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Merlin is sitting in the splintered trunk of a hollow oak when the father of the Once and Future King finds him, lounging with the comfortable arrogance of a cat sleeping on someone else’s chair.
He opens one eye just a little as Uther Pendragon stomps up, as though he’s just waking from a nap that someone merely happened to find him in the middle of, instead of having foreseen their meeting nearly a week ago.
(He’s been waiting here for this man to actually find him for a full two days. You know, because it’s not like he had stuff to do or anything.)
“Mage of Flowers, I come to call upon your aid!”
“Oh?” Well, he’s bold, he’ll give him that. Manners could use some work, but he’s heard worse.
“Gorlois has given me great insult, and we are now at war-“
“Yes, yes, I’ve noticed. Everyone’s noticed, it’s been three years and you two aren’t subtle. What is it you want me to do about it?”
“End it.” There’s no doubt or hesitation from Uther, even though by all accounts it was his rash actions and wounded pride that started it in the first place. “Gorlois yet lives only because he has not faced me in battle. Bring me to him before he can escape once more, so that I may cut him down at last!”
This time, Merlin opens both eyes.
He doesn’t care about this incredibly petty war- or, he does, but only for the same reason he cares about Uther: because his king won’t be born until after Gorlois is dead. And the timetable’s been getting, well… he can’t do the math off hand, but he knows that it needs to happen by a certain date if it’s going to happen at all, and they’re definitely starting to cut it close by now.
“There will be a cost to our bargain,” he says, pretending as though fate has given him the option of saying no.
“Of course, you’ll have your payment.” Uther waves a hand, smiling with the faintly insulting magnanimousness of royalty.
Merlin waits for him to add some kind of condition or caveat to that agreement, or really anything that would indicate that Uther’s not just handing out a blank check while making a deal with an actual, literal demon, and then keeps waiting for another half-minute until he finally realizes it’s not coming.
…Well! Okay!
His future king’s father is kind of an idiot, apparently? That’s fine, not his problem, as long as the child takes after Igraine it shouldn’t be an issue.
(He’s never actually met Igraine in person, admittedly, but he assumes his future king’s mother is better than this. It would be pretty hard to be worse.)
He leans back in his oaken seat and smiles mysteriously, deciding to let everyone think that full thirty seconds of dead silence was just an unusually long dramatic pause.
“Then you and I have a bargain, Uther Pendragon- you need only take the opportunity I grant you. Prepare your men for battle, and before dawn tomorrow you will face your foe.” He pauses thoughtfully, wondering if maybe he should at least drop a subtle hint or something, for the sake of fairness. “Long have I known your line-“
“Yes, I’ve heard tell you knew my fool brother, and could once be found among his court.”
Oh! Okay!
So they’re just talking about that now, like it isn’t awkward. That’s fine, because it isn’t. He has no mixed feelings on the subject at all.
Uther smirks. “Rest assured, unlike Vortigern, you will find that I am no weakling.”
On an unrelated note, this conversation is over, get the fuck out of his tree.
The story of Britain’s latest bullshit, as Merlin understands it, goes like this: back when the brothers Pendragon were on marginally better terms, Uther wanted a wife. Naturally, not any wife would do, no- it absolutely, positively had to be a woman capable of reviving the ancient magic of the Pendragon bloodline, which was about the only mutual interest Uther and Vortigern had.
Complaining about the decay of their line was practically a family bonding activity, really.
Luckily for him, at the time Vortigern happened to have a lovely young court mage who hadn’t yet figured out that his royal patron’s entire personality was a major red flag, and was only too happy to help.
He’d taken an afternoon to do some scrying, found an extremely suitable candidate, helpfully dropped Igraine’s name in his next conversation with Vortigern, and wandered off to go relax. Problem solved.
The fact that Uther had then immediately gone on to cause a bunch of new, worse problems was not his fault, okay. He’d like everyone to be very clear on that. He did his job just fine.
Admittedly, it had seemed like a pretty promising start- Uther had talked Igraine around on the whole concept of needing an heir with vast and terrible powers, she’d seemed willing to give it a shot out of general loyalty to her land, if not any real interest in the man himself. Her father had been considering the proposal.
