Merlin: A Study in Natural Philosophy 1/2 (A/M, PG-13)
Title: A Study in Natural Philosophy 1/2
Author: mad_maudlin
Fandom: Merlin
Pairing: Merlin/Arthur
Rating: PG-13
Warnings/Spoilers: Asymptotic to season 1 canon; after that, it's a total AU.
Summary: It's not unusual for people to hide their daemons. Merlin, however, seems to be taking it a little far.
Notes: So there was a craze for a while, at least in SGA fandom, for writing daemon!fic--using the concept from Phillip Pullman's "His Dark Materials" trilogy of a animal-form spiritual companion. And it occurred to me, a while ago, that I'd never seen a Merlin version of that, and I quite wanted to. Which, of course, meant I had to write it myself. And then sit on it in anxiety until the whole damn thing had turned into an AU anyway. (Well, and even bigger AU, I guess.)
This is not a crossover with HDM, so don't worry if you aren't familiar with that canon; I hope everything you need to know about daemons is here in the text. Thanks to Linnet for the beta, as always.
A/N: This fic now comes with fanart, courtesy of scowling_hermit: find it here!
A Study in Natural Philosophy
by Mad Maudlin
It wasn't all that unusual for people to hide their daemons; not everyone was as fortunate as Arthur, after all, so not every daemon was as beautiful and practical and helpful and, um, big. Some people had mice and spiders and even flea daemons, and those were easy to hide (or in the case of the fleas, difficult not to). Sir Gareth had a leech daemon that Arthur wished he'd hide, instead of taking it out to dangle from his nose or chin at feasts to the delight of the pages and the shrieks of the serving girls. Gaius's daemon had a tendency to crawl up his sleeves or down his collar at the first hint of cold, though you could usually see the shape of her around his neck and shoulders like a strange, rippling noose. Morgana's daemon often rode in her hair or on the neck of her gowns, so still that an inattentive visitor might mistake him for a fantastic bit of jewelry until he suddenly flickered his wings.
And then there was Merlin, who didn't seem to be actively hiding anything, but neither seemed to ever have his daemon where anyone could see it. At one point Arthur even began to wonder if Merlin even had a daemon, though it was such a stupid thought he only voice it to Amaranth, who quite reasonably snorted at him. "It's probably a dung beetle or something," she said while he curried her coat. "Or a weevil. Or a worm. He could keep it in his pocket and we'd never know."
"Doesn't seem like a safe place to keep a daemon that squishy," Arthur said, running the comb down her flanks.
"Remember Lord Elric had an ant daemon? He kept her in a little iron case so no one could step on her." Amaranth suddenly stamped her hoof at him. "Oh, oh, right there, I think I've got some mud on me and it itches..."
"Bossy," Arthur sneered, but obliged her, brushing away the alleged mud until her bay coat lay smooth and glossy. It wouldn't be appropriate for him to appear in public with his daemon looking like she'd run through a sty, after all.
On the subject of daemons, Merlin didn't exactly volunteer any information, either. During, for instance, the doomed lessons on swordwork, Arthur had tried to explain the important of protecting one's daemon. "If it's not big enough to be safe on the ground, you've got to find a place for it under your armor where it'll be protected as you are," he explained.
"Yeah, sure," Merlin said absently; for some reason he was watching the sky.
"Well?" Arthur asked. "Is it?"
Merlin's eyes snapped down guiltily. "Sorry, what's what?"
"Is your daemon protected," Arthur said slowly, "or am I going to kill you the first time I make contact?"
"He's fine," Merlin had said, and fitted his helmet into place. Arthur had glanced back at Amaranth, but she'd been snacking on late clover and not following the conversation.
Arthur knew, of course, that there was nothing unusual about having a daemon the same sex as yourself-it had been one of the first things Gaius put out of his mind, back when the king had decided Arthur should have tutelage in natural philosophy. "It is abnormal in the sense that it's uncommon," Gaius said, "but it has no bearing on one's character or abilities."
"Morgana said it means you're a cocksucker," Arthur had volunteered, being nine and too young to know what that meant except naughty and therefore fun to say.
Gaius had sighed but not gotten angry. "Lady Morgana expresses a popular assumption. The truth is, sire, our daemons reflect complicated aspects of our personalities-that is why it's so hard to judge a man by his daemon. Taking one trait like sex or species and making a sweeping judgment based on that alone is reductivist."
He must've seen the glazed look on Arthur's face then, because he smiled and coaxed his daemon out of his sleeve. "Let me use myself and Meditrina as an example. What does she tell you about me?"
"That...you're Gaius?" Arthur hazarded. He watched Amaranth climb onto the tabletop and transform herself into something like a long, lithe polecat, hissing and chittering. Meditrina tasted the air once and then flicked her head away from the other daemon, coiling more of herself around Gaius's wrist.
Gaius chuckled at Arthur's answer. "Let me put it another way. If you were told someone has a serpent for a daemon, what would you think of that person?"
"I dunno," Arthur said, but Gaius was giving him the raised-eyebrow look, so he thought about it while Amaranth tried to get Meditrina's attention. "I guess...that they were cold, and not nice, and kind of sneaky."
"Do you associate any of those words with me?" Gaius asked with a small smile.
Arthur hesitated. "Well...you didn't tell Father that you brought me honey when I had the pox."
Gaius laughed, just as Meditrina's patience gave out; she bared her fangs at Amaranth, who turned into a squirrel so she could scamper onto the bookshelf over Arthur's head and hiss back. "So I did not. But Meditrina's shape is appropriate in other ways as well, Arthur. I have studied science and philosophy since I was your age, and in warmer lands than ours snakes are believed to be bringers of great wisdom. I believe wisdom is what she has brought to me." He stroked her flat head affectionately; she just crawled back up his sleeve. "So it is with all daemons, Arthur; if you are fortunate, you might know a man well enough to understand why daemon has a certain form, but you can tell nothing of him from his daemon on first sight."
Arthur had the disappointing suspicion that he'd just learned something, but wasn't going to surrender to it without a fight. "But sometimes you can tell things," he protested. "Like a sorcerer."
For some reason that made Gaius go stiff. "Is this something else Morgana has been telling you?" he asked.
"Everyone knows about sorcerers, Gaius," Arthur said. "Father even made a law--"
"We are here to discuss natural philosophy, not legal theory," Gaius said; it was the first time Arthur had ever heard him angry, but he only realized that later, in hindsight; at the time he was annoyed with Gaius for interrupting him. "As it is, I have known of many sorcerers whose daemons were common beasts of the earth and water."
"But a bird daemon always means a sorcerer, right?" Arthur asked. "Because it's not a proper daemon if it can fly away!"
"A daemon is a daemon," Gaius said quietly, "and there is no difference between yours or mine or a sorcerer's, whatever form they might assume."
He'd changed the subject that day, and it had been many years ago. Arthur had eventually accepted the general lesson about daemon-reading and even the specific lesson about sex and sexual preferences, but it was hard to remember a sorcerer's daemon could take any form it pleased when you were busy remembering that anyone with a bird daemon had to be shot on sight.
And none of that really helped with Merlin.
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Arthur justified nagging Merlin about it on the grounds that Merlin was fascinated with Amaranth-a natural and entirely justifiable reaction to her, in Arthur's opinion. "I've never met someone with such a big daemon before," Merlin confessed at one point, early in his employment. "How do you, you know, get around?"
"She's more agile than she looks," Arthur explained, "and most of the passages in the castle are sufficiently wide for her. If they weren't before she settled, Father had them altered." He'd complained about, too, but in the end he'd accepted that the trouble of hiring the masons and cutting new doorways was better than the shame of his son and heir sleeping in the stables.
"You'd never get her into the kitchens," was Merlin's comment, and for a moment he looked almost tempted to touch her, hands twitching at his side. Amaranth could tell so, too, and she tossed her forelock flirtatiously, but of course Merlin would never dare. Even peasants knew such things.
Arthur rolled his eyes at him. "Well, it's a good thing I don't have to go into the kitchens, isn't it? That is, in theory, why I have you, and it's not as if your daemon needs to be winched in the windows..."
