Chapter Text
It took a special kind of strength to act the part of a self-assured monarch after such a costly victory to keep his men marching further north. The hills slowed them down, skirmishes were most definitely to be expected, and the ashes were exhausting to tread. In this monochrome landscape of mud and grass sticking out of pottery shards, the road to Eoforvic cut through a kingdom in ruins.
Looking up at the small black shape of Kilgharrah soaring underneath the heavy clouds of autumn to scout ahead, Arthur could not help but shudder under the phantom touch of Destiny pushing him forward. The blue peeked through the swirls of smoke indistinguishable from the clouds crowding in once they were in the foothills as though the rising terrain snagged the heavens like sheep wool. Merlin said he barely felt the cold of the heavens; that he could breathe better up there. His skin smelled of rain clouds instead of the cloying smoke when Arthur dared to draw him close at night. He wanted the man, not the legend, though both broke his heart: While Merin had washed off Kilgharrah’s blood, the wounds on his soul remained. The terror of loss and loneliness, the deep stab wound betrayal dealt unexpectedly, and the terrible rash the first battle left behind on a previously unblemished conscience.
Under the cover of darkness and scratchy wool the night after, Merlin had told him in a halting tone everything he had missed in the heat of battle. The trap sprung so easily, his horror at Morgana either having enslaved Aithusa or truly bonded to her; either way, her only friend in the world was gone, and while Aithusa was alive if she hadn’t succumbed to her wounds or poachers ever since, she would never trust him ever again. The pain of it reflected on his face like that of losing a daughter. It was obvious even to Arthur that she was too small, devoid of colour but for her blood-red eyes, and Merlin said she could (or would) not talk to him. After that chase, it was doubtful she would ever seek out Kilgharrah for protection. Concerning the future of their kind, he would have crushed her accidentally before she had the chance to carry out his eggs, not to mention that she was nothing more than a child to him.
So, with or without her, the dragons were dying out. Merlin, last of the dragonlords, embodied the end of an era. Arthur was the start of one.
The Once and Future King of Albion.
He felt it, finally, in those dark, tiresome marching days. The rest of him just hurt.
The Battle of the Burnt Plains was bound to become legend before Camelot’s army even arrived to take Eoforvic, and as always, Arthur felt it bind Merlin’s fate tighter to his own. The long look they had shared in the wake of the fire underneath the heavy magical dome which kept him from burning alive – Morgana slipping from Excalibur in his hand, drenched crimson but gleaming silver underneath – that all-encompassing silence after the flames died, leaving charcoal-corpses like trees felled in a single, broad corridor that cut all the way to the edge of the battlefield – He still felt like he had dreamed it all. But for how winded he was, how much his entire body hurt from the fighting, the rainbow of bruises from the blows he had sustained to the ribs and the single cut to his left calf, he barely would have believed it to have happened at all. The bandages slathered in crème which Merlin had wrapped him in so carefully the evening afterwards itched underneath his tunic. For all intents and purposes, Merlin should have been a bit of pitch-black flesh charred to an unrecognizable shadow-shape. Not a hair on his head had been singed. They didn’t talk about it. Arthur could not find the words to ask a single one of the endless questions on his mind, and Merlin kissed him silent each time he opened his mouth to try. Kissed and kissed and kissed him, hungry, determined, but rigid. Waiting for judgement. During daylight hours, he was gone to the skies.
Arthur simultaneously yearned for arrival in Eoforvic and dreaded it like he never had anything in his entire life.
They came through villages where people were still picking up the pieces of their lives. A burnt-out mill was being cleared of the rubble, windows shuttered, the wings hanging off the riggings like sails. The red King they called Arthur, and a fitting name it was. Merlin was never there to witness how they feared the army of Camelot. They had no reason to see them as liberators; the last army which had come through here had set their lives on fire. Arthur did not take anything from them, but he had no food he could spare to give them either.