And then Gorlois had turned up offering a bigger bride-price and it’d all gone straight to fuck.
Which, judging by how quickly Igraine had given birth to a healthy young daughter after her hasty wedding to Gorlois, was also what she and Uther had gone to before they’d even been legally engaged.
Apparently, he’d wanted to get to work on solving that heir problem right away, and hadn’t seen the need to bother waiting on what he’d thought was a sure bet.
Winnings from that sure bet: one (1) bastard daughter he either couldn’t or wouldn’t acknowledge for a whole host of political reasons, eighteen total shouting matches with various family members, and a three-year war.
Merlin has already privately resolved to teach his future king that gambling is a terrible temptation that should only be done by extremely powerful and handsome mages who can see the future, and avoided by royalty at all costs.
He is going to help Uther go double or nothing, though- otherwise, he won’t have a king to teach.
The thing about prophecy is that breaking it is usually worse than the alternative.
Merlin’s had plenty of visions of the future, and even tried to avert them more than once, back when he was young and stupid. By now, he knows better.
Generally, when you try to change fate, one of two things happens: either the whole thing turns out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy and your efforts to avoid it directly cause whatever you were trying to prevent, or you somehow wildly derail everything in a way that can’t be predicted or controlled, but definitely fucks you over personally.
Prophesizing is kind of a shit job, actually.
Which isn’t to say that the ability to see the future isn’t useful- when you can see something coming, you can at least prepare for it. Brace yourself for the inevitable, face your fate with dignity or at least a sense of humor, mitigate the aftermath.
The trouble is that while normal people fulfill prophecies without even intending to, simply by acting of their own free will and doing what comes naturally to them, actually getting visions of the future tends to be a sign that you’re expected to step up and make it happen.
Personally.
He knows when his king will be born. He knows who the parents will be.
He also knows that even if he made Gorlois drop dead and deposited Igraine directly in Uther’s lap right now, there wouldn’t actually be enough time for the kind of long and tactful courtship involved in wedding a grieving widow to happen if his king is going to be born on what his visions insist is the correct date.
And Uther is going to insist on a full and proper courtship this time, he knows already. There’s no chance of him budging on that, not when trying to sidestep it before caused this whole fiasco in the first place.
He mentally weighs the odds that this is the kind of fate that will make itself happen no matter how much you try to stop it, versus the kind of fate that will make itself everyone’s problem if it doesn’t go right, and winces.
So, they probably won’t agree to have another kid in the kind of timespan he needs here. But any method of forcing them to produce the Once and Future King he can think of is… pretty unethical, even by his own notoriously low standards.
Basically, he needs a way for Uther and Igraine to have sex, without them actually having sex with each other?
It’s a full half-hour before the obvious answer hits him, and he lets his head fall against the tree with a dull wooden thunk and an exasperated groan.
“Really?” He addresses the woods at large, despite having no visible audience. He always likes to make any complaints and/or terrible puns he can think of out loud, just in case one of his fellow Clairvoyants is listening.
They’d do the same to him, he’s sure.
(They wouldn’t and he knows it. Gilgamesh has too much pride and Solomon has too much dignity. It’s basically the worst thing about them, except for literally everything else about Gilgamesh.)
…On second thought, maybe he should just look into getting a familiar, if he wants a captive audience so badly. Still, never let it be said that he’d let the opportunity for a good one-liner go to waste.
“I swear, it’s like I have to do everyone myself around here.”
It’s not exactly hard for an incubus to seduce someone.
Despite what myth and rumor have to say about it, he can’t outright control the emotions of others- but then again, when you can read minds and shift shape to reflect the exact form of someone’s deepest fantasies, you don’t really need to.
A quick look through Uther Pendragon’s dreams and he probably knows more about what the man is sexually attracted to than Uther himself does. Still, he crafts the form with care, getting all the little details just so.
Here’s another thing the legends didn’t quite get right: how cambions are made. The classical depiction is of incubi and succubi as sterile beings, relying on humans to reproduce- seducing a human man as a succubus, allowing the twisted power of their nature to alter the collected seed, then shifting to incubus form and delivering it to a human woman.
