The King's Wizard (8 page)

Try as she might, Nimue could not forget that the Old Ways had done this to her … and that Merlin was a part of them.

No!
she cried silently.
I love him!

But the love for Merlin that she had cherished in her secret heart for so many years had been permanently tainted. Nimue had
always been fearless, and now her every conscious moment was consumed by fear. Each time she thought of Merlin the memory
of the dragon returned—a creature the Christians taught was a symbol of the Devil—and each time it was
harder to separate them: dragon and wizard, wizard and dragon. …

The sound of the church bells ringing out on the wintery air soothed Nimue, driving away the monsters in her dreams. She realized
she was back at Avalon where she had always been safe. Nothing could hurt her here. All the brutality of the outside world
stopped at the Abbey gates, unable to enter these holy precincts.

Here she was safe. Only here.

After what seemed like years spent in a timeless healing sleep, Nimue slipped closer to the borderlands of wakefulness until
at last, in response to insistent gentle coaxing, she opened her eyes.

The first thing she saw was Merlin. He was sitting on the edge of her bed, gazing down at her with grave pity.

“Hush,” he whispered, when he saw she was awake. “Don’t say anything. Save your strength.”

Nimue could taste the bitterness of healing herbs upon her tongue and feel the thick weight of bandages covering her face
and chest. Painfully, she moved the tips of her fingers, and felt the tightness of the burns along her arm. Once again she
relived the moment that the dragon’s flaming breath had licked over her, searing and scarring her face and body.

Forever.

She moaned and tried to turn away. She did not want to see Merlin now, not when she had the power to hurt him so deeply with
her helpless cruelty and revulsion against what he was. She knew that wizards could see things unknown: he would see into
her heart and see the fear there.

“No. Don’t turn your face to the wall,” she heard him plead.

“I’ll … be … scarred,” Nimue said painfully.

Forever. I will never again be the girl you loved. How can you still love what I have become? Oh, Merlin. …

Merlin’s hands were gentle as he turned her face toward him. Even though when Nimue looked into his eyes she saw nothing but
love, the sight of him terrified her. She would never be able to be open and honest with him again. The attack had stolen
an innocence that she had not known she still possessed.

Her eyes filled with tears and Nimue shut them tightly. Merlin was honor itself. If she lied to him he would learn to hate
her, and she could not tell him the truth. Not now.

Perhaps not ever.

Merlin smiled gently at his love, though inside he was howling with rage. Half of Nimue’s face was swathed in wide linen bandages
covering a mask of herbal ointment. Though the Healing Sisters had saved her life, there was no possibility that she would
recover completely unscathed.

It was true that Nimue had been beautiful, in the way that mortals reckoned beauty, but it was not her beauty that Merlin
had fallen in love with on that long-ago summer’s day. It was her spirit, that joyful dauntless thing that he had glimpsed
in the moment their eyes first met.

He’d seen the fear in her eyes when she’d looked at him just now. The smiling young woman who had
laughed in Vortigern’s face was gone forever as surely as if Mab had cut her throat, and Merlin vowed vengeance. He could
not bear the thought of leaving what had been done to her unpunished.

Vengeance is mine. …

“Nimue, I have to go away for a little while,” he said gently. “When I come back, it’ll be forever.”
If I come back
. “You’ll always be beautiful to me,” he pleaded urgently as she closed her eyes once more.
Nimue, don’t shut me out. I have given up everything for you
.

He kissed her gently and felt her yearning—not for him, but for the inviolate love they had shared, a love that had been a
shining shield against the cruelties of the real world. Now that sanctuary was gone.

Vortigern and Mab would pay. The Queen of the Old Ways had wanted Merlin to use his magic? Very well. Merlin smiled savagely.
Let her see what a great enemy that magic could be.

The seasons had turned while Nimue lay injured, and it was now close to the Feast of Midwinter, the time at which Pagan and
Christian alike celebrated, though for different reasons. Merlin found nothing to celebrate; the wizard rode through a landscape
as cold and wintery as his own heart, toward a destination only he could reach. Sir Rupert’s silver-shod hooves covered the
frozen ground in a tireless gallop, and Merlin’s long dark cloak of pheasant and owl feathers, trimmed in the skulls of ravens,
billowed about him as he rode. Beneath it he wore rich clothing donated to the Abbey by some pious pilgrim, but the cold that
burned him came from within, and no amount of fur and velvet could shut it out.

The Enchanted Lake glittered under the harsh winter sunlight. Its surface was frozen into a smooth layer of sparkling ice,
and the reeds and bushes along its shoreline were stiff and glittering with the frost and snow that enveloped the landscape.
This region looked like the mirror image of the Land of Magic: light where that was dark, bright where that was shadowed.
But where the Land Under Hill was lifeless and crystalline, beneath the surface of the Enchanted Lake, life still burned.

Merlin dismounted from Sir Rupert’s back and walked to the edge of the frozen water. Mist rose from the ground, shining with
the light of the winter sun and turning everything ethereal, unreal. In counterpoint to that in substantiality, Merlin’s boots
crunched loudly through the brittle surface of the hard-frozen snow.

“My Lady of the Lake!” Merlin cried. His breath made white clouds on the air and there was frost on his hair and eyelashes.
He stepped carefully out onto the frozen surface of the lake. It was a darker silver than the land that surrounded it, humming
faintly with its own weight.

“It is I, Merlin. I need your help. I need a sword!”

A sword with which to cut out Vortigern’s heart.

For a long moment the young wizard did not think the Lady of the Lake would answer his cry—perhaps he had somehow angered
her, or perhaps she had dwindled and disappeared into nothing as humankind forgot her, in just the way that Mab feared to
do. But at last Merlin saw the glint of movement beneath the surface
of the ice, and the figure of a pale shining woman who glowed like the full moon looked up at him through its frozen surface.

