gotten here so fast. Val was barely visible at the center of the black water, one hand grasping for the sky. Merlin cast himself away from the shore with a messy dive.
He swallowed lake water, swam harder. “I’m here,” he shouted, grabbing on to Val’s hand. Merlin wrapped one arm around the shoulders he knew so well and tried not to think about how much smaller he was than the last time they’d been this close. Turning their bodies, he aimed them back toward the shore. He used a bit of magic to buoy them up and focused on his kicking, not strong or steady but good enough.
Val slipped, disappeared under the water. Merlin grabbed him. Heaved him back up. Sparks filled the water, bright blue, as he expended more magic.
More time lost.
When they finally reached the bank, Merlin dragged Val past the edge of the water; he didn’t want Nin touching his boyfriend again.
Val’s eyes slowly rediscovered their focus. His face lit with the saddest smile in the universe. “You have freckles now.”
“I… I do?” Merlin asked. He hadn’t had freckles this morning. They must have been a feature of his youngest years, one that had lain in wait. Whatever magic he’d just used had cost him dearly. Whatever months he’d been clinging to that kept them close in age had slipped away.
But Val was alive. They were reunited. Anything else in the universe could be overcome.
Merlin could feel the great, foolish smile on his face. “Oh, Merlin,” Val said with a wince. He twirled one of Merlin’s damp red curls, then pressed a hand on his cheek. “You stupid, sweet boy. You just gave Nin exactly what she wanted.”
The entire kingdom of Camelot was hungover. Or still drunk.
Ari was both.
Dawn’s rays seared through the high windows in the great hall, baking Ari in her armor. She sat up from where she’d slumped over on the head table, Arthur deeply asleep beside her. Looking around for Gwen, she found the chair on the other side of the king was empty. Ari got to her feet and nearly went down. Arthur stirred beside her, and she hefted one of his arms over her shoulder. He mumbled something along the lines of, “Leave me to die,” and Ari carried him to his rooms as if she’d plucked him wounded from a battlefield.
Which actually worked as a metaphor because parties in Camelot were ragers. Ari hadn’t seen anything like it since she and Kay had found their way into a twenty-four-hour lock-in nightclub on Tanaka. Once she’d deposited the one true king in his rooms, his army of long-legged, huge-pawed hunting dogs barking incessantly as she stumbled out into the same antechamber where she’d snuck behind a tapestry with Gwen.
Gwen.
Almost the entire kingdom was asleep. Could she sneak up to the queen’s rooms unnoticed?
“Merlin,” Ari murmured to herself, a reminder. She needed to find Merlin, to make sure he got the chalice after Arthur passed it off. And Ari desperately wanted to take it for a test drive. To know what it could do. How it could be the answer to stopping Mercer…
Ari checked the tower where they’d sent Jordan back. The cot was empty, and there was no sign of Merlin. While climbing back down the spiral stairs, her feet took her toward Gwen’s rooms. Perhaps Merlin was there.
She wasn’t persuading herself. No, not at all.
Ari found Gwen’s guards dead asleep and decided against knocking. She pressed the door open, closed it behind herself quietly, and looked around. But Gwen wasn’t in the large, canopy bed or any of the smaller chambers attached to the room. And that’s when Ari stopped worrying about her headache and started worrying about the love of her life.
She shot out of the room and began a thorough search of the castle, making sure to drop in on the small hole of the oubliette, which was thankfully unoccupied. When she checked the room she shared with Lam she discovered that no, not everyone was incapacitated. Lamarack and Morgause were in the throes of an encounter so epic they both didn’t notice when Ari walked in—and walked straight out again.
“Fuck,” Ari muttered, shaking her head and the rather potent images nestled therein. “At least someone is enjoying the Middle Ages.”
Ari decided to try the courtyard, passing dozens of downed villagers on the way. She checked for Merlin and found the pile of Gwen’s handmaidens, which at least indicated her last known whereabouts. Ari went to the stables, too hot to stay in this armor a moment longer. She retreated to the back corner where Lam kept some things and pulled off several heavy pieces, pouring cold water from the horses’ trough over herself. Her headache began to ease as she remembered more of what had happened. They’d sent Jordan home; that was good. They’d laid eyes on the chalice; also good. The book still detailed Arthur’s legendary adventures with his knights, and that had to be a victory. They’d made their way into the story without changing the time continuum.