That’s not actually how half-demons happen.
Merlin would know. Source: he’s half-demon, that’s not how he happened.
But it is something they’re capable of, technically, if you want to waste a bunch of time and energy doing things the long way around for no reason.
Although it’s going to take less energy, in this case, since he’s going to be putting absolutely no trace of himself into this child whatsoever.
Well, magically speaking, it’s going to take less energy. Emotionally, he can already tell that this is going to take up basically all of his limited supply of patience.
Uther had been talking about some batshit scheme for his new heir that involved a dragon core, which Merlin is probably going to have to make happen for him- he’s not sure what you get if you combine “demon” and “dragon”, but it can’t possibly be good.
He can already tell this family tree is going to be complicated enough without adding himself to it, thanks.
Perched delicately on a gnarled tree root rising up out of the cold hillside, he does one last check as he senses Uther’s approach.
Full beautiful in fair and pleasing form, check. Posed just well enough to look effortlessly seductive without making it obvious that he actually is putting in an effort, check. Garment not of gold but gilded, and incidentally cut in a way that leaves very little of the body he’d pulled from Uther’s imagination to the imagination, check. Hair flowing long and lovely in the gentle breeze? Eh, blonde wouldn’t have been his first choice but he’s making it work, check check check.
Uther Pendragon comes into view and stops dead as he makes eye contact with the most beautiful woman he has ever seen.
She’s like a painting come to life, some perfect design placed here by inhuman hands, a masterpiece left to be reclaimed by silent nature.
Anyone so impossibly beautiful is almost certainly not human- perhaps a faery’s child, perhaps simply the sudden reflection of his own most desperate dreams. But Uther apparently has as little self-preservation instinct when it comes to the fae as he does about demons, because he’s already drifting slowly forward, as if in thrall.
She smiles at him like she’s been waiting here to see him all her life. Her teeth are sharp and white, and her eyes are wild.
“Hello, your majesty.”
From there, it’s all over bar getting undressed.
He’s not sure why the phrase lie back and think of England keeps drifting into his head on stray wisps of clairvoyance- he’s doing this out of pragmatism, not patriotism, and anyway he’s Welsh- but he gets the sense he’ll look back on it and laugh someday, so he does.
So far, Uther has spent the entire encounter with his head planted firmly between Merlin’s tits. He appreciates this- partially because he went to a lot of trouble to design a frankly magnificent pair of breasts and someone damn well should be appreciating them face-first, but mostly because it saves him the trouble of having to come up with a facial expression.
Instead, he makes encouraging noises at what feels like the appropriate moments and stares blankly up into the tree line, making indifferent eye contact with an equally disinterested squirrel.
It would be a little unfair to say that it’s bad sex, exactly- Uther’s a bit selfish, but his technique isn’t terrible. If you asked Merlin to rank all the sex he’s had in his life on a scale from “fantastic” to “awful”, this would rate a solid “okay”.
But it’s hard to really get into it when his mind is elsewhere, charting down the course of the future in bits and pieces, already looking at the reaction before the action is even done. There’s the persistent sense that somebody’s tripped and spilled destiny all over what would otherwise be a pretty decent one-night stand, and it’s really killing the mood for him.
(Not enough to keep him from noticing that Uther is better endowed than his brother was, though. He discreetly files away that fact on the off-chance he ever needs something else to taunt Vortigern about.)
Somewhere above and within him, the steady rhythm of Uther’s hips hitches. He cries out, jerks forward, and spills destiny all over his lap. Alarmed by the sudden increase in noise, the squirrel turns tail and vanishes.
As soon as Uther looks away, Merlin does too.
When he arrives at Igraine’s castle, he tells her that he’s a messenger and she’s a widow. The former is a lie from all but the most generous perspectives, but the latter is solid truth, so it evens out.
Uther’s army arriving in full might without warning a stone’s throw from where Gorlois was making camp, a vast distance crossed in a snap of Merlin’s fingers, had put paid to his half of the bargain and the opposing half of the war in a single night.
