Cards of Love

by Sierra Simone

  All were welcome and worshipped on Avalon. For a time, it was beautiful.

  Your mother had two daughters of her body—yourself, of course, and your older sister, Vivienne. Some say it was because of Vivienne that she began to change and harden, but I’ve seen nothing in my visions to think that’s true. I think she began to change the way people often change as they grow older. They forget what it’s like to learn, they forget how to change. They forget their own part in their unhappiness and begin to suspect other people are to blame.

  What is certain is this: the custom was for the Queen of Avalon to have only one daughter. Sons were tolerated, she might have many of those, but once she had a living daughter, she would use her knowledge and magic to make sure she conceived no more. (There was a time, not so far removed from Arthur’s, but far enough, when her consort would be killed after the birth of her daughter, as a sacrifice of thanksgiving, but even in my time, this practice was considered horrifying beyond measure. Barely spoken of, and only in hushed, fearful tones.)

  But Queen Nyneve, for reasons we’ll never know, decided not to use her proficiency with herbs and plants to keep herself from conceiving a second daughter, and so she had you. None would gainsay her to her face, but the scandal of it rippled through every kingdom in the isles and all the holy places from Ireland to Armorica in Gaul. Her transgression was compounded by the mounting proof that your older sister, Vivienne, was without magic—though terrifically intelligent and already wielding a sharp political acumen for such a young age.

  And you?

  You were so full of magic that on the night you were born, two hundred miles away, a ten-year-old boy woke from a dead sleep to find himself cloaked in a silver fall of moonlight that whispered his name. When he fell back asleep, he dreamt of the woman he was fated to love.

  Now he knows that the moonlight whispered his name in your voice.

  But back to the queen and our story.

  Nyneve had broken with the tradition of having only one heir—one daughter who held both magic and earthly power inside her—and now she had two heirs. The power of Avalon was split.

  I’m not sure how she came to decide that it was my fault, but it must have been around the time she sent you and your sister to Tintagel, where Uther Pendragon was holding his court at the time. She never liked me—I came from my own holy island, you see, and dared to advise the king of Britain apart from her—but when she heard from Vivienne precisely how close I was with the king…the things I had done in his service and outside it in order to steer the fate of our nation, I believe that dislike crystalized into something worse.

  I was innocent of this knowledge at the time, veiled from seeing it, and so I only knew that there was a new young woman at court, more beautiful than any I’d ever seen. You were fourteen and so merry and joyful that you could even make the old and grizzled Uther smile. You’d sing for us in the hall on the winter nights, lovely, lilting tunes that made even the coldest corners feel warm, and your laughter often echoed throughout the large rooms of the keep before it was snatched away by the sea’s greedy wind.

  Had I just been a young warrior, a loyal soldier to my king with land and value attached to my name, I would have found a way to beg Uther for your hand. Even the Queen of Avalon would be hard-pressed to deny the king if he wished to tie his court to hers in that way, and I was utterly besotted by you, as young as you were.

  I would have recognized your voice anywhere, you see. And I didn’t yet know what the future held for me. I thought only I’d been lucky enough to find the love fate had set apart for me.

  But I didn’t have land or value, and I wasn’t a warrior. I worked in the shadows, I worked with a very different kind of danger, and I had nothing to offer a young bride. And anyway, my work was only just beginning.

  The next time I saw you, we had a new king. He’d been blessed by your mother and was building a new court very close to Avalon. You were seventeen now, and certainly of marriageable age, and I knew if I asked Arthur, he would do everything in his power to help me wed you. If you wanted, of course, and that was the tricky thing. Did you want me? Did you care for me as I did you? Did you sense, as I did, that silver band of moonlight pulling us together through the mist and fog?

  But perhaps I’d been too busy, away too often at Arthur’s side as he fought his famous battles, and when we finally settled into the new court at Camelot, I came to learn that you were betrothed to another. Pelleas, a young knight with all the things I didn’t have—money, land, battle scars. He was from Avalon itself, and so a great favorite of your mother’s.

  After all we’ve been through now, I’m not ashamed to tell you that I wept when I heard. The moonlight and your voice—I’d held onto the promise of them for so long, through all the cold nights and muddy battles and encounters with death. And somehow, I’d let the moonlight slip through my fingers. It seemed as inevitable as it was torturous.

  I recall that night so vividly. I’d gone down into the woods and was looking back up at Camelot, which was blazing with raucous celebration at Arthur’s homecoming, and I nearly decided not to go back. To leave and go elsewhere, find some other king to serve, some other court where I wouldn’t have to watch you marry another man and bear his children. It even seemed like the night itself was beckoning me on—the breeze blew warm and the trees rustled and the stars glittered and it would have been so easy to walk away from the pain.

  But Arthur needed me, and for Merlin the Enchanter, there would be no other king.

  I stayed.

  The proverbial fatal mistake.

  The legends have been wrong about so many things. My age, my magic, my motivations. But this they got right—by your hand, I was spirited away to a remote place and held there.

