Below the Darksome Yew: Part Six
6
Each movement shocks pain across the worn spread of his skin and down through the roots of his muscles. Even his bones hurt, and Arthur swears he can hear them grating against each other every time he so much as turns his head.
When Gwaine had cut the leather jerkin from his body - metal buckles having melted into his skin and re-hardened in the wake of Kilgharrah’s departure - Arthur had strangled screams in his throat. Gwaine had been grimacing, wincing in sympathy as his fingers skated along mottled red and black skin, some of it crisp, some sore and oozing sickly blood. Distantly, Arthur had noted the chill burgeoning on the damp of his face where tears had streamed constantly.
“Come on now,” Gwaine had snapped, his head twisted around to glare wildly at Emrys where he had lurked. “You can help him. So do it.”
Riptides of pain had swept Arthur into a place of red and fear and inescapable fire, a swirl so violent that nausea had crawled into his throat dragging his belly behind it. (The sharp image of Gwaine saying, “No, no, no,” as he tilted Arthur’s head to the side so he wouldn’t drown in his own bile.)
“Please,” Arthur had moaned.
Emrys had swept up to Arthur’s side moth-quiet and had spoken with a voice of incongruous thunder, a hand hovering over Arthur’s forehead.
And Arthur’s skin had quieted; his muscles had ceased their screaming; his breathing had slowed into the steady rhythm of sleep. But he hadn’t slept.
He can’t sleep yet, with his thoughts so clamorous in his mind.
The sun is long in setting and all that time is spent in silence as Gwaine wraps Arthur’s remaining burns - some running deep, but none so deep as before, where in places the shine of bone glistened in Arthur’s own blood - and Emrys sits once again with his back to the pile of logs no one could stomach setting alight.
Arthur waits until the dark deniability of night to talk, Gwaine reduced to a gentle snore to his left and the moon on a slow rise, casting ghostly pale beams of dim light over the woods.
“I can feel you. Where you’ve been, what you’ve felt. Like a drumbeat rapping against my skin, I know exactly where your footsteps have taken you. You need to tell me…” (So many moments like this had come before, and in every one, Arthur had let his resolution wither; had let his voice curl around his tongue and sit there until he resigned himself to staying quiet just this once. But kings don’t fear to speak their minds.) “Is there a reason I’ve always been able to feel the draw of your presence? For so many years, the… the knowing has been getting stronger. Is there… why?”
Emrys sighs. “I know what you’re thinking, and it isn’t anything half so special as that, Arthur. It’s just the call of blood to blood.”
Arthur lets the lull of speech droop thick in the air for a moment before asking, “Blood to blood?”
“Oh yes. Magic is your lifeblood as surely as it is mine. Or did my king never tell you? Well, regardless. Put your mind at rest, little king.” Emrys settles back against the hollow curl of the tree he’s curled up below, arm tucked beneath his head. Strangely childlike for the multifold age in his eyes. “It isn’t anything half so complex as love that binds us together. Just magic attracted to like magic. The Druids - ” Emrys yawns, jaw cracking loud enough for Arthur to hear, and Arthur feels a yawn of his own prise his jaws open. “- liked to talk about you, Arthur. Told me that you were Albion’s vessel, and I her conduit. It’s just her lifeblood trying to bind itself together. This isn’t anything so complex as love.”
“But I wasn’t scared of that,” Arthur says, confession teased out of him by the cover of a clouded night.
Emrys looks at him, and doesn’t turn away. Considering. Then he smiles, faint and wistful, the curve of his lips pulling at the fish hook scar stretching across his mouth. Arthur can’t stop himself from staring. Emrys has the skin of a warrior, worn with scarring, deep and shining pale in the moonlight; hands that have never held a sword bear so many nicks and mementoes of deeper injuries that Arthur would have mocked him for an overgrown novice had he not known the truth scraped across Camelot’s bloody dungeon walls. The truth about the darkness Uther forced Emrys into, festering at his edges until it found Emrys’s secret cracks, little weaknesses, and used them to slither inside and devour him like a festering wound gone untreated.
“What do you know of the Old Religion?” Emrys asks after a long moment filled with the skitter of tiny paws against the thick forest bracken and little else, his face still slanted away.
Arthur swallows and says, “Nothing more than what you once told me, years ago, on our way back from a Druid camp. My first, actually.”
Emrys smiles, Arthur thinks, though from where he sits all he can see is the bunching up atop Emrys’s cheekbones.