It will take some time for other, more mortal messengers to carry the news to a close, parceling out surrenders and sending soldiers home, but at the end of the day this was a strife between two lords of the land, proud and bitter. The rank and file have neither the need nor the desire to keep fighting, now that the man they owe their service to is gone.
She takes the news solemnly and without surprise. He looks at her lovely, weary face, thinks I killed your husband, and wonders absently if he should feel bad about that, under the circumstances.
“Distantly wondering if you should feel bad about it” also seems to be the extent of the emotion Igraine can muster up about her husband’s death. He’s not sure what that says about Gorlois, as a person.
Then again, he’s been gone for a long time. It’s been a long war. Maybe she’s just tired. He certainly wouldn’t blame her- he got involved in this bullshit less than a week ago, and he’s already fucking exhausted.
She bids him walk with her and tell her more of the situation, mind ever on the practicalities- how far are Uther’s forces? What does he intend in victory? Would she be wisest to greet him as a rescued ladylove, prepare to negotiate with him as a conquered vassal, or weather a siege as a defiant foe?
He answers honestly, if only because none of her questions are about him.
The news that Uther would most likely prefer to return to nothing more than the coldly practical political marriage they’d been headed towards seems to come as a relief. She was born and raised in unsettled times, and the idea of dealing with powerful men to secure her safety and future, as well as that of her people, is not a foreign one.
“It won’t be easy,” she smiles thinly, the most feeling she’s shown so far. “But at least it’s something I can do.”
He’s pretty sure she’ll be running Uther’s kingdom for him in about a month. Good for her, they could probably use it.
He speaks when she bids him, and listens when she speaks, and deftly offers sympathy without a trace of pity at all. Their walk takes them into a walled garden, and they find a seat on a stone bench to continue the conversation. He subtly positions himself so that the branches of a flowering tree frame the handsome face he’s put on for her just so, artfully contrasting the silky black braid of his hair, bringing out the stormy color of his eyes.
Igraine doesn’t have bad taste, really, if a little on the darkly romantic side. It’s a shame he won’t be able to use this face for anything else, afterward.
Step by step the conversation drifts from practical to personal, until she looks at him and asks:
“Tell me, how much further does your duty carry you this night?”
“Yours was the only urgent message I carried, good lady. I had planned to ask shelter in a town if I could find one, or a ditch if I could not, and ride on in the morning.”
“And come morning you will, of course, be very far from here, never to return.”
“Yes, kind lady.”
She’s married and mourning, not dead- unlike her husband, who has been gone for a very long time, and won’t be coming back to complain. She slowly looks him up and down, taking in the full effect of the form he’d carefully tailored to her tastes, and gives a single brisk nod as she makes her decision.
“Come morning you will be gone, and I will have a great deal of work to do. But it isn’t morning yet, and I find that I would like to take a moment for myself while I can.” Her eyes meet his, calm and clear. “Stay the night. Just the night. And in the morning… don’t come back.”
“As you say, Lady Igraine.”
When she rises, he follows her from the garden. Eventually, he departs.
He looks straight ahead as he walks away, and does not linger.
The day Artoria is born, Uther rages at him as though Merlin had personally chosen to make her a girl out of sheer spite.
He can’t actually remember any of what he said, since he was too busy staring down at the fragile little scrap of humanity cradled in his arms. Clearly hardier than she looked, if she could sleep through her father’s ranting.
That was good. A king should be strong, shouldn’t she?
According to Uther, a king also shouldn’t be a she. Merlin figures that’s his problem.
Frankly, he’s never been too hung up on gender, as a concept- maybe that’s more of an issue for people who aren’t shapeshifters, whatever. As far as he’s concerned, it’s only an obstacle because people insist on making it one. At this point, it might end up being an improvement- Pendragon men have failed to impress him much, in the long run.
He knows this child to be his king the second he lays eyes on her, a sudden powerful sense of recognition. It’s not new, not strange or foreign- just something in the pit of his soul quietly going Oh. There you are.
He’s always known he would someday serve this king. It’s nice to finally meet her.
