Chapter Thirty-Six
T he men were in good spirits as we rode away from the castle, chatting amongst themselves as I stared off into the horizon.
Something deep in my chest felt off about the entire affair. As we drew closer the same buzzing sensation I always felt when a portent was about to become true grew more and more steady as we found the river and began to follow it in the direction in which the Saxons had last been spotted.
“Merlin, are you well?” Arthur asked as he pulled his stallion, Llamarei, up beside my own horse. The alpha seemed unperturbed by the events unfolding before us—far more comfortable than he usually was before riding into battle.
“I…” I trailed off, unsure of what to say. Normally when I felt such a buzzing, I knew what event the gods were trying to steer me to focus towards. But I had no inkling of what they wanted me to experience here. Never before had I seen this stretch of river, nor had I seen any of the events leading up to it.
It was all very strange and I was used to being the strange thing—not the other way around.
In a way it felt as if we were riding blindly to a fate I could not understand.
“I am wary of this, Arthur,” I finally admitted to him as I stared off into the horizon. It was a beautiful day in Logres which provided a stark contrast to the potential battle that was about to occur. “It feels as if I am meant to know something, but I find myself in the dark.”
Arthur nodded as if he understood. “This has been foretold before,” he said mysteriously.
I frowned at him, wanting to ask what he had meant by that. I knew he had dreams at times of the future thanks to the touch of magic in his soul that allowed him to wield Excalibur , but more often than not the king refused outright to speak of them.
“Does this have to do with your dreams?” I asked outright, feeling slightly offended that he didn’t trust me enough to tell me what to expect.
This must be how everyone else feels, a quiet voice in my head whispered, reminding me that I had done very much the same the night I had left the castle in a flurry to begin my attempts to pull an omega through time.
Arthur never responded to me, the tendon in his jaw tightening as he looked ahead to the horizon where the path began to veer upwards into the foothills that surrounded the territory of Camelot.
“Arthur?” I prodded, the buzzing in my chest growing with intensity as we neared.
“Promise me something, Merlin,” Arthur said suddenly, turning to face me as we approached what looked to be a gully with high stone walls on either side. Normally, Arthur would never lead his men into such an obvious trap, but he made no move to stop his men and instead allowed Llamarei to continue on.
“Anything,” I told him seriously, my heart hammering in my chest as I wished that the gods had seen fit to show me what was about to occur so that I could be ready for it.
Arthur pulled Excalibur from its sheath, the sound echoing off of the stone surrounding us. “Protect Guinevere. Even if it is from me.”
Before I could ask what he meant, he had turned to the men following us. “It is an ambush!”
His bellow seemed to bring them from the sky as men began to rain down around us, their swords already drawn.
The sounds of battle began almost immediately as my horse grew spooked and forced me to either get off or be dragged along as it fled.
My feet hit the dirt and I was immediately surrounded by the cacophony.
It was more intense than any of the small skirmishes we had faced traveling back to Castle Camelot after Arthur and Guinevere’s weddings. Men surrounded us from all sides and it quickly became clear to me that it was not just the brown-liveried Saxons that were amongst our enemies.
The bright green dress of the King of Lothian was mixed in. We had been betrayed and much earlier than the gods had originally shown me.
Morgana was always supposed to turn on Arthur in a bid to take over his throne for her son, Mordred, but that happened much later.
Something was afoot here, but I did not know what.
It made me realize how truly blind I was relying on just what the gods deigned to show me.
A man dressed in green raised his sword to me.
“I fear that is the worst idea you have had all day,” I told the man and with a flick of my wrist he went flying.
My magic wouldn’t hold up in the long term, not with the damage to my magical core, but my kiss with Guinevere had filled my stores more than anything I had ever experienced.
Men flew out of my way as I tried to get to Arthur who was razing through groups of attackers with ease, Excalibur glowing in the late-afternoon light.
I just needed to get to him—to right whatever future it was that he had dreamt about because it was not the one that I had been shown by the gods.
Then I saw her, dressed in green and coming up behind Arthur as he was distracted by a trio of enemies. Morgana had slipped into the crowded battle with an ease that was borne from the treachery she so regularly dabbled in.
No one else could see her magic the way I could, the way I always had ever since we were introduced to her when she was a young princess about to be married off to a much older king.
There had always been something so very wrong about the deep, almost rotten color of her core and I had told Arthur so. But the man had been torn between the desire to know his blood family and my counsel and had let her be.
Today, as she reached for Arthur, that magic seemed to ebb out of her in powerful waves. This was not just her own magic at work, but something far more dastardly. Almost god-like.
Arthur’s blue-eyed gaze found mine as fingers wrapped around his temples. He had seen this. He had known it was coming and he still walked headlong into it anyway.
Protect her, he mouthed, his confidence in me evident on his face as Morgana’s magic began to seep into his skull.
I moved to cast a spell to stop her—to impede her magic so it would have no hold over my king. The magic crackled along my fingertips, ready to shoot out and smite her down.
Then Arthur’s eyes widened with shock and his hand lifted as if to reach for me, but it was of no use. In a blink the sounds of rocks crackling around me filled my ears and darkness enveloped me.
Stones pressed into my back and chest, making it hard for me to breathe as I tried to orient myself and what had just happened.
It must have been a trap set by Morgana—and a powerful one at that—because as I tried to cast a spell to break the rocks I found that my magic fizzled away into nothing.
Fear filled me as I realized exactly what I had been placed within. Morgana had created a mage’s prison, a trap that I would never have been caught dead in… except I had allowed myself to get distracted by the unknown.
It must have been triggered when I attempted to use magic to stop Morgana’s mind control over Arthur.
Taking a fist, I pounded it on the rock wall in front of me. “Hello?”
But I couldn’t hear anything aside from the occasional sound of metal-hitting-metal outside and even that ended soon.
With the level of magic she was carrying, it would have been an easy task for her to take over the minds of the rest of our company. Hells, she could probably take over the entirety of Camelot if she wished. All she needed to do was touch someone and they would be hers.
Which put Guinevere’s safety in dire straits. I needed to get out. To get to her and the rest of the pack and break Morgana’s mind control over Arthur before he did something he regretted.
“Let me out!” I shouted, my voice dampened by the stone around us.
My chest began to buzz again, but this time I could not reach down to rub it as the stone dug too deeply into my torso, making it hard for me to breathe.
Was this the gods’ way of punishing me for going outside of the bounds of the fate they had set before me? For liking a woman and reciprocating her feelings?
Images began to flash painfully through my mind as if someone was taking an ice pick and digging just behind my eyes.
I saw her, Guinevere standing alone on a hilltop, tears running down her face as she faced the carnage in the valley down below.
“Don’t leave me!” she cried out, her sobs making the sky weep right alongside her as she clutched her fists to her chest, her legs giving out as the torrent of rain began to fill the valley, the shores of the lake spilling over and washing around the boots of the combatting warriors.
“Please,” I said out loud to whoever was listening. “Please do not do this to her.”
But the gods were not willing to listen to me and instead showed me more of that fate. Understanding began to dawn on me as I realized that this was my own fate.
I was their creation, but I was also a hindrance to the grand plan, one that surprised me and changed everything I thought I had known about Arthur’s fate.
“No,” I whispered, completely alone. “It cannot be.”