Below the Darksome Yew: Part Five ii
There’s a shiver wracking down his spine. The morning dawned crisp, still reeling from the bloom of misty rain and before-dawn dew left over from the night’s ending. Water chills its way through the thin leather of his calfskin boots. A shiver wracks his spine because Arthur is cold, having left his mug of fire-warmed wine - Get the blood flowing, Leon had once told him - propped atop a conveniently flat hearth-rock at camp.
Birds sing through the air, and every so often there’s the cry of a hunting bird of prey, breaking the song-bird babble until the moment passes and the birds feel safe once more. (Though they are not.) The morning is quiet and wet and yellow green, the sun shining thin through the forest canopy, light spun into gentle halos that fuzz around the scrubby saplings and spring flowers that hug around strong rooted trees.
Arthur’s breath puffs before his face and he shivers against his will, an embarrassing, wracking shiver that shakes up and down his spine, almost breaking the hold he has on his scabbarded sword. It’s the cold, and it’s because he’s tired, and it’s because -
- something is wrong, and he can’t ignore it this time. His skin tingles, but it isn’t familiar. Not like the dragon, and not like Emrys - that rush down the back of his throat and threading through the almost-silenced quarters at the back of his mind. But there is still the spark of unease riddling through him.
Empty waterskins bob against Arthur’s chest, but the stream is close enough to hear, gushing fast with spring melt and eager under the morning sun. The forest hushes around him, still lazy with lingering night, birds singing gentle into the breeze but not much else making any noise at all. No Gwaine to fill the silence, either - he’s busy packing up the camp from last night. So far as duties go, Arthur is fairly certain that his - filling the waterskins - is the more dignified, but not quite certain enough that he will allow himself a smile.
Arthur slings the string of waterskins onto a large rock by the stream. Moss edges into the grey bulk and shines in the sun, spray from the crashing stream sliming it into a slippery mess. The skins slide down off the rock and into the grass. He shrugs and then moves to uncap the first, but -
The birds and the ache of pressure behind his nose and vibrating along the edges of his teeth; that something that squeezes the air from his throat in a tight hiss.
Sunshine beats onto Arthur’s head as he stands up and out of the low shade. Silence coats his ears, fuzzy and oppressive, the sound of water not loud enough to outweigh the absence of bird song.
And in the sky, a falcon shrieks.
The white light of the sun, clouds a loose threat still ringing the horizon, blots a shock of pain against his eyes. Arthur blinks, slow, but doesn’t turn away, because -
echoing through the air, hard with the teeth-hurting and pulse-pounding rush of magic
- there’s something magic up there, and it feels as sharp as the fury of a new wound with all the ache of scars that twisted deep into bone.
The silhouette, when the dark spots of the sun fade from Arthur’s sight, looks disarmingly small against the vastness of the open sky. It holds its wings stiff in an easy glide, circling, waiting. The breath of calm, the gathering of nerve and the readying of muscles, before a dive. It is only a raptor, small and swift. So small; perhaps as small as a merlin falcon.
There’s a shiver wracking its way down Arthur’s spine, that damned shiver that shakes him as though he were a soft-faced squire, new to tournaments and the heady pulse of court. It’s an itch hidden in the bend of his neck that he cannot scratch away.
When it starts to burn him, scald his skin with unseen flame, Arthur turns, his gaze falling from the sky, and runs. This isn’t the plan, not at all - Gwaine is all he has that might stitch Emrys back into the fold of humanity, but alone Arthur can do aught but die at Emrys’s hand.
And no, he says to the derisive voice of Uther that lies trapped at the forefront of Arthur’s mind so constantly in these days since his passing, that isn’t fatalistic. It’s pragmatic. To know your own weakness; to accept the inevitability of your own loss.
The sun shines green through the tree leaves and the falcon cries above his head and Arthur runs, twisting around trees he should have seen sooner - the oddest kind of tunnel vision, that which follows on the feet of terror - and forcing his legs to press down harder on the soft sponge of moss; lift faster as he stretches out his stride; lift higher over rotting tree trunks.
Twigs snap and loose branches whip along in scratchy lines across his cheeks as he bursts from the treeline out into the open air of a large clearing between pockets of trees.
Arthur runs, fleet and feather-light (because if you think you are, you will be, says the Bedivere who lives now only in his mind) and rough-shod over tufts of hard grass. Cold blooms thin in his lungs and lances down his throat, but he runs as fast as he can, holding his sheathed sword tight in his arm to spare it from bouncing against his thighs. No more armour plating dragging him down, at least - he had thought he would miss it more, the pressing weight of steel against his chest, but this is more reassuring by far. In place of his plate hauberk, a worn leather jerkin skims along his chest and eases aside with each heaving breath he takes. Lighter, and it doesn’t gleam so brightly in the cheery sun of spring.
Not that it makes much difference, he thinks as he weaves between the trees. Falcons have eyes too keen by far.
Might be nothing, the falcon wheeling above him, drafting in circles over his head. Might be nothing, just a bird, maybe a bird blessed by the old gods, but -
Arthur grunts as his foot catches in a rabbit hole, throwing his arms wide to stay standing, fingers loosening over his sword just enough that it goes flying out of his reach, golden pommel making a white arc in the sun. He stops, panting, throat aching and thirsty for water he doesn’t have. Arthur looks up and sees the falcon diving down straight at him and knows, and his sword is too far away, and he runs, he runs so fast he can hardly breathe, chest tight and mind whirling with the damage he might be able to do with the dagger strapped inside his boot, and his skin pulls and tugs with every stride at the deep-running pain rooted in his dragon-hurt shoulder.
This isn’t the plan. Gwaine is still at their camp, and this isn’t the plan at all.
“Gwaine!” Arthur shouts, and the air feels thick around him, and how far is camp? Too far, or - “Gwaine, he’s here!”
His legs collapse under him, pain and bone-deep exhaustion from so many days spent running under threat of attack overpowering the buzzing energy that had been keeping him going. So King Arthur Pendragon lies in a field under the sun in the nascence of his reign, too far from the treeline for hope, and pants and thinks that as a boy, he had never imagined this ending.
He will not entertain the thought of it now.
Flat on his back, struggling to breathe - air gone, escaped, burned in the furnace of his lungs as he tries so hard to open up his chest against the pain scored so deeply into his torso - and afraid, Arthur points his boot knife (a bright blurring glint in front of Arthur’s eyes) wildly. It shakes in his hand, throwing spears of the sun across his face. He winces as light stabs briefly through his eye, grits his teeth and crawls to his knees, feeling the stretching damp of blood at his back weighing the bandaging down, skin ripped open against the ground, muscles shuddering and tearing as he pushes himself upright.
The bird dives, curving up just before he hits the ground. Emrys flaps his wings once, twice, and on the third, his wings fold into a black cloak that wraps around his human shoulders as he stands tall. Stands still and smiles, eyes dark with memory.
“Arthur Pendragon,” he says. (And how strange that his voice is nothing special at all.) “Last in the short line of usurper kings. And look, here you are, for all your years of training, crouched before me like a boy.”
“Emrys,” Arthur gasps. “Or is it Merlin, now?”
Cloud cover pulls shadow over Emrys’s face and rushes into the field of old, dead grass. The breeze picks up and flares cold, but Arthur burns with the power of the battle-born fire in his limbs.
“Where did you - “ Emrys cuts himself off. Shakes his head and forces an ugly expression onto his face where it sits, awkward over the cruel bent of his scarring.
(Horse hooves thud over the hard pack of dead grass and dirt.)
“Met someone who knows you,” Arthur says, loud and rushed and through the thick swallow he gives in to. “Or at least, someone who thinks he knows you.”
The scrape of tough leather and stiff cloth against the now-wet bandaging left by the druids hurts with a sharpness that has Arthur wincing, but there’s something like anger crawling across Emrys’s face, and Arthur can work with that. Arthur grew up learning what games were most fun to play at court; had gotten quite good at turning anger to enthusiastic coalescence when it served him.
“Had to act like it wasn’t you that we were after, to get Gwaine to follow me. He believes in you that much. Believes you aren’t a killer. That you wouldn’t bring so much death to Camelot’s doorstep.”
“Stop it,” Emrys says. “You’re a king, Pendragon, but you aren’t my king.”
“No, because you killed your king - my father!”
“Because he deserved it.” There’s a bitter curve to the bend in his lips. “He has killed thousands for who they are. He would teach his land to do the same. He is poison, and all his line is corrupted.”