Over the course of the next twelve minutes, he discovers that Artoria’s little baby fists are both ridiculously tiny and, when tugging on the pretty white hair she can see dangling above her, surprisingly powerful.
(Definitely a strong king.)
And also that Uther is capable of talking for a surprisingly long time without pausing for breath. It’s almost impressive.
By contrast, the day Uther disavows his youngest daughter and demands Merlin take her away for good, he is grimly silent.
He has made his decision, and even his own wife’s most cleverly-worded and deeply heartfelt petitions will not move him.
Artoria is heavier sleeping in his arms at five years old than she was as a newborn, but not by much.
Merlin stands blank-faced and serene in the center of this silent tableau- the mother pleading, the father refusing, the frightened servants caught between duty to their lord and to their lady. He waits a moment longer, one last chance for the man to change his mind, then turns to go.
As he begins to pass the threshold, Igraine tries to cave his head in with a fire poker.
It doesn’t work, but he respects the effort. He’s fairly sure that it’s the most that anyone has ever done on Artoria’s behalf in the entirety of her short life thus far.
He lets the dented iron drop to the floor with a clang, too loud in this haunting silence, smiles unreadably at her, and disappears in a rain of flower petals.
Neither king nor queen has seen fit to call upon him since.
The point is that, even years later, Merlin has no reason to expect a warm welcome in Uther Pendragon’s castle. Frankly, he’ll be lucky if he’s just facing a chilly reception and not a foot of cold steel to the gut.
“Hello, your majesty! I hear you’re in need of some help.”
So naturally, he announces himself with all the vibrant good cheer of man who knows he’s immortal and doesn’t deserve to be.
The moment Merlin had appeared in the throne room, Uther had lowered his head into his hand, looking painfully tired. He doesn’t bother to lift it as he waves his other hand at the approaching guards, signaling them to back off before someone gets hurt.
“If you’re here to try and claim Morgan this time, I will hold you down while Igraine takes another try with that poker.” His voice is slightly muffled by his hand, but the tone of cold contempt is still clearly audible.
Merlin grins widely. “We both know that if I should ever so offend your dearest daughter, hard iron to the head would be a sweet mercy compared to her own response.”
Uther has no argument to this. Having never forgiven her faithless father’s refusal to consider a bastard daughter as an heir, she’s tried to poison him twice already. Probably the only reason she hasn’t kept trying is because it’s quickly becoming clear that old age and old enemies will do the job for her soon enough.
(The murder attempts aren’t a great sign for a teenager, he guesses, but it’s not like she doesn’t have a valid grievance here. It’ll probably be fine. After all, he’s a royal bastard himself, and he turned out… well, he could be a lot worse, at least.)
Still, he’s surprised at the lack of heat in Uther’s voice when he asks: “What do you want, Merlin?”
“Nothing from you or yours, this time. I’m just going to make things a little easier for us all.”
The king is still a moment, then sighs deeply and rises from his throne. “Walk with me, Mage of Flowers- no, you stay here,” He waves off the guards again as they attempt to follow. “If he’s here to cause trouble, I don’t know what you think you’re going to be able to do about it.”
Merlin turns his head to wink obnoxiously at the guards and follows him out of the throne room.
He explains the plan as they walk. It’s simple, really- setting aside whose fault it might or might not be that Uther Pendragon has no heir, the fact remains that he doesn’t.
When he dies, and it will be soon, in the absence of a clear, obvious successor, claimants will come out of the woodwork to try and grab the throne.
Conflict over the throne would be worse than the throne lying empty- not having a ruler is a dubious position to be in, but civil war is a disastrous one. But sooner or later, there will be a new ruler, either because someone takes the throne or because some outside power conquers them outright.
So, sooner rather than later, they want a king. Ideally, they’d like a good king. Most importantly, they need some very clear, strong way for whoever takes the throne to prove that they have a valid claim to it, at least enough that they can establish some kind of stable power base before someone inevitably tries to tear it all down.
(Humans. He loves them, really he does, but they’re collectively the kind of species that could start a fight in an empty room.)
The answer is this: magic.
