Sword in the Stars (Once & Future #2) - Cori McCarthy Page 0,92
iron knife.
Merlin ducked behind a screen of weeds. He didn’t know exactly what he was about to witness. He only knew he’d told the time portal to send him back to the beginning of Nin’s story. The truth was hiding in the past, and he was the only one who could go back to find it.
He needed to know how to stop the Lady of the Lake.
The woman crouched in the water up to her chest. Merlin peeled his attention away and found he wasn’t the only one watching—an entire village had poured out to see this moment. When the woman screamed, Merlin was surprised the sky itself didn’t tear open. The water thickened and darkened with blood. The knife plunged down, and a few moments later the man raised a tiny child.
It cried as hard as its mother had just screamed.
This must be the birth the enchantresses had told him about—the only other birth that ever happened in the waters of time.
The woman disappeared under the water, and Merlin worried that she had drifted into death, but after a moment she came back up, shining and wet, gasping for breath.
That’s when the man started to yell at her.
They spoke a tongue that beat like a battle drum, tense and taut. Merlin was mesmerized, though he didn’t know half the words they used, and the others were only kin to English. One word he picked out, over and over. “Sunn.” At first, he thought they were talking about the sky overhead, the clouds that refused to break.
“No,” the woman said softly. “Dohtor.”
“Dohtor,” the man said again, bitter as salt.
He was angry that she’d given birth to a girl instead of a boy. The man flung his hands up and argued with the heavens, as if they’d given him a bad deal. Merlin stole a word from the angry stream. Steorra. Was he claiming that their child had been born under the wrong stars? That the heavens hadn’t aligned to give him the one thing he wanted?
The woman shook off his words like dirty water, clutching the tiny child to her breast.
“Nimue,” she said, holding out her baby for everyone to admire. If they were as upset as the man in the lake, they did a better job of hiding it. Merlin felt the air fill with their celebrations as they played crude flutes and beat drums and cried out her name.
“Nimue. Nimue.”
Merlin needed to learn everything he could about Nin if he was going to defeat her. Which meant staying here until she turned into an inhuman being—however long that took. However hard it was to keep away from Ari and Gwen and Val.
Yes, he could jump back to whatever moment in time he wanted now that he could use his powers without aging down into an embryo. But how long would he last without his friends? Especially like this—small and alone and uncared for in a time when violence seemed a given, rather than an option?
He was crouched in the