  I woke up one morning not long after the night I nearly abandoned Camelot and found myself in a cave, large and dark and dry. You have to understand, it still wasn’t unusual for people to sleep and even dwell in caves—I did so frequently on my journeys—but it was unusual enough after the comforts of Camelot to be disorienting.

  Slowly, I began to fully wake, to trace the outline of the cave’s mouth against a starry field of night sky. There was another light from somewhere, and I realized it was you, sitting next to me with a lamp by your knee and your eyes bright with tears.

  “I’m sorry,” you said. “I’m so sorry.”

  Your mother was forcing your hand, you told me, she was making you marry Pelleas and you had no wish to. So you did what young people across the world do when they’re frightened and jumpy: you came up with a stupid, terrible plan.

  The logic ran like this: you’d run away with me, and then when Pelleas invariably found you—he was doggedly loyal, that one—he’d find you unchaperoned with a man who had the king’s favor, and he’d have no choice but to step aside. To marry a woman who’d compromised herself thus would offend his sense of honor, but he’d never be able to challenge me without losing his tenuous esteem with Arthur. Therefore, he’d drop his suit for your hand and you’d be free of him.

  Of course, the one thing you didn’t feel like you could count on was my cooperation, so you drugged me for the ship’s journey to Bardsey and warded the cave with your spells so I couldn’t leave, although it took only the barest probing with my mind to see that I could easily break your spells if I wanted to.

  I didn’t want to. I wanted to stay wherever you were no matter what the reason, so I never tried to break them. Never even told you I could.

  And by the end, you’d taken so much of my power that I couldn’t break them anymore, even when I desperately wanted to. Such is the irony of life.

  Christ, Nimue, if only you’d asked me. If only you’d said, “Run away with me,” I would have left everything behind, even the king I loved but who no longer needed me as he once did. All the drugs and the spells were so unnecessary when taken in view of how much I longed for you.

  But why would you have known that? We’d barely exchanged two words
at court, I’d never made my love for you known because I had nothing to offer, and for all you knew, I was barely aware of your existence.

  “Why Bardsey?” I asked you after you finished explaining.

  “It’s remote,” you said. “And holy. Pelleas wouldn’t dare spill blood on holy ground.”

  True.

  But it was hard to ignore that however remote and holy it was, it was also my home. They would say later that Bardsey was the island of twenty thousand saints—twenty thousand holy souls interred on this small jag of turf and rock—and that number included the people of the old ways and the Druids as well as the Christians who came after. In many real ways, the island was the source of my power, or, if not its source, its conduit. It was here that I was the most powerful…and the most vulnerable.

  Surely that couldn’t have been a coincidence. But I was blinded by how much I wanted you, how much I wanted to be near you, even if it was as your prisoner as you schemed to avoid a marriage you didn’t want.

  We were in the cave together for three months. And until the end, it was perfect.

  You were innocent, virginal, and let me tell you, it was a heady combination when paired with your inherent joy and merriment. I would get hard just watching you laugh or sing to yourself, harder still when you’d look up and catch me staring and you’d swallow, as if you’d never felt a man’s attention on you before.

  You’d blush when we’d accidentally touch, you’d catch your breath when I said your name. The first time I touched your face, you ducked your head and shivered. And you gasped the first time we kissed, stole the air from right between our lips.

  “I care for you,” I said, brushing hair away from your face. “Let me marry you, Nimue. We don’t even have to wait for Pelleas to find us. We’ll find one of the holy women here or go back to Avalon—or even a church, if you’d rather do that. But please, let me be your husband.”

  You looked so unhappy right then that I pulled back, worried I’d gone too far.

  “I can’t marry you, Merlin,” you said, and the tears you spilled were like acid as they dropped onto the place where my hands clasped yours.

  You couldn’t marry me, you said, but neither could you stop yourself from falling in love with me—or at least I thought at the time. The kisses grew more frequent, heated and long and slow, until inevitably the kisses begat caresses and then the caresses begat sex. Our first time, I’d undressed you and kissed every part of your body I could, fondled and stroked, until you made a cradle for me with your legs and shyly asked me to kiss you as I lay there. To go inside you.

  I did, and it was the first time I shared magic with you.

  I didn’t truly know then, as I know now, what was happening. I didn’t realize that I wasn’t sharing, I was giving, and I equally didn’t realize that my giving became your stealing the deeper in love we fell. Or I fell, at least.

  For several heady weeks, we spent the long hours of the day and night tangled with each other, making love some times and fucking like animals some others, and every time you’d blink up at me with those sultry blue eyes and beg for more of my “glow” as you called it. More of that shimmering magic from my body into yours. And I shared it willingly.

  At some point, you began to tell me you loved me. Shy whispers at first, as if you couldn’t believe it yourself, and then more often, more unabashed. I’d look up from my bowl of stew to find you staring at me. “I love you,” you’d declare, as if my eating stew were some kind of revelation you never could have imagined. Or I’d be washing myself in the small spring-fed pool in the back of the cave, and you’d be teasing me about my catlike obsession with cleanliness, and then your jibes would abruptly transform into grinning statements of love.

  You fell in love like you did everything—happily, merrily, singing.