Though Merlin never mentioned Ealdor again, one evening he came back from Kilgharrah having just landed with red-rimmed eyes and shaking like a terrified animal. Keeping his gaze to the ground as he dodged his title muttered with reverence all around, he only startled when Arthur gripped him by the arm as soon as he recognized him in the regulated camp-chaos. Merlin looked at him wide-eyed, unrecognizing for a moment until he slumped like a schoolboy having been caught out after dark. But Arthur, in the middle of six guards plus Lancelot and Tristan, only pulled him into a rough embrace. Merlin clung to him like he was drowning. He trembled full-bodily. I fear that it will break you. But when he pulled back in order to duck into the council tent for privacy, he regained that inexplicable steel in his spine, and though his eyes were wet, he radiated gratitude for simply being close to Arthur. Perhaps there was nothing left to break in him, or all the softness in him was tucked away underneath his brand-new armour made of dragonscales. Some days, Arthur wanted to take a chisel to it. But God help him, if there was one thing he knew, it was how to protect Merlin from himself.
“Bring us something stronger than ale and a washing bowl,” he ordered the next servant who stumbled into his line of sight. “Does Kilgharrah need anything?”
“He only dropped me off. Wants to hunt. Outside of the Burnt Lands.” Merlin rubbed his arms as though he was still feeling the cold of the skies. “He’s… not very fond of soldiers right now.” As the servant sketched a hasty bow to hurry off in the direction of the field kitchen, Merlin stared at the ground, a strange emptiness in his eyes that only fled when he looked directly at Arthur, young, grieving, lost. “It looks even worse from above. Like a wound gone foul cut diagonally through the endless forests.” A bitter smile flitted over his features. “It’s not so broad as it seems down on the ground. We’re already through the widest part. If I could only get myself together, I would be able to…”
“No.” Arthur led him into the tent by the elbow, quickly shaking his head to his guards including Tristan and Lancelot. Leave us. It disturbed him how docile Merlin was; how easily he let himself be dragged off when usually he would have protested loudly, only half joking. His breathing was too fast and shallow when Arthur took his face in both hands the moment they were inside the tent, willing them still. “This is why we have Mordred waiting at home with your own people eager to help you. In another day or two, we’ll stand at the gates of Eoforvic, take the city weakened by Lot’s own cruelty, and shove a sword down his throat. The second he’s dead, you can send another raven to Mordred, take some time to rest, and you won’t even have to march back across this hell when you go to meet him and your warlocks in order to heal this land. We have a plan, Merlin. I won’t lose you again.”
“I don’t know how much of me is going to be left when we are done here,” Merlin rasped choked by tears that kept coming no matter how many of them Arthur wiped away with his thumbs. He wanted to hit whoever taught him to cry completely silently. His shoulders were convulsing, his breaths came too fast, but no guard standing outside would have heard a shred of his grief.
Arthur pulled him in, and for once in his life didn’t know what to say.
~*~
That scorch wound running through the land cut off only a score of miles before Eoforwic came into sight. Eoforwic, like so many of the towns in Britannia, was a decrepit shell of its former Roman glory. They were encamped in front of the town with a good stretch of meadow (green, unburnt, blessedly free of ashes) between them and the wooden outskirts. There stood no city wall around the settlement south of the Ouse, only a massive, white wall built with Roman resilience protected the former fortress in the middle of the town on the flat ground between the rivers from flooding. The Foss was the less volatile of the two, but the Ouse grew fat and hungry every winter, taking a part of the lower town chunk by chunk like bits of bread gone mouldy. The riverbanks were blackened with decay, and while the limestone houses might once have been as white as the fortress wall, now they were holding onto a memory of cosmopolitan trading riches as the wind sighed through the streets.
It should have surprised Arthur that the lower town was nearly deserted, but it still hit him with the stench of ruins left too late. A hundred, two hundred years ago under the Romans, this had been the heart of the north. When they had still been full of enough hybris to believe themselves capable of conquering the true north, the ever-rising hills which grew into ragged mountains for who knew how many miles and miles towards the eternal ice, Eoforwic had been Eboracum, jewel of Britannia, a colonia. It was hard to picture now.