Wind bites at the heels of Emrys’s cloak and pull it almost level with the ground before slapping it flush against his legs; snapping wind hits Arthur hard where he balances on one knee and one planted foot. Arthur stumbles, starts forward, hands lurching out to brace himself, and there, the dagger still clutched in his fist, bright in the sun, bright and sharp and fast slicing between the winds and forward. Emrys flinches, arm barring across his face for a moment and then he grits his teeth, splays out one (twisted, bent and battered and broken) hand -
- it hits Arthur full in his chest, kicking into his ribs and throwing him back and beating the air from his lungs. (It’s like falling off his childhood pony for the first time, six and scared, trying to breathe like he’s forgotten how, chest clenched tight like the fists he made during play even though Nana had hated them so.) Arthur lands awkward on his thrown out elbow, the hard pack of the ground jarring him until he falls back, arm bent underneath the small of his back, dagger flat against leather of his jerkin. The sound of Arthur’s futile gasping for air - chest still clenched, still shuttered and spasming in the wake of that punch of magic - is quickly swallowed in the rush and crackle of static emanating from Emrys.
Thud, thud, thud.
Horse hooves beating on the ground like a drum, the sound thick through the pack of dirt and faint in Arthur’s ear where it presses against the prickle and grit of winter-dead grass.
Gwaine.
Arthur’s eyes rove as he struggles to pull in long heaves of air. He lurches back up to his knees - shear of pain in his shuddering limbs - with the dagger clenched in his fist behind his back. The ground twirls dizzily with the sky and he can’t get his eyes to focus and his head feels as though it might split at the seams of his tender flesh like a carcass left to bloat in the sun - aching from the light, from the jagged pressure of a building bruise inside his skull, from the loud and fast and overwhelming press of Emrys; from magic poured into a vessel of blood and bone and bursting with power.
Black hair sharp as it flutters around a pale face, and Emrys isn’t trying to smile anymore. He looks - Arthur swallows, tongue clicking dry against the back of his throat and stinging - like he’s tired.
“You killed her, and you’re going to kill so many more,” Emrys says, soft and sure.
“Emrys - I didn’t… I wouldn’t…” Arthur’s head burns and spins and thoughts jumble so fast around him. (Leon showing him how to grip a hand-and-a-half sword, the pale eyes and dark stare of the boy Emrys upon his introduction to court; the smell of mint and lavender hushing over the Seer Witch as she swept through the halls; the bloom of blood in his father’s sightless eyes.) The dagger at his back, tight in his fist, leather wrapped hilt sliding against his palm - he inches it closer to his side and fights to fix Emrys in his sight.
“Oh,” Emrys says, eyes flicking down to where Arthur’s readying his dagger before he raises his arms, fingers spread, light crackling between them. “Be careful, Pendragon. I’d put that dagger down if I were you.”
Arthur closes his eyes, head hitching down just slightly, and sighs out a long breath. Drops the dagger straight down - it sticks fast in the ground, hilt in the air, but Emrys doesn’t seem concerned.
“Your campaign against magic is over, Arthur.” Emrys stands with the shine of the sun at his back, flaring around him with glory and brilliance. “It died as she died.”
And horse hooves thunder closer, ever closer, leaden in the air and heavy through the ephemeral light of mourning. The wind is quiet, and the birds have not yet taken up song again, and Emrys looks so old and sad and angry in a manner Arthur’s father never had been. Emrys looks angry, looks vicious and fierce, but it is tempered with a resignation that Arthur is unused to seeing on his face.
Suddenly, Arthur is tired too. Shoulders shake and shiver as he lets his arms fall loose; he collapses back to sit on his heels and he feels the weight of ash close in over him, flood through his veins and press thick on his tongue and fill his throat with cinder - all those he has seen die, and all those he has killed, and maybe Emrys is right about him. So many slaughtered at his hand, or under his orders, or because his voice had shrivelled in his throat when he had wanted nothing more than to speak up.
“I am sorry,” Arthur says. Emrys pauses, eyes flickering, eyebrows tightening before his mouth curls hard and thin. “I cannot right any of the wrongs done to you; to your people. But I am sorry for what my father - for what I have done.” Breath slips too easily from his mouth - too like a gasp - so Arthur stops for a moment, settles himself, until he’s beaten control back into his greedy fist. “But she wanted - there was a knight, at her execution.” (A pulse of thick magic, wet and dewed with grief but strong with the pressure of anger swollen around it, slides across Arthur and slips beneath his skin until he’s drowning in it.) “She wanted to tell you - she wanted you to know… Her name was Morgana.”
Emrys falls into himself, eyes dropping to the ground, mouth shaping itself around her name. (“Morgana.”) His fist tightens and Arthur -
- Arthur can’t breathe, but it happens almost gently. A swelling in his throat until the air whispers thin into his lungs; until the whispers fades into silence and he’s left with only the beating of his heart.
Arthur can’t breathe, noises smacking out from his mouth as it opens and closes and gapes, but this dying feels almost sweet, pain softened into the dull ache of absence by the swathe of magic spread through his lungs.
Did the Seer Witch - did Morgana feel like this, as she died? Arthur never had asked Leon, and Leon had never brought it up. But he thinks she would have died in agony, in the fire, choking and feeling the ooze of fat melt from her bones, because if she had had her magic still, surely she would have broken her chains and slain Arthur’s father where he stood. She hadn’t, though, so she must have died screaming.
She who saw so many things. (Dark red spots stain his eyesight, and he is tired, he is mired in almost sleepy remembrance.) Arthur wonders, sometimes, if she saw her own end. If she would have run from it if she had. If she knew that Emrys would become this thing greedy for blood and broken by memory. This thing that sees Arthur’s head begin to nod and tightens his fist, determination wrought through the sad pall of his face.
Blood beats thick in Arthur’s ears, and slows and slows, thudding, thudding, slowing and stopping, and -
“Merlin!”
Arthur chokes as the swell suffocating him pops, melts away, and air floods his lungs. He sucks it in, greedy for it, coughing and gasping and heaving heavy air through his loosened throat. Gwaine hops off of Hengroen, throws the shield hitherto strapped to his arm onto the ground, and kneels down beside Arthur, holding him up by his shoulders and jostling him until he no longer feels himself falling from the edge of consciousness.
“Gwaine?” Emrys says. Arthur - his eyes clearing, but the strain pulls pain tight against his skull - watches Emrys lower his arms and tilt his head, something small and vulnerable tucked into the shine of his eyes. “What are you doing here?”
Arthur shakes himself, stirring against the hold Gwaine has him in, but he still feels the rumble of Gwaine’s chest as he speaks and it feels like it had when Arthur had been a child, leaning back against his father’s chest on those rarer and rarer days he would prop Arthur up on his knee and hold him steady; hold him firm against tumbling off. Arthur feels he may still be air-starved.
“You know, I thought you had some grand calling when I met you,” Gwaine says. “That you had heard your calling, like the Druids always told me I would one day.”
Emrys swallows and his hands shake. “If you would…” Emrys’s voice hitches. “If you would protect a Pendragon, then you’re just as reprehensible as he.”
“Well, I wouldn’t go that far,” Gwaine says, jesting but without spirit, heart pounding loud where Arthur clutches his wrist. Emrys holds his hands up, but reluctant this time. “Merlin! Merlin, stop this,” Gwaine shouts, no longer trying to hide the desperation in his voice. “Come on, I know you.”
“You know nothing about me,” Emrys spits out.
“You’re wrong - I know a lot about you,” Gwaine says. “Because you talk in your sleep. Did you know that? I know more than you think I do, about the love you lost and the crusade you’re on, but I still thought that you were only after justice.”
“I am,” Emrys snaps, biting the words to pieces between his teeth.
“No, you’re not. Not anymore,” Arthur says through his aching throat. The blue of the sky gentles the harsh light of the sun as it shines fierce down against Emrys’s weather-worn skin. And flowing up from deep down, Arthur feels a foreign ache settle into his bones; feels ancient and sad and wistful. “Why are you doing this, Emrys? We used to talk; I once thought we could have been friends, were things different.”
“But here I’ve broken free of your father’s hold at last,” Emrys says, spreading his arms.
“And what of my hold?”
“You never held me like he had.”
“I know,” Arthur says. “And that’s the point.”
Arthur’s fingers band painfully slow and his grip on Gwaine’s forearm flutters in its weakness, but he gets his grip eventually; lurches upright, swaying under the silver sun and steadying himself before leaning into Hengroen’s warmth.