Merlin ignored this completely and instead asked, "Does she, you know, let you ride her?"
"Would be a waste if she didn't," Arthur said, and even Amaranth was rolling her eyes at Merlin now, behind his back. "Though she's too light for jousting. I have a destrier for that, as well as various coursers and palfreys for other purposes, so I don't wear her out. Incidentally, you're mucking out their stable tonight."
Merlin glared daggers at him, but asked, "What about hers?" with a nod towards the notch in the wall that served Amaranth as a stall. (It had been a closet before she settled, and there was only so much the masons could do about the size without, they said, threatening the strength of the ceiling and walls.)
"What about it?" Arthur said. "Honestly, Merlin, you have the brains of a bird. Clean it as you would the rest of the room, change the bedding and make certain you get all the hair out of her comb. Do I have to explain everything to you?"
Apparently, Arthur did. And Merlin listened, and sometimes actually did as he was told, and refused to be baited into a conversation about his own daemon, no matter how many ways Arthur went about it. Just smiled at him strangely, changed the subject, dropped things-the last of which probably wasn't a deliberate change of subject, but Arthur could never be sure. What it all meant was that in the first few months of their acquaintance he learned only that Merlin's daemon was male and apparently small enough to hide forever; Merlin never even mentioned him by name.
Of course, then Merlin tried to get himself killed, first by accusing the king of Mercia of poisoning Arthur and then setting out to prove it. Arthur had helped drag Merlin's limp body up to Gaius's workroom, Amaranth following clumsily behind, and watched as Gaius stripped away Merlin's fussy court clothes to evaluate the poison, and--"Where's his daemon?"
"Hmm?" Gaius looked up, while Meditrina continued to taste the air around Merlin's mouth, like she could identify the poison by smell.
Arthur nodded at the tunic that had been flung across the room, too far away to possibly be comfortable if the daemon was in a pocket. "His daemon, he hides it. Where is it now?"
"Comfortable," Gaius said firmly, and started fussing with a sheet. "Your highness, I think you should step outside. I need to undress him and I will not be able to answer any questions until I have finished my examination."
The next time Arthur saw Merlin, just before setting out to find the mortaeus flower, there was a small lump under the blanket, over Merlin's heart. It was only about the size of Arthur's fist, and if he'd been thinking about it, he could've tugged down the blanket and gotten a good look at it then-but there were more important things to worry about at the time, and then there were much more important things, such as for instance, Amaranth's sudden and unanticipated ability to fly
"I'm not delusional," Arthur told Gaius later (after verifying for himself that Merlin was well and would be back to work soon.) "There was a big ball of light that picked her up and carried her out of the cave with me. I don't know why it couldn't have fetched the both of us..."
"Start over from when Nimueh destroyed the ledge," Gaius said. "If you could."
Arthur took a deep breath. "Right. I was trapped on the wrong side of the ledge, and Nimueh said-something like I wasn't destined to die by her hand. Her daemon, I guess that's what it was, it looked like some kind of buzzard and it stooped on Amaranth while Nimueh was talking-nearly put her eyes out." He leaned back on his stool, against Amaranth's flank, deliberately reminding himself that she was still there and all right.
Gaius nodded like he'd expected this. "And after she left?"
"I...well...there were these giant spiders, coming up the wall," Arthur said. "Probably not the best company. I couldn't very well draw a sword just hanging there, so I tried to climb higher, but...but it was too far."
He'd tried, though, at Amaranth's own hysterical urging; he'd pulled himself up one hand at a time, putting distance between them and trying to push down the pain until he was sobbing with it; she had been no better, dancing precariously close to the crumbled edge of the ledge, whining and tossing her head. But at some point his limbs had locked in a spasm, and Amaranth had let out an agonized cry that sounded as much like a human as a horse, and Arthur knew he was done for, that he couldn't go an inch further.
Gaius nodded, as if he understood all Arthur had left unspoken. "And then what happened?"
Arthur shrugged. "There was this...light. I don't know where it came from. A big sphere of blue light-not fire, because it wasn't hot, just...bright. It must've been magical, but I don't know why Nimueh would've sent it. I could see the spiders, and the flower, and the ledge...and then..." This was the crazy sounding part, so Arthur tried to lay it out simply. "The light sort of split in half. One part stayed over me, and the other part flew down to Amaranth and...lifted her up."
He'd been too grateful at the time to question it, grateful for the absence of pain and for the clear path out if only he could climb that far. It was too perfectly convenient to be a threat, he thought, and it wasn't as if whoever had sent the light had actually touched her-so he'd seized the flower and hauled himself up the wall to the surface, just in time to watch Amaranth settle daintily on the grass, just before the light went out.
"It didn't hurt," Amaranth suddenly said, looking at Gaius herself. "It didn't really feel like anything. I was just...flying." Her tail switched anxiously. "Not something I want to do again."
"And you didn't see anyone when you came to the surface?" Gaius asked. "Didn't hear anything?"
Arthur had been a bit distracted by a belated case of the shakes, the burning in his arms and the delirious joy of seeing Amaranth alive and well and close enough to touch, but... "Wings," he said, and Amaranth nodded in confirmation. "I heard wings, like something was flying overhead."
Gaius nodded at that, and said something about Nimueh's motives being opaque to everyone, and never said anything more on the matter.
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Arthur eventually let it go, too-after all, it was hard to question something that saved your life. He did not let go of his new hint about the identity of Merlin's daemon, since it had been clearly much larger than a bug, which suggested that Merlin was deliberately keeping it hidden. There weren't many creatures Arthur could think of that would merit that sort of treatment-Merlin had never shown any particular affinity for water, so he thought could rule out frogs, and he didn't see any reason to be ashamed of a rat unless it had fleas. He then spent a week worrying that Merlin was going to give him fleas, but when Amaranth pointed out there had been no excessive scratching, he conceded the point.
"Why do you even care?" Amaranth asked, amusedly, during another session with the curry-comb.
"You aren't at all curious?" Arthur demanded.
"If he's hiding it, he's got a reason," she said with a little toss of her mane. "No need to go on about it."
"What if I want to know the reason?" Arthur asked. After all, Merlin was his servant and Arthur had every right to indulge his own curiosity.
Amaranth sighed. "Look, Arthur, just because you fancy the lad--" She had to stop to let him splutter indignantly. "Don't carry on, you know it's true."
"Isn't!" Arthur managed to spit out.
She turned her head to look for him. "So that's why we risked life and limb to pick him a pretty flower?"
"That is reductivist," Arthur said. (He could learn things, if pressed, and when he did they tended to stay with him.)
"Fine," Amaranth said. "You care deeply about him, as you owe him your life and he's the closest thing to a friend you've got besides Morgana and the fact that he's got adorable eyes is just icing on the cake."
"'Adorable eyes'?" Arthur echoed, choosing to ignore the dig about friends. "Are you sure it's not you who fancies him?"
"You're changing the subject," she said.
"You're clouding the issue!" Arthur made one last swipe with the comb and set it aside. "I am expressing a perfectly natural and healthy curiosity about him. Just because a daemon doesn't tell you much about a man doesn't mean it can't give us a hint."
"Or you could just, you know, get to know him," Amaranth said, but Arthur decided to ignore her, and so she snorted and bedded down for the night.
The world seemed to want to give Arthur object lessons in the irrelevance of daemons over the next few weeks; Lancelot's hound and Edwin's pig hadn't given away anything about their true natures except perhaps in hindsight. Merlin was somehow in the middle of both affairs, of course, or at least skulking about the edges looking anxious; while Arthur was properly annoyed with him for it he was also a bit preoccupied with various monsters and near-death experiences. Worrying about Merlin's mystery daemon went on the shelf for a while.
And then Sophia came to Camelot.
Looking back on the whole affair, Arthur found it hard to remember clearly-like it was a vivid dream, or like he'd been continuously drunk. Sophia was beautiful, and he had been happy around her, but he couldn't quite explain why. He remembered wanting to be with her with a fervor that bordered on physical need, remembered that it had somehow been perfectly reasonable to elope into the woods, remembered riding Amaranth by a placid lake...