“Your father was very angry that I told you anything at all,” he says, not a drop of resentment hiding anywhere in his tone. “Oh, he kept me in the dungeons for ages after that.”
“But I didn’t - I didn’t tell him anything!” Arthur says, heart quickening. “I never told anyone.”
Emrys turns to look at him, finally. His eyes have a curious lilt to them, gentle and sad and pitying.
“I know, Arthur. I told him.”
“But - why would you...”
“Because how could I not? I told your father everything.”
Arthur shifts against the knotted roots he sits on. “Did he - is that how he found out about you and...” Heat blooms across Arthur’s face. He clears his throat, but suddenly finds that he can’t continue.
“Yes. Of course I told him. He knew everything.” An ugly scowl twists Emrys’s face, and he thunks his head noisily against the strong tree trunk behind his head.
“Then why would he have...” Arthur can’t find the words to say why would my father have killed the Witch - Morgana - if he had known from you everything you felt?
“I told him, Arthur, but that doesn’t mean he listened or believed. You heard him, didn’t you?” Emrys speaks with little inflection - a control born of a lifetime of training. “Talking about how droll it was that his two favourite pets thought to play at love. But then, there was really quite a lot he didn’t understand. I suppose that’s why he never cared whether I trusted my soul to the old gods - heathens, he would say - and I suppose that’s why he thought there no better methods of disheartening the Druids than to call me by their name for me.”
“He thought it was funny,” Arthur says. “Especially when he heard of how they still told your legend to each other as a solace. He thought it was so funny.”
“They talk about their legends still. The sign of the Trio has arisen, a small Druid boy told me.”
“Do you... Do you think that’s true, Emrys?” Arthur asks, pillow soft.
“Kind of hard not to, ‘less you’re too bound by the fears of your father, fears of the old ways, to actually look up at the stars,” Emrys says. He points his arm straight up and Arthur’s gaze follows from the tips of Emrys’s fingers through the gaps between buds on greening trees to the vast expanse of stars and blackness. The wash a swathe through the sky, a kingly sash tying the heavens, and... there. Three patterns - or is it only one? - linked just over the mountains on the horizon. On the rise, Arthur thinks.
“Did she know?” Arthur asks. “About any of this, before she...”
“Hard to say. I would have once said that if she had known, I would have too, but it’s become quite clear she was more adept at keeping secrets from me than I had thought.”
Arthur stays quiet; picks at a scab of burnt skin between his knuckles. The oily smear of salve has already worked at softening it though, so all he gets for his efforts is a thick cake of salve under his nails.
“She got lost, sometimes,” Emrys says, quiet.
Arthur turns his head at a shivery rustle of noise and sees Emrys curling up still half turned away, sitting back against the tree and tucking his legs up to his chest; wrapping his arms around his knees and hooking his fingers together fretfully. A strange dichotomy of power and helplessness, Arthur thinks wistfully.
“Forgot which world she was in, closer to the end,” Emrys murmurs. “She started to let things slip. Little things, little stories about her other worlds that she wouldn’t tell me fully conscious and that I couldn’t see even in her mind if I looked. I thought she just forgot what she dreamed; couldn’t remember more than a hazy image, nothing worth sharing, but I don’t think that’s what happened.” The dark swallows Emrys’s words, covers them with susurrations of tree leaves almost louder than Emrys’s hesitant voice. “I think she was practising so that I wouldn’t know her plans for Kilgharrah.”
Arthur thinks about Morgana, how wrapped up she and Emrys were about the castle - not ostentatious, but obvious all the same. He thinks about her scheming to overthrow the kingdom Emrys served, and while he... almost... doesn’t blame her, he doesn’t understand her.
“She would do that?” Arthur asks. “Keep so many secrets?”
“You didn’t know her at all, did you, Pendragon?”
Arthur’s eyes trace the bramble that starts crawling around his legs with a strange pulsing (Emrys with eyes that glow like embers, but with a face in profile to Arthur, perhaps unaware the he is doing anything at all) and he thinks, oh, but this is dangerous, careful, careful.
“I never had the chance to,” Arthur says, words gentle and slow and clear. “But in another world, I think I might have, Emrys.”
The gleam fades from Emrys’s eyes and he sighs back against the tree, a little lost but looking like he might not mind as much as Arthur would have.
“Don’t call me that,” Emrys says, almost as though he hadn’t meant to.
“Emrys?” Arthur frowns.
“It’s not... I don’t think it’s suitable anymore. Emrys... Emrys belonged everyone but himself. I can’t be him anymore.”
