The End of Magic (27 page)

Quickly and carefully—for to fall would place Merlin wholly at Mab’s mercy—he cupped his hands, feeling for the main thrust
of the magic. When he was sure he had touched it, he turned it gently, not stopping it, but bending its force away from him.
Slowly, he drifted safely back to the ground.

Mab glared at him, breathing hard with the effort the spell had taken. Merlin smiled to himself. Frik had spoken no more than
the truth here a few moments ago. She was weak, her magic failing.

“I’ll show you how weak I am!” Mab cried, as if she’d heard his thoughts.

She flung her hands out before her, fingers spread wide. Her nails became silvery dagger points, then arrowheads shooting
outward on slender deadly shafts. With a shrug, Mab launched all ten of the deadly missiles straight at Merlin’s heart.

In that instant Merlin achieved his apotheosis. He became a Wizard of Pure Thought, the highest stage of wizardry. He did
not think. He did not plan. He simply raised his hands, knowing he must counter her attack. Knowing that failure was not an
option. Knowing he must win.

In the twinkling of a thought, a shield grew in the air between his hand and the arrows, the central iron boss growing a fan
of thick wooden planks that stopped all ten of Mab’s missiles. It was white with a green band around the edge—the Round Table
in miniature.

As the arrows thudded into it, Merlin straightened and flung the shield aside. He saw Mab snarl in disbelief. She had always
mocked his weakness, his inability to master the highest grades of magic.

No more.

But Mab was far from being defeated. She reared back, and in her outflung hand grew a ball of pure brightness that danced
there for a moment before she flung it, swift as a burning spear. Mab was no longer toying with Merlin. Now she was lashing
out with the raw, untransformed power of magic itself, power that could unmake Merlin in an instant.

It took all of Merlin’s power to deflect the elemental flame and send it careening about the room to spend itself against
the carven beams of the roof, charring the praying angels fixed there.

On the heels of the first, Mab flung a second bolt, though she could little spare it, but Merlin brushed that one aside as
well. She did not yet realize that Merlin was only countering her attacks, letting her expend her strength while he did nothing
to fight back. Now he saw her draw deep upon her inner resources, holding her hands out before her and summoning up the biggest
fire-bolt yet, an orb of flame a foot across that roiled darkly beneath its bright surface.

And outside the room, Frik was doing his part.

Merlin had blown Idath’s Horn and summoned Idath’s magic. Time had stopped in the chamber in Camelot where Merlin and Mab
engaged in desperate battle, sealed away from the rest of the world while Mab, distracted from realizing what had been done,
concentrated all her energies upon Merlin.

But it had not stopped elsewhere. Outside, the world went on without them.

Gawain was crowned on Christmas Day. He became King of Britain just as his father had once hoped, though the lands he ruled
over were much diminished by the inroads of the Saxons to the east. Gawain married his childhood sweetheart, and they had
a son named Constans who would come to rule Britain after him.

The Great Comet disappeared from the sky by the autumn of that year, and slowly the ravages of the wounded land began to heal.
Some said it was because Galahad had found the Grail and returned it to Avalon Abbey. Those few who still followed the Old
Ways said that Britain itself was the Grail, ever-renewing, ever-full.

And by the time Gawain died in a rich old age, people already thought Arthur was a myth, for King Gawain was the last of those
who had known Arthur the man. With his death, the last link to that age of marvels was broken, and slowly, as Merlin had once
predicted, they came to believe that Arthur and all his companions were myths, tales from the morning of the world.

Frik helped that along, just as he had from the very beginning. He was first Gawain’s court poet, then Constans’s, then a
traveling bard.

He told many tales of the wondrous King Arthur, who had defeated many foes, fought giants and dragons and enchanters, and
brought peace and plenty to Britain by saying might must always be used in the service of right. He told of Arthur’s beautiful
wife Guinevere, who had loved Arthur’s champion Lancelot. He told of Arthur’s wizard, Merlin, the last of the great enchanters,
who had gained the miraculous sword Excalibur and given it to Arthur so that he might prove himself the true King. He told
of Herne and Morgan, of Uther and Igraine, of the Lady of the Lake and the Old Man of the Mountain, but in all his tales and
stories, Frik wrote nothing of Mab. No one remembered her.