Hearing these tales from his tutors, Arthur had imagined a sprawling city where happy townsfolk in colourful tunics never went hungry and something of the ancient glory remained. But the Romans had been gone for over a century now, and so was the Saxon kingdom of Deira, dwindled down into scorched, isolated Essetir. Had Arthur not been planning to hand the fortress keys to Lancelot at the end of this treacherously beautiful October day, Mercia eventually would have divided up their shares of a meagre kingdom’s corpse. The skin of the once wealthy Eoforvic still hung off the former castra in the shape of watchtowers placed throughout the lower town, evidence of walls having been knocked down to build the newer, stronger one from limestone gone slick from rain.
Arthur had expected ambushes in the muddy roads that did not deserve the term streets. If there was good, Roman cobblestone underneath, it had been buried by decades of winter flood slick. Few people Merlin reported from flying over the town in circles. Survivors, ravaged with famine. The houses were mostly wooden, but closer to the fortress, stone replaced the timber, however greyed. Stone turned as black in death as human flesh. To be out of the Burnt Lands was but a temporary relief: the choice now lying before Arthur was a terrible one indeed.
“Either we burn down the entire town for our own safety so we can lay siege to the fortress without worrying for our backs, or we use those precarious huts for shelter with the risk of being burnt in the night ourselves. One torch to the timber is all it takes.” Nobody wanted to meet his eye at the strategy table. Perched over the hastily drawn map with all his weight on both hands, he tried to catch their gazes; Gwaine worrying his own lower lip, Tristan with his arms crossed and his focus fixed on the map of Eoforwic that was half bullsh*t anyway, and Lancelot, solemn and steadfast even in the face of what looked like a long, exhausting siege to a fortress they couldn’t destroy if they wanted to take it. A Roman castra was nothing to sneeze at. They all had the same lay-out for a reason: It was near impenetrable.
“More fire,” Merlin murmured through his fingers, watching the map as though it hid the secret to taking it the fast way. “I don’t like this. Where has everyone gone? The city is almost empty, most I saw live away from the rivers in the poorer areas. Have we chased the last of Essetir out of their own hometown?”
“They’ve gone to starve somewhere else,” Gwaine huffed with no small amount of bitterness. Not for the first time, Arthur wondered whether the kinds of people he had known here were commoners or the military strongmen huddled up in their Roman ruins. “If they’re smart, the poor sods will try to outrace the coming autumn storms and seek shelter in Mercia. And you can smell the sea from here; some might have taken to the Norse kingdoms across the whale paths.”
“You’ve been to the continent?” Lancelot asked with honest curiosity which earned him a toothy grin.
“Much further south, but yes. Francia. Good wine, beautiful women. Met some Norsem*n there. Traders. Biggest guys you’ve ever seen. Blond, bearded, could have broken me in two like a twig. They were fun, I’m telling you.”
“To haggle with, or in bed?” Tristan never could keep his mouth shut when it came to Gwaine’s exploits. But he, too, only received the pride of a well-travelled man who kept his past closer even than his knives.
“Yes.”
Percival wheezed out a cough as his wine went down the wrong pipe, so at least he could pretend to redden from the strain while Gwaine happily pounded him on the back. Arthur could have pointed out that he was big, built like a tree and though decidedly beardless by choice, very much could have developed a whole nest of wiry curls. Or he could keep his tongue to himself and not risk getting lightly stabbed by Gwaine in his sleep whether they put Eoforwic to the torch or not.
“The matter remains. Lancelot, this is your town we are talking about. Building it from the ground up is going to take decades. And I would hate being the one to wipe the rest of Essetir off the face of the world.”
“And yet it is our safety, and above all, your safety, my liege, on the line here.” Lancelot’s smile was strained. If Arthur felt rotten for even considering torching Eoforwic, he must have been screaming on the inside. The silence reigned for so long that Merlin clearing his throat sounded comically loud in the tent.
