Chapter Text
There was a sudden banging at Arthur’s door, and he jerked, splattering several grain reports with ink, as it was flung open with such force that it nearly hit the wall. By instinct, Arthur had put his hand on a dagger— one of Merlin’s, probably— that had been left on his desk, and he could practically hear his servant’s— lover’s? — voice saying really, you ought to keep more weapons on hand, you never know when you might need a good knife, before he registered who had interrupted him.
“Leon?” Arthur gasped. “What on earth is—”
“No time,” Leon said, heaving in great, gulping breaths, red-faced from exertion. “Merlin— arrested— come quickly!”
“Shit!” Arthur cried, leaping from his desk and following Leon, who nevertheless moved with great speed, for all that he was still out of breath, as he led Arthur to the Great Hall, where they were barred by the guards at the doors who informed them, in no uncertain terms, that they were not to enter, by the explicit and specific order of the King.
Arthur and Leon looked to each other, for a moment, then leapt forward.
Then, a moment later, they threw open the door and stepped into the hall— really, there were only four guards, and between the two of them that was hardly even an inconvenience, let alone an obstacle— and Arthur strode forward as Leon hung back to pull the doors shut behind them.
The Great Hall was empty, apart from Merlin, who was kneeling on the floor, weighed down by thick iron chains connected to a heavy collar and manacles around his wrists and ankles, and Uther, who was glaring at Arthur.
“What is the meaning of this?” Uther roared.
“I was about to ask you the same thing,” Arthur shot back in almost the same tone as he stormed over to his father, passing Merlin without looking at him, because if he looked overlong at how brutally Merlin was chained, he might actually throw down his gauntlet before the King instead of trying to talk him down. “Why on earth are you treating Merlin, of all people, like this? He has only ever acted in our best interests!”
“Your best interests,” Uther grumbled, very quietly. Then, louder, he said, “I caught him stealing state secrets!”
“Ygraine’s journal,” Merlin admitted easily, seemingly without any concern whatsoever for the entire ordeal.
“Shut up, Merlin!” Arthur snapped, and did not turn to face him, because now that he knew why Merlin had been arrested, he really didn’t want to see those chains again, because if he did, he"d skip the gauntlet and go right on to drawing his sword on his father. “Father, he was only trying to help me, and—”
“And nothing!” Uther yelled. “He had no right to them! He is constantly overstepping his bounds and ignoring propriety, and if he will steal one thing, how do we know he would not stoop to steal another? For all we know, it could have been him who broke into the vaults last night!”
“Someone broke into the vaults?” Merlin said in a cold, furious voice. “And I wasn’t informed?”
Uther glared at him, and Arthur did look back, at that, to try to convey with his eyes a warning that Merlin really should listen to Arthur and shut up now, when suddenly the doors shattered into fist-sized chunks of wood and a great cloud of splinters and sawdust, and then a grizzled man with a haggard drooping face, flushed and glistening with tear tracks, surged into the room. He waved an arm, sending Leon flying, and brandished a glowing talon-set gem at the King and the Prince; Arthur recognized it, vaguely, as the gem that his father had confiscated from the sorcerer Morgana had killed after he had tricked Gwen’s father into committing treason and gulped, because he remembered Uther saying that it was incredibly powerful and that even a mediocre sorcerer could do horrible things with it.
The man glared at them with eyes that glowed a steady gold and said, menacingly, “Which one of you killed Alined? Which one of you killed my king?”
“That would be me,” Merlin said calmly, struggling to his feet and moving to stand in between Arthur and the sorcerer.
“Merlin, you idiot,” Arthur shouted; Merlin only shrugged as much as the chains would allow.
“You?” the sorcerer said, his eyes dimming to brown in the wake of his obvious confusion. Then they flared gold again as he remembered his rage, and he spat, “Then you will die first, and you will die screaming!”
And with that, and a snarled, sorcerous word, he heaved the gem forward, and an enormous ball of fire appeared and roared towards Merlin, making Arthur and the King stumble back from the heat even before it had cleared half the length of the hall.
Merlin stood straighter and threw up a hand, fingers splayed wide, and the fireball veered off to the side, rapidly losing its bulk until it hit the ground at a fraction of its original size and burst apart into a shower of sparks and tiny rivulets of flame that skittered harmlessly across the floor.
“He has magic? And he can cast even through iron?” Uther whispered in a shocked, broken voice.
Arthur looked at the King, who looked back, and Arthur thought "this explains everything!" and saw the realization dawn on Uther’s face as well; then Arthur realized that they’d both been looking right at Merlin when he’d done most of those bizarrely competent things, and his eyes hadn’t so much as flickered, and Arthur saw the moment Uther realized that, too, because the King’s face was overtaken by an awful look of absolute dread, and Arthur imagined that they were probably thinking the exact same thing, although Arthur was thinking it with something like wonder, in stark contrast to Uther’s mortal terror.