“I wouldn’t move any further, were I you,” Emrys says, stepping forward and raising his arms, but he sees Gwaine - now standing too, arms angled slightly out, set in front of Arthur like a shield - and hesitates.
“Not moving,” Arthur says, “just…” His hand digs deep into Hengroen’s saddlebag, hoping that it didn’t get lost; that he kept it safe enough to still be in here - and he finds it. The leather satchel tied together with a brittle necklace. “Gwaine,” Arthur says, quiet, and passes it to him. The bag is heavy and hard, lumpy with the jut of bones inside.
Emrys watches with wide eyes and stands, silent but for the snap of his cloak in the wind, as Gwaine hands the bag to him.
“I’m sorry,” Arthur says. Inside his chest, his heart runs faster faster fast because this is it. This is all he has standing against him and the inhumanity that Uther planted under Emrys’s skin, where it festered and grew with its roots drinking for years from a well dark and sickly. “I’ve been - I have been afraid for most all my life of disappointing my people; my father. So I never said a word against him, and I never did more than turn my head as so many were slain before my eyes. I’ve been frozen all my life, but… I don’t want to be anymore.”
Heat prickles around the edges of his eyes, and that’s okay; that might even help. Arthur remembers countless raids and hunting parties, remembers how Emrys would shatter their defenses and stand aside, cold and distant from the warmth steaming up from the blood strewn ground, and that makes the tears come easily, flooding his eyes until he has to blink them into falling so he can see.
“And I couldn’t help the Witch; don’t think I would have, had I the chance. But I promise you that now that I am king, nothing like what you’ve gone through, what the Witch - what Morgana - went through, will ever happen again. I give you my word.”
Emrys stares at the bag and smiles viciously, but the hard lines of his face won’t set; he’s crumbling, muscles in his cheek shivering, eyebrows clenching at a desperate angle. With his cloak flapping out behind him and the shattering movement of his expression, Arthur thinks that he is falling to pieces; that soon little bits of him will swirl away into the wind like ash, like Morgana must have at her end.
The pendant does not sway along it’s chain - fire melted the links into a crisp curl, brittle, ready to shatter - as Emrys trails his finger along its rough edges. He almost turns his back to Arthur, perhaps shy of how his weakness is caught so firmly inside a lover’s necklace, but catches himself. His throat worries up and before before he finally speaks with a voice low and lowly.
“There was this place she would talk about, my lady - Morgana. I asked her a thousand times not to, but, well. She knew, I think, that the stupid, tiny, treasonous part of me loved it when she told me of it. Her other now. She went there often. As often as she could. And sometimes, in the night, when the dark crept close and we both felt we could reach out and live in our dreams, she would talk about what she saw. And so often it was about us, Arthur.”
Through the long pause that follows, Arthur struggles with whether or not he should talk; should break Emrys out of his memory. But Emrys continues before Arthur works through enough of the mire of his fatigue to say anything at all.
“You never spoke with her much, did you? King kept his pets close, after all. But she spoke of you. Like she knew you; like she loved you.”
Tension stretches the muscles in Arthur’s neck thin.
“Because she did,” Emrys says.
Gwaine starts easing to the side and Arthur breathes deeply, trying to suppress the war-drum thudding of his heart and steady the waver in his gaze.
“But I don’t think I can. Not anymore,” Emrys croaks.
“Arthur!” Gwaine yells, but Emrys sweeps his hand and knocks Gwaine back, pins him to the ground and though he struggles, fingers shredding through grass and digging lines of soft-with-rainwater dirt wherever he can reach.
Arthur sways where he stands, and his head is heavy; so heavy.
“What do I do?” Emrys asks, but Arthur doesn’t know of whom. “What did you want me to do?”
He stares blankly, eyes wandering, peeling off of Arthur’s face until they’re searching the sky. And then he stops. Stares. Leans forward, breath hissing out, neck tense.
Arthur turns and cranes his neck with stiff muscles to stare at the sky.
The darkening sky, pulsing with thudding waves of pressure and itching with wrongness.
“GWAINE, RUN,” Arthur bellows.
In the field, wide open and in exactly the spot the dragon is spearing towards, Gwaine panics, thrashing where he lies, eyes bulging, mouth wide open and teeth gnashing.
“Let him go!” Arthur shouts at Emrys, the habit of command almost overwhelmed by a stretched twist of pleading running through his voice, as he picks up the tower shield Gwaine had thrown aside and slaps at Hengroen’s flank, saying, “Go, go, run,” until he flees.
There’s a snap that shears through the clearing, a pulse of repealed magic that leaves them all gasping like its their first breath after a deeply driven dive, before Gwaine lurches to his feet. His hand goes white at the knuckles where he grabs at his sword hilt and he runs, diving to the ground as far from the dragon as he can get before it lands, opens its massive maw, and roars.
Fire bursts heavy and loud from the dragon’s throat, raw and white and cracking the air with its heat. Arthur has the barest sliver of time before it hits him and he spends it staring over at Emrys, who had once - years ago - stepped between a blazing column of angry inferno and Arthur without pause and who now stands to the side, statue still but for the flap of his black cloak in the fire-wind. His eyes are wide and lit with fire-glow or magic - Arthur doesn’t know which, but he hopes that Emrys has enough good in him yet to stop another man from burning alive - and his gaze is fixed on the curling fingers of fire pealing from between Kilgharrah’s teeth. Pealing, spreading, pooling and twisting and flowing so fast.
Arthur snaps his tower shield up (and why hadn’t he had any tower shields equipped before, in the clearing where his men were burnt to snapping brands of bone?) and kneels in one smooth motion. Heat hits the metal with a punch and spreads, fleet and fierce, clawing hooks into Arthur’s hands where they clench so tight at the leather strappings.
(Distantly, through the roar of the fire-that-flies, someone is screaming. They scream so loud it scrapes a bloody rash down Arthur’s throat and pinches through his ears, but the sound dims under the heavy weight of golden-green that spreads from the earth and fuzzy up through his legs. Cool and verdant, smooth against his bone and strong like the mountains spreading wide at Camelot’s borders, whispering against the grain of the heat and the burning and the screaming that you must have courage, Pendragon King.)
Boiling inside his skin, under the quickly softening leather of his armour, the fabric underneath catching alight in the heat, slow and smoldering - the heavy weight of Albion presses up from the ground, but still his arms start shaking. Hurting and shaking and shattering apart, trembling in the screaming torrent of flame, metal buckles of his vambraces scoring deep into the flesh of his forearm, sinking and melting and burning even through the cool wash of courage spreading from his bones.
Sound creaks through him in a rush, a half-remembered and barely-known voice shouting out, “Oi, feeling a little neglected here!”
From between the gasps of pain that ring through his ears and through the roar of heat, Arthur hears the sick slick slide of a blade scraping against scale and through the squelch of flesh -
- and then he collapses under the booming-cracking-thunder that rips the air between its teeth, agony and pain and not Arthur’s pain, not this time. The dragon screams and the splash of dragon’s blood that reaches Arthur’s cheek is cold.
Shadows of the grass that once spread vibrant through the clearing crumble to shapeless ash when Arthur falls from his knees onto his back. His arms slide against his sides and shred his nerves to pieces, but the damp of the earth holds him in its palm and spreads sweet through his veins, smoothing the edges of the twitching-burning-flaring pain.
Get up, need to get up, get up get UP.
But his legs won’t do aught but twitch and tremble and his arms collapse in shrieking pain when he tries to get them underneath himself. (Bedivere had died like this, flesh melted away and bones brittle like cinder, snapping under the weight of the world on his husk of a body.) The sky spins blue above him and an acrid stench billows in wing-born waves over his face. (The dragon, roaring - is he spinning back to face Arthur? Spinning back from wherever he had turned, moments before Arthur would have let his shield drop and swallowed the fire set against him?)
The brittle prick of burnt ground rubs at his cheek when his head lolls and lags to the side, and he’s tired and he’s weak, I’m sorry for being so weak, Father. But -
- bright sparks lance down his arms as someone pulls him upright.
“Come on, now, princess, he’s not fair happy with me right now - gouging out a fellow’s eye will do that - so we gotta move, let’s go!”
Arms hooking under his shoulders, hitching him higher, head swinging around and there, the dragon, the dragon!
Time snaps back into place in a rush of cold fear and helpless resolve. He pulls Gwaine down with him onto bended knee, reaching out to grab his shield back up, stuttering through the motions over Gwaine’s, “Bloody fucking gods,” scrabbling with fingers raw and blistered and cracked and bloody-black at the still hot to touch leather straps. “Fuck,” Gwaine breathes out before hugging one arm around Arthur’s chest and bracing Arthur’s back.
