Sword in the Stars

by Cori McCarthy

  “No bite?”

  “Later.” Ari shrugged the rest of Gwen’s dress off, and Gwen stepped out of the circle of it. Ari didn’t press her with glances or touches or her mountain of aches. She stepped into the shower, turned it on as hot as it would go. Gwen joined her, their bodies close but not quite touching in the steam. Ari washed Gwen’s hair, pulling the knots out of her curls, watching Gwen’s eyes close.

  “You’re doing amazingly well for someone who gave birth yesterday.”

  “I raided the first aid box.” She smiled. “Zero pain now. Just so… tired.”

  “Me, too.”

  Next, Gwen washed the grime off Ari’s sore arms, her shoulder muscles, and more. The water drained darkly from the rich soil of a planet that could no longer grow life. When Gwen made it to Ari’s fingers, she kissed each one with an attentiveness that left Ari remembering better times. “What would you say to me right now if you didn’t think you were about to die?”

  “Go dancing with me,” Ari said. Gwen laughed. “I saw you dancing once, in Dark Matter on that moon colony.” Ari smirked. “You remember, lady? You totally drugged me and took me back to your spaceship like a caveman.”

  “Stop being cute.” She put the soap down and laced their fingers. “I’ll go dancing with you, but not on that ridiculous moon. There’s a platform club on Tanaka with the best starscape.” Gwen’s body was unfurled, faceup, breasts pressing into the space beneath Ari’s.

  “Forgot how well we fit together,” Ari marveled.

  Gwen leaned the rest of the way, sealing their bodies together in the stream. Her head rested over Ari’s heart. “Really? I didn’t.”

  When Gwen left the bathroom, Ari tried to get a comb through the thick, black tangles of her hair. Impossible. She spied Val’s clippers and didn’t think twice as she sheared most of it away. Ari tied a towel around her waist and glanced in the mirror at her work. She looked sharper, new, older. The shave felt good, especially when she ran her hands up the back and through the messy points at the front. The circular scars across her shoulders and back were bleached from being hidden under armor for so long in Camelot. It was a strange dream already. Too unsettled and unsettling to be true.

  She stepped out and felt Gwen’s eyes on her. “I did a thing.”

  “I like it.” Gwen looked over her own body, wounded. “I’m not the same, Ara.”

  “Well, that’s perfect because I’m different.” Ari moved forward, sat next to her, sliding one hand on Gwen’s perfect hip, fingers tracing artistically woven stretch marks.

  “I’m serious,” Gwen said gently, and Ari only nodded, the tide of her feelings pulling and cresting, pulling and cresting.

  “Yeah, me, too.” Her voice broke until she cleared her throat.

  “What I wouldn’t give for something to wear that didn’t once belong to Kay.” Gwen sighed, holding up a shirt with several holes.

  “Shall I order us something from Mercer?” Ari joked.

  “Not funny. Although the convenience should never be underestimated. This is what I learned from Camelot, where it took a whole month to sew one dress. The real power is in convenience.” Gwen squinted. “I’ve been thinking about how the Mercer boycott failed after the fall of the last Administrator. Unlike Lionel, most planets and settlements can’t afford not to work with Mercer. We need to be prepared beyond defeating them. We need to have a plan for rebuilding the universe.”

  “What these galaxies need is a Mercer Company that isn’t corrupt.” Ari grabbed the chalice off the shelf. “I saw what happened to Arthur when he asked the right question and drank the water. It’s like his eyes were opened to the entire universe. To all kinds of people. To the fight for equality. It didn’t make him see the truth. It made him believe it was possible.”

  “You want to trick the new Administrator into drinking from the chalice like Arthur did,” Gwen said, surprise—and approval—taking over her tone. “And how are you going to do that?”

  “I’ll be persuasive.”

  Amal wasn’t nearly as big as the largest Mercer freighters, but she was still big enough for her docking deck to swallow Error as if the craft were a drop of water.