Then why did something feel very wrong?
A hand slipped over Ari’s shoulder, making her jump so hard she nearly punched the person attached to it. Gwen held her palms up, eyes wide. She wore one of her handmaiden’s dresses, not the billowing gold finery from the previous evening. Her hair was down and curly and Ari’s heart pounded.
“You scared the life out of me.”
“I didn’t mean to.”
“It’s okay.” Ari rubbed the water out of her eyes. “I’ve been looking for you and Merlin all morning.”
“I’ve been looking for him, too. Did he leave Camelot? I haven’t seen him since he ran after Old Merlin. You don’t think he got caught again, do you?”
“I checked the oubliette. It’s empty.” Ari took off a few more pieces of armor, and when Gwen started to help, Ari fell out of time for a spell, as if this were nothing more than a friendly morning on Lionel, following a fierce tournament. Gwen pulled off her layers, and Ari was exhaustingly grateful for each one. Until Gwen tugged off Ari’s undershirt, and she was bare breasted before Gwen for the first time in years.
Gwen’s hands found Ari’s biceps and slid up to her shoulders, fingers splayed. Ari’s eyes closed and the most damning sound slipped out. “Your muscles are enormous, Ari. And you’re really dirty, and it’s doing a whole thing for me that I do not understand but really want to go with.” Her hands slid all the way down to the low-slung edge of Ari’s linen unders, hooking into the waistband.
Ari cracked a smile. She stepped out of Gwen’s reach and threw on one of Lam’s clean shirts. Gwen’s instant scowl was adorable. “You know we can’t. Not even for a few minutes.”
“I hate you.”
“I know.” Ari slid her arms around Gwen, and Gwen tucked her head beneath Ari’s chin. Something on Gwen buzzed but Gwen didn’t seem to care, so Ari ignored it as well. “She’s going to be okay,” Ari said, knowing that Gwen’s thoughts couldn’t be far from Jordan.
“What if no one found her fast enough?”
“She’s going to be okay.” Ari kissed Gwen’s forehead, and then they were staring into each other’s eyes, which was ever-so-much more dangerous than being topless. “Captain Mom was prowling about the night we left. She’ll find Jordan.”
“Promise?” Gwen murmured.
Ari leaned closer, tracing Gwen’s lips with her thumb. What had Nin called them? Magnets. Yes, they were magnetic, and she swore she could feel their bodies lining up in the way that pulled fast and forever. Ari was painfully aware that each breath like
this was a gamble, but before she could pull away, Gwen buzzed again. “Lady, as much as I enjoy vibrating pleasures, did you sneak something from the future back with you?”
“It’s just my watch. I think it’s finally broken. It’s been trying to give me a news notification since last night.”
“Wow, news from a distant future. Mercer has really outdone itself this time.” Ari picked up Gwen’s wrist, eyeing the slim piece of tech she’d hidden beneath a jeweled bracelet. “You know this is my watch.”
“No. It’s mine. You gave it to me on Urite. Remember?”
Ari winced. “I remember. When we got torn apart… when Morgana…” A thunderclap of a thought pounded through Ari’s hangover. She pushed Gwen away, leaning over to support herself on her knees.
“Ari, what’s wrong?”
“Nin. She’s so motherfucking evil. I mean, she’s good.”
“Are you saying she’s good or evil? I’m not following.”
“She’s really good at being evil. She told me that you and I are like magnets to her. That she’s amused by pulling us apart. She’s the one who tore me from your side in the portal. And she acted like she’d done it before. Maybe she was behind our separation at Urite.”
“How? Wasn’t that Morgana?”
“Yes and no. Morgana took me to Ketch, but once we were there, she couldn’t make another portal to get us out again. She always acted weird about it. Weird because it hadn’t been her magic to begin with.” Gwen didn’t looked convinced, but Ari hadn’t wanted to trust Nin from the beginning, and now she really didn’t want to. “We have to get Val back.”
Gwen’s watch buzzed again, and this time Ari picked up her wrist to close out the notification. She clicked on it by accident and a small holographic news bulletin lit up the medieval stable. Both girls scrambled to mute it before someone heard, but then froze when they beheld the lines of bound people being marched onto Mercer police cruisers.
“That’s Ketch,” Ari murmured.
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