The dragon swings his head around and they together barely have the shield back in the air before fire cascades around them. The thick weld of metal begins its slow softening.
“You said you weren’t there, Merlin!” Gwaine shouts, and how his voice is brighter than the dragon fire, Arthur doesn’t dare guess at. (Blessing of the gods or wisp of idling magic, or both or neither.) “When you had your fever, when you were dreaming, you screamed for her, for your lady, and you asked me why you weren’t even fucking there when she died.” (The dragon roars in a brief respite, wings beating wind into them, but Gwaine holds steady behind him and together they hold tight against the barrage.) “I tried to light the hearth and you flinched so fucking hard in your sleep that you woke yourself up. You weren’t there, and she died. But - “
(Arthur can’t feel his fingers, dares not look down at his arms, and he’s tired.)
“ - you’re fucking here now, and I don’t want to die!”
A strangled, “Morgana,” and a shearing scream splits the fire around them. Arthur tumbles down. Stirs on the ground where he lies, balm born of the earth twining up through the wreck of burnt skin and twitching muscle that he has become, and something golden and good wreathes around the secret stitchings of his heart.
Father, it was never like this for you, was it?
Green bough and blue sky and a multitude of singing breezes bolster Arthur, carry the weight of his damaged bones, and he feels brave like he hasn’t for years. Not since he cornered Emrys in the unlit room just off the kitchens, demanding an explanation for stolen scraps of bread and saying, “That’s okay, I won’t - Father won’t know from me,” when no explanation (and especially not the truth - that Emrys’s army of animal friends would only stay so long as certain food-related bribes were upkept) came.
Arthur had never told Uther about the little thief raiding the kitchens, and he thinks - he likes to think that that’s why Emrys never once told Uther about... About that one hazy, lazy day spent idling beside a stream, when Arthur had looked at the bow of Emrys’s lips and the keen sharp of his gaze and thought, “Maybe.”
The inclination would not have shocked his father, but it would have disappointed him all the same. Would have disgusted him even further, how Arthur had not pressed when Emrys had simply told him, “The Witch waits for me in her tower. Don’t tell me you don’t fear her retaliation for taking what is hers. I can see the pulse jump in your throat when she passes you in the hall.” How Arthur had not taken his right as Crown Prince. Had not made Emrys pay for refusing Arthur’s own idle (and deep and ferocious) wanting. But Emrys had never told Uther. Not ever.
Spring blooms along his calves and down his forearms; autumn scalds down his face, hard and withering.
Father, you never knew this blessing because you would never have returned it, and the land will have her due.
A steamy haze hugs around Arthur as he rises. The light of the sun and the moon together in the sky with a rush of speckled stars burnishes the mist brighter and cleaner that the dragon’s blaze. His sword is in his hand, and of course it is. It has always been there, gold spilling over the fuller, baptized in the fire set against it and righteous in his grip.
The dragon’s - Kilgharrah, our last first son, the whispers bubbling from the watery veins of the earth tell him - flame still wreathes around his teeth, but it no longer spills towards Arthur as it ought. As Arthur stands, he can see the confusion, the furious disbelief, pull Kilgharrah’s head down to face -
- Emrys, white as winter’s cold pall. His mouth gapes open, skin stretched about his face tight enough that his scars cast no relief, and he looks small. Like he had upon his first introduction to the court, a black shadow trailing at Uther’s heels, eyes incongruously shadowed for how wide they were opened. His arm stretches to the side, and he - the fire gathers at his palm, curling and taking form, a dragon of his own, and it’s - it rears back and grows. Kilgharrah pulls back desperately, one good eye rolling with the effort of breaking the hold Emrys has on him, but Emrys leans forward, throws both his arms out, hands curled into clutching claws, and he’s pulling breath from Kilgharrah’s throat. It twists and ignites, fire streaming to the creature of raw, angry magic that takes swift shape at Emrys’s side.
It stands tall on hind legs, wings snapping and cracking and opening wider than the sky. White spears crown it and red anger holds tight to its breast. It opens its mouth and roars, spitting out a gust of flame that twists into a hunting falcon. The falcon shrieks, pinions loud as they snap in a multitude against the wind, and clutches a sword gone ruby red with bleeding flame.
“I’ve seen that before.”
(And how is it that Emrys’s whisper can soak in through Arthur’s skin so simply, the sharp tang of magic loose in his mouth and tingling in his ears?)
“Omens in the fire...”
(Emrys, speaking soft as a summer pelt, and it almost feels like this was meant for Arthur alone.)
The fire-dragon snaps, the falcon screams, and between its claws the sword engenders sparks against the hard rush of wind. Black spreads in them, pooling at the heart of their flame, snarling, looking rotten in their assumed glory. The tang of the back of Arthur’s throat, the tingle-sharp-bitter-itch of magic he has only ever (and always) felt around this thing of magic that Uther stole from a swaddled crib and allowed to grow tumour-sick in the dark of Camelot’s dungeons, slides oil-slick down his throat and tastes wrong.
Kilgharrah recoils, still belching fire unwillingly from between his clenched teeth, and -
- Our last first son, whispered against Arthur’s skin, sad and resigned, mourning already. Shadows cast by thick, roiling clouds spread a shivery chill through the air, even stronger than the inferno the glade has become. Our conduit’s last living brother.
“STOP!”
The command echoes up and down the shaking spine of magic bending through the clearing. Emrys snaps around to look at him, and he looks so small against the dragon cowering behind him that Arthur forgets to feel afraid.
“Camelot has lost enough,” Arthur says, and something deep and dark and ancient threads through his voice. “Albion will have no more of it. Not by your hand, Emrys. Not your own kin.”
Gwaine stands loose beside him, but at Arthur’s nod, something seems to fall into place. His demeanour shifts, hardening, some loose hitch Gwaine had been carrying for so many years vanishing from his no longer listing stride as he moves to fall into Arthur’s side.
“The Tyrant has forced brother upon brother for too long,” Albion says. Arthur relaxes and feels the land speak through his willing mouth. “Only with our Strength will we put our child to his final rest.”
There’s a calmness to Gwaine’s movements that seems to gentle Emrys for a moment. His face slackens, grey with stress and lined with muffled horror. Remembering, maybe, the day he had heard of the Witch’s execution. (And still, Arthur wonders what his father had possibly been thinking that that had seemed a good idea.)
The dragon sways on its feet and lurches, though something - Albion or Emrys, Arthur doesn’t know, and he doesn’t know if there’s really any difference anymore - holds him steady and still. Kilgharrah waits, head lowered, neck curved in a grieving arch. Gwaine’s blade lies bloody on the ground with the blood from Kilgharrah’s eye before he picks it up with a soft swish.
“She broke my chains for you, Emrys,” Kilgharrah says. His voice doesn’t boom as Arthur (and Camelot and the gentle depth of Albion) thinks it ought, but races quietly, trying to outpace his own death. “Remember, young Warlock. Whatever I did with the freedom I gained, she broke my chains so that she might also break yours.”
The sun waves against the steel sword in Gwaine’s hand and sharpens his face into a brittle line of anger, and it doesn’t sit well on Gwaine at all.
Emrys tracks Gwaine as he strides across the clearing, scanning from Kilgharrah to the sword and then to Arthur of all things, before sucking in a breath and shaking out a long sigh.
“Remember your lost kin, Warlock. Remember those who would have remembered you, had the world wandered a different path.”
Gwaine’s arm is steady as he stands before Kilgharrah, the great dragon head almost touching the ground. A bow, Arthur thinks of a sudden. And it is. Kilgharrah’s foreleg is stretched forward, opposite hindleg stretching back, neck a long line from his shoulders down to the prickling grass.
His right eye is huge and wide and wet and his left gapes red.
“No,” Emrys says. His voice hitches and his face shines, errant tears shining along the scarred grooves on his face. “No, stop,” he moans.
Arthur says nothing. Gwaine’s jaw clenches and he shifts his sword in his hand until it’s angled in his hand like a spear, ready to be thrown.
“STOP!” Emrys screams, the sound thick with the rough of his throat, heavy and scraping. And something even - it is heavy with something even deeper than himself. He says, “You will leave this place, Kilgharrah, and you will never return,” and Arthur jolts at the command.
Our last first son, Albion says, and his Dragonlord. If Arthur had not spent his years idling away at court during otherwise lovely summer afternoons, he would not have noticed the smugness in the voice speaking inside him, but he had and so he does.
