Once & Future (Once & Future #1)(29)

“Mermaids?” Merlin asked, tempted to launch into a mini-lecture on historical accuracy.

Val rubbed his hand up and down Merlin’s arm, and the lecture vanished. “If you want her to train, you have to give her something real to do. Games are fake to her, and Ari doesn’t do fake. That’s why she objected at top volume to knight camp.”

“Hmmm,” Merlin grumbled.

And then he started, gently, to float.

He wasn’t the only one—Val was floating, as well as their cups and a few beads of water. “What’s this?” Merlin asked, as Val propelled himself out of the tiny kitchen to investigate.

In the main cabin, Lam seemed to have woken up mid-float. Jordan’s armor lifted away from her body. Excalibur had started spinning. “Oh, excellent,” Merlin said. “A naked sword in free float.”

“Dude,” Lam said, their dreads floating above their face as they giggled. “Naked sword.”

“What is happening on this cursed ship?” Jordan cried.

Kay clomped in on locking magboots, pointing toward the far door. “I turned off the gravity so my sister can’t do anything in my bedroom.”

“You mean, anything else,” Lam said.

“You’re going out the airlock,” Kay promised, with a sharply pointed finger. “I had the weirdest drunk dream that Ari cut her hair, and she would not stop making out with Gwen.” He glared at Merlin. “And you wouldn’t stop hugging me.”

“You two are being ridiculous yet again,” Val said, crossing his arms as the rest of him drifted. “Gwen would never move so fast with a consort. This is a political marriage, first and foremost. If she and Ari do end up together in a romantic sense, it will happen in its own time.”

Merlin’s hope perked. “You think they might not be…?”

A sound spread from Kay’s room.

An unmistakable, moaning, gasping sound.

“Sounds like the zero-grav just gave them a new challenge,” Lam said. “Get it, girls!”

“No! Absolutely not!” Kay stomped for the ship’s controls, and everything tumbled down. Merlin fell, chin first, on the hard metal floor, giving him a perfect view of Excalibur. The sword stopped spinning, the blade penetrating the round table with a slick sheening sound that left the entire spaceship in postcoital silence.

While the rest of Ari’s knights snickered, Merlin groaned. “I loathe that sword’s sense of humor.”





When Ari and Gwen emerged from Kay’s room, hours later, they looked a mess, and they acted like strangers. Gwen’s long hair had been freed from its braids, rippling over one of Ari’s old T-shirts, nearly reaching her tiny shorts. Somehow she looked even more regal—like a queen in the marketplace, trying to pass for a commoner. Ari edged around her, nervous.

Jordan greeted Gwen with a little feast on a tray. “You didn’t need to do this,” Gwen said sweetly as she seized a piece of toast and held it out to Ari.

Lancelot.

Jordan’s name was wrong, but that happened—the cycle couldn’t always give Merlin a 100 percent match, especially when cultural differences came into play. It wasn’t reasonable to expect an Arthur and Percival and Lancelot in feudal Japan or Renaissance Italy. It was character that truly defined someone’s role in the cycle. Lam had the undying loyalty of their predecessors; this Lamarack wasn’t the first to lose a hand in the service of King Arthur. Val was the descendant of the driven, clever knight who had found the Holy Grail, though he’d never been quite this compellingly gorgeous. Jordan possessed the shining excellence, unbridled chivalry, and love for Gweneviere that added up to Ari’s annihilation.

Gwen and Ari brought their breakfast to the tiny round table, a nearby window providing a scenic view of the Mercer ships. Soon they were all watching the fleet like it was a terrible TV show.

“What happens when we get to Troy?” Ari asked, eyes hard on the white vessels.

“They’ll march us to the galactic state department like criminals,” Gwen said. “Not my preferred way to make an entrance.”

Merlin thought of what Val had said about giving Ari something real for her training—something that mattered. “Unless they can’t get out of their ships,” Merlin said. Everyone looked at him. “What if we sealed them inside of their vessels? Then you would arrive on Troy without their shadows looming over you.”

“That’s not going to change Mercer’s game,” Lam said.

Merlin had to prepare Ari for an inevitable standoff with Mercer. He might have failed to keep her safe from Gwen, but that made it all the more important to train her for this. “When you want to become a dragon slayer, you don’t charge straight into the nest, swords swinging,” Merlin said. “You sneak in and steal a few coins from his hoard first.”

“What if the dragon worked hard for that money?” Lam asked. “You don’t know his life. And how do you even know the dragon’s a…”

“He’s a boy dragon!” Merlin roared.

“Sure thing, old man,” Kay said, slapping his arm.

“What?” Merlin asked. “Val, did you tell all of them that I age backward?”

Val shrugged. “It came up naturally.”

“How does something like that come up naturally?”