  Once on board, Ari and her friends were escorted to a large, circular amphitheater full of hundreds of Ketchans. The swirl of her native tongue made the room feel dizzying, bright—like a dream. Distinctly colored thawbs marked the thirteen founding families. Even Yaz had pulled on a steely blue abaya over her black leather pants and khanjar knives. She had tossed a second one at Ari before they left Error, and Ari had draped the robelike garment over her clothes, trying not to imagine how much Merlin would like it.

  Gwen kept close to Ari, her long curls braided into the same crown Ari had been captivated by that day she crashed Gwen’s tournament. Somehow it hinted at royalty even more than the gold points of the circlet Jordan had saved.

  Yasmeen introduced them to a few dozen people. All of whom seemed tentatively hopeful about Ari’s presence, none of whom had known her parents or Ari as a child. No matter how relieved she was that they had returned—that Ketchans weren’t gone from the universe—Ari couldn’t fight the feeling of being an outsider. Maybe because she was.

  In the amphitheater, an elder from each of the founding families gathered around a circular table, and a person with a booming voice translated their messages into the Mercer language. They spoke of being in exile for so long, of coming back because of Ara Azar’s public stand against the Administrator.

  Ari felt a bit speechless when the room seemed to tilt toward her expectantly, all of the Ketchans waiting to hear her plan. Somehow her chalice idea seemed silly now… or perhaps too hard to explain to anyone who hadn’t seen firsthand what the cup could do.

  Yaz elbowed Ari. “They want to know where you’ve been.”

  Gwen spoke up. “We’ve been in the past. After Mercer demanded our child, we went back in time, hoping to secure a safe place for the baby to be born and to find a mystical weapon that might be powerful enough to stop Mercer’s cruelty and domination.”

  “Excalibur!” someone called out.

  “Excalibur is… gone,” Ari said, her voice giving away her lingering grief for the sword. “But we have something else. Something designed to instill truth and understanding.”

  “What is it?” one of the elders asked, leaning over the table.

  “That’s hard to explain, and we’re going to keep it secret until the time comes to employ it.” Ari and Gwen exchanged glances; this was what they had agreed upon in Kay’s old room. Secrecy could only help their cause. “Mercer mustn’t know what we mean to do before we do it.”

  “And what would you need from us to use this weapon?” the same elder asked. “We do not have the kind of numbers we would need to face them in battle.”

  “But we’re not helpless, either,” Yasmeen said, calling out toward the entire assembly. “We have a chance to make a difference. Now, before it’s too late.”

  Some people cheered; others voiced that this was impossible.

  Ari spoke over them. “Yasmeen is right. Mercer is powerful and impressive, but no armor is without its chink. We find Mercer’s weakness, and we use our weapon.” Ari took Gwen’s hand. “The last time we faced Mercer, we were able to exploit the Administrator’s need for a dramatic show, for legitimacy and control. We need to learn what this new Administrator values, and we will know her weakness.”

  A new elder stepped forward, wearing a deep-purple thawb and wrinkles that seemed almost familiar to Ari. “Forgive me, but I must know. You stepped into the past and lived there for some time. How did you return to this future without disrupting the time continuum?”

  Ari glanced at Val, who cast his eyes downward over the loss of Lam, no doubt. “We were careful. And we had a sort of… map from the future that made it possible. Also, one of us stayed behind to make sure the story remained the same.”

  Jordan surprised everyone, speaking in a booming voice. “Of course, some
things changed anyway.” All of them spun to face her. “I speak of CamelotTM.”

  “Excuse me?” Gwen asked. “What are you talking about?”

  “As far as I can tell, the only thing that has changed since we went to the past is Mercer’s theme park on Old Earth’s moon.”

  “Mercer’s what?” Val asked.

  “Old Earth’s moon is full of weird colonies named after the old vehicular gods,” Ari said.

  “Not in this time line,” Jordan said, crossing her arms over her massive chest. “It’s an entertainment facility. They released a new ad just this morning, an aggressive one, too. It pushed through all the pop-up blockers on Error.”