Arthur feels fresh warmth slide across his skin, soft as silk sheets (sent for at great expense on his request from Persia) decadently spread across his bed. He waits with a smile on his face.
“Let the Druids have their legends.” Merlin shifts where he sits, his face still his neck plagued by nervous fluttering. “I just... I want to be Merlin.
“Merlin,” Arthur says. “Well, that’s all right then.”
The air hangs in a stifle of silence around the clearing, and though Arthur doesn’t know quite what he could possibly say to perpetuate this almost-novel softness Em - Merlin - is wearing, anything is better than this nothing.
“Would you... Can you tell me some of those legends, then?” Arthur ventures. “They seem to belong to us, after all. ‘S only right I know more about them.”
Merlin smiles, small but dimpled, points to the central constellation in the pattern of three - the Sword - and says, “Goes a bit beyond just us, your Lordship, and don’t you forget.”
Tomorrow will be a struggle - Arthur feels he could sleep for years, but Camelot might well think themselves kingless by now and both Leon and Owain will be fighting the urge to mourn. They will have to make a steady pace back to the Druids, and from them to Camelot. Find a messenger to return to Camelot with news of their king’s health and the peoples’ safety... but Arthur will figure that all out tomorrow. For now, he lays back and stares at the stars.
Maybe this is what it looks like, those omens Arthur has been looking for since he was a boy - maybe this is who he has been waiting for: these two who lie, one silent and the other truly talking to Arthur at long last, beside him in friendship. Across from Arthur: a nobleman-turned-wretched drunk who ripped himself away from his vice to fight for a near-stranger’s justice with a steel-strong will that Arthur doesn’t know he can understand. And beside him, staring up at the sky with blinking eyes: a boy raised by the faith of the Old gods, by Druidic rite and in a time of their greatest trial, but twisted in the forge of a tyrant; a boy grown and tempered by love and withered by loss but rooted even deeper by something Arthur doesn’t understand.
Maybe this is the portent unlocking the secrets of Arthur’s future reign: in a company of allies, his father’s creature has been undone and reborn and talks softly into the night about the things he sees in the stars at last, so long after he had heard the Druids talk of them: the Dragon, Sword, and Falcon twining together, burnishing the sky with light brighter even than the pale curve of the moon. Brighter than Arthur’s ever seen.
Epilogue
Each movement shocks pain across the worn spread of his skin and down through the roots of his muscles. Even his bones hurt, and Arthur swears he can hear them grating against each other every time he so much as turns his head.
When Gwaine had cut the leather jerkin from his body - metal buckles having melted into his skin and re-hardened in the wake of Kilgharrah’s departure - Arthur had strangled screams in his throat. Gwaine had been grimacing, wincing in sympathy as his fingers skated along mottled red and black skin, some of it crisp, some sore and oozing sickly blood. Distantly, Arthur had noted the chill burgeoning on the damp of his face where tears had streamed constantly.
“Come on now,” Gwaine had snapped, his head twisted around to glare wildly at Emrys where he had lurked. “You can help him. So do it.”
Riptides of pain had swept Arthur into a place of red and fear and inescapable fire, a swirl so violent that nausea had crawled into his throat dragging his belly behind it. (The sharp image of Gwaine saying, “No, no, no,” as he tilted Arthur’s head to the side so he wouldn’t drown in his own bile.)
“Please,” Arthur had moaned.
Emrys had swept up to Arthur’s side moth-quiet and had spoken with a voice of incongruous thunder, a hand hovering over Arthur’s forehead.
And Arthur’s skin had quieted; his muscles had ceased their screaming; his breathing had slowed into the steady rhythm of sleep. But he hadn’t slept.
He can’t sleep yet, with his thoughts so clamorous in his mind.
The sun is long in setting and all that time is spent in silence as Gwaine wraps Arthur’s remaining burns - some running deep, but none so deep as before, where in places the shine of bone glistened in Arthur’s own blood - and Emrys sits once again with his back to the pile of logs no one could stomach setting alight.
Arthur waits until the dark deniability of night to talk, Gwaine reduced to a gentle snore to his left and the moon on a slow rise, casting ghostly pale beams of dim light over the woods.
“I can feel you. Where you’ve been, what you’ve felt. Like a drumbeat rapping against my skin, I know exactly where your footsteps have taken you. You need to tell me…” (So many moments like this had come before, and in every one, Arthur had let his resolution wither; had let his voice curl around his tongue and sit there until he resigned himself to staying quiet just this once. But kings don’t fear to speak their minds.) “Is there a reason I’ve always been able to feel the draw of your presence? For so many years, the… the knowing has been getting stronger. Is there… why?”