“Kilgharrah is scouting the area, but I haven’t heard from him yet, so I assume there are no secret battalions hidden in the town or the fields. And the harvest is brought in. I would not put it past Lot to take everything that remains of his corn for himself, pick the orchards clean so he’s got apples to give to his horses, and leave the lower town with nothing. There is no money here; look around, the trading has collapsed after he massacred his own people.” That he avoided Arthur’s eyes as much as everyone else chilled him to the bone. “Walls are inconsequential to me. Kilgharrah could land inside the fortress so I can open the gates from the inside. It would most definitely deal some damage to the interior, but that’s better than burning down the entirety of Eoforwic without having done a damned thing to those massive walls.”
“Alone?”
Merlin grinned crookedly at Gwaine with half a shrug.
“You’re welcome to ask Kilgharrah if you could come along, but don’t get your hopes up. I’m surprised he lets even me ride him.”
Kilgharrah, to say the least, was not having it. When Gwaine came back from talking to him, he muttered something about the arrogance of ancient lizard creatures. Arthur wasn’t surprised in the least, but it twisted his insides with worry to send Merlin alone into the garrison. Not that he couldn’t take care of himself – impatience burned in him now that they were here, and that usually made him careless. Arthur could see it in his twitching jaw muscles.
“We’re losing light,” he said tersely, standing at the mouth of the siege camp in front of Eoforwic with his arms crossed, watching soldiers hurrying to and fro with wooden beams and buckets of dirt on their shoulders. Slowly, an earthen hill rose around their camp, supported by the palisade made of the logs pointed at the top.
“You’re not going until tomorrow morning, Merlin. You need to eat, rest, and prepare yourself. We are not hurtling into this fortress until my army is protected from trebuchets behind those massive walls.”
“It’s so quiet,” Merlin said instead of a fruitless disagreement that made his Adam’s apple bob when he swallowed. “I don’t like it. Where is Lot’s army? The walls are manned, but the noise of a garrison – it’s missing. I can’t see into the barracks.” He stared at the distant castrum with a muscle jumping in his clenched jaw. “Lot may have fled by ship. Or… something dangerous is waiting inside.”
“Laying siege to an empty fortress would make me look like the biggest idiot in the world. I’d never live it down.”
“Better than a battalion of magicians waiting to tear Kilgharrah apart,” he answered without a trace of humour. “This screams of a trap, Arthur. Gods, I should have known Lot wouldn’t wait for us to come and slaughter him.” His eyes were hard as flint, his jaw one hard line shifting as he ground his teeth. If his stare alone could have penetrated the massive, whitewashed limestone, someone would have surrendered the gates by now. “His soldiers might have decimated our army, but the surviving ones saw me on Kilgharrah and how I ended the battle. The tale must have reached him by now, likely exaggerated. He’s scared. Like a cornered, wounded dog.”
“Are you scared?” The question was out before Arthur could stop himself. Merlin glanced at him briefly, breathing out misdirected anger.
“Worried. We cannot lay siege to this relic for long. There is no reinforcement coming; we are as cut off from Camelot as we would be on the other side of the sea. And Lot knows it.” Briefly, his gaze flickered to Arthur, blue and determined. “So, we crack this nut the fast way. As long as you and our closest friends are safe, he has nothing to scare me with any longer. I have to go alone.”
Laying a careful hand on Merlin’s forearm, feeling more solid than Arthur ever remembered him having been in the past decade, he tried to take the knee-jerk offense out of his calm disagreement.
“You can’t protect me forever.”
Merlin’s features hardened, then softened with another exhale. Had they both been any less exhausted, perhaps he would have smiled, but there was only wariness now.
“I’ve done nothing else since I left my mother behind. Do you trust me?”
“You know I do.”
He covered Arthur’s hand with his own, a shred of that old warmth which had once come so easily to him shining in the golden flecks in his blue eyes.
“Then let me do this for you and for Lancelot. I have a badly tempered dragon with me; I’m going to be fine.” Arthur so badly wanted to believe him that he tilted their heads together with a forced breath of relief. If he wanted to lead what was left of his army into another battle against an opponent whom he knew not the shape and size of, he had to stop constantly worrying about Merlin.