More specifically, Merlin’s magic. He’s a neutral party, sworn to no one involved in the situation except, by a very loose definition of the entire concept of fealty, Uther himself.
And thanks to a widespread and eventful career of both causing and solving problems- sometimes even for the same people- his power is well-known and well-respected, at least in the sense that most people know better than to fuck with it.
Having Merlin himself be an arbiter of the whole mess would have the authority of whoever he chose rest on his character, which is notoriously terrible- but having it rest on his magical ability is much more believable.
If he casts this spell, he explains, then whosoever takes up the title will be the rightful king of England.
At that point, it’ll be out of their hands.
Uther listens and considers the matter, slowly going from suspicious to thoughtful. This time, at least, he actually asks questions instead of simply taking the deal without bothering to check for fine print.
It’s a little late for it to help him much, but he’s not going to discourage personal improvement.
Eventually they come to a stop in a quiet, empty corridor as Uther gazes out the window overlooking his wild, maddening, perpetually rain-sodden mess of a kingdom. It’s silent for several long moments, until:
“Do you know,” He begins. “What my wife asked of me when we were married?”
He turns to look Merlin in the eye. Uther Pendragon was not a young man when he came to him, is much further from young now, but somehow looking him in the face and seeing the steady work of time on him really brings it home how long it’s been.
Someday, Merlin will be ancient. But he will never grow old.
“Three things. Just three. That I would take her as a proper queen in her own right, lawfully wedded and properly titled, instead of simply keeping her as a passing amusement. That I would never raise my hand against her Morgan, nor turn her from my house though she could never be my heir. And that should I ever tire of her, or if she should outlive me, that I would make provisions for her to retire to a private life with peace and dignity, instead of forcing her to once more bet her fate on the whims of another.
“Somewhere quiet, perhaps. She said she’d like a quiet life.
“I came to her a conquering king, and she asked so little of me, because she thought so little of me.”
For lack of any possible response both polite and honest, Merlin simply nods.
Uther’s expression is strangely unreadable. There might be an emotion of some kind behind it, but he can’t quite put his finger on what it is.
“A wise man learns from his mistakes, and I have not ignored my own. Not least among them, going to war to avenge myself on a man who’d insulted me, and then walking up to a man I knew my brother had offered most grievous insult to, and demanding he aid me. As though he couldn’t have as much pride as any man.”
…All right, that’s not where he thought this was going. It’s not exactly an apology, he’s pretty sure- and if it was meant as one it’s way off base, since Merlin does not, in fact, have any pride whatsoever.
It goes very nicely with his complete lack of shame.
It doesn’t feel like an accusation, though, either. He’s not entirely sure what this conversation is anymore. A confession, possibly?
“I wondered, after, if I might have freely handed you your own vengeance. Against all our line- for as you said, long have you known us. I know… Even if she were returned to me, alive and well, a girl could not take the throne I leave.”
Ah. Not a confession.
A plea, from a man unwilling or unable to admit that he’s pleading.
“But I would know, my daughter, is she-”
He falls silent as Merlin holds up a hand, cutting him off midsentence.
“Artoria is alive and well.” Even now, he can detect neither passion nor compassion in Uther Pendragon’s face. “Believe it or not, I don’t bear any ill-will towards you- on the days I think of you at all- and I didn’t take her from you for revenge.”
A rare moment of tact keeps him from adding Not everything is about you.
As much as he’d like to, he can’t quite bring himself to believe the man actually cares about his daughter- it could just as well be a matter of pride, not wanting to let anyone have a victory over even a cast-off Pendragon.
But even asking is more than he’d expected from him.
Merlin isn’t quite sure how to feel about the fact that, despite having gotten far warier in his old age, Uther will still simply take a demon at his word.
The next time he meets Igraine, she’s too weak to lift a feather, let alone solid iron.
Her eyes are clouded with the daze of long illness, but they still narrow in recognition when he walks in. Even knowing the state she’s in, he ducks reflexively.
It makes her smile, just the tiniest bit, to see him flinch.
“The physicians tell me I’m dying, magus. Sit down before I decide I’d rather pass on now than keep looking at you.”