  “Run it,” Gwen demanded.

  One of the elders drew interesting circles on the round stone table, calling up a hologram advertisement that reached the height of the ceiling and boomed sound throughout the amphitheater. The incandescent blue made them all wince.

  Ari beheld the glowing image of a sword half-sheathed in moon rock. “What the—”

  “Come one, come all to King Arthur’s court…” an old-timey voice bellowed, “… at CamelotTM! Where all your Old Earth dreams come true!”

  Ari swore exquisitely.

  The commercial zoomed out, showing off the surface of a familiar gray moon—now cluttered with some abominable hybrid of the actual Camelot, Lionel, and Mercer’s knack for selling everything. The commercial flashed a series of aerial shots. Of gift shops and rides—and employees wearing medieval garb.

  “It’s a demented amusement park!” Val exclaimed. “How tacky.”

  Gwen gasped. “Those are my people. Look! They’re being forced to work there!” The Lionelians seemed to be perfectly framed in the ad, their suffering unsuccessfully masked by sparkling filters.

  Ari squeezed Gwen’s hand. “It’s a trap. That’s why they released the ad today. They must know we’re back somehow, and they want us to come. To try to save your people.”

  The ad continued. “And as a grand finale to your stay in the land of medieval dreams…”

  “I just threw up in my mouth,” Val muttered.

  “… try your hand at the Sword in the Stars. Pull it free and become the new Mercer Administrator! You could be the next king of the cosmos!”

  Ari lost her breath. The hologram focused on a sword, showing dozens of people trying to lift it free while triumphant music blared. The commercial zoomed in until the sword was the only thing visible. It radiated light in a way that felt beyond anything Mercer could manufacture.

  “Doesn’t even look like Excalibur,” Val noted. “Morons.”

  “That’s because it isn’t Excalibur. This is a different sword,” Ari said, tingling all over as she stepped forward, drawn in.

  “That sword has been lodged in the rock of the moon since humans first pioneered space,” one of the Ketchan elders said. “It’s always been there. Mercer has just capitalized on it. Built around it like a fortress.”

  “They did,” Ari murmured, pulling herself closer to the ad. Why a Mercer stronghold on this small moon?

  “Pause!” She stepped so close that she was face-to-face with the hologram of the sword. Her eyes trailed the hilt to the spot where she’d first read the name of Arthur’s famed blade.

  She pointed to the finely etched word. “This sword is Kairos.”

  Merlin stepped out of the portal and onto the edge of the lake. It had the same surface as ever: silver and gleaming, like a weapon polished and ready. But it also looked different than it had in the time of Camelot. Less defined at the edges, streams running to and away from it in all directions.

  Avalon crouched in the mists on the far side, though Merlin didn’t know if they called it Avalon yet—he had gone that far back. The air was heavy with the cries of birds.

  At first, he didn’t hear the woman screaming.

  She had waded into the shallows, her hair like pale weeds, a man trudging next to her, carrying an iron knife.

  Merlin ducked behind a screen of weeds. He didn’t know exactly what he was about to witness. He only knew he’d told the time portal to send him back to the beginning of Nin’s story. The truth was hiding in the past, and he was the only one who could go back to find it.

  He needed to know how to stop the Lady of the Lake.

  The woman crouched in the water up to her chest. Merlin peeled his attention away and found he wasn’t the only one watching—an entire village had poured out to see this moment. When the woman screamed, Merlin was surprised the sky itself didn’t tear open. The water thickened and darkened with blood. The knife plunged down, and a few moments later the man raised a tiny child.

  It cried as hard as its mother had just screamed.

  This must be the birth the enchantresses had told him about—the only other birth that ever happened in the waters of time.

  The woman disappeared under the water, and Merlin worried that she had drifted into death, but after a moment she came back up, shining and wet, gasping for breath.

  That’s when the man started to yell at her.