  But as often as you sang, you cried. I often caught you with tears on your face and your shoulders hunched in and shaking. Sitting by the mouth of the cave, or farther down by the sea, where you thought I could not follow. I could have, could have broken the wards trapping me inside the cave easily, but I also didn’t want to crowd you or press you when you didn’t want to be pressed. I would do what I could to cheer you, thinking that you cried because you feared your mother’s anger or because you didn’t think I’d be willing to marry you after all this, but your sadness had a deeper source.

  And I eventually found out what it was.

  You slept cradled in my arms one night, naked as I liked you, and limp and well-fucked as I liked you even more, and I was close to sleep myself when I felt something wet against my chest. I thought you might be crying in your sleep, and the idea was heartbreaking enough that I leaned back to check. But no, in the low light of the fire, your face was dry. I pulled back even more, nestling you carefully into the blankets and I would have missed it had the firelight not made it glisten.

  A single drop of something golden-clear beading at the tip of your nipple.

  I knew nothing of women and women’s bodies; my destiny from birth had been kings and war. When you told me that it wasn’t uncommon for you not to bleed for months at a time, in response to my observation that we hadn’t needed to curb our lusts for any monthly bleeding, I had no reason not to believe you. But even I knew only breeding women produced milk. I tugged the blanket down farther, shaping my hand to the curve of your belly. It was subtle—so subtle I’d missed it, thinking it just another curve added by our weeks of sleep and sex and eating the food left near our cave by the holy women who honored the Princess of Avalon—but now I knew. My babe grew there.

  For a short moment, I was elated. I can’t even tell you how joyful. I loved you and I’d created a child inside you—what further happiness could I ever grasp at? And perhaps finally you’d consent to marry me, despite my strange position at court and lack of land.

  Then you woke. “What is it?” you asked, all dozy and flush-cheeked with sleep.

  I ducked my head and licked the sweet milk from your breast. “You’re breeding,” I said hoarsely, happily. “You carry my child.”

  You froze then, blinking fast, and your hand came up to cover your breast.

  “Nimue?” I asked, puzzled, and you wrapped yourself in a blanket and stood. You were crying, but your voice was curiously wooden when you said, “I wondered when you would notice.”

  “You should have told me,” I said gently. “Is this what’s been troubling you? Of course I’ll marry you, little moon. It’s been fated to be so; I dreamt of you when you were born, you know. The moonlight spoke in your voice, and the moment I first glimpsed you at court, I knew. Come back to bed, and let me prove to you that fate was right.”

  You winced. “You can’t marry me, Merlin.”

  “I know I have no land or titles, but if I ask, Arthur will—”

  “No,” you grated out. “You can’t marry me because I’m already married.”

  I stared at you, unable to understand. Or maybe unwilling.

  “Don’t you see?” you said, pressing your face into your hands. “Mother made me marry Pelleas in secret months ago. It’s his child. Everything I told you was a lie.”

  “But…then…why…”

  You looked at me with something like pity. “Can you not guess?”

  And then you went down to the sea, and this time, I could not follow because I couldn’t break the wards.

  My power was gone.

  You didn’t return until the next day, and when you did, Queen Nyneve was with you.

  I sat on a small outcrop just on the inside of the cave. I’d been waiting for you to return, watching the rocky approach to our little domicile, not sure if I was going to roar at you like a wounded bear or beg you to stay, only knowing I needed to see you again. I was like a starving man wanting just one more crumb—no matter that the crumb was poisoned. I missed you, I ached for you, even as I felt I could hate you for being married to another, for stealing my power. And most of all, for planning to leave.

  I knew I l
ooked pathetic sitting there—forlorn and bitter and without the strength my magic used to give me—but I didn’t care. I just wanted to see your face and hear your voice.

  And then there you were, dark hair blowing in the wind, blue eyes red-rimmed, that merry mouth pulled into a frown I couldn’t help but regret.

  “Well done,” Nyneve told you when she saw me, and you looked miserable. Despite everything you’d done to me, I wanted to comfort you, to pull you into my arms and tell you I would make everything right.

  But I couldn’t, because you stood just outside the cave, and you’d stolen my ability to leave it. You’d stolen my ability to make anything right ever again.

  I focused on your mother instead. “Arthur will kill you for this,” I informed her.

  “Not when Nimue becomes his advisor,” Nyneve tutted. “Wiser and even more far-seeing than you, because she carries both the power of Avalon and the power of Bardsey in her veins now.”

  I had to admit that while Arthur would die to avenge me, he only could if he knew the truth of what had happened. And who would tell him if I was never able to leave this place?

  “And Pelleas? Your son-in-law? Is he as serene as you are to prostitute your daughter for power?”

  You flinched when I said that, but you didn’t defend yourself.

  “Pelleas is loyal to Avalon,” the queen said coldly. “When I told him what was required of Nimue, he acquiesced immediately. He knew how vital it was to correct the imbalance.”

  “Imbalance?”

  Fury touched her cheeks. “You are the reason my daughters have inherited divided powers—you and your shameless grabbing of this kingdom’s magic. There’s only so much of it, Merlin, and you have been gathering it all to you since the day you were born. No longer. Here you were robbed and here you shall die.”