Chapter 3 #2
Three dragons will fight to the death where five rivers converge.
Unable to decipher the puzzling lines, I flipped to the book’s first page.
Herein being a book of prophecies by the Ambrosius Merlin…
I heard a rustling in the corner. Viviana had swept in and was now frantically hunting through the shelves.
“What are you looking for?” I asked.
“One of my leechbooks,” she huffed. “I’m stirring an elixir for lung pain and can’t remember if the last ingredient is helenium or goose dung.
” She plucked out a thin codex with a loose binding.
“Yes, here it is. Elinor is short of breath again.” She glanced down at the book in my hand. “What are you reading, my prince?”
“Merlin’s book of prophecies,” I said, holding up the small bound manuscript. “They seem very strange.”
She snatched the book from my hands. “I didn’t know we had this.”
“Is something wrong?”
She thumbed through the book, glancing at me with alarm. “Prophecies are a type of magic I avoid. They’re dangerous.”
If she was attempting to scare me, her warning had the opposite effect. “How so?”
“Think of leading a cow on a rope. A prophecy turns you into the cow.”
“A prophecy turns me into a cow!” I understood what she meant, but it was always best to defuse her vexation with a joke. She laughed.
“Yours won’t. But this book is worthless rot.
Here.” She flipped to a random page and read, “The shadow of a man in a blue hauberk will consume an Irish king. Is the shadow real or figurative? Does it mean the man in the blue hauberk will outshine an Irish king in battle, or that some unnamed darkness begotten by a man in a blue hauberk will drive an Irish king mad? It is vague enough to mean nothing and everything, and therefore not worth puzzling through. Besides.” She slammed the book shut. “Merlin is a foolish ass.”
She returned to the kitchen with the book in hand. I could hear the hearth crack and pop as she tossed it into the fire.
I didn’t care. I didn’t need to read more. Viviana had been oblivious to the revelation she’d let slip.
Yours won’t, she’d said.
Meaning I had a prophecy.
Merlin, the great wizard, had made a prophecy about me.
He was Uther Pendragon’s most trusted advisor, an eccentric wielder of magic. If the stories were true, he was the son of an incubus, though Viviana told me the scribes tended to exaggerate. When she read sections about Merlin from A History of Camelot, I could sense her derision.
“They give him all the credit,” she used to say. “But the Round Table was not Merlin’s idea. It was the women of Camelot who worked in secret to unite the kingdom.”
Embellishments aside, Merlin was said to experience time at a point where the future transcribed the present.
His power of foresight helped Uther defeat the Saxons and form strategic relationships with the mainland.
After Uther’s death, his only son, Arthur, took the throne.
He was just sixteen and Merlin became a father figure, helping him negotiate the rising threat of nearby kingdoms aligned with Rome.
In the subsequent days, I searched the shelves for every history I could find, hoping to uncover some new detail.
I read and reread A History of Camelot, desperate for breadcrumbs about Merlin and his prophecies.
At various points Merlin was said to have lived in the Old North, in Ireland, in various parts of the mainland.
Was I from one of those regions? Had Merlin known my birth parents?
It was impossible to know. Inquiring about my origins was against the rules of the sisterhood.
Such knowledge, they felt, would be dangerous in my hands.
It dawned on me then what I was actually seeking.
I went out back and chopped firewood, letting the physical exertion scrub my mind.
My attempts to unwind the prophecy, I realized, were not about elucidating my future.
In truth, I did not care to know what the hands of fate might deliver.
What I really sought was a thread to the past. By tracing the prophecy back to its roots, I might finally unearth my own.
Up until that point I had assumed my origins were shameful.
Why else keep them a secret? Surely the sisterhood was only trying to protect me.
But now, I was not so sure. Some prophecies foretold doom, but didn’t others anticipate greatness?
What if greatness existed in my familial past, and the sisterhood was purposely keeping me from it, afraid I might one day overshadow them and their magic?
I lowered the axe, a new strength gathering in my muscles.
I had lived these years as a nameless boy, subsisting off the tepid kindness of the sisterhood, clinging to Viviana like a scared pup.
I was an outsider here. I always would be.
But I could not continue to stand by as my life unfolded.
Not when the loneliness threatened to pull me under.
The truth was that I wanted, I dreamed, I yearned and desired, and I would no longer harbor shame for nurturing ambitions beyond a makeshift archer’s target in the clearing.
Failure, exile, I’d face both. I did not care. And the not caring felt like the early glimmers of bravery.
I promised myself I would learn the truth.