"What was I thinking?" Arthur asked Amaranth after Merlin and Gaius had gone. The blankets from her stall and a good deal of straw had migrated to Arthur's bedside, and he wasn't sure which image amused him more: Amaranth dragging them over herself, or her bullying Merlin into doing it for her.
Amaranth snorted at him. "You weren't thinking, prat. Neither of us were."
Arthur glanced at her sideways. "I think Merlin is becoming a negative influence on you."
She just stretched her head up to rest on the bed next to his; Arthur took the hint and started scratching between her ears. "I think he's had quite a positive impact on our lives, actually," she said daintily.
"'Impact' being the operative word, apparently," Arthur muttered. "I can't believe he hit me. I wasn't that far gone, was I?" Surprisingly, Amaranth remained quiet, though her ears switched backwards; down on the floor, her tail lashed, spreading bits of straw in all directions. Arthur frowned. "Are you all right?"
"Fine," she said, and stretched up to whuff his hair a bit. "Just fine."
"Liar," Arthur immediately answered. "Was it that traumatic?"
Amaranth looked like she was going to say something, and the switching of her tail got worse. But in the end she just pressed her nose closer to Arthur's shoulder and muttered. "I promised I wouldn't talk about it."
"Promised who?" Arthur demanded immediately.
"Ambrosius," she answered, after another long pause.
Arthur pushed himself up on his elbows, taking advantage of a rare change to look down on his daemon. "And who the hell is Ambrosius?"
She huffed at him, but under his glare she eventually answered, "Merlin's daemon," with a sort of equine pout.
"So you've seen him!" Arthur cheered. "What is--"
"Just because you want to know, I'm not telling," Amaranth blustered, and pulled her head back so she could put her neck in an arrogant arch.
"Come oooon," Arthur moaned. "It'll help loads with my recovery. Unless...did he bite you?"
"What?" Amaranth blinked at him. "No, of course not--"
'Did he have to bite you so Merlin could whack me?" Arthur asked. "Run under your feet? Jump on your head and yell 'boo'?"
"He did nothing of the sort," Amaranth protested. "We just...spoke a bit. And I gave him my word of honor not to say anything more."
"Why would you do a thing like that?" Arthur demanded, because while he was certain Amaranth would never keep something truly dangerous from him (as if Merlin's daemon could possibly be a threat, fleas or no fleas) the fact that it was a secret worth keeping made him want to know more than ever.
"Because if anyone should tell you, it should be Merlin himself," Amaranth said, and before Arthur could challenge that, she added, "Besides, it's not his daemon you should be worrying about."
"Attention whore," Arthur sniffed, and reached out to scratch at Amaranth's ears again.
Surprisingly, she twisted out of his reach. "That's not what I meant," she said. "Arthur, what was Sophia's daemon?"
It was such an obvious question that Arthur laughed, but when he tried to answer he realized...but he had ridden out with her so many times, and there had been those moments in the forest...they had stood before the whole court, and yet... "I have no idea," he admitted.
"No one does," Amaranth said softly. "Everyone remembers Sophia and Aulfric, and nobody seems to remember their daemons. Mimir thinks--"
"Mimir is as addled as Morgana," Arthur said gruffly, thinking about the dragonfly buzzing about his face while Morgana tried to talk to him about...whatever she wanted to talk about. That was one of the memories drowned in fog.
"He thinks they didn't have any," Amaranth said, which was just absurd, because every living human had a daemon-even sorcerers, unnatural though they might be. Arthur told Amaranth so, and she dropped the whole conversation, but it was several days before she let Merlin move her bedding back to her stall, and even longer before she'd stop randomly nuzzling the back of Arthur's neck, even in the middle of important meetings. (Merlin himself was little better, come to think of it-perhaps he was guilty about the hitting.)
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Arthur was still thinking about daemons when they found the druid boy, the one Morgana and Merlin were so eager to save. Mordred was still young enough that his daemon wasn't settled, but instead constantly shifted forms-pigeon, plover, woodpecker, kingfisher, owlet, robin, raven, wren, though for a little while it turned into a wobbly foal the same color as Amaranth. While the boy was ill enough that the daemon didn't leave his side, when Arthur returned him to his people the woods were full of flapping wings and not one of the green-cloaked druids had had a daemon in sight. It had made Arthur all too aware of Amaranth at his back, and he felt vulnerable in a way he didn't like at all.
"It's unnatural," he groused to Merlin later, having successfully snuck back into the castle despite the distinct lack of faith Morgana had showed in him. (Just because his daemon was a fourteen-hand courser didn't mean he couldn't sneak, thank you.)
Merlin got an odd look on his face then. "What, the birds?"
"The distance," Arthur said. "The...how could they stand to have their daemons flying about like that?"
"Maybe they don't know any different," Merlin said stiffly. "Besides, Morgana's daemon flies."
"Yes, but not to the other side of the castle," Arthur pointed out. "I just...I can't imagine how they can do that without pain. How someone could stand by and just let their daemon go. It's...inhuman."
Something in Merlin's pocket made a high squeaking noise, and Merlin stuffed his hand in there quickly to muffle whatever it was. Arthur himself had a pretty good guess. "You saw he was as human as you or me," Merlin shot back. "Just because he's unusual doesn't mean he's a monster."
"He's a potential enemy of Camelot, which is all the more disturbing," Arthur said sharply. "I accepted that he's an innocent as of now, and I helped you save him; but when I look to the future I have to wonder if it will ever be possible to make peace with those people...if they can even be called that."
There was another squeak from Merlin's pocket that could only be the elusive Ambrosius, and Arthur really hoped he wasn't a hedgehog, judging by how Merlin was obviously squeezing him. Amaranth, surprisingly, nipped at the collar of Arthur's coat, the closest she would ever get to disagreeing with him in front of someone else; he glared at her, and was met with a narrow eye and ears flattened straight back.
"Good night, sire," Merlin huffed, and stomped out of the room with his hand still thrust deep in his pocket.
As soon as the door of Arthur's room was closed, Amaranth snorted. "Of all the insensitive, pigheaded things you could've said..."
"What?" Arthur demanded. "I'm only speaking my mind! Don't tell me it didn't give you the heebie-jeebies!"
"Be that as it may," she said coldly, "you've gone and upset him."
"I'm the bloody prince!" Arthur said, though he couldn't muster the proper feeling. "I'm allowed to upset him! I'm allowed to upset lots of people!"
"Did you really want to, though?" she asked.
Arthur flopped down on a chair by the fire. "I want him to understand what position I'm in. I have to keep my kingdom safe-I have to keep my people safe-I don't have the luxury of absolute moral clarity, not when actions have consequences."
"You know," Amaranth said softly, "you sound an awful lot like your father when you say that."
Arthur glared at her. "I'm going to bed," he declared. "Wake me when everyone's gotten over their treasonous urges." She snorted at him, and he wondered if anybody in the castle agreed with him-even, deep down, himself.
Especially when he got a real look at what something inhuman looked like, with the appearance of the late Tristan du Bois. At least Arthur had been able to hear the daemons of the druids moving about, even if he couldn't see them; it was another thing entirely to see the tall black-clad knight move and speak and know there was no daemon hidden at his side, there was just nothing, nothing at all...Arthur would admit it scared him, a little, the thought of facing a thing like that in battle, but not so much that he was ever going to forgive Gaius. At least, not for as long as it took to replace the door that Amaranth had kicked down. (The advantages to a horse daemon were really boundless.) His father, on the other hand...
"You had Gaius drug me!" he snapped, while Uther stood hunched over the table, still favoring his injured side. Elen was on the table, still her badger-sized armor, which clattered as she hopped down to the floor. Arthur stepped over her and pressed closer to Uther. "I was meant to fight him--!"
"No, you weren't," Uther said coolly, as if not three feet behind him Amaranth hadn't dropped to her knees to nuzzle Elen. The badger reached up and stroked Amaranth's nose in response.
