Sword in the Stars (Once & Future #2) - Cori McCarthy Page 0,11
at the knees. Quite the ill-made knight… Sir?”
Again, Ari merely smirked. She could not name herself Ironfist; that was a lie too far.
Gwen came forward, pushing through the ladies. She stood at Arthur’s side, taking his elbow in a way that made him sort of… shiver… and Ari pound all over with jealousy. “King Arthur has asked you here, good knight, to thank you for your services in yesterday’s battle. I believe you saved my life.”
Arthur smiled at Gwen and then returned his scrutinizing glare to Ari. “Yes, I owe you a debt and would like to invite you to assemble a team to fight in my melee in three days’ time. Alas, if you will not share your name, I must imagine you to be suspicious.”
A word slid forward in Ari’s mind as if pushed across a polished table by a steady hand. This was Arthur. Not the child king in front of her but the bonded presence she’d begun to doubt since crash-landing in the past.
The proffered word crystallized. Not a word; a name.
“Lancelot,” Ari said, surprised to find that it left her mouth as lightly as any truth. Gwen’s eyes flew wide. “I am Sir Lancelot.”
“Stay invisible! Don’t engage! Leave the legend alone. Are none of you hearing me?” Merlin yelled the next morning. He’d slept on it, by request of Lam, but was still dizzy with the affront of Ari naming herself Lancelot. He’d called an emergency meeting, pulling them all into an empty tower. Apart from Gwen, who could not be separated from her fleet of handmaidens.
“Careful,” Lam warned. “Merlin’s going to start ranting about moths.”
“Butterflies,” Merlin said, mentally arranging a lecture on the introductory physics of time travel.
Ari stopped him with a harshly pointed finger. “You’re the one who should explain, Merlin. You said eighteenth birthday celebration. Eighteenth. That ‘king’ is a baby! Gwen has been married off to a thirteen-year-old!”
“Arthur always lied about his age,” Merlin said, “quite unabashedly. Like most commoners in this time, he doesn’t know precisely when he was born, and he was crowned at a tender age. A lot of rush to grow up. To prove that he can be a man.”
“He told Gwen he’s nearly sixteen,” Jordan added unhelpfully.
“He could be fifteen,” Lam said. “Val would say he’s fifteen, but he’d laugh into the back of his hand the whole time.”
“Arthur’s celebration will happen soon, thus his true age doesn’t matter.” Jordan’s stare sliced off further opinions. “Plus the only important measure of time is that he’s young enough not to have figured out that Gwen is pregnant, yet old enough to stare longingly upon her swelling breasts with unbridled appreciation.”
Merlin could follow this logic without liking it one bit.
“He doesn’t know she’s pregnant?” Ari asked, cringing with her eyes nearly closed. “So they haven’t…?” Bless her strategic vagueness.
“It’s a political match. To make him seem older in the eyes of his people,” Lam said, placing their wrist on Ari’s shoulder.
“He has his own chambers and sleeps in a pile of hunting dogs,” Jordan admitted.
“Aw,” Lam said.
“Okay, but,” Ari said, “this isn’t about Arthur and his adorable dog pile. This is about getting the chalice and getting back to our time without messing up the story. Check that dumb book, Jordan. Are the Lancelot pages still missing?”
Jordan hiked up her skirts and pulled out the MercersNotes, paging through. “They’ve returned.”
“See?” Ari asked Merlin. “I fixed it. Time continuum patched.”
“For now,” he said. “But if we’re not meant to be part of this legend, it will derail.”
Ari crossed her arms, bristling with challenge. “Wouldn’t it be helpful if one of us knew exactly what was going to happen because he’d lived through it before?”
“You have to understand,” Merlin wheedled. “This era was horrid, and not just for humans in general. I was new to the world, dropped down here with a fully formed intellect, the selfish emotions of a newborn, and no one to learn from. I spent years in a state of savage enchanted survival. And then Arthur came along. This innocent child. This spark of goodness. I believed my sole purpose was to protect him, and if that meant being the dark so he could be the light, well, I did what I believed I must. But since then—”
“You’ve grown a conscience?” Lam asked.
“I’ve blocked most of it out,” he said, head drooping, the rest of his shameful words hitting the floor. “All the pain. The missteps, the cruelty… I banished it from my mind.”