Once & Future (Once & Future #1)(75)

Morgana was getting uncomfortably close.

Merlin started backing up. “Don’t you remember how Arthur’s knights kept him alive? The round table wasn’t just a decorating choice, Morgana. We’ll never finish the cycle if she falls today.” He nodded to the grove. Ari’s voice rang out, carrying at a heroic pitch. At this very second, she was calling on her allies to unite against Mercer.

“I don’t care about your little hero games,” Morgana said.

“You want to put your brother to rest,” Merlin said, and Morgana’s eyes went wide. Merlin could see the whites. She was really getting in his personal space.

“Ari told you,” Morgana said, looking a bit betrayed. She swiped at Merlin with her nails, and he leaped back. So it had come to this—a plain old catfight.

“She always tells the truth,” Merlin said. “Haven’t you noticed?” Morgana lashed out at Merlin again, and he caught her forearms in a weak grip. “You want peace for your brother, but the cycle must be completed first! Nin gave me the steps. Find Arthur, train Arthur, nudge Arthur onto the nearest—”

“How much is the Lady of the Lake bound up in this?” Morgana interrupted, looking properly afraid. “And why did you never see fit to mention it?”

“Maybe because you never asked nicely,” Merlin said, pushing Morgana away and running to put some distance between them.

“I’m not nice,” Morgana hissed from where she fell to the ground, her ancient dress now covered in dirt. “Nice is for women who haven’t had their bodies taken away and replaced by the eternal torture of people-watching. They’re so terrible to each other, Merlin.” She put her head to the ground, heavily, and keened as if she was tortured by the same images she’d given him so many times on waking from the crystal cave.

“You’re really feeling it, aren’t you?” Merlin asked, his empathy springing up in unsuspected places, like flowers out of season. “You haven’t had a body to feel their pain in so long…”

“It’s… it’s unbearable,” she gasped.

Merlin rushed to her side. He kneeled, one hand on her bony back as she tried to pull in air. He couldn’t have her dying now. How would he punish her if she was dead?

“Think of something good,” he said. “That… might help.”

“Nothing good has happened to me in so long,” she whispered, the words slick with pain.

“Think of Ari!” Merlin cried. And, as much as it hurt him to admit it, he added, “I know you two must have developed some feeling for each other on Ketch. She’s your Ketch buddy!”

Morgana shook her head, her dark hair hanging in tatters around her face. “Ari hates me for deceiving her. For killing her in the eyes of her friends.”

“You can fix that,” Merlin said, still surprised that he was comforting Morgana. Still worried that she was about to spring up and stab him through the heart. He patted her back gingerly.

“There is no taking back what is done,” Morgana said, staring up at Merlin with the kind of accusation that never wavered. “You, of all people, should know that.”

Merlin took a deep breath. If Ari was out in the grove taking on the future, perhaps it was time for him to finally face the horrors of the past. “There are times when I think I should not have taken your brother,” he admitted. “But your stepfather was treating him as a dangerous bastard, and I…”

Merlin dug up the truth by its roots, one word at a time. “I believed I could create a kind of justice for Uther’s actions. I never should have given that man the magic to appear in your father’s form. Uther was violent, as so many were then, but I never… I never imagined he would do such a vile thing.” His voice broke into a thousand pieces. “I was a fool. I left his service at once and raised your brother to change the ways of men. To prove that might does not equal right. To show the world that alliance is more powerful than violence.”

Morgana keened, and Merlin could not tell if it was from his words, or from the memories seething through her mind.

There was one more truth, and the story would never be finished without it. “None of that changes your mother’s hurt. Or your own loss.”

And in that moment, Merlin understood. He wasn’t going to make Morgana pay. She had been paying, for centuries, the toll the cycle took on her soul as great as the one it took on his. They had both done awful things in their time. They had both suffered. But no single human could hold the pain of all the terrible things in the universe.

Merlin touched Morgana’s temple, and memories flowed between them, a river running back to its source.

Arthur, magically changing into a squirrel, scampering through the trees as the green leaves danced.

Arthur, his scruffy hair and bright-blue eyes, the freckles that hadn’t yet faded peeking above the top of a tome Merlin had given him.

Arthur, crowned king when he was still a nervous young man, while a young woman watched from the crowd, a pilgrim from Avalon, wearing priestess robes and sharing Arthur’s faded freckles.

“What are you doing?” Morgana asked, gasping as if she were surfacing from a deep lake.

“I’m giving you what you missed, Morgana,” he said.

It was what she had done so many times, when Merlin woke up, except she’d only shown him the worst of humanity.