“I know you can take care of yourself,” he said, one hand in Merlin’s neck. Had they not been surrounded by soldiers… That age-old urge to grasp with both hands the one person he could not stand to lose and never let go rose in him like sour wine. For now, he had to contend himself with taking Merlin’s hand to gently pull him back from the rising ridge which hid the sight of Eoforwic. It felt like turning away from a gravestone. “Come on, you have to let Mordred know we reached our destination. Did you get an answer to your last message, by the way?”
“No,” Merlin murmured, still craning his neck at the closing camp entrance until the soldiers swallowed them up once more. Bowing deeply to the King and the Court Sorcerer, their names floated on the heavy air like a prayer. Carrying reverence like a yoke, he turned his gaze heavenward. Merlin’s eyes flashed gold at the clouds, and a crow came swooping down on him. Half his men Arthur had lost in the Burnt Lands. He couldn’t help but wonder if that bird had feasted on one of them.
It seemed extremely uncharacteristic for Mordred not to keep in contact with Merlin. To send a lonely rider or three across the Burnt Lands all the way back to Camelot would have been a suicide mission and a foolish one on top: Not only their own mortal peril made it unwise, but the possibility of capture. Exhausted, without orientation or shelter, any messenger would have been an easy target for thugs having become desperate in destitution. So, animals were the only means of communication with Camelot they had.
That now in the most crucial stretch of their journey no word from the citadel returned made Arthur’s stomach churn with dread. They had left Mordred behind precisely because he was too young to waste himself on a campaign as spontaneous and ill-prepared as this one, and to protect the court in turn if it came to it. But there still were a lot of people who saw him as nothing more than a boy who had cheated his way into knighthood, and contrary to Merlin, his magic did not protect him from swords and daggers brandished in the shadows.
“I don’t envy him, Leon and Elyan for running the Kingdom in my absence,” Arthur joked as they made their way back into the heart of the camp. His honour guard closed around them in the busy, trodden paths of dirt torn up by thousands of feet. “But he’ll get the dubious honour to follow us to the Burnt Lands very soon, if we are lucky enough tomorrow to end this once and for all.” At the prospect of seeing Mordred again soon Merlin’s entire face lightened, adorned by a fond little quirk of his eyebrows as the hulking crow settled on his shoulder. He spoke to it in the language of magic which made his eyes glow. Arthur only recognized the word please, engraved into his mind from copious use of the family of supplicants who had started all this so long ago.
“What did you ask him for?”
“To be careful.” Merlin didn’t elaborate. He didn’t have to.
That night, Arthur wrapped himself around him, plastered to his back without a sliver of air between them. Merlin held his hand, his nose turned into Arthur’s arm as though he wanted to breathe in the scent of him to commit it to memory. He was so warm in their little cocoon of blankets on the hard bedroll, breathing slowly and deeply in a matter of minutes; calmer than he had any right to be, much more than Arthur who had fought countless battles and had been taught the theories of siege strategy together with his unparalleled swordsmanship. And yet, his heart was beating too hard, too fast against Merlin’s back. For an eternity, he lay wide awake, inhaling Merlin’s sleep-scent, all his senses filled in equal parts with love and terror.
A month ago, Merlin would have flinched from his own grim determination, but the hunter’s instinct in him had grown teeth and claws, his magic deepened, broadened, gone bottomless now in comparison to his collapse in Camelot’s Stagswood. But no matter how bitterly he conducted himself during the long days surrounded by hardened soldiers, asleep here in Arthur’s arms his face was slack and smooth, all the tension bled from him because he was safe here. Arthur wanted bedcurtains to draw shut around them, a door to lock, and three sets of the thickest castle walls in all of Albion to hide him behind, but in his heart of hearts, he knew that what terrified and thrilled him so was the undeniable fact that Merlin had broken free of all his cages and thrown the key away somewhere in the clouds. Power looked good on him. But Arthur’s heart still clamoured for him, afraid to be left behind.
“I love you,” he whispered into the soft, ticklish skin in Merlin’s neck, placing a lingering kiss on the spinal knob like a blessing. All night, he listened to the camp holding watch.
