The baby gave a final-sounding roar, complete with another shower of magical sparks.
Merlin tucked the toy falcon in the little one’s mouth, and the baby went instantly silent. “Oh, so you’re hungry,” Merlin murmured as the baby gummed the falcon heartily. “I am, too. And I do always get a bit sparkly when I need to eat.” He spoke to calm his own racing heart, although he’d brought up an important point.
Where had this child come by such magic? Certainly not from Gwen or Kay.
Was this what Ari had meant when she said the baby was a little different?
“Carbuncle!” Old Merlin’s voice scoured the woods. “Come here and I might not kill you!”
That was a blatant lie. He was going to wipe Merlin right out of the story. Maybe… it didn’t require him anymore. Had he come back to Camelot to die at his own hand? What if this was truly his end, back at the beginning? What if this was how Nin won, and she was watching from her cave—the way she’d made him watch Arthur’s death?
The way she watched everything Merlin did.
The baby cooed with delight, and their fingers glowed, tips like tiny holiday lights, bright and glittering, as if the joy of the falcon was too much.
“Hey, that’s my signature move,” Merlin said.
As if to prove it, sparks exploded farther off in the forest and illuminated the figure of Old Merlin crashing in their direction. “Carbuncle! I can see you! No use hiding now!”
Merlin clutched the baby close and ran deeper into the woods, avoiding all obvious paths, keeping to the soft beds of dark moss, occasionally cracking a dead stick. Had the sparks given away their location?
And how had Gwen and Ari’s baby done Merlin’s magic? Twice?
Merlin had accused his old self of ignoring the obvious. Now here he was, doing the same thing. He found a large black oak to hide behind, stopping to catch his breath and grip the impossible. The baby’s sparkle fingers had dimmed, but they glowed like tiny stars while clutching the falcon—the only evidence Merlin had ever been loved.
Perhaps because he’d just handed it to himself.
“I mean, there can’t be…” Merlin’s voice tiptoed toward the impossible, trying not to scare it away. “Three Merlins?”
The tree that Merlin was standing behind exploded, disappearing in a hailstorm of white sparks. Merlin hunched forward, his entire body shielding the baby.
Old Merlin emerged from between the trees, blazing them to nothing as he walked by. His hands were full of lightning, his eyes burning up all possibilities for mercy. “Give me the child, carbuncle. The augury—”
“It’s not about this baby! You know auguries are vague as fuck!”
Old Merlin raised a hand, one blazing finger leveled at Merlin. He ducked, keeping the baby at the center of his huddled body as the magic hit the tree behind him. It sizzled like a sparkler. Merlin couldn’t keep his hold on the blankets and fight back at the same time, so he ran once more, any sense of direction disappearing in the haze of fire and smoke. He came out, coughing and sagging, back on the shores of the lake.
In one direction, Old Merlin was advancing on him, stalking between the white-hot hearts of burning trees. In the other, the water of Nin’s lake lapped silently. Hungrily.
Oh, good. He was stuck between a rock and an evil place.
“You don’t understand the doom you’re bringing on us all,” Old Merlin growled through a smoke-ravaged throat. “This world needs heroes. It needs Arthur.”
“I agree!” Merlin cried. “But I’ve seen the future. I’ve lived it. This baby might not be the hero you want, but you do need him. You need him so very much.” If he was right about his wild doppelbaby suspicions, killing this tiny person would mean wiping all three of them out of existence in one go.
“Merlin!” Ari cried, bursting out of the woods farther down the shore, sword raised.
Gwen was right behind her. “Where’s my baby?”
Wait, if the sparkly ragamuffin in his arms really was him, did that make Gwen his mother? It was too much to swallow—and yet far better than choking down the idea of Nin as a parent.
Old Merlin turned on Gwen and Ari as sparks hailed from the trees, pelting them with tiny points of fire like unholy rain. Ari took Gwen in her arms, and Old Merlin’s scream lit the night brighter than his magical flame. “You two! In league to destroy Arthur from the moment you appeared in Camelot. Feeding him treachery and lies!”