"But the Knight's Code is very--" Arthur tried to protest.
"Be damned!" Uther's shout startled their daemons as much as it did Arthur, though Amaranth made no move to get up and Elen didn't try to move away. "I believed you would die and that is a risk I could not take. You are too precious to me."
Arthur felt himself go very still. The only noise in Uther's pause was Elen, very softly, snorting.
"You mean more to me than anything I know," Uther continued, as if he was lecturing Arthur for another failure. "More than this entire kingdom and certainly more than my own life."
Arthur got a grip on the chair at his side, because Amaranth was still on the floor with Elen and he needed to grab hold of something. His mouth, unattended, ran off without him. "I always thought that..."
"What?" Uther snapped, still looking irritated despite his words.
He could've said nothing, he could've made something up, but Uther had nearly died today, and not for politics or warfare or the future of all Camelot, but for Arthur. "That I was a big disappointment to you," he said, trying to sound neutral about it, as if he were describing the weather.
Amaranth sighed, and Elen snuggled up against the side of her great head. Uther looked as if he'd been wounded all over again. "Well, that is my fault," he said softly, "and not yours." He reached up and gripped Arthur's shoulder. "You are my only son, and I wouldn't wish for another."
His hand was heavy, and for a moment Arthur wondered if he should say something back, and what-because this wasn't what he and Uther did, they weren't good at this, there was a reason they normally related by shouting. He cleared his throat and turned aside, and Uther let his hand drop, looking-maybe--just as relieved as Arthur felt. Amaranth, with a long, exasperated whinny, clambered back to her feet, giving Elen one last nudge before returning to Arthur's side.
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After a while, Arthur even to remember to be painfully curious about Merlin's daemon, but even though he'd apparently forgiven Arthur for any rude remarks about the druid boy, he still didn't seem inclined to give up so much as a hair of the beast (and Amaranth still refused to give Arthur a hint). Arthur thought maybe on their trip to Ealdor, Merlin might feel comfortable enough to let Ambrosius see daylight, but if he did, Arthur was too busy to notice it; and afterwards--
Well, afterwards there were more important matters. With the death of Will, Arthur could barely bring himself to talk to Merlin at all, for fear of saying something wrong. Will had had a shaggy fox daemon, and Merlin had touched it, had put his hand on her head as Will lay dying until she faded away completely-and Arthur suddenly wondered about men with male daemons all over again, because mere friends didn't do that, some families didn't do that, some lovers didn't do that sort of thing. But Arthur couldn't reconcile the fact that Will had saved his village, saved him personally, with the fact that he'd used sorcery to do it, and so Merlin was best left to his own grief, or to soft talks with Gwen on the ride back.
"A sorcerer saved us from Nimeuh's spiders," Amaranth argued, late in the night when the others had fallen deeply asleep.
"Nimueh is a sorcerer, if you didn't notice," Arthur hissed back. "One honorable warlock doesn't absolve the whole breed of them."
"A few bad ones shouldn't damn it, either."
Arthur glared into her one open eye. "That's treasonous talk, you know."
"We're not back in Camelot yet," Amaranth said. "And if anyone can entertain treasonous thoughts, Arthur, it's the future king."
"I have a duty to obey my father like anyone else," he reminded her.
She whuffed her nose in his hair. "And when he's wrong, Arthur? If, one day, he goes too far? Who else do you trust to oppose him?"
Arthur couldn't answer her, not then, and not when Gwen sat weeping in Merlin's room while her father's body grew cold in the guardhouse. He came as close as he dared to express his condolences, and if anyone had asked he'd have pointed out that Amaranth couldn't maneuver very well in the cramped workshop; he would never have admitted that while Gwen wept, her daemon, a six-foot-long mastiff, growled at him with baleful eyes. Most servants had dog daemons, but he'd always known hers was exceptional, a sign of strength of character; he'd just never wanted or expected to be on the receiving end of it.
Morgana has strength of character, too, strength enough to voice the kind of thoughts that Arthur choked on and still save Uther's life in the end. Arthur may not have disappointed his father, but he sometimes disappointed himself.
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It was after the affair of that damned Questing Beast, when Gaius had finally cleared Arthur to resume "light activity;" his shoulder still hurt on and off, but Morgana and Uther and Merlin had all been acting strange lately, and Amaranth was half-mad from being cooped up as long as he was, and if he didn't get out of the castle somehow he was going to go quite mad. So he sent for Merlin and a few other knights and announced his intention to take a hunting trip.
"As you wish," Uther said, and he didn't interrogate Arthur about the arrangements or when he meant to be back or offer any unsolicited advice about tracking techniques. Morgana didn't even seem to notice anyone else was at breakfast.
And Merlin, when he finally showed up with Arthur's things, was smiling to himself like he'd been dropped as a baby, just like he'd been since he'd returned from whatever journey he and Gaius had taken during Arthur's convalescence. "What are you smirking about now?" Arthur asked, as he had done several times since he first noticed the new habit.
"Nothing," Merlin said, then contradicted himself. "It's a nice day to be outside."
"It would be nicer without your stupid face," Arthur muttered, which was a terribly weak comeback, especially when he had to follow it up with, "Come on, hurry up, are you coming or not?" Merlin just kept smiling his sunny dopey smile, and Arthur wondered, yet again, why he continually kept this idiot around.
Shoulder aside, the air and activity did improve Arthur's mood, to the point where he could even be sanguine about his utter inability to hit anything. (He blamed the wound more than his enforced lack of practice, and no one dared disagree with him.) He even started feeling less weary of Merlin's goofy behavior, or perhaps more willing to confront it. When it came time to finally call the whole party back to the castle-past time, really, but Arthur had no fear of riding the final stretch in the dark-he deliberately steered Amaranth alongside Merlin's spotted rouncey and waited for her to match its pace. (Her bridle had no bit in it, and idiots occasionally wondered allowed how Arthur controlled her without one; he rarely bothered to point out that he didn't need to.)
"So where did you go?" he asked, as his opening feint.
Merlin small smile faded a bit. "Go, sire?"
"While I was recovering," Arthur said. "After you decided to give me some advice on kingship, you and Gaius ran off together for a few days. What was that?"
Merlin's smiled had disappeared completely, and he looked at his hands. "Oh, you know, it was-science stuff," he said. "Gaius wanted to learn more about the Questing Beast, see if anyone else had recovered like you did."
"And where did he go to find that out?" Arthur asked.
Merlin shrugged, one-sided, and gave a belated jerk to the reins when his horse showed a bit too much interest in a shrubbery. "Just, people. That he knew. I didn't, um, I was just there to...help out. And maybe see if they could help my mother."
Right, his mother had been ill at the same time. Arthur had heard about it, but only indirectly; Hunith had hurried back to Ealdor when she recovered. "Well, that sounds scintillating," Arthur said. "I can't imagine what the big secret was, if that's all you did."
"Guess he didn't want to bother anybody," Merlin mumbled, and if he thought he was fooling anybody, he was as simple as he looked.
Arthur decided he was fed up with all the secrecy. Merlin wasn't supposed to have any secrets; he was just a manservant, and a crap one at that, and maybe he was also a bit of a friend and all and possibly had attractive hands, but he was a peasant from a village and he wasn't nearly important enough to have secrets about anything. Not about trips with Gaius. Not about his friend Will (who, granted, hadn't exactly been a secret since Arthur had never asked anything.) And definitely, Arthur decided, not about bloody Ambrosius.
Amaranth slowed her pace, and Merlin, noticing a beat too late, reined in his own horse a bit, letting the others ride ahead. Arthur lowered his voice so the rest of the party wouldn't overhear him, because he wasn't utterly without manners, but he did ask: "So what is your daemon, then, anyway?"
Merlin's eyes went wide with terror, and Arthur wasn't entirely sure how to interpret that-he'd meant to unsettle him, not horrify him-but the next thing Merlin shouted was "Duck!" and the last thing Arthur clearly remembered was thinking, what sort of daemon is a duck, anyway? before the world exploded around him.
