Sword in the Stars (Once & Future #2) - Cori McCarthy Page 0,48

take care of him, especially if time keeps… stealing him away.”

“I’ve been thinking about that, too,” Gwen whispered.

Ari took in the curve of Gwen’s lovely neck, the way her lips parted with each breath. Ari could see it so clearly: a home for all of them. Visits from her parents. A dog. Oh, they were definitely getting a dog. “I just really want a bed that’s ours. For sleeping all tangled up. For not sleeping,” she said with a lift of the eyebrows. “A place where we aren’t separated. Not by anything or anyone ever again.”

“Gweneviere?”

Arthur stood in the middle of the floor, flanked by guards. Ari didn’t know when they’d stopped dancing, when they’d woven their hands together and pressed their chests as close as they could be—as if they had become an illuminated illustration in an ancient text of Lancelot matched with her Gweneviere.

“Arthur,” Gwen started, but the king merely took her arm and led her away. Gwen looked back at Ari while she was tugged out of the great hall, mouthing a warning.

Ari never saw the face of the knight who knocked her out cold.

Merlin stepped into the crystal cave, Val right behind him. The inky portal closed, leaving them alone together for the first time since they embarked on this ruinous trip.

“So this is your cave of wonders,” Val said, peering around. Merlin had always loved that brash interest. Of course, it used to be pointed at him. Now Val was taking in Merlin’s private sanctuary.

Which was, frankly, a mess.

He’d never brought anyone here before, and suddenly it seemed like a mistake to let Val see this hidden part of him. The crystals were a splendid blushing pink quartz, natural columns sparkling in the dim light. But Merlin hadn’t kept the place up through the ages. With everything he’d stashed in various nooks and crannies, it was midway between a historical museum and a level four hoarding situation.

“I only ever come here to sleep off the cycles,” Merlin admitted, running about to do a lightning round of tidying. “It’s become a bit of a dumping ground for things that came to me over the ages. Though I swear I did clean it up after Arthur 28. Or was it Arthur 29? Please don’t judge!”

“Too late,” Val said. “I just saw the little crystal bed where you sleep. The collection of nightcaps? Merlin, you have like two hundred.”

“Have you ever slept for a decade?” Merlin asked. “It requires extreme comfort.”

“Where do you think the chalice could be?” Val asked, nudging an orphaned slipper with his toe.

“I probably wouldn’t have put it in a special spot because that’s exactly where someone else would check. As you can tell from looking around, my strategy was to toss things in all higgledy-piggledy.”

“Did you say higgledy-piggledy?” Val asked.

Merlin blushed. Why did blushing feel so different as an eleven-year-old—less tingly and pleasant, more cruelly embarrassing? “The younger I get the more conversational filters I lose. Just give me a lunch box and some juice and call it a lifetime.”

Merlin thought that Val might comfort him, even put an arm around his shoulder. He would take any scrap of age-appropriate affection he could get at this point. Val reached into a pile of souvenirs and pulled out a tin square. “Done and done.”

It was an ancient, rusted-out lunch box, complete with Thermos. The metal was adorned with an image of King Arthur and a very powerful-looking magician with a gnarled staff. “Do you collect your own merchandise, Merlin?”

He laughed—despite himself. Despite everything.

Val still had the power to make him happy. Considering how slim their chances were of ever being a couple again, it was quite a miserable revelation. “All right, you take the right-hand chambers and I’ll take the left,” Val said. “Sing out when you see a magical cup.”

Merlin squatted in the first cluster of crystals looking for the small, bony, gold-rimmed chalice. He hated being apart from Val for even a minute, but as the future moved on without them, it grew ever more imperative to fulfill the Arthurian legend, grab the chalice, and get out.

Would that really end the cycle, though, if Nin was the one behind it? Or would she find a way to keep it spinning on forever?

Merlin suddenly couldn’t handle being back in this place, stuffed with the detritus of so many years spent chained to Arthur’s story—the evidence that this cycle truly was his prison.

“Val?” Merlin asked, his voice pinging around in the high-ceilinged space. “Val,