Arthur smiles in giddy relief, laughs and laughs and hears Gwaine join in, as he watches the dragon take flight and knows that he doesn't have to struggle to save Camelot anymore.
6
Birds sing through the air, and every so often there’s the cry of a hunting bird of prey, breaking the song-bird babble until the moment passes and the birds feel safe once more. (Though they are not.) The morning is quiet and wet and yellow green, the sun shining thin through the forest canopy, light spun into gentle halos that fuzz around the scrubby saplings and spring flowers that hug around strong rooted trees.
Arthur’s breath puffs before his face and he shivers against his will, an embarrassing, wracking shiver that shakes up and down his spine, almost breaking the hold he has on his scabbarded sword. It’s the cold, and it’s because he’s tired, and it’s because -
- something is wrong, and he can’t ignore it this time. His skin tingles, but it isn’t familiar. Not like the dragon, and not like Emrys - that rush down the back of his throat and threading through the almost-silenced quarters at the back of his mind. But there is still the spark of unease riddling through him.
Empty waterskins bob against Arthur’s chest, but the stream is close enough to hear, gushing fast with spring melt and eager under the morning sun. The forest hushes around him, still lazy with lingering night, birds singing gentle into the breeze but not much else making any noise at all. No Gwaine to fill the silence, either - he’s busy packing up the camp from last night. So far as duties go, Arthur is fairly certain that his - filling the waterskins - is the more dignified, but not quite certain enough that he will allow himself a smile.
Arthur slings the string of waterskins onto a large rock by the stream. Moss edges into the grey bulk and shines in the sun, spray from the crashing stream sliming it into a slippery mess. The skins slide down off the rock and into the grass. He shrugs and then moves to uncap the first, but -
The birds and the ache of pressure behind his nose and vibrating along the edges of his teeth; that something that squeezes the air from his throat in a tight hiss.
Sunshine beats onto Arthur’s head as he stands up and out of the low shade. Silence coats his ears, fuzzy and oppressive, the sound of water not loud enough to outweigh the absence of bird song.
And in the sky, a falcon shrieks.
The white light of the sun, clouds a loose threat still ringing the horizon, blots a shock of pain against his eyes. Arthur blinks, slow, but doesn’t turn away, because -
echoing through the air, hard with the teeth-hurting and pulse-pounding rush of magic
- there’s something magic up there, and it feels as sharp as the fury of a new wound with all the ache of scars that twisted deep into bone.
The silhouette, when the dark spots of the sun fade from Arthur’s sight, looks disarmingly small against the vastness of the open sky. It holds its wings stiff in an easy glide, circling, waiting. The breath of calm, the gathering of nerve and the readying of muscles, before a dive. It is only a raptor, small and swift. So small; perhaps as small as a merlin falcon.
There’s a shiver wracking its way down Arthur’s spine, that damned shiver that shakes him as though he were a soft-faced squire, new to tournaments and the heady pulse of court. It’s an itch hidden in the bend of his neck that he cannot scratch away.
When it starts to burn him, scald his skin with unseen flame, Arthur turns, his gaze falling from the sky, and runs. This isn’t the plan, not at all - Gwaine is all he has that might stitch Emrys back into the fold of humanity, but alone Arthur can do aught but die at Emrys’s hand.
And no, he says to the derisive voice of Uther that lies trapped at the forefront of Arthur’s mind so constantly in these days since his passing, that isn’t fatalistic. It’s pragmatic. To know your own weakness; to accept the inevitability of your own loss.
The sun shines green through the tree leaves and the falcon cries above his head and Arthur runs, twisting around trees he should have seen sooner - the oddest kind of tunnel vision, that which follows on the feet of terror - and forcing his legs to press down harder on the soft sponge of moss; lift faster as he stretches out his stride; lift higher over rotting tree trunks.
Twigs snap and loose branches whip along in scratchy lines across his cheeks as he bursts from the treeline out into the open air of a large clearing between pockets of trees.
Arthur runs, fleet and feather-light (because if you think you are, you will be, says the Bedivere who lives now only in his mind) and rough-shod over tufts of hard grass. Cold blooms thin in his lungs and lances down his throat, but he runs as fast as he can, holding his sheathed sword tight in his arm to spare it from bouncing against his thighs. No more armour plating dragging him down, at least - he had thought he would miss it more, the pressing weight of steel against his chest, but this is more reassuring by far. In place of his plate hauberk, a worn leather jerkin skims along his chest and eases aside with each heaving breath he takes. Lighter, and it doesn’t gleam so brightly in the cheery sun of spring.
Not that it makes much difference, he thinks as he weaves between the trees. Falcons have eyes too keen by far.
Might be nothing, the falcon wheeling above him, drafting in circles over his head. Might be nothing, just a bird, maybe a bird blessed by the old gods, but -
Arthur grunts as his foot catches in a rabbit hole, throwing his arms wide to stay standing, fingers loosening over his sword just enough that it goes flying out of his reach, golden pommel making a white arc in the sun. He stops, panting, throat aching and thirsty for water he doesn’t have. Arthur looks up and sees the falcon diving down straight at him and knows, and his sword is too far away, and he runs, he runs so fast he can hardly breathe, chest tight and mind whirling with the damage he might be able to do with the dagger strapped inside his boot, and his skin pulls and tugs with every stride at the deep-running pain rooted in his dragon-hurt shoulder.
This isn’t the plan. Gwaine is still at their camp, and this isn’t the plan at all.
“Gwaine!” Arthur shouts, and the air feels thick around him, and how far is camp? Too far, or - “Gwaine, he’s here!”
His legs collapse under him, pain and bone-deep exhaustion from so many days spent running under threat of attack overpowering the buzzing energy that had been keeping him going. So King Arthur Pendragon lies in a field under the sun in the nascence of his reign, too far from the treeline for hope, and pants and thinks that as a boy, he had never imagined this ending.
He will not entertain the thought of it now.
Flat on his back, struggling to breathe - air gone, escaped, burned in the furnace of his lungs as he tries so hard to open up his chest against the pain scored so deeply into his torso - and afraid, Arthur points his boot knife (a bright blurring glint in front of Arthur’s eyes) wildly. It shakes in his hand, throwing spears of the sun across his face. He winces as light stabs briefly through his eye, grits his teeth and crawls to his knees, feeling the stretching damp of blood at his back weighing the bandaging down, skin ripped open against the ground, muscles shuddering and tearing as he pushes himself upright.
The bird dives, curving up just before he hits the ground. Emrys flaps his wings once, twice, and on the third, his wings fold into a black cloak that wraps around his human shoulders as he stands tall. Stands still and smiles, eyes dark with memory.
“Arthur Pendragon,” he says. (And how strange that his voice is nothing special at all.) “Last in the short line of usurper kings. And look, here you are, for all your years of training, crouched before me like a boy.”
“Emrys,” Arthur gasps. “Or is it Merlin, now?”
Cloud cover pulls shadow over Emrys’s face and rushes into the field of old, dead grass. The breeze picks up and flares cold, but Arthur burns with the power of the battle-born fire in his limbs.
“Where did you - “ Emrys cuts himself off. Shakes his head and forces an ugly expression onto his face where it sits, awkward over the cruel bent of his scarring.
(Horse hooves thud over the hard pack of dead grass and dirt.)
“Met someone who knows you,” Arthur says, loud and rushed and through the thick swallow he gives in to. “Or at least, someone who thinks he knows you.”
The scrape of tough leather and stiff cloth against the now-wet bandaging left by the druids hurts with a sharpness that has Arthur wincing, but there’s something like anger crawling across Emrys’s face, and Arthur can work with that. Arthur grew up learning what games were most fun to play at court; had gotten quite good at turning anger to enthusiastic coalescence when it served him.
“Had to act like it wasn’t you that we were after, to get Gwaine to follow me. He believes in you that much. Believes you aren’t a killer. That you wouldn’t bring so much death to Camelot’s doorstep.”
“Stop it,” Emrys says. “You’re a king, Pendragon, but you aren’t my king.”
“No, because you killed your king - my father!”
“Because he deserved it.” There’s a bitter curve to the bend in his lips. “He has killed thousands for who they are. He would teach his land to do the same. He is poison, and all his line is corrupted.”