Part Two
Author: mad_maudlin
Fandom: Merlin
Pairing: Merlin/Arthur
Rating: PG-13
Warnings/Spoilers: Asymptotic to season 1 canon; after that, it's a total AU.
Summary: It's not unusual for people to hide their daemons. Merlin, however, seems to be taking it a little far.
Notes: So there was a craze for a while, at least in SGA fandom, for writing daemon!fic--using the concept from Phillip Pullman's "His Dark Materials" trilogy of a animal-form spiritual companion. And it occurred to me, a while ago, that I'd never seen a Merlin version of that, and I quite wanted to. Which, of course, meant I had to write it myself. And then sit on it in anxiety until the whole damn thing had turned into an AU anyway. (Well, and even bigger AU, I guess.)
This is not a crossover with HDM, so don't worry if you aren't familiar with that canon; I hope everything you need to know about daemons is here in the text. Thanks to Linnet for the beta, as always.
A/N: This fic now comes with fanart, courtesy of scowling_hermit: find it here!
A Study in Natural Philosophy
by Mad Maudlin
It wasn't all that unusual for people to hide their daemons; not everyone was as fortunate as Arthur, after all, so not every daemon was as beautiful and practical and helpful and, um, big. Some people had mice and spiders and even flea daemons, and those were easy to hide (or in the case of the fleas, difficult not to). Sir Gareth had a leech daemon that Arthur wished he'd hide, instead of taking it out to dangle from his nose or chin at feasts to the delight of the pages and the shrieks of the serving girls. Gaius's daemon had a tendency to crawl up his sleeves or down his collar at the first hint of cold, though you could usually see the shape of her around his neck and shoulders like a strange, rippling noose. Morgana's daemon often rode in her hair or on the neck of her gowns, so still that an inattentive visitor might mistake him for a fantastic bit of jewelry until he suddenly flickered his wings.
And then there was Merlin, who didn't seem to be actively hiding anything, but neither seemed to ever have his daemon where anyone could see it. At one point Arthur even began to wonder if Merlin even had a daemon, though it was such a stupid thought he only voice it to Amaranth, who quite reasonably snorted at him. "It's probably a dung beetle or something," she said while he curried her coat. "Or a weevil. Or a worm. He could keep it in his pocket and we'd never know."
"Doesn't seem like a safe place to keep a daemon that squishy," Arthur said, running the comb down her flanks.
"Remember Lord Elric had an ant daemon? He kept her in a little iron case so no one could step on her." Amaranth suddenly stamped her hoof at him. "Oh, oh, right there, I think I've got some mud on me and it itches..."
"Bossy," Arthur sneered, but obliged her, brushing away the alleged mud until her bay coat lay smooth and glossy. It wouldn't be appropriate for him to appear in public with his daemon looking like she'd run through a sty, after all.
On the subject of daemons, Merlin didn't exactly volunteer any information, either. During, for instance, the doomed lessons on swordwork, Arthur had tried to explain the important of protecting one's daemon. "If it's not big enough to be safe on the ground, you've got to find a place for it under your armor where it'll be protected as you are," he explained.
"Yeah, sure," Merlin said absently; for some reason he was watching the sky.
"Well?" Arthur asked. "Is it?"
Merlin's eyes snapped down guiltily. "Sorry, what's what?"
"Is your daemon protected," Arthur said slowly, "or am I going to kill you the first time I make contact?"
"He's fine," Merlin had said, and fitted his helmet into place. Arthur had glanced back at Amaranth, but she'd been snacking on late clover and not following the conversation.
Arthur knew, of course, that there was nothing unusual about having a daemon the same sex as yourself-it had been one of the first things Gaius put out of his mind, back when the king had decided Arthur should have tutelage in natural philosophy. "It is abnormal in the sense that it's uncommon," Gaius said, "but it has no bearing on one's character or abilities."
"Morgana said it means you're a cocksucker," Arthur had volunteered, being nine and too young to know what that meant except naughty and therefore fun to say.
Gaius had sighed but not gotten angry. "Lady Morgana expresses a popular assumption. The truth is, sire, our daemons reflect complicated aspects of our personalities-that is why it's so hard to judge a man by his daemon. Taking one trait like sex or species and making a sweeping judgment based on that alone is reductivist."
He must've seen the glazed look on Arthur's face then, because he smiled and coaxed his daemon out of his sleeve. "Let me use myself and Meditrina as an example. What does she tell you about me?"
"That...you're Gaius?" Arthur hazarded. He watched Amaranth climb onto the tabletop and transform herself into something like a long, lithe polecat, hissing and chittering. Meditrina tasted the air once and then flicked her head away from the other daemon, coiling more of herself around Gaius's wrist.
Gaius chuckled at Arthur's answer. "Let me put it another way. If you were told someone has a serpent for a daemon, what would you think of that person?"
"I dunno," Arthur said, but Gaius was giving him the raised-eyebrow look, so he thought about it while Amaranth tried to get Meditrina's attention. "I guess...that they were cold, and not nice, and kind of sneaky."
"Do you associate any of those words with me?" Gaius asked with a small smile.
Arthur hesitated. "Well...you didn't tell Father that you brought me honey when I had the pox."
Gaius laughed, just as Meditrina's patience gave out; she bared her fangs at Amaranth, who turned into a squirrel so she could scamper onto the bookshelf over Arthur's head and hiss back. "So I did not. But Meditrina's shape is appropriate in other ways as well, Arthur. I have studied science and philosophy since I was your age, and in warmer lands than ours snakes are believed to be bringers of great wisdom. I believe wisdom is what she has brought to me." He stroked her flat head affectionately; she just crawled back up his sleeve. "So it is with all daemons, Arthur; if you are fortunate, you might know a man well enough to understand why daemon has a certain form, but you can tell nothing of him from his daemon on first sight."
Arthur had the disappointing suspicion that he'd just learned something, but wasn't going to surrender to it without a fight. "But sometimes you can tell things," he protested. "Like a sorcerer."
For some reason that made Gaius go stiff. "Is this something else Morgana has been telling you?" he asked.
"Everyone knows about sorcerers, Gaius," Arthur said. "Father even made a law--"
"We are here to discuss natural philosophy, not legal theory," Gaius said; it was the first time Arthur had ever heard him angry, but he only realized that later, in hindsight; at the time he was annoyed with Gaius for interrupting him. "As it is, I have known of many sorcerers whose daemons were common beasts of the earth and water."
"But a bird daemon always means a sorcerer, right?" Arthur asked. "Because it's not a proper daemon if it can fly away!"
"A daemon is a daemon," Gaius said quietly, "and there is no difference between yours or mine or a sorcerer's, whatever form they might assume."
He'd changed the subject that day, and it had been many years ago. Arthur had eventually accepted the general lesson about daemon-reading and even the specific lesson about sex and sexual preferences, but it was hard to remember a sorcerer's daemon could take any form it pleased when you were busy remembering that anyone with a bird daemon had to be shot on sight.
And none of that really helped with Merlin.
-\-\-\-
Arthur justified nagging Merlin about it on the grounds that Merlin was fascinated with Amaranth-a natural and entirely justifiable reaction to her, in Arthur's opinion. "I've never met someone with such a big daemon before," Merlin confessed at one point, early in his employment. "How do you, you know, get around?"
"She's more agile than she looks," Arthur explained, "and most of the passages in the castle are sufficiently wide for her. If they weren't before she settled, Father had them altered." He'd complained about, too, but in the end he'd accepted that the trouble of hiring the masons and cutting new doorways was better than the shame of his son and heir sleeping in the stables.
"You'd never get her into the kitchens," was Merlin's comment, and for a moment he looked almost tempted to touch her, hands twitching at his side. Amaranth could tell so, too, and she tossed her forelock flirtatiously, but of course Merlin would never dare. Even peasants knew such things.
Arthur rolled his eyes at him. "Well, it's a good thing I don't have to go into the kitchens, isn't it? That is, in theory, why I have you, and it's not as if your daemon needs to be winched in the windows..."