Uther hadn’t given his wife much, but he’d given and kept his word to her. She’d had the retirement befitting a dowager queen- a quiet keep somewhere out of everyone’s reach, and servants to tend to it and her, as her health began to fail.
He sits down carefully on the end of her bed and waits patiently as she speaks, her voice slow and creaking.
“I hear my husband’s son is our new king.”
“You don’t seem surprised about it.”
She snorts. “I knew he might have a bastard out there somewhere- besides my Morgan, that is. He admitted it to me after we wed, in case the pretty blonde girl he’d been with ever turned up wanting compensation. Is he hers, then?”
“You could say that.” You could also not say it. He certainly hasn’t been.
“Well, if she’s angling to be Queen Regent, I wish her all joy of it. I’m too damn old for rivals, and I spent too long on that throne to want it back.”
Merlin, by a great feat of will, manages not to cringe visibly at the mental image. He appreciates a fancy chair as much as the next man, but this one comes free with an ugly hat and way too much responsibility. He’ll pass, thanks.
“Oh, no- she knows better than to try, I think.”
“Then she’s smarter than I was at her age. Explains why half the rumors about the boy say he’s mine instead, some trueborn hidden heir.” Igraine leans back into the pillows, staring at the ceiling. He gets the feeling she’s looking more at old memories than anything else. “A nice thought, but unlike my husband I damn well remember every child I’ve had.”
“You don’t seem upset about it.” Kind of sarcastic, sure. But not what he’d call hurt.
“I didn’t judge him for his bastards… couldn’t, with what I wondered about Artoria.”
The name hangs heavy between them. She doesn’t glare at him, too weary for anger, too bitter for grief. He nods silently in tacit acknowledgement.
“Whether she was his or that passing courier, that night?”
“Hah. Of course you knew- no secrets from a mage, are there?”
He smiles cheerfully. “None of the really interesting ones, anyway.”
She rolls her eyes, but her expression has gone quietly pleased now, a look of fond remembrance. “He was… a good memory, my messenger. Nothing more than that, but nothing less either.”
Sooner or later, everything mortal is a memory. They come and go so fast it almost hurts to look at them.
Merlin shakes his head.
“Artoria Pendragon was Uther’s flesh and blood, I can tell you that with certainty.”
“Ah, well- more fool him, since he still threw her away.” Her gaze hardens, still no anger- but resolve, deep resolve, strong as an iron bar. There is the silent understanding that he will answer her here, or be haunted by her forever, no matter what grave she has to drag herself from. “And what happened to my baby girl, when he did?”
He will not answer honestly. He does not dare to lie.
“As it happens… after I took her, she ended up with your messenger.”
She stares at him wide-eyed for a long moment, then barks out a laugh so hard and sudden it sends her into a coughing fit. When it subsides, she grins at him, sharp and wry.
“So, two fathers to choose from and she at least knew one. Is it fate that has the terrible sense of humor, or just you?”
In what might be his most honest gesture since entering this room, he shrugs. “At this point, it’s hard to say- but probably both.”
“And was he fit at all to raise her, in the end?”
No. Not in a million years could he have raised the king that sits on the throne today, by himself. But between Ector’s efforts and his own… well. They could certainly have done worse.
In place of a funeral gift, he gives her the truth:
“He’s a coward, and something of a fool. But he does love her, for all that’s worth.”
“Aye?” Her goal achieved, her prize claimed, the strength is starting to leave her. Igraine’s eyes slide shut with the satisfied weariness of a woman who knows she’s won. “Well. That’s all right, then.”
He can feel her drop into sleep a moment later, too drained to keep up the effort of consciousness. Even in sleep he can feel the aches and pains of her dying body claw at her, troubling her mind as they bore into her dreams.
Merlin reaches out, lets her pains settle into his palm, and then shuts his hand with a snap.
“Just the night, Lady Igraine. Just for the one night, sleep peacefully.”
He knows she won’t need more than one.
In the morning he departs, unheard and unseen, leaving not even a memory behind. When he returns to Camelot, there’s no need to explain his sudden absence- by now they’re all used to his wandering, unreliable ways.
His king never asks him where he’s gone.