Namely: If Merlin could do all that without magic, then what could he do with it?
“You utter prick!” Merlin cried. “Do you have any idea what I’ve done to keep this prat and his family safe so I wouldn’t have to use any magic? So I wouldn’t get arrested and have to stop helping Arthur? So Uther wouldn’t try and burn me for the way I was born?” Then Merlin slammed his hands together, and there was a thunderous sound as the manacles, collar, and chains all shattered as one, and the sharp, jagged shards of iron flew toward the other sorcerer like a volley of arrows.
The other man cried out more words in the strange, twisting language of magic, and held the mage stone in front of him with both hands. Immediately a shimmering dome of light sprang up to surround him; it held up well against the onslaught— for a few brief moments— then shattered, and a few of the barbed pieces of iron blew through the fading light to catch him on his hands and shoulders. The stone flew out of his grasp, scraping along the floor until it landed next to Leon’s prone form. Leon grabbed it, shoved it back behind himself, and stared at Merlin and the sorcerer as Merlin started to wave his hands through the air, using magic to fling anything that wasn’t nailed down at his opponent.
“I learned swordplay,” Merlin shrieked as he threw a lit torch.
“Spycraft!” accompanied by a chair.
“Poison, and stealth, and hand-to-hand combat!”
A cup, one of the shields that hung on the wall, and a piece of wood from one of the shattered doors.
“I got into tavern-fights to learn how to brawl and fight dirty, and I don’t even drink,” Merlin said, and then, in tones of blackest, deepest rage, he shouted, “I even took exercise!”
Remembering that seemed to be the last straw for Merlin, because his face twisted up into a brutal snarl, and he pointed at the man with the forefingers of both hands and, for the first time in the entire fight, he called out an incantation of his own. There was a great flash of soundless light and heat, and when Arthur finally blinked away the afterimage, he stopped and stared, open-mouthed, at the greasy scorch mark and tiny chips of blackened bone that was all that was left of the other sorcerer, and at the tiny bits of ash and cinder still floating gently through the air.
Then Arthur looked at Merlin, whose chest was still heaving from the force of his anger, but who seemed to have hardly exerted himself otherwise.
Then, slowly, Arthur started to turn to face his father, and had to stumble back a few steps as something hit his chest with great force; he caught it instinctively, and then looked down at the crown he was holding.
Then he snapped his head up to look at Uther, who was glaring at Merlin, and said, “Father?”
Leon looked up at Uther from his spot on the floor and said, hesitantly, “Your Majesty?”
“That’s him now,” Uther snapped, pointing at Arthur, who was still holding the crown and standing there, dumbstruck. “This?” Uther said, gesturing at Merlin and at the wreckage of the room. “All of this? That’s his problem now! I’m moving to the southern estates, or maybe even Amata!”
Then he stormed out, and called without looking back, “I’ll inform Geoffrey, and I’ll write to you, Arthur. Good luck!” And then Uther was gone, having stepped over the rubble that used to be a door and sharply turned round the corner.
Arthur looked down at the crown, and stared into the rubies that adorned the gold until gentle fingers pulled it from his grasp.
He looked up just as Merlin stood on his toes to place the crown, ever so gently, on Arthur’s head.
Then, eyes glowing with pride instead of magic, Merlin said, “Long live the King,” and Leon, who still hadn’t managed to pull himself up, echoed him weakly.
“Oh, shit, Leon!” Merlin said before rushing over to the knight’s side.
Arthur watched as Merlin pulled the mage stone out from behind Leon and held it over the man. He watched even more carefully as his best knight’s injuries faded away as if they had never been, banished by a series of slippery, oddly beautiful serpentine words that fell freely from Merlin’s lips.
Idly, Arthur wondered what Merlin would do once Arthur repealed the ban now that he was King.
* * *
“Oh, good gods, Merlin, have mercy!” Arthur cried desperately as he crested again, for the fifth bloody time, writhing against the glowing lines of delicate golden magic that pinned him to the bed beneath Merlin’s undulating form.
Really, it was a damned good thing that Merlin was on his side.
* * *
Somewhere below the castle, Kilgarrah raised the bit of scale that would have been an eyebrow if he were a mammal and thought, "That’s not exactly the means I’d imagined he’d employ," and huffed out a smoky laugh; then, wisely, he decided he’d wait until tomorrow to call out to the warlock and ask about getting released.
He had a trip to Amata to plan, after all.