Merlin ignored this completely and instead asked, "Does she, you know, let you ride her?"
"Would be a waste if she didn't," Arthur said, and even Amaranth was rolling her eyes at Merlin now, behind his back. "Though she's too light for jousting. I have a destrier for that, as well as various coursers and palfreys for other purposes, so I don't wear her out. Incidentally, you're mucking out their stable tonight."
Merlin glared daggers at him, but asked, "What about hers?" with a nod towards the notch in the wall that served Amaranth as a stall. (It had been a closet before she settled, and there was only so much the masons could do about the size without, they said, threatening the strength of the ceiling and walls.)
"What about it?" Arthur said. "Honestly, Merlin, you have the brains of a bird. Clean it as you would the rest of the room, change the bedding and make certain you get all the hair out of her comb. Do I have to explain everything to you?"
Apparently, Arthur did. And Merlin listened, and sometimes actually did as he was told, and refused to be baited into a conversation about his own daemon, no matter how many ways Arthur went about it. Just smiled at him strangely, changed the subject, dropped things-the last of which probably wasn't a deliberate change of subject, but Arthur could never be sure. What it all meant was that in the first few months of their acquaintance he learned only that Merlin's daemon was male and apparently small enough to hide forever; Merlin never even mentioned him by name.
Of course, then Merlin tried to get himself killed, first by accusing the king of Mercia of poisoning Arthur and then setting out to prove it. Arthur had helped drag Merlin's limp body up to Gaius's workroom, Amaranth following clumsily behind, and watched as Gaius stripped away Merlin's fussy court clothes to evaluate the poison, and--"Where's his daemon?"
"Hmm?" Gaius looked up, while Meditrina continued to taste the air around Merlin's mouth, like she could identify the poison by smell.
Arthur nodded at the tunic that had been flung across the room, too far away to possibly be comfortable if the daemon was in a pocket. "His daemon, he hides it. Where is it now?"
"Comfortable," Gaius said firmly, and started fussing with a sheet. "Your highness, I think you should step outside. I need to undress him and I will not be able to answer any questions until I have finished my examination."
The next time Arthur saw Merlin, just before setting out to find the mortaeus flower, there was a small lump under the blanket, over Merlin's heart. It was only about the size of Arthur's fist, and if he'd been thinking about it, he could've tugged down the blanket and gotten a good look at it then-but there were more important things to worry about at the time, and then there were much more important things, such as for instance, Amaranth's sudden and unanticipated ability to fly
"I'm not delusional," Arthur told Gaius later (after verifying for himself that Merlin was well and would be back to work soon.) "There was a big ball of light that picked her up and carried her out of the cave with me. I don't know why it couldn't have fetched the both of us..."
"Start over from when Nimueh destroyed the ledge," Gaius said. "If you could."
Arthur took a deep breath. "Right. I was trapped on the wrong side of the ledge, and Nimueh said-something like I wasn't destined to die by her hand. Her daemon, I guess that's what it was, it looked like some kind of buzzard and it stooped on Amaranth while Nimueh was talking-nearly put her eyes out." He leaned back on his stool, against Amaranth's flank, deliberately reminding himself that she was still there and all right.
Gaius nodded like he'd expected this. "And after she left?"
"I...well...there were these giant spiders, coming up the wall," Arthur said. "Probably not the best company. I couldn't very well draw a sword just hanging there, so I tried to climb higher, but...but it was too far."
He'd tried, though, at Amaranth's own hysterical urging; he'd pulled himself up one hand at a time, putting distance between them and trying to push down the pain until he was sobbing with it; she had been no better, dancing precariously close to the crumbled edge of the ledge, whining and tossing her head. But at some point his limbs had locked in a spasm, and Amaranth had let out an agonized cry that sounded as much like a human as a horse, and Arthur knew he was done for, that he couldn't go an inch further.
Gaius nodded, as if he understood all Arthur had left unspoken. "And then what happened?"
Arthur shrugged. "There was this...light. I don't know where it came from. A big sphere of blue light-not fire, because it wasn't hot, just...bright. It must've been magical, but I don't know why Nimueh would've sent it. I could see the spiders, and the flower, and the ledge...and then..." This was the crazy sounding part, so Arthur tried to lay it out simply. "The light sort of split in half. One part stayed over me, and the other part flew down to Amaranth and...lifted her up."
He'd been too grateful at the time to question it, grateful for the absence of pain and for the clear path out if only he could climb that far. It was too perfectly convenient to be a threat, he thought, and it wasn't as if whoever had sent the light had actually touched her-so he'd seized the flower and hauled himself up the wall to the surface, just in time to watch Amaranth settle daintily on the grass, just before the light went out.
"It didn't hurt," Amaranth suddenly said, looking at Gaius herself. "It didn't really feel like anything. I was just...flying." Her tail switched anxiously. "Not something I want to do again."
"And you didn't see anyone when you came to the surface?" Gaius asked. "Didn't hear anything?"
Arthur had been a bit distracted by a belated case of the shakes, the burning in his arms and the delirious joy of seeing Amaranth alive and well and close enough to touch, but... "Wings," he said, and Amaranth nodded in confirmation. "I heard wings, like something was flying overhead."
Gaius nodded at that, and said something about Nimueh's motives being opaque to everyone, and never said anything more on the matter.
-\-\-\-
Arthur eventually let it go, too-after all, it was hard to question something that saved your life. He did not let go of his new hint about the identity of Merlin's daemon, since it had been clearly much larger than a bug, which suggested that Merlin was deliberately keeping it hidden. There weren't many creatures Arthur could think of that would merit that sort of treatment-Merlin had never shown any particular affinity for water, so he thought could rule out frogs, and he didn't see any reason to be ashamed of a rat unless it had fleas. He then spent a week worrying that Merlin was going to give him fleas, but when Amaranth pointed out there had been no excessive scratching, he conceded the point.
"Why do you even care?" Amaranth asked, amusedly, during another session with the curry-comb.
"You aren't at all curious?" Arthur demanded.
"If he's hiding it, he's got a reason," she said with a little toss of her mane. "No need to go on about it."
"What if I want to know the reason?" Arthur asked. After all, Merlin was his servant and Arthur had every right to indulge his own curiosity.
Amaranth sighed. "Look, Arthur, just because you fancy the lad--" She had to stop to let him splutter indignantly. "Don't carry on, you know it's true."
"Isn't!" Arthur managed to spit out.
She turned her head to look for him. "So that's why we risked life and limb to pick him a pretty flower?"
"That is reductivist," Arthur said. (He could learn things, if pressed, and when he did they tended to stay with him.)
"Fine," Amaranth said. "You care deeply about him, as you owe him your life and he's the closest thing to a friend you've got besides Morgana and the fact that he's got adorable eyes is just icing on the cake."
"'Adorable eyes'?" Arthur echoed, choosing to ignore the dig about friends. "Are you sure it's not you who fancies him?"
"You're changing the subject," she said.
"You're clouding the issue!" Arthur made one last swipe with the comb and set it aside. "I am expressing a perfectly natural and healthy curiosity about him. Just because a daemon doesn't tell you much about a man doesn't mean it can't give us a hint."
"Or you could just, you know, get to know him," Amaranth said, but Arthur decided to ignore her, and so she snorted and bedded down for the night.
The world seemed to want to give Arthur object lessons in the irrelevance of daemons over the next few weeks; Lancelot's hound and Edwin's pig hadn't given away anything about their true natures except perhaps in hindsight. Merlin was somehow in the middle of both affairs, of course, or at least skulking about the edges looking anxious; while Arthur was properly annoyed with him for it he was also a bit preoccupied with various monsters and near-death experiences. Worrying about Merlin's mystery daemon went on the shelf for a while.
And then Sophia came to Camelot.
Looking back on the whole affair, Arthur found it hard to remember clearly-like it was a vivid dream, or like he'd been continuously drunk. Sophia was beautiful, and he had been happy around her, but he couldn't quite explain why. He remembered wanting to be with her with a fervor that bordered on physical need, remembered that it had somehow been perfectly reasonable to elope into the woods, remembered riding Amaranth by a placid lake...