And others who followed him learned his songs and stories, and added stories of their own, of Mark and Tristan, of Iseult
and Perceval. Years passed, and the wheel turned. Slowly the Saxons became Britons, as did the Normans who followed them into
Britain.

Arthur’s story lived on in all of their hearts, each generation telling it over afresh and adding new signs and wonders to
it. They told of the wicked and beautiful enchantress Morgan le Fay, but there were no tales told of the Fairy Queen who had
given Morgan her power.

No one remembered Mab at all.

And slowly the people came to settle on the river Astolat once more, and to build a new city there, though they no longer
remembered that Camelot had once stood here. Camelot was not a real city. Camelot was a beautiful dream of a time long ago,
before the end of magic.

But that was outside the room.

Inside it, Mab readied her last and most lethal attack. Merlin could have no hope of turning it aside.

And so he did not try. His purpose had not been to defeat Mab himself. The Lady of the Lake’s words had taught him that she
could not be defeated, for to make war upon her would only be to give her the power that came through remembering her name,
and it was from fear and worship that all the Old Ones drew their power. And so Merlin had planned only to hold her here,
to distract her while Frik made sure that the people of Britain forgot her completely.

And now they had.

The firebolt rolled through the air toward him, growing larger as it came. Merlin flung himself down and let it pass harmlessly
above him.

It struck the door, and when it hit, it blew a great hole through the door, destroying the cocoon of magic in which the chamber
had been wrapped for so many years. There were cries in the corridor beyond as the great glowing bolt of fairy-fire rolled
through the people standing there, but it did not hurt them. They no longer believed in fairies or fairy magic, and thus it
had no power over them.

Inside the chamber, when she saw that Merlin still lived, Mab snarled and hissed in pure animal fury. She was staggering with
weakness—still dangerous, but only a shadow of her former self.

But in that instant, Mab thought she saw the path to victory. Through the open door she saw the people gathered in the hall.
Frik must have summoned them, Mab decided, in order to try and rescue Merlin from her wrath. But the gnome had played right
into her hands. The pain and suffering of the mortals gathered to gawk at her would fuel her waning powers, and their deaths
would cause Merlin unspeakable agony.

“My strength may be fading,” Mab hissed, “but I can still deal with these poor humans! What do you plan to do, use your puny
swords and axes on me?”

“No,” Merlin said, answering for them. “We’re going to forget you, Mab.”

He climbed through the smoking hole in the door, and walked out into the corridor. Frik was there waiting, and Merlin stood
beside him. The people around him were puzzled at the disruption of their day, but already beginning to forget what had just
happened. Everyone knew there was really no such thing as magic. And none of them had ever heard of Mab, or the Old Ways.
All of them stood with their backs to the door. They knew there was no door there, just as there was no chamber behind it,
and so they did not see either one.

“Merlin! What are you doing?” Mab cried imperiously. But of all those gathered in this hall, only Merlin and Frik could hear
her.

Merlin half-turned to look back at her. “You can’t fight us, or frighten us. You’re just not important enough anymore. We
forget you, Queen Mab. Go join your sister in the lake and be forgotten.”

He turned away for the last time. He would always remember her, of course, and so would Frik, but two memories were not enough
to sustain Mab’s reality.

“Look at me!” she cried, and Merlin heard terror beginning to creep into her voice.

“Look at me!” she begged.

Of all things, Mab had most feared the oblivion that would come with being forgotten. The Lady of the Lake, the Lord of Winter,
the Old Man of the Mountain, had all accepted their fates, and so their memories survived in Frik’s stories, even though no
one actually believed in their reality anymore.

The people in the corridor began to move away, back to their daily tasks.

But the Queen of the Old Ways had fought to stop time and the normal progression of things, and soon she would no longer be
even a memory.

“Frik!” Mab cried desperately.

Merlin saw an expression of stubborn anger cross the gnome’s face. Was it his imagination, or did Frik already look more human,
less like a creature of the Old Ways? Frik walked away, ignoring his former mistress.

“Merlin!” Mab wailed. “Merlin!”