Wind bites at the heels of Emrys’s cloak and pull it almost level with the ground before slapping it flush against his legs; snapping wind hits Arthur hard where he balances on one knee and one planted foot. Arthur stumbles, starts forward, hands lurching out to brace himself, and there, the dagger still clutched in his fist, bright in the sun, bright and sharp and fast slicing between the winds and forward. Emrys flinches, arm barring across his face for a moment and then he grits his teeth, splays out one (twisted, bent and battered and broken) hand -
- it hits Arthur full in his chest, kicking into his ribs and throwing him back and beating the air from his lungs. (It’s like falling off his childhood pony for the first time, six and scared, trying to breathe like he’s forgotten how, chest clenched tight like the fists he made during play even though Nana had hated them so.) Arthur lands awkward on his thrown out elbow, the hard pack of the ground jarring him until he falls back, arm bent underneath the small of his back, dagger flat against leather of his jerkin. The sound of Arthur’s futile gasping for air - chest still clenched, still shuttered and spasming in the wake of that punch of magic - is quickly swallowed in the rush and crackle of static emanating from Emrys.
Thud, thud, thud.
Horse hooves beating on the ground like a drum, the sound thick through the pack of dirt and faint in Arthur’s ear where it presses against the prickle and grit of winter-dead grass.
Gwaine.
Arthur’s eyes rove as he struggles to pull in long heaves of air. He lurches back up to his knees - shear of pain in his shuddering limbs - with the dagger clenched in his fist behind his back. The ground twirls dizzily with the sky and he can’t get his eyes to focus and his head feels as though it might split at the seams of his tender flesh like a carcass left to bloat in the sun - aching from the light, from the jagged pressure of a building bruise inside his skull, from the loud and fast and overwhelming press of Emrys; from magic poured into a vessel of blood and bone and bursting with power.
Black hair sharp as it flutters around a pale face, and Emrys isn’t trying to smile anymore. He looks - Arthur swallows, tongue clicking dry against the back of his throat and stinging - like he’s tired.
“You killed her, and you’re going to kill so many more,” Emrys says, soft and sure.
“Emrys - I didn’t… I wouldn’t…” Arthur’s head burns and spins and thoughts jumble so fast around him. (Leon showing him how to grip a hand-and-a-half sword, the pale eyes and dark stare of the boy Emrys upon his introduction to court; the smell of mint and lavender hushing over the Seer Witch as she swept through the halls; the bloom of blood in his father’s sightless eyes.) The dagger at his back, tight in his fist, leather wrapped hilt sliding against his palm - he inches it closer to his side and fights to fix Emrys in his sight.
“Oh,” Emrys says, eyes flicking down to where Arthur’s readying his dagger before he raises his arms, fingers spread, light crackling between them. “Be careful, Pendragon. I’d put that dagger down if I were you.”
Arthur closes his eyes, head hitching down just slightly, and sighs out a long breath. Drops the dagger straight down - it sticks fast in the ground, hilt in the air, but Emrys doesn’t seem concerned.
“Your campaign against magic is over, Arthur.” Emrys stands with the shine of the sun at his back, flaring around him with glory and brilliance. “It died as she died.”
And horse hooves thunder closer, ever closer, leaden in the air and heavy through the ephemeral light of mourning. The wind is quiet, and the birds have not yet taken up song again, and Emrys looks so old and sad and angry in a manner Arthur’s father never had been. Emrys looks angry, looks vicious and fierce, but it is tempered with a resignation that Arthur is unused to seeing on his face.
Suddenly, Arthur is tired too. Shoulders shake and shiver as he lets his arms fall loose; he collapses back to sit on his heels and he feels the weight of ash close in over him, flood through his veins and press thick on his tongue and fill his throat with cinder - all those he has seen die, and all those he has killed, and maybe Emrys is right about him. So many slaughtered at his hand, or under his orders, or because his voice had shrivelled in his throat when he had wanted nothing more than to speak up.
“I am sorry,” Arthur says. Emrys pauses, eyes flickering, eyebrows tightening before his mouth curls hard and thin. “I cannot right any of the wrongs done to you; to your people. But I am sorry for what my father - for what I have done.” Breath slips too easily from his mouth - too like a gasp - so Arthur stops for a moment, settles himself, until he’s beaten control back into his greedy fist. “But she wanted - there was a knight, at her execution.” (A pulse of thick magic, wet and dewed with grief but strong with the pressure of anger swollen around it, slides across Arthur and slips beneath his skin until he’s drowning in it.) “She wanted to tell you - she wanted you to know… Her name was Morgana.”
Emrys falls into himself, eyes dropping to the ground, mouth shaping itself around her name. (“Morgana.”) His fist tightens and Arthur -
- Arthur can’t breathe, but it happens almost gently. A swelling in his throat until the air whispers thin into his lungs; until the whispers fades into silence and he’s left with only the beating of his heart.
Arthur can’t breathe, noises smacking out from his mouth as it opens and closes and gapes, but this dying feels almost sweet, pain softened into the dull ache of absence by the swathe of magic spread through his lungs.
Did the Seer Witch - did Morgana feel like this, as she died? Arthur never had asked Leon, and Leon had never brought it up. But he thinks she would have died in agony, in the fire, choking and feeling the ooze of fat melt from her bones, because if she had had her magic still, surely she would have broken her chains and slain Arthur’s father where he stood. She hadn’t, though, so she must have died screaming.
She who saw so many things. (Dark red spots stain his eyesight, and he is tired, he is mired in almost sleepy remembrance.) Arthur wonders, sometimes, if she saw her own end. If she would have run from it if she had. If she knew that Emrys would become this thing greedy for blood and broken by memory. This thing that sees Arthur’s head begin to nod and tightens his fist, determination wrought through the sad pall of his face.
Blood beats thick in Arthur’s ears, and slows and slows, thudding, thudding, slowing and stopping, and -
“Merlin!”
Arthur chokes as the swell suffocating him pops, melts away, and air floods his lungs. He sucks it in, greedy for it, coughing and gasping and heaving heavy air through his loosened throat. Gwaine hops off of Hengroen, throws the shield hitherto strapped to his arm onto the ground, and kneels down beside Arthur, holding him up by his shoulders and jostling him until he no longer feels himself falling from the edge of consciousness.
“Gwaine?” Emrys says. Arthur - his eyes clearing, but the strain pulls pain tight against his skull - watches Emrys lower his arms and tilt his head, something small and vulnerable tucked into the shine of his eyes. “What are you doing here?”
Arthur shakes himself, stirring against the hold Gwaine has him in, but he still feels the rumble of Gwaine’s chest as he speaks and it feels like it had when Arthur had been a child, leaning back against his father’s chest on those rarer and rarer days he would prop Arthur up on his knee and hold him steady; hold him firm against tumbling off. Arthur feels he may still be air-starved.
“You know, I thought you had some grand calling when I met you,” Gwaine says. “That you had heard your calling, like the Druids always told me I would one day.”
Emrys swallows and his hands shake. “If you would…” Emrys’s voice hitches. “If you would protect a Pendragon, then you’re just as reprehensible as he.”
“Well, I wouldn’t go that far,” Gwaine says, jesting but without spirit, heart pounding loud where Arthur clutches his wrist. Emrys holds his hands up, but reluctant this time. “Merlin! Merlin, stop this,” Gwaine shouts, no longer trying to hide the desperation in his voice. “Come on, I know you.”
“You know nothing about me,” Emrys spits out.
“You’re wrong - I know a lot about you,” Gwaine says. “Because you talk in your sleep. Did you know that? I know more than you think I do, about the love you lost and the crusade you’re on, but I still thought that you were only after justice.”
“I am,” Emrys snaps, biting the words to pieces between his teeth.
“No, you’re not. Not anymore,” Arthur says through his aching throat. The blue of the sky gentles the harsh light of the sun as it shines fierce down against Emrys’s weather-worn skin. And flowing up from deep down, Arthur feels a foreign ache settle into his bones; feels ancient and sad and wistful. “Why are you doing this, Emrys? We used to talk; I once thought we could have been friends, were things different.”
“But here I’ve broken free of your father’s hold at last,” Emrys says, spreading his arms.
“And what of my hold?”
“You never held me like he had.”
“I know,” Arthur says. “And that’s the point.”
Arthur’s fingers band painfully slow and his grip on Gwaine’s forearm flutters in its weakness, but he gets his grip eventually; lurches upright, swaying under the silver sun and steadying himself before leaning into Hengroen’s warmth.
“I wouldn’t move any further, were I you,” Emrys says, stepping forward and raising his arms, but he sees Gwaine - now standing too, arms angled slightly out, set in front of Arthur like a shield - and hesitates.