"What was I thinking?" Arthur asked Amaranth after Merlin and Gaius had gone. The blankets from her stall and a good deal of straw had migrated to Arthur's bedside, and he wasn't sure which image amused him more: Amaranth dragging them over herself, or her bullying Merlin into doing it for her.
Amaranth snorted at him. "You weren't thinking, prat. Neither of us were."
Arthur glanced at her sideways. "I think Merlin is becoming a negative influence on you."
She just stretched her head up to rest on the bed next to his; Arthur took the hint and started scratching between her ears. "I think he's had quite a positive impact on our lives, actually," she said daintily.
"'Impact' being the operative word, apparently," Arthur muttered. "I can't believe he hit me. I wasn't that far gone, was I?" Surprisingly, Amaranth remained quiet, though her ears switched backwards; down on the floor, her tail lashed, spreading bits of straw in all directions. Arthur frowned. "Are you all right?"
"Fine," she said, and stretched up to whuff his hair a bit. "Just fine."
"Liar," Arthur immediately answered. "Was it that traumatic?"
Amaranth looked like she was going to say something, and the switching of her tail got worse. But in the end she just pressed her nose closer to Arthur's shoulder and muttered. "I promised I wouldn't talk about it."
"Promised who?" Arthur demanded immediately.
"Ambrosius," she answered, after another long pause.
Arthur pushed himself up on his elbows, taking advantage of a rare change to look down on his daemon. "And who the hell is Ambrosius?"
She huffed at him, but under his glare she eventually answered, "Merlin's daemon," with a sort of equine pout.
"So you've seen him!" Arthur cheered. "What is--"
"Just because you want to know, I'm not telling," Amaranth blustered, and pulled her head back so she could put her neck in an arrogant arch.
"Come oooon," Arthur moaned. "It'll help loads with my recovery. Unless...did he bite you?"
"What?" Amaranth blinked at him. "No, of course not--"
'Did he have to bite you so Merlin could whack me?" Arthur asked. "Run under your feet? Jump on your head and yell 'boo'?"
"He did nothing of the sort," Amaranth protested. "We just...spoke a bit. And I gave him my word of honor not to say anything more."
"Why would you do a thing like that?" Arthur demanded, because while he was certain Amaranth would never keep something truly dangerous from him (as if Merlin's daemon could possibly be a threat, fleas or no fleas) the fact that it was a secret worth keeping made him want to know more than ever.
"Because if anyone should tell you, it should be Merlin himself," Amaranth said, and before Arthur could challenge that, she added, "Besides, it's not his daemon you should be worrying about."
"Attention whore," Arthur sniffed, and reached out to scratch at Amaranth's ears again.
Surprisingly, she twisted out of his reach. "That's not what I meant," she said. "Arthur, what was Sophia's daemon?"
It was such an obvious question that Arthur laughed, but when he tried to answer he realized...but he had ridden out with her so many times, and there had been those moments in the forest...they had stood before the whole court, and yet... "I have no idea," he admitted.
"No one does," Amaranth said softly. "Everyone remembers Sophia and Aulfric, and nobody seems to remember their daemons. Mimir thinks--"
"Mimir is as addled as Morgana," Arthur said gruffly, thinking about the dragonfly buzzing about his face while Morgana tried to talk to him about...whatever she wanted to talk about. That was one of the memories drowned in fog.
"He thinks they didn't have any," Amaranth said, which was just absurd, because every living human had a daemon-even sorcerers, unnatural though they might be. Arthur told Amaranth so, and she dropped the whole conversation, but it was several days before she let Merlin move her bedding back to her stall, and even longer before she'd stop randomly nuzzling the back of Arthur's neck, even in the middle of important meetings. (Merlin himself was little better, come to think of it-perhaps he was guilty about the hitting.)
-\-\-\-
Arthur was still thinking about daemons when they found the druid boy, the one Morgana and Merlin were so eager to save. Mordred was still young enough that his daemon wasn't settled, but instead constantly shifted forms-pigeon, plover, woodpecker, kingfisher, owlet, robin, raven, wren, though for a little while it turned into a wobbly foal the same color as Amaranth. While the boy was ill enough that the daemon didn't leave his side, when Arthur returned him to his people the woods were full of flapping wings and not one of the green-cloaked druids had had a daemon in sight. It had made Arthur all too aware of Amaranth at his back, and he felt vulnerable in a way he didn't like at all.
"It's unnatural," he groused to Merlin later, having successfully snuck back into the castle despite the distinct lack of faith Morgana had showed in him. (Just because his daemon was a fourteen-hand courser didn't mean he couldn't sneak, thank you.)
Merlin got an odd look on his face then. "What, the birds?"
"The distance," Arthur said. "The...how could they stand to have their daemons flying about like that?"
"Maybe they don't know any different," Merlin said stiffly. "Besides, Morgana's daemon flies."
"Yes, but not to the other side of the castle," Arthur pointed out. "I just...I can't imagine how they can do that without pain. How someone could stand by and just let their daemon go. It's...inhuman."
Something in Merlin's pocket made a high squeaking noise, and Merlin stuffed his hand in there quickly to muffle whatever it was. Arthur himself had a pretty good guess. "You saw he was as human as you or me," Merlin shot back. "Just because he's unusual doesn't mean he's a monster."
"He's a potential enemy of Camelot, which is all the more disturbing," Arthur said sharply. "I accepted that he's an innocent as of now, and I helped you save him; but when I look to the future I have to wonder if it will ever be possible to make peace with those people...if they can even be called that."
There was another squeak from Merlin's pocket that could only be the elusive Ambrosius, and Arthur really hoped he wasn't a hedgehog, judging by how Merlin was obviously squeezing him. Amaranth, surprisingly, nipped at the collar of Arthur's coat, the closest she would ever get to disagreeing with him in front of someone else; he glared at her, and was met with a narrow eye and ears flattened straight back.
"Good night, sire," Merlin huffed, and stomped out of the room with his hand still thrust deep in his pocket.
As soon as the door of Arthur's room was closed, Amaranth snorted. "Of all the insensitive, pigheaded things you could've said..."
"What?" Arthur demanded. "I'm only speaking my mind! Don't tell me it didn't give you the heebie-jeebies!"
"Be that as it may," she said coldly, "you've gone and upset him."
"I'm the bloody prince!" Arthur said, though he couldn't muster the proper feeling. "I'm allowed to upset him! I'm allowed to upset lots of people!"
"Did you really want to, though?" she asked.
Arthur flopped down on a chair by the fire. "I want him to understand what position I'm in. I have to keep my kingdom safe-I have to keep my people safe-I don't have the luxury of absolute moral clarity, not when actions have consequences."
"You know," Amaranth said softly, "you sound an awful lot like your father when you say that."
Arthur glared at her. "I'm going to bed," he declared. "Wake me when everyone's gotten over their treasonous urges." She snorted at him, and he wondered if anybody in the castle agreed with him-even, deep down, himself.
Especially when he got a real look at what something inhuman looked like, with the appearance of the late Tristan du Bois. At least Arthur had been able to hear the daemons of the druids moving about, even if he couldn't see them; it was another thing entirely to see the tall black-clad knight move and speak and know there was no daemon hidden at his side, there was just nothing, nothing at all...Arthur would admit it scared him, a little, the thought of facing a thing like that in battle, but not so much that he was ever going to forgive Gaius. At least, not for as long as it took to replace the door that Amaranth had kicked down. (The advantages to a horse daemon were really boundless.) His father, on the other hand...
"You had Gaius drug me!" he snapped, while Uther stood hunched over the table, still favoring his injured side. Elen was on the table, still her badger-sized armor, which clattered as she hopped down to the floor. Arthur stepped over her and pressed closer to Uther. "I was meant to fight him--!"
"No, you weren't," Uther said coolly, as if not three feet behind him Amaranth hadn't dropped to her knees to nuzzle Elen. The badger reached up and stroked Amaranth's nose in response.