Val and Lam came running, emerging from the smoke just behind Old Merlin.
“Go back!” Merlin shouted, waving them off.
“We’re not leaving you with him.” Ari leveled her sword, and Old Merlin looked far too happy to duel. Merlin couldn’t believe that he had friends who would stand between him and his sordid past.
Old Merlin’s fingers crackled, bolts of magic leaping out. Ari caught them on the edge of her blade, driven back toward the lake. Merlin ran to Gwen and handed off the tiny one. “Thank you,” he whispered solemnly.
“For what?” Gwen asked, one eye on Ari as she battled the screeching mage.
“I don’t know!” Merlin tried. “A lot of things, apparently!”
He turned back to Ari just as one of the old mage’s bolts caught her across the face.
“No!” Merlin cried, hands sputtering with sparks.
Ari fell back heavily and landed with a crash at the edge of the lake. Lam rushed forward with their sword drawn, but Merlin got there first, throwing himself at the head of the pack.
It was time to take down this ancient nightmare.
A song roared out of Merlin’s throat as his fingers fired up. He raised his hands, calling up a dragon of flame to match the one that had attacked Camelot. The sky above the shoreline filled with its long, flowing lines, its fiery breath.
Old Merlin didn’t miss a beat. He conjured a fire-dragon of his own, one bright sinuous line at a time, green to clash with Merlin’s orange. They met in an explosion above the water, parting to whip at the trees with their long, deadly tails. As they met again and again, the sky turned viciously bright.
Merlin flagged from heat and magic exhaustion, but in the corner of his eye he saw Lam and Val sneaking up on Old Merlin. He needed to keep the old mage distracted. He pushed harder, splitting his dragon in two and attacking from both sides at once. Old Merlin looked delighted and maddened at once. “Perhaps we are the same person, carbuncle! No one else could hold out against me like this!”
The sky sizzled with lightning and the first threatening drops of rain, as if Nin had opened her mouth to disagree on that point. Both Merlins paused, looking up, but the clouds grumbled once and that was it.
Old Merlin’s hands went back to their wild symphonic dancing, and Merlin kept pouring out magic, because he could see no other choice. His dragons bit and reared and breathed fire, and on any other day it would have given him joy.
But today, this fight was going to end him.
He shrank so fast that he could feel it happening, his bones and skin narrowing down. If Merlin had been eleven when he’d left Camelot a few hours ago, he was much younger now. Nine? Eight? Even his mind felt different, like clothes nearly falling off. He needed to stop soon. If he didn’t, he’d slip into the dark place before memories—he was risking the best of his past. The first time he’d met Ari on the moon. The last time he’d kissed Val. The golden days with Arthur, so very long ago. The new wonder of Lam’s friendship. Jordan’s ferocity and Gwen’s bright torch of resistance. Even Kay, the ridiculous. Kay, who wasn’t coming back. Merlin couldn’t bear to lose the shining thought of the people he loved.
He couldn’t let himself forget.
Merlin’s mind lit up as bright as the stars.
Old Merlin was the one who needed to forget. As long as he knew about the baby, he wouldn’t let this go. There was no convincing him that the child wasn’t a threat to Arthur. No reasoning with his fears or the violence that followed in their wake. No winning this fight, because the old mage had hundr
eds of years to waste and Merlin had none.
He let out one last push of magic, his dragon splitting in dozens of fiery directions. A pack of dragons to rival the knights of the round table, each one pointed at Old Merlin’s great hulking beast. Instead of attacking, they flew straight into its mouth, like a brace of arrows released down its throat. Old Merlin’s dragon thrashed and burst but re-formed just as quickly. With a great swipe of its claws, it scattered Merlin’s little dragons into the sky, where they fizzled into nothing.
In that moment when Old Merlin was crowing his victory, Merlin shouted, “Grab him!”
Lam and Val took hold of the skinny old mage, keeping him down. “Restrain his fingers! Cover his mouth!” With the old mage’s access to magic cut off, Merlin limped forward.
