Sword in the Stars (Once & Future #2) - Cori McCarthy Page 0,108

might as well go now, because it’s about to get much sadder. You thought you knew tragedy? Imagine how much worse this will be with a girl like Ari. She’ll pick the strongest, the bravest, the stubbornest as a home for her spirit. She’ll search for her lost love. But it won’t work, Merlin. You know that. Every single one of her would-be heroes will fall.”

She glanced toward Ari with Kay’s face, but Nin’s terrible calm. The Lady of the Lake was going to take Ari now, claim her.

Merlin’s throat seized around tears. “Can I… can I say good-bye?”

Nin shrugged Kay’s shoulders.

“You know, Kay hates when people borrow his face,” Merlin muttered.

“You have two minutes,” Nin said, gesturing toward Ari’s prone figure. “Don’t disappoint me. Make them truly awful, Merlin.”

He nodded, tears blazing down his face. As he passed Nin and she could no longer see his expression, he nearly broke into a dance of glee. He’d time-magicked those tears, stolen them from a moment when he’d been truly sad. Because Merlin had glimpsed the truth behind Nin’s gloating. She would only be messing with him this intently if she were afraid. That meant there was still a way to stop her. He only had to find it.

Merlin walked to Ari on the bier. He kneeled at her side, blinking at the dried blood on her shirt. Merlin peeked and found that the spot where Ari had stabbed herself had all but healed. The Mercer pill must have worked on her wound. But she still wasn’t breathing.

And Nin was still a big, immortal problem.

Merlin laid a hand on Ari’s heart, hummed, and sparked. She jolted up, then quickly went back down. No breath.

The winds in the cave picked up, blasting Merlin away from Ari. Nin looked furious. Good. He wanted her furious. He wanted her small and petty and fighting and caring and… human.

Merlin closed his eyes, in the grips of a new idea. He sang as loud as he could, filling up every crevice of Nin’s cave with his deepest contralto, belting out the beginnings of Cher’s masterpiece, “If I Could Turn Back Time.”

“What are you doing?” Nin seethed, as her glow dimmed and flared.

Merlin kept singing her backward, the same way he’d brought the tree in the woods to a seed. This whole time he’d been assuming he had to become as powerful as Nin, to step up to her level of existence. But what if he had it all backward, in true Merlin fashion? What if he didn’t need to be less human to fight Nin? What if he needed to bring her down to his size?

As Merlin hit the chorus, Nin started screaming. Her face contorted, its perfection dropping away. Her golden hair was back to its reedy paleness, her skin the sort of milky blue-white that would have occurred naturally if she’d spent too long in a cave. She dropped out of her gentle float, hitting the rocks. Her hands came up bloody and Merlin gasped.

Nimue was back.

But Nin was still fighting to regain every second, every year, every century.

“You know, this was much easier with Morgana,” he gritted as he fought.

The cave spat rocks like bloody teeth. The water started to boil.

Merlin reached the end of the song, and Nimue was still Nimue: the young woman who’d lost herself in her anger, but had not yet given up her humanity.

“What are you doing?” she asked, looking up at Merlin with a flash of disgust. Her voice was small, a cold drop of water where it used to be a raging tide. “You’ll never be able to keep me like this. You’ll drain your magic and then…”

“Then what?” Merlin asked. “You’ll be Nin again?”

He rushed over to her, fingers blazing with the threat of sparks, his hand closing around her startlingly real neck. “I’m afraid you’ll be too dead for that.”

Nimue laid a hand over her heart. A whirlwind of magic started up, time pushing at Merlin, trying to age him prematurely. He could feel his skin prune, his hair shoot longer. He sang and reversed it; she screeched and he sprouted gray hairs. They were fighting now, but for the first time they were matched. Merlin’s magic was depleted in a way that Nimue’s wasn’t, but she was so out of practice at being in a body that she stumbled like a new colt.

“Boy,” she spat. “Are you going to kill me? That’s what men do. That’s what men have always done. They kill