"But the Knight's Code is very--" Arthur tried to protest.
"Be damned!" Uther's shout startled their daemons as much as it did Arthur, though Amaranth made no move to get up and Elen didn't try to move away. "I believed you would die and that is a risk I could not take. You are too precious to me."
Arthur felt himself go very still. The only noise in Uther's pause was Elen, very softly, snorting.
"You mean more to me than anything I know," Uther continued, as if he was lecturing Arthur for another failure. "More than this entire kingdom and certainly more than my own life."
Arthur got a grip on the chair at his side, because Amaranth was still on the floor with Elen and he needed to grab hold of something. His mouth, unattended, ran off without him. "I always thought that..."
"What?" Uther snapped, still looking irritated despite his words.
He could've said nothing, he could've made something up, but Uther had nearly died today, and not for politics or warfare or the future of all Camelot, but for Arthur. "That I was a big disappointment to you," he said, trying to sound neutral about it, as if he were describing the weather.
Amaranth sighed, and Elen snuggled up against the side of her great head. Uther looked as if he'd been wounded all over again. "Well, that is my fault," he said softly, "and not yours." He reached up and gripped Arthur's shoulder. "You are my only son, and I wouldn't wish for another."
His hand was heavy, and for a moment Arthur wondered if he should say something back, and what-because this wasn't what he and Uther did, they weren't good at this, there was a reason they normally related by shouting. He cleared his throat and turned aside, and Uther let his hand drop, looking-maybe--just as relieved as Arthur felt. Amaranth, with a long, exasperated whinny, clambered back to her feet, giving Elen one last nudge before returning to Arthur's side.
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After a while, Arthur even to remember to be painfully curious about Merlin's daemon, but even though he'd apparently forgiven Arthur for any rude remarks about the druid boy, he still didn't seem inclined to give up so much as a hair of the beast (and Amaranth still refused to give Arthur a hint). Arthur thought maybe on their trip to Ealdor, Merlin might feel comfortable enough to let Ambrosius see daylight, but if he did, Arthur was too busy to notice it; and afterwards--
Well, afterwards there were more important matters. With the death of Will, Arthur could barely bring himself to talk to Merlin at all, for fear of saying something wrong. Will had had a shaggy fox daemon, and Merlin had touched it, had put his hand on her head as Will lay dying until she faded away completely-and Arthur suddenly wondered about men with male daemons all over again, because mere friends didn't do that, some families didn't do that, some lovers didn't do that sort of thing. But Arthur couldn't reconcile the fact that Will had saved his village, saved him personally, with the fact that he'd used sorcery to do it, and so Merlin was best left to his own grief, or to soft talks with Gwen on the ride back.
"A sorcerer saved us from Nimeuh's spiders," Amaranth argued, late in the night when the others had fallen deeply asleep.
"Nimueh is a sorcerer, if you didn't notice," Arthur hissed back. "One honorable warlock doesn't absolve the whole breed of them."
"A few bad ones shouldn't damn it, either."
Arthur glared into her one open eye. "That's treasonous talk, you know."
"We're not back in Camelot yet," Amaranth said. "And if anyone can entertain treasonous thoughts, Arthur, it's the future king."
"I have a duty to obey my father like anyone else," he reminded her.
She whuffed her nose in his hair. "And when he's wrong, Arthur? If, one day, he goes too far? Who else do you trust to oppose him?"
Arthur couldn't answer her, not then, and not when Gwen sat weeping in Merlin's room while her father's body grew cold in the guardhouse. He came as close as he dared to express his condolences, and if anyone had asked he'd have pointed out that Amaranth couldn't maneuver very well in the cramped workshop; he would never have admitted that while Gwen wept, her daemon, a six-foot-long mastiff, growled at him with baleful eyes. Most servants had dog daemons, but he'd always known hers was exceptional, a sign of strength of character; he'd just never wanted or expected to be on the receiving end of it.
Morgana has strength of character, too, strength enough to voice the kind of thoughts that Arthur choked on and still save Uther's life in the end. Arthur may not have disappointed his father, but he sometimes disappointed himself.
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It was after the affair of that damned Questing Beast, when Gaius had finally cleared Arthur to resume "light activity;" his shoulder still hurt on and off, but Morgana and Uther and Merlin had all been acting strange lately, and Amaranth was half-mad from being cooped up as long as he was, and if he didn't get out of the castle somehow he was going to go quite mad. So he sent for Merlin and a few other knights and announced his intention to take a hunting trip.
"As you wish," Uther said, and he didn't interrogate Arthur about the arrangements or when he meant to be back or offer any unsolicited advice about tracking techniques. Morgana didn't even seem to notice anyone else was at breakfast.
And Merlin, when he finally showed up with Arthur's things, was smiling to himself like he'd been dropped as a baby, just like he'd been since he'd returned from whatever journey he and Gaius had taken during Arthur's convalescence. "What are you smirking about now?" Arthur asked, as he had done several times since he first noticed the new habit.
"Nothing," Merlin said, then contradicted himself. "It's a nice day to be outside."
"It would be nicer without your stupid face," Arthur muttered, which was a terribly weak comeback, especially when he had to follow it up with, "Come on, hurry up, are you coming or not?" Merlin just kept smiling his sunny dopey smile, and Arthur wondered, yet again, why he continually kept this idiot around.
Shoulder aside, the air and activity did improve Arthur's mood, to the point where he could even be sanguine about his utter inability to hit anything. (He blamed the wound more than his enforced lack of practice, and no one dared disagree with him.) He even started feeling less weary of Merlin's goofy behavior, or perhaps more willing to confront it. When it came time to finally call the whole party back to the castle-past time, really, but Arthur had no fear of riding the final stretch in the dark-he deliberately steered Amaranth alongside Merlin's spotted rouncey and waited for her to match its pace. (Her bridle had no bit in it, and idiots occasionally wondered allowed how Arthur controlled her without one; he rarely bothered to point out that he didn't need to.)
"So where did you go?" he asked, as his opening feint.
Merlin small smile faded a bit. "Go, sire?"
"While I was recovering," Arthur said. "After you decided to give me some advice on kingship, you and Gaius ran off together for a few days. What was that?"
Merlin's smiled had disappeared completely, and he looked at his hands. "Oh, you know, it was-science stuff," he said. "Gaius wanted to learn more about the Questing Beast, see if anyone else had recovered like you did."
"And where did he go to find that out?" Arthur asked.
Merlin shrugged, one-sided, and gave a belated jerk to the reins when his horse showed a bit too much interest in a shrubbery. "Just, people. That he knew. I didn't, um, I was just there to...help out. And maybe see if they could help my mother."
Right, his mother had been ill at the same time. Arthur had heard about it, but only indirectly; Hunith had hurried back to Ealdor when she recovered. "Well, that sounds scintillating," Arthur said. "I can't imagine what the big secret was, if that's all you did."
"Guess he didn't want to bother anybody," Merlin mumbled, and if he thought he was fooling anybody, he was as simple as he looked.
Arthur decided he was fed up with all the secrecy. Merlin wasn't supposed to have any secrets; he was just a manservant, and a crap one at that, and maybe he was also a bit of a friend and all and possibly had attractive hands, but he was a peasant from a village and he wasn't nearly important enough to have secrets about anything. Not about trips with Gaius. Not about his friend Will (who, granted, hadn't exactly been a secret since Arthur had never asked anything.) And definitely, Arthur decided, not about bloody Ambrosius.
Amaranth slowed her pace, and Merlin, noticing a beat too late, reined in his own horse a bit, letting the others ride ahead. Arthur lowered his voice so the rest of the party wouldn't overhear him, because he wasn't utterly without manners, but he did ask: "So what is your daemon, then, anyway?"
Merlin's eyes went wide with terror, and Arthur wasn't entirely sure how to interpret that-he'd meant to unsettle him, not horrify him-but the next thing Merlin shouted was "Duck!" and the last thing Arthur clearly remembered was thinking, what sort of daemon is a duck, anyway? before the world exploded around him.
Part Two