“Not moving,” Arthur says, “just…” His hand digs deep into Hengroen’s saddlebag, hoping that it didn’t get lost; that he kept it safe enough to still be in here - and he finds it. The leather satchel tied together with a brittle necklace. “Gwaine,” Arthur says, quiet, and passes it to him. The bag is heavy and hard, lumpy with the jut of bones inside.
Emrys watches with wide eyes and stands, silent but for the snap of his cloak in the wind, as Gwaine hands the bag to him.
“I’m sorry,” Arthur says. Inside his chest, his heart runs faster faster fast because this is it. This is all he has standing against him and the inhumanity that Uther planted under Emrys’s skin, where it festered and grew with its roots drinking for years from a well dark and sickly. “I’ve been - I have been afraid for most all my life of disappointing my people; my father. So I never said a word against him, and I never did more than turn my head as so many were slain before my eyes. I’ve been frozen all my life, but… I don’t want to be anymore.”
Heat prickles around the edges of his eyes, and that’s okay; that might even help. Arthur remembers countless raids and hunting parties, remembers how Emrys would shatter their defenses and stand aside, cold and distant from the warmth steaming up from the blood strewn ground, and that makes the tears come easily, flooding his eyes until he has to blink them into falling so he can see.
“And I couldn’t help the Witch; don’t think I would have, had I the chance. But I promise you that now that I am king, nothing like what you’ve gone through, what the Witch - what Morgana - went through, will ever happen again. I give you my word.”
Emrys stares at the bag and smiles viciously, but the hard lines of his face won’t set; he’s crumbling, muscles in his cheek shivering, eyebrows clenching at a desperate angle. With his cloak flapping out behind him and the shattering movement of his expression, Arthur thinks that he is falling to pieces; that soon little bits of him will swirl away into the wind like ash, like Morgana must have at her end.
The pendant does not sway along it’s chain - fire melted the links into a crisp curl, brittle, ready to shatter - as Emrys trails his finger along its rough edges. He almost turns his back to Arthur, perhaps shy of how his weakness is caught so firmly inside a lover’s necklace, but catches himself. His throat worries up and before before he finally speaks with a voice low and lowly.
“There was this place she would talk about, my lady - Morgana. I asked her a thousand times not to, but, well. She knew, I think, that the stupid, tiny, treasonous part of me loved it when she told me of it. Her other now. She went there often. As often as she could. And sometimes, in the night, when the dark crept close and we both felt we could reach out and live in our dreams, she would talk about what she saw. And so often it was about us, Arthur.”
Through the long pause that follows, Arthur struggles with whether or not he should talk; should break Emrys out of his memory. But Emrys continues before Arthur works through enough of the mire of his fatigue to say anything at all.
“You never spoke with her much, did you? King kept his pets close, after all. But she spoke of you. Like she knew you; like she loved you.”
Tension stretches the muscles in Arthur’s neck thin.
“Because she did,” Emrys says.
Gwaine starts easing to the side and Arthur breathes deeply, trying to suppress the war-drum thudding of his heart and steady the waver in his gaze.
“But I don’t think I can. Not anymore,” Emrys croaks.
“Arthur!” Gwaine yells, but Emrys sweeps his hand and knocks Gwaine back, pins him to the ground and though he struggles, fingers shredding through grass and digging lines of soft-with-rainwater dirt wherever he can reach.
Arthur sways where he stands, and his head is heavy; so heavy.
“What do I do?” Emrys asks, but Arthur doesn’t know of whom. “What did you want me to do?”
He stares blankly, eyes wandering, peeling off of Arthur’s face until they’re searching the sky. And then he stops. Stares. Leans forward, breath hissing out, neck tense.
Arthur turns and cranes his neck with stiff muscles to stare at the sky.
The darkening sky, pulsing with thudding waves of pressure and itching with wrongness.
“GWAINE, RUN,” Arthur bellows.
In the field, wide open and in exactly the spot the dragon is spearing towards, Gwaine panics, thrashing where he lies, eyes bulging, mouth wide open and teeth gnashing.
“Let him go!” Arthur shouts at Emrys, the habit of command almost overwhelmed by a stretched twist of pleading running through his voice, as he picks up the tower shield Gwaine had thrown aside and slaps at Hengroen’s flank, saying, “Go, go, run,” until he flees.
There’s a snap that shears through the clearing, a pulse of repealed magic that leaves them all gasping like its their first breath after a deeply driven dive, before Gwaine lurches to his feet. His hand goes white at the knuckles where he grabs at his sword hilt and he runs, diving to the ground as far from the dragon as he can get before it lands, opens its massive maw, and roars.
Fire bursts heavy and loud from the dragon’s throat, raw and white and cracking the air with its heat. Arthur has the barest sliver of time before it hits him and he spends it staring over at Emrys, who had once - years ago - stepped between a blazing column of angry inferno and Arthur without pause and who now stands to the side, statue still but for the flap of his black cloak in the fire-wind. His eyes are wide and lit with fire-glow or magic - Arthur doesn’t know which, but he hopes that Emrys has enough good in him yet to stop another man from burning alive - and his gaze is fixed on the curling fingers of fire pealing from between Kilgharrah’s teeth. Pealing, spreading, pooling and twisting and flowing so fast.
Arthur snaps his tower shield up (and why hadn’t he had any tower shields equipped before, in the clearing where his men were burnt to snapping brands of bone?) and kneels in one smooth motion. Heat hits the metal with a punch and spreads, fleet and fierce, clawing hooks into Arthur’s hands where they clench so tight at the leather strappings.
(Distantly, through the roar of the fire-that-flies, someone is screaming. They scream so loud it scrapes a bloody rash down Arthur’s throat and pinches through his ears, but the sound dims under the heavy weight of golden-green that spreads from the earth and fuzzy up through his legs. Cool and verdant, smooth against his bone and strong like the mountains spreading wide at Camelot’s borders, whispering against the grain of the heat and the burning and the screaming that you must have courage, Pendragon King.)
Boiling inside his skin, under the quickly softening leather of his armour, the fabric underneath catching alight in the heat, slow and smoldering - the heavy weight of Albion presses up from the ground, but still his arms start shaking. Hurting and shaking and shattering apart, trembling in the screaming torrent of flame, metal buckles of his vambraces scoring deep into the flesh of his forearm, sinking and melting and burning even through the cool wash of courage spreading from his bones.
Sound creaks through him in a rush, a half-remembered and barely-known voice shouting out, “Oi, feeling a little neglected here!”
From between the gasps of pain that ring through his ears and through the roar of heat, Arthur hears the sick slick slide of a blade scraping against scale and through the squelch of flesh -
- and then he collapses under the booming-cracking-thunder that rips the air between its teeth, agony and pain and not Arthur’s pain, not this time. The dragon screams and the splash of dragon’s blood that reaches Arthur’s cheek is cold.
Shadows of the grass that once spread vibrant through the clearing crumble to shapeless ash when Arthur falls from his knees onto his back. His arms slide against his sides and shred his nerves to pieces, but the damp of the earth holds him in its palm and spreads sweet through his veins, smoothing the edges of the twitching-burning-flaring pain.
Get up, need to get up, get up get UP.
But his legs won’t do aught but twitch and tremble and his arms collapse in shrieking pain when he tries to get them underneath himself. (Bedivere had died like this, flesh melted away and bones brittle like cinder, snapping under the weight of the world on his husk of a body.) The sky spins blue above him and an acrid stench billows in wing-born waves over his face. (The dragon, roaring - is he spinning back to face Arthur? Spinning back from wherever he had turned, moments before Arthur would have let his shield drop and swallowed the fire set against him?)
The brittle prick of burnt ground rubs at his cheek when his head lolls and lags to the side, and he’s tired and he’s weak, I’m sorry for being so weak, Father. But -
- bright sparks lance down his arms as someone pulls him upright.
“Come on, now, princess, he’s not fair happy with me right now - gouging out a fellow’s eye will do that - so we gotta move, let’s go!”
Arms hooking under his shoulders, hitching him higher, head swinging around and there, the dragon, the dragon!
Time snaps back into place in a rush of cold fear and helpless resolve. He pulls Gwaine down with him onto bended knee, reaching out to grab his shield back up, stuttering through the motions over Gwaine’s, “Bloody fucking gods,” scrabbling with fingers raw and blistered and cracked and bloody-black at the still hot to touch leather straps. “Fuck,” Gwaine breathes out before hugging one arm around Arthur’s chest and bracing Arthur’s back.
The dragon swings his head around and they together barely have the shield back in the air before fire cascades around them. The thick weld of metal begins its slow softening.