Merlin stayed where he was. He would not acknowledge her, but he owed one last duty to the people of Britain to watch over
their greatest enemy until she vanished forever.

“Don’t forget me, Merlin! I… love you,” Mab croaked at last. “As a son!”

The Fair Folk could not lie. Perhaps what she said was the truth, or at least
a
truth. It did not matter. Mab had destroyed Merlin’s ability to love her long ago. It was the greatest of the many injuries
she had done him.

He began to walk away.

And then there was silence, and the faintest of whispered wailing. Merlin felt the last of Mab’s magic thin out and fade away.

When he turned, all that he saw through the hole in the door was an empty room, and slowly the door faded, and the room beyond
faded with it, and Merlin was alone.

He had won, but victory did not carry with it the joy and exultation that it ought, for his own losses were so very great.
For the first time since his sixteenth year, Merlin found himself without a purpose in the world. The fight he had chosen—that
had been his true destiny—was over.

But unlike the neat endings in the tales of bards, Merlin still had a life to live and a chance to live it. It seemed only
days since he had lightly spoken those words to Arthur, but now Arthur was a myth and he, Merlin, the last wizard, was an
anachronism, a creature out of time.

He left the castle. For months afterward Merlin searched for Nimue, for the cave, for the Enchanted Lake and the Door Into
Magic. But he never found any of them again, and finally he gave up.

There was nothing now to tie him to Britain, and so he traveled, working at odd jobs along the way, always moving on when
people became suspicious of him, as they nearly always did. For Merlin still carried Mab’s blood in his veins. He was half-fairy,
and though he aged, he did so far more slowly than mortal kind.

But age he did.

The Italian sun was a more generous overlord than the pale sun of Britain had ever been. Though it was barely March, the spring
flowers were well established in the Tuscan hills, and the air was soft and gentle with warmth. It was a blessing for old
bones. And Merlin was old, grey and bent with years of wandering.

The staff he had once carried for show and for power served now only as a support to his stiffness. The gnarled wood was still
the same, but the wizard-crystal it had once borne was long gone. Merlin thought he had thrown it in the Tiber. Or perhaps
the Danube. Whichever river it had been, it was a long time ago.

These days, everything seemed a long time ago.

Last night Merlin had dreamed. He’d stopped for the night in some country inn, where for a few coppers the landlord would
give him a mug of beer and let him—an old man, with an old man’s privileges—sit by the fire.

There he had dreamed, and in his dream Merlin had seen himself as he had been when he first came to the Land of Magic—so young!
Frik and Mab were with him.

“This is you as you will be,” he heard Mab say, pointing at him as he drowsed by the fire in some country inn.

The boy looked shocked. “Me? Will I grow that old?” he blurted gracelessly.

“Have a care, young Merlin!” he said, glaring at the boy and tightening his grip on his stick. Had he really grown so old
and grey that this young boy thought him unbelievable? This was his younger self. Perhaps he could help him, warn him about
what was to come in his future: Arthur, Lancelot, Mordred. But what could he say that would help? “Try and always stay as
young inside as you are now. And that’s another thing. Don’t start giving advice. It always ends badly.”

“What—” the boy began, but Mab gestured, and Merlin awoke, the dream fading.

He knew it was a dream. Mab had been gone for many years, and Frik… well, Merlin didn’t quite know where Frik was. He hadn’t
seen him since that day they had stood shoulder to shoulder in the halls of Camelot to put an end to Mab forever. Perhaps
the gnome was dead, for Mab had taken away his magic, and without it Frik was as mortal as anyone else.

As mortal as Merlin.

It was time, the old wizard thought to himself, to go home. He had traveled enough, seen all that the world had to offer,
fulfilled all the boyhood dreams that the years had left him. It was time to go back to the place where he had begun.

It was a bright autumn day in Nottingham, the day of the fair, and Marian had wandered away from her nurse to see the delights
the fair had to offer
all by her self.
Marian was eight years old, and the daughter of the
shire reeve
—or as the Normans said it,
sheriff
—who was a very important man in these parts. Her father had given her a whole silver penny to spend on whatever she chose,
and Marian wandered among the booths of the fair, trying to make up her mind what she would buy.