Emrys sighs. “I know what you’re thinking, and it isn’t anything half so special as that, Arthur. It’s just the call of blood to blood.”
Arthur lets the lull of speech droop thick in the air for a moment before asking, “Blood to blood?”
“Oh yes. Magic is your lifeblood as surely as it is mine. Or did my king never tell you? Well, regardless. Put your mind at rest, little king.” Emrys settles back against the hollow curl of the tree he’s curled up below, arm tucked beneath his head. Strangely childlike for the multifold age in his eyes. “It isn’t anything half so complex as love that binds us together. Just magic attracted to like magic. The Druids - ” Emrys yawns, jaw cracking loud enough for Arthur to hear, and Arthur feels a yawn of his own prise his jaws open. “- liked to talk about you, Arthur. Told me that you were Albion’s vessel, and I her conduit. It’s just her lifeblood trying to bind itself together. This isn’t anything so complex as love.”
“But I wasn’t scared of that,” Arthur says, confession teased out of him by the cover of a clouded night.
Emrys looks at him, and doesn’t turn away. Considering. Then he smiles, faint and wistful, the curve of his lips pulling at the fish hook scar stretching across his mouth. Arthur can’t stop himself from staring. Emrys has the skin of a warrior, worn with scarring, deep and shining pale in the moonlight; hands that have never held a sword bear so many nicks and mementoes of deeper injuries that Arthur would have mocked him for an overgrown novice had he not known the truth scraped across Camelot’s bloody dungeon walls. The truth about the darkness Uther forced Emrys into, festering at his edges until it found Emrys’s secret cracks, little weaknesses, and used them to slither inside and devour him like a festering wound gone untreated.
“What do you know of the Old Religion?” Emrys asks after a long moment filled with the skitter of tiny paws against the thick forest bracken and little else, his face still slanted away.
Arthur swallows and says, “Nothing more than what you once told me, years ago, on our way back from a Druid camp. My first, actually.”
Emrys smiles, Arthur thinks, though from where he sits all he can see is the bunching up atop Emrys’s cheekbones.
“Your father was very angry that I told you anything at all,” he says, not a drop of resentment hiding anywhere in his tone. “Oh, he kept me in the dungeons for ages after that.”
“But I didn’t - I didn’t tell him anything!” Arthur says, heart quickening. “I never told anyone.”
Emrys turns to look at him, finally. His eyes have a curious lilt to them, gentle and sad and pitying.
“I know, Arthur. I told him.”
“But - why would you...”
“Because how could I not? I told your father everything.”
Arthur shifts against the knotted roots he sits on. “Did he - is that how he found out about you and...” Heat blooms across Arthur’s face. He clears his throat, but suddenly finds that he can’t continue.
“Yes. Of course I told him. He knew everything.” An ugly scowl twists Emrys’s face, and he thunks his head noisily against the strong tree trunk behind his head.
“Then why would he have...” Arthur can’t find the words to say why would my father have killed the Witch - Morgana - if he had known from you everything you felt?
“I told him, Arthur, but that doesn’t mean he listened or believed. You heard him, didn’t you?” Emrys speaks with little inflection - a control born of a lifetime of training. “Talking about how droll it was that his two favourite pets thought to play at love. But then, there was really quite a lot he didn’t understand. I suppose that’s why he never cared whether I trusted my soul to the old gods - heathens, he would say - and I suppose that’s why he thought there no better methods of disheartening the Druids than to call me by their name for me.”
“He thought it was funny,” Arthur says. “Especially when he heard of how they still told your legend to each other as a solace. He thought it was so funny.”
“They talk about their legends still. The sign of the Trio has arisen, a small Druid boy told me.”
“Do you... Do you think that’s true, Emrys?” Arthur asks, pillow soft.
“Kind of hard not to, ‘less you’re too bound by the fears of your father, fears of the old ways, to actually look up at the stars,” Emrys says. He points his arm straight up and Arthur’s gaze follows from the tips of Emrys’s fingers through the gaps between buds on greening trees to the vast expanse of stars and blackness. The wash a swathe through the sky, a kingly sash tying the heavens, and... there. Three patterns - or is it only one? - linked just over the mountains on the horizon. On the rise, Arthur thinks.
“Did she know?” Arthur asks. “About any of this, before she...”
“Hard to say. I would have once said that if she had known, I would have too, but it’s become quite clear she was more adept at keeping secrets from me than I had thought.”