“You said you weren’t there, Merlin!” Gwaine shouts, and how his voice is brighter than the dragon fire, Arthur doesn’t dare guess at. (Blessing of the gods or wisp of idling magic, or both or neither.) “When you had your fever, when you were dreaming, you screamed for her, for your lady, and you asked me why you weren’t even fucking there when she died.” (The dragon roars in a brief respite, wings beating wind into them, but Gwaine holds steady behind him and together they hold tight against the barrage.) “I tried to light the hearth and you flinched so fucking hard in your sleep that you woke yourself up. You weren’t there, and she died. But - “
(Arthur can’t feel his fingers, dares not look down at his arms, and he’s tired.)
“ - you’re fucking here now, and I don’t want to die!”
A strangled, “Morgana,” and a shearing scream splits the fire around them. Arthur tumbles down. Stirs on the ground where he lies, balm born of the earth twining up through the wreck of burnt skin and twitching muscle that he has become, and something golden and good wreathes around the secret stitchings of his heart.
Father, it was never like this for you, was it?
Green bough and blue sky and a multitude of singing breezes bolster Arthur, carry the weight of his damaged bones, and he feels brave like he hasn’t for years. Not since he cornered Emrys in the unlit room just off the kitchens, demanding an explanation for stolen scraps of bread and saying, “That’s okay, I won’t - Father won’t know from me,” when no explanation (and especially not the truth - that Emrys’s army of animal friends would only stay so long as certain food-related bribes were upkept) came.
Arthur had never told Uther about the little thief raiding the kitchens, and he thinks - he likes to think that that’s why Emrys never once told Uther about... About that one hazy, lazy day spent idling beside a stream, when Arthur had looked at the bow of Emrys’s lips and the keen sharp of his gaze and thought, “Maybe.”
The inclination would not have shocked his father, but it would have disappointed him all the same. Would have disgusted him even further, how Arthur had not pressed when Emrys had simply told him, “The Witch waits for me in her tower. Don’t tell me you don’t fear her retaliation for taking what is hers. I can see the pulse jump in your throat when she passes you in the hall.” How Arthur had not taken his right as Crown Prince. Had not made Emrys pay for refusing Arthur’s own idle (and deep and ferocious) wanting. But Emrys had never told Uther. Not ever.
Spring blooms along his calves and down his forearms; autumn scalds down his face, hard and withering.
Father, you never knew this blessing because you would never have returned it, and the land will have her due.
A steamy haze hugs around Arthur as he rises. The light of the sun and the moon together in the sky with a rush of speckled stars burnishes the mist brighter and cleaner that the dragon’s blaze. His sword is in his hand, and of course it is. It has always been there, gold spilling over the fuller, baptized in the fire set against it and righteous in his grip.
The dragon’s - Kilgharrah, our last first son, the whispers bubbling from the watery veins of the earth tell him - flame still wreathes around his teeth, but it no longer spills towards Arthur as it ought. As Arthur stands, he can see the confusion, the furious disbelief, pull Kilgharrah’s head down to face -
- Emrys, white as winter’s cold pall. His mouth gapes open, skin stretched about his face tight enough that his scars cast no relief, and he looks small. Like he had upon his first introduction to the court, a black shadow trailing at Uther’s heels, eyes incongruously shadowed for how wide they were opened. His arm stretches to the side, and he - the fire gathers at his palm, curling and taking form, a dragon of his own, and it’s - it rears back and grows. Kilgharrah pulls back desperately, one good eye rolling with the effort of breaking the hold Emrys has on him, but Emrys leans forward, throws both his arms out, hands curled into clutching claws, and he’s pulling breath from Kilgharrah’s throat. It twists and ignites, fire streaming to the creature of raw, angry magic that takes swift shape at Emrys’s side.
It stands tall on hind legs, wings snapping and cracking and opening wider than the sky. White spears crown it and red anger holds tight to its breast. It opens its mouth and roars, spitting out a gust of flame that twists into a hunting falcon. The falcon shrieks, pinions loud as they snap in a multitude against the wind, and clutches a sword gone ruby red with bleeding flame.
“I’ve seen that before.”
(And how is it that Emrys’s whisper can soak in through Arthur’s skin so simply, the sharp tang of magic loose in his mouth and tingling in his ears?)
“Omens in the fire...”
(Emrys, speaking soft as a summer pelt, and it almost feels like this was meant for Arthur alone.)
The fire-dragon snaps, the falcon screams, and between its claws the sword engenders sparks against the hard rush of wind. Black spreads in them, pooling at the heart of their flame, snarling, looking rotten in their assumed glory. The tang of the back of Arthur’s throat, the tingle-sharp-bitter-itch of magic he has only ever (and always) felt around this thing of magic that Uther stole from a swaddled crib and allowed to grow tumour-sick in the dark of Camelot’s dungeons, slides oil-slick down his throat and tastes wrong.
Kilgharrah recoils, still belching fire unwillingly from between his clenched teeth, and -
- Our last first son, whispered against Arthur’s skin, sad and resigned, mourning already. Shadows cast by thick, roiling clouds spread a shivery chill through the air, even stronger than the inferno the glade has become. Our conduit’s last living brother.
“STOP!”
The command echoes up and down the shaking spine of magic bending through the clearing. Emrys snaps around to look at him, and he looks so small against the dragon cowering behind him that Arthur forgets to feel afraid.
“Camelot has lost enough,” Arthur says, and something deep and dark and ancient threads through his voice. “Albion will have no more of it. Not by your hand, Emrys. Not your own kin.”
Gwaine stands loose beside him, but at Arthur’s nod, something seems to fall into place. His demeanour shifts, hardening, some loose hitch Gwaine had been carrying for so many years vanishing from his no longer listing stride as he moves to fall into Arthur’s side.
“The Tyrant has forced brother upon brother for too long,” Albion says. Arthur relaxes and feels the land speak through his willing mouth. “Only with our Strength will we put our child to his final rest.”
There’s a calmness to Gwaine’s movements that seems to gentle Emrys for a moment. His face slackens, grey with stress and lined with muffled horror. Remembering, maybe, the day he had heard of the Witch’s execution. (And still, Arthur wonders what his father had possibly been thinking that that had seemed a good idea.)
The dragon sways on its feet and lurches, though something - Albion or Emrys, Arthur doesn’t know, and he doesn’t know if there’s really any difference anymore - holds him steady and still. Kilgharrah waits, head lowered, neck curved in a grieving arch. Gwaine’s blade lies bloody on the ground with the blood from Kilgharrah’s eye before he picks it up with a soft swish.
“She broke my chains for you, Emrys,” Kilgharrah says. His voice doesn’t boom as Arthur (and Camelot and the gentle depth of Albion) thinks it ought, but races quietly, trying to outpace his own death. “Remember, young Warlock. Whatever I did with the freedom I gained, she broke my chains so that she might also break yours.”
The sun waves against the steel sword in Gwaine’s hand and sharpens his face into a brittle line of anger, and it doesn’t sit well on Gwaine at all.
Emrys tracks Gwaine as he strides across the clearing, scanning from Kilgharrah to the sword and then to Arthur of all things, before sucking in a breath and shaking out a long sigh.
“Remember your lost kin, Warlock. Remember those who would have remembered you, had the world wandered a different path.”
Gwaine’s arm is steady as he stands before Kilgharrah, the great dragon head almost touching the ground. A bow, Arthur thinks of a sudden. And it is. Kilgharrah’s foreleg is stretched forward, opposite hindleg stretching back, neck a long line from his shoulders down to the prickling grass.
His right eye is huge and wide and wet and his left gapes red.
“No,” Emrys says. His voice hitches and his face shines, errant tears shining along the scarred grooves on his face. “No, stop,” he moans.
Arthur says nothing. Gwaine’s jaw clenches and he shifts his sword in his hand until it’s angled in his hand like a spear, ready to be thrown.
“STOP!” Emrys screams, the sound thick with the rough of his throat, heavy and scraping. And something even - it is heavy with something even deeper than himself. He says, “You will leave this place, Kilgharrah, and you will never return,” and Arthur jolts at the command.
Our last first son, Albion says, and his Dragonlord. If Arthur had not spent his years idling away at court during otherwise lovely summer afternoons, he would not have noticed the smugness in the voice speaking inside him, but he had and so he does.
Arthur smiles in giddy relief, laughs and laughs and hears Gwaine join in, as he watches the dragon take flight and knows that he doesn't have to struggle to save Camelot anymore.
6