“For what purpose, Merlin?” the Lady of the Lake asked. Her voice shimmered, chiming like the ice-covered branches of the
winter trees.

“To defeat Vortigern,” he said. “He is Mab’s ally, and a tyrant.” He spoke the words that had formed in his soul through all
the desolate nights he had watched by Nimue’s bedside.

The Lady of the Lake shook her head slowly, sadly. “Good king … bad king … you judge too easily, Merlin. You’ll learn,” she
sighed.

Her image faded away beneath the ice, and Merlin was alone.

She would not help him.

He shook his head. He tried not to be disappointed that she had refused him. The Lady of the Lake went her own way, as subtle
and mysterious as the deep waters that were her realm. He would find another way to aid Uther and destroy Vortigern.

Merlin turned away, and as he did there was a rumbling explosion behind him. He turned back. Slabs and shards of ice were
sprayed across the frozen surface of the lake, and a glowing woman’s arm, garbed in shining white, thrust up through the surface
of the ice. Rings glittered on her fingers.

In her hand she held a sword.

“I give you—Excalibur!” the Lady of the Lake cried.

Excalibur! Sword of the Ancient Kings, summoned out of the Lands of Magic and now a part of the
World of Men once more. The blade was as long as his arm, and shone brighter than anything Merlin had ever seen, brighter
than candle flames reflected in wine. Its hilt and fittings were gold, almost in the Roman style, but decorated with the triple
spiral of the Great Goddess.

Slowly, Merlin walked out onto the surface of the frozen lake and took Excalibur from the Lady’s glowing white hand. Magic
thrilled through him at the touch of the hilt and he swung the sword into the air. It sang a high sweet note, as if he’d struck
it against a blacksmith’s anvil, and the scent of magic filled the air as the humming grew louder. Excalibur was to the Old
Ways what the Grail was to the Christians. So long as the sword remained unbroken, the land it served would endure.

Merlin looked down at the sword he held. In his hands he held the soul of the land, the secret history of Britain.

At the dawn of Time, when the tribes first came to Britain from the uttermost East, they had brought with them the gods who
knew the secret of working cold iron. In that unimaginably ancient era, the Queen of the Old Ways had summoned a star down
from heaven and from its fiery body had forged … Excalibur! From god to king to hero the blade had been handed down, always
returning to the Ancient Ones who had forged it when its time on Earth was done. It was the sword of Weyland, of Lughd, of
Taliesin—the sword of Maxen Wledig, last emperor of Britain before the Dark Times came. And now Merlin would use it to put
a new king, a good king, upon the throne of Britain once more.

Merlin held the sword skyward in triumph. The blade flashed silver in the winter sun, and once more he heard the faint song
of the blade’s inviolable magic. Excalibur granted victory to any who wielded it and made them unbeatable in war. Merlin swore
he would never allow the sword to be used except for a good purpose.

The cold of its blade burned his fingers. Holding the sword in his two hands, Merlin walked back to where Sir Rupert stood
patiently. When he reached Sir Rupert, he found a swordbelt and scabbard hanging from his mount’s saddle.

So this was meant to be
, Merlin thought to himself as he buckled on the swordbelt. It was of soft golden leather, very plain, but worked by a master
hand. When Merlin slid Excalibur into its sheath, the new weight at his hip felt right, as if it had always hung there. In
a way, he felt that his life began at this moment.

Merlin had always thought that his future would hold great deeds. It had begun when he had slain Draco Magnus Maleficarum,
the Great Dragon. Now, armed with the sword of the Just, he was going to face another dragon—a red one.

The red dragon was Uther’s crest, and Merlin was about to make it supreme—if Uther would let him.

And he would slay a king.

T
he Roman legions had worshiped Mithras as the Unconquered Sun at this season, and now the Christians worshiped a different
Son in his place. There was a cathedral at Winchester, its presence was one of the reasons Uther had chosen to make that city
his stronghold. The Young Prince was holding Christmas Court in Winchester Castle. His forces had doubled and doubled again
in the weeks since his landing. All those who resented Vortigern—or had royal ambitions of their own—had flocked to Prince
Uther’s red dragon standard.

The red dragon will fight the white come spring
.

Uther was a young man, who wore his dark hair short and a neat beard in the Roman fashion, as well as a Roman cloak and armor.
The Continental courts were still run very much in the Roman style, and the boy who would be king had grown up there, as a
landless beggar suppliant at the foot of a Norman throne, existing in the shadow of his mother, Queen Lionor, King Constant’s
widow.

He had not enjoyed the experience.

Time and again Uther had fretted beneath the yoke of patience, waiting—always waiting—for the moment of his ascension. A thousand
times he would have resigned his claim on Britain to become the Norman king’s vassal, but his mother had always dissuaded
him. To the day of her death, Lionor had believed that Britain was a rich prize worth fighting for, but that it could only
be won when the time was right.

And at last Uther had come to share her vision. He had watched and waited until he was a man grown, until King Vortigern was
old, and rotted through with mistrust, and had oppressed his people for so long that they looked back on the reign of King
Constant as a golden time. Then Constant’s son had sold his mother’s jewels, borrowed all the money anyone would lend him,
and sailed for Britain with the cross of the New Religion held proudly before him.

Though he still marched beneath the red dragon standard of his Pagan ancestors, Uther was a Christian king, and meant to make
Britain a Christian land. The Christian lords of Britain had flocked to him to pledge their support as soon as his ships landed,
and the Bishop of Winchester himself had opened the gates of the walled city to Uther’s troops.