Gwen was kneeling in the shallows of the lake, over Ari’s unconscious body. At least the baby was firmly ensconced in her arms. “He’ll be punished for this,” Gwen demanded hoarsely. “The old mage has no idea what a real queen can do.”
“I know what to do,” Merlin said—sounding a little too much like a child bragging to his mother. “And believe me, he’ll be punished.”
He pushed up the sleeves of his robes, which were puddles of fabric now. His breath stuttered with uncertainty. This was something he’d never tried. But over the course of this fight, he’d gotten so young that it freed him from his old ways. Here, finally, was a silver lining of these backward aging shenanigans. Becoming a child had changed the architecture of his mind. There was no lifetime of fear holding him back.
Val had told him the truth: he had time powers.
And he had them because he was tied to the lake.
Like Nin.
Suddenly, he understood himself in ways he hadn’t before. Because he’d come back to Camelot, to this moment, he’d found his lost origins. Merlin knew the place where his story began, the ways that he was different. Having that truth set him free—and in that same moment it set his magic free as well.
It felt like a rushing of dark water inside of him.
It felt like time flowing in every direction.
He closed the gap between himself and Old Merlin. “You thought you beat me,” he said. “But we are more than songs and sparks.”
Merlin didn’t know exactly what to do—but then he remembered Morgana, touching his forehead, gifting him a few hundred years of wretched history. What he needed to do was nearly the reverse. He needed to take the past, steal the baby right out of Old Merlin’s head.
He touched the wrinkles on the mage’s troubled forehead.
And then Merlin was gone, spinning through the darkness. This was different than traveling through portals, behind the scenes of pure time. He was pushing into the folds of personal time—distorted and musty and strange. Still, he navigated it like he was born to the task, as instinctive as Jordan swinging a sword or Kay flying Error.
He crashed around in Old Merlin’s memories of Camelot, finding Uther, the vile Pendragon patriarch. Merlin had gone back too far. He moved forward, through a golden age with the Wart, briefly reliving that miraculous moment of a sword pulled from stone.
Here it was: a coronation, a marriage, a baby kept hidden. Merlin tugged, absconding with any memories of the baby’s existence, but they were connected to other things. It was like a root system—tug on one and the rest came up with it. Every moment the baby had touched had to go, which meant that Old Merlin’s memories of Gweneviere and Lancelot ripped away along with the rumor of their love. His own time as an apprentice went next. He felt the memory of this very fight breaking free, crumbling Old Merlin’s mind when it left.
The old mage howled as Merlin took everything.
Ari was lying on her back in a shallow pool of water beneath a black sky full of crystal stars.
Familiar stars.
She wasn’t on Old Earth.
Ari sat up on her elbows, dizzy from the bolt of Old Merlin’s magic she’d taken straight to the face. She tried to touch the wound, but the pain wouldn’t let her. And what was she doing lying in the city center fountain? She glanced around at Omaira, the capital of Ketch. It was night, but there were still orange lights in distant windows. Signs of life. Gwen’s people? Or had Nin thrust her back to a time when Ketch was still full of Ketchans?
The lights glowed brighter, spreading. Flames painted the city red, followed by screams that reached her as if being filtered through deep water. Which meant Ari wasn’t here; she was seeing what Nin wanted her to see.
Ketch on fire.
“Stop this, Nin!” Ari croaked. “I’ll take your fucking deal!”
Nin plucked her out of the spreading devastation as if drawing a curtain.
Ari was lying in the mercilessly cold water of Nin’s lake. Her friends gathered around her, hauling her limp limbs toward the shore. “Get her out of the water!” Val yelled, his words cottony as if Ari’s ears were still full of Nin’s liquid time magic.
Once she was out of the lake, Gwen grabbed Ari by the front of the shirt. Ari came back to Earth gasping, mind spinning. The screams of Gwen’s people on Ketch were still circling in her ears.
“Gwen,” she said, out of breath. “We have to go home. Now.”
Gwen spoke with measured calm, cradling Kairos to her chest. “You’ve had a serious blow to the head. We’ve all had one of the worst nights of our lives. Take a minute.”
“Every minute here is lost for our future. Ketch is burning.”
“Nin is messing with you, Ari,” Val said. “She could have shown you months ago or years from now.” Ari let him believe that could be true, but she knew Nin had gone from asking to demanding that she take her deal.
Ari beheld how small Merlin had become. He sat beside her with his knees drawn up to his chest, his arms wrapped around thin legs. She’d stopped herself from thinking of him as a child so many times in the last few weeks… but that was over now. She put a hand on his bony little shoulder, surprised when he launched himself into a hug, his head tucked against her chest.
“I’m so sorry. I’m so, so sorry,” he chanted.
“That wasn’t you,” Ari said. “It was Old Merlin.”
Merlin pulled away, chin thrust up in defiance. “And I used to be him. So it was me, back when I was a villain.”
Gwen handed off Kai to Ari and took Merlin by the upper arms. “We are all knights and villains, commoners and kings. A true hero plays every role.” Big tears rolled down Merlin’s face, and Gwen wiped them away with her thumbs. “I am so proud of you. You saved all of us.”
Ari looked for Old Merlin, finding the ancient magician sitting on a log beside the misted lake. He muttered fragments of magic that sent small rocks spinning in the air like a tiny galaxy.
“He’s fucked up,” Val said quietly. “Barely remembers his own name.”
“Arthur!” Old Merlin suddenly shouted. “Arthur? Where are you, boy?”
Lam jogged over to the magician, quieting him with murmured words while Ari turned back to tiny Merlin. “What did you do to him exactly?”
“It looked awful,” Val added as if he couldn’t stop himself.
“I stole his memories of us. Ripped them out. Synapses were… severed. His mind is broken earth and shifting ground now, and it will be for many lifetimes.”
Ari looked at Merlin anew. He was impossibly skinny, his head somehow larger, or perhaps his shoulders had shrunk. “That’s why you didn’t remember us,” she said. “Why you didn’t realize that I was Lancelot and that Gwen has always been Queen Gweneviere.”
“That’s why I didn’t know a great many things.” Merlin’s high voice bled with regret. “I stole them from myself.”
Ari cocked her head. “Merlin, that’s different magic for you. How did you do it? It’s like you channeled Morgana.”
“This place has opened my eyes to a few curious realities about my powers.” Merlin looked at Ari as if he were waiting for her to do something. She smiled and tried not to stare at the way he reminded her of
Kay, back when they’d first met. Her brother had also been chubby-cheeked, red-haired, and full of pouts. “The baby has strange magic, too.”
“Wait, the baby can do magic?” Val asked. “Like you?”
“After they were born they sort of… glowed,” Gwen said, eyeing the sleeping baby in Ari’s arms. “What else can they do, do you think?”
Merlin shrugged. “I don’t think there’s a full answer to that one yet.”
“They were born in the water,” Ari said. “Do you think that had something to do with it?”
Merlin stared out at the lake. “Yes. But I don’t know what it means.”
“You know what it does mean? This baby cannot be Mordred,” Gwen nearly shouted, her expression melting into relief. “Mordred couldn’t do magic in any of the stories! He was a whiny, power-hungry cis boy. See? I told you I knew who my baby was the whole time!”
Merlin coughed, and Ari squinted at the tiny one in her arms. They certainly didn’t look like an entitled princeling with patricidal leanings. Little Kai began to fuss, and Ari bounced them. She couldn’t stop herself from staring at Merlin, gauging his years. Seven… eight? Seven. He was too young now to even think about calling up a portal, unless they wanted him toddling into the Mercer-ridden future.
Ari wouldn’t put him in that kind of danger.
This was what Nin meant when she insisted that Ari would have to take her deal. The future needed them now. The baby had to be protected from both time lines… and so did Merlin. She caught eyes with Gwen, who nodded while chewing on her lips. They both glanced at the mist, the veil that separated Avalon from a harsh past and corrupted future.
Lamarack approached Ari with an unflinching smile. “Not to change the subject from one bleak emotional nightmare to the next, but we’ve not been introduced.” Lam reached out, and Ari wasn’t ready for the pride that poured through her as she handed the bundle over.
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