Arthur stays quiet; picks at a scab of burnt skin between his knuckles. The oily smear of salve has already worked at softening it though, so all he gets for his efforts is a thick cake of salve under his nails.
“She got lost, sometimes,” Emrys says, quiet.
Arthur turns his head at a shivery rustle of noise and sees Emrys curling up still half turned away, sitting back against the tree and tucking his legs up to his chest; wrapping his arms around his knees and hooking his fingers together fretfully. A strange dichotomy of power and helplessness, Arthur thinks wistfully.
“Forgot which world she was in, closer to the end,” Emrys murmurs. “She started to let things slip. Little things, little stories about her other worlds that she wouldn’t tell me fully conscious and that I couldn’t see even in her mind if I looked. I thought she just forgot what she dreamed; couldn’t remember more than a hazy image, nothing worth sharing, but I don’t think that’s what happened.” The dark swallows Emrys’s words, covers them with susurrations of tree leaves almost louder than Emrys’s hesitant voice. “I think she was practising so that I wouldn’t know her plans for Kilgharrah.”
Arthur thinks about Morgana, how wrapped up she and Emrys were about the castle - not ostentatious, but obvious all the same. He thinks about her scheming to overthrow the kingdom Emrys served, and while he... almost... doesn’t blame her, he doesn’t understand her.
“She would do that?” Arthur asks. “Keep so many secrets?”
“You didn’t know her at all, did you, Pendragon?”
Arthur’s eyes trace the bramble that starts crawling around his legs with a strange pulsing (Emrys with eyes that glow like embers, but with a face in profile to Arthur, perhaps unaware the he is doing anything at all) and he thinks, oh, but this is dangerous, careful, careful.
“I never had the chance to,” Arthur says, words gentle and slow and clear. “But in another world, I think I might have, Emrys.”
The gleam fades from Emrys’s eyes and he sighs back against the tree, a little lost but looking like he might not mind as much as Arthur would have.
“Don’t call me that,” Emrys says, almost as though he hadn’t meant to.
“Emrys?” Arthur frowns.
“It’s not... I don’t think it’s suitable anymore. Emrys... Emrys belonged everyone but himself. I can’t be him anymore.”
Arthur feels fresh warmth slide across his skin, soft as silk sheets (sent for at great expense on his request from Persia) decadently spread across his bed. He waits with a smile on his face.
“Let the Druids have their legends.” Merlin shifts where he sits, his face still his neck plagued by nervous fluttering. “I just... I want to be Merlin.
“Merlin,” Arthur says. “Well, that’s all right then.”
The air hangs in a stifle of silence around the clearing, and though Arthur doesn’t know quite what he could possibly say to perpetuate this almost-novel softness Em - Merlin - is wearing, anything is better than this nothing.
“Would you... Can you tell me some of those legends, then?” Arthur ventures. “They seem to belong to us, after all. ‘S only right I know more about them.”
Merlin smiles, small but dimpled, points to the central constellation in the pattern of three - the Sword - and says, “Goes a bit beyond just us, your Lordship, and don’t you forget.”
Tomorrow will be a struggle - Arthur feels he could sleep for years, but Camelot might well think themselves kingless by now and both Leon and Owain will be fighting the urge to mourn. They will have to make a steady pace back to the Druids, and from them to Camelot. Find a messenger to return to Camelot with news of their king’s health and the peoples’ safety... but Arthur will figure that all out tomorrow. For now, he lays back and stares at the stars.
Maybe this is what it looks like, those omens Arthur has been looking for since he was a boy - maybe this is who he has been waiting for: these two who lie, one silent and the other truly talking to Arthur at long last, beside him in friendship. Across from Arthur: a nobleman-turned-wretched drunk who ripped himself away from his vice to fight for a near-stranger’s justice with a steel-strong will that Arthur doesn’t know he can understand. And beside him, staring up at the sky with blinking eyes: a boy raised by the faith of the Old gods, by Druidic rite and in a time of their greatest trial, but twisted in the forge of a tyrant; a boy grown and tempered by love and withered by loss but rooted even deeper by something Arthur doesn’t understand.
Maybe this is the portent unlocking the secrets of Arthur’s future reign: in a company of allies, his father’s creature has been undone and reborn and talks softly into the night about the things he sees in the stars at last, so long after he had heard the Druids talk of them: the Dragon, Sword, and Falcon twining together, burnishing the sky with light brighter even than the pale curve of the moon. Brighter than Arthur’s ever seen.
Epilogue