  They spoke a tongue that beat like a battle drum, tense and taut. Merlin was mesmerized, though he didn’t know half the words they used, and the others were only kin to English. One word he picked out, over and over. “Sunn.” At first, he thought they were talking about the sky overhead, the clouds that refused to break.

  “No,” the woman said softly. “Dohtor.”

  “Dohtor,” the man said again, bitter as salt.

  He was angry that she’d given birth to a girl instead of a boy. The man flung his hands up and argued with the heavens, as if they’d given him a bad deal. Merlin stole a word from the angry stream. Steorra. Was he claiming that their child had been born under the wrong stars? That the heavens hadn’t aligned to give him the one thing he wanted?

  The woman shook off his words like dirty water, clutching the tiny child to her breast.

  “Nimue,” she said, holding out her baby for everyone to admire. If they were as upset as the man in the lake, they did a better job of hiding it. Merlin felt the air fill with their celebrations as they played crude flutes and beat drums and cried out her name.

  “Nimue. Nimue.”

  Merlin needed to learn everything he could about Nin if he was going to defeat her. Which meant staying here until she turned into an inhuman being—however long that took. However hard it was to keep away from Ari and Gwen and Val.

  Yes, he could jump back to whatever moment in time he wanted now that he could use his powers without aging down into an embryo. But how long would he last without his friends? Especially like this—small and alone and uncared for in a time when violence seemed a given, rather than an option?

  He was crouched in the reeds, on the verge of a panic attack, when someone crept up on him. Merlin whirled at the footsteps and found he was being watched. A woman with long, light-brown braids approached him with a curious look. “Bearn?” she asked in a low tone.

  Had she just called him a bear?

  “Hello,” Merlin said, hoping that the greeting translated. “I’m just… here to see the baby. I’ll be going now.”

  He didn’t care how nice she looked. He couldn’t trust anyone. And not to sound like a contestant on one of those Mercer reality shows where they crammed a bunch of unlikely roommates in a spaceship together and sent one out the airlock every week, but he wasn’t here to make friends.

  The woman looked at him like he was speaking a babbling baby language. Merlin realized he’d just said all of that out loud. “Fewmets,” he cursed.

  “Fewmets?” She pointed to him, then put a hand to her chest. “Aethelwyn.”

  “No, no!” Fewmets was a term for dragon droppings and definitely not his name. But what was he supposed to call himself? He’d picked Merlin when he woke up as an old man with nothing but a tiny falcon in his hand. And then there was Kairos, the only other baby ever born in this lake. The time child, the chosen one. Did he deserve to claim that name after he’d dro
pped Gwen and Ari’s baby at the beginning of a cruel cycle?

  He pointed at himself. “Kai.”

  “Kai,” the woman repeated. She brought food out of her pockets—dark berries and dried meat—and held it out, luring him closer like a wild rabbit. Merlin ran to her, so hungry that he acted like the desperate little kid he was.

  After all of this time, was he going to be undone by snacks?

  Aethelwyn only smiled and led him back to her village, following baby Nimue’s procession. The woman had a tiny hovel that she lived in alone. Merlin had years to wait out as Nin grew up, and he aged through time in his mortal body, so he dropped into the little rope bed in the corner and decided to stay. He’d promised Gwen to take care of Kairos, and in a very convoluted way, that’s what he was doing.

  As he learned to speak the harsh, ringing words of this time, Aethelwyn’s story became clear. Her husband and children had been killed in a raid, and she was lonely enough to take in a stray. When she asked about his parents, he fumbled for words that fit this era, and also fit them.

  “Cwene,” for Gwen. That was easy enough.

  But there was no word that seemed to do for Ari. Hero hadn’t been invented yet. Maybe heroes didn’t exist to these people. There were only raiders who were right according to them, and wrong according to those they plundered and killed. They had many words for warrior—but they all meant man.

  So Merlin chose wine, which meant friend.

  Late one snowy night, when the tallow candles were almost out, Aethelwyn finally asked what had become of his family.

  “I don’t know,” he said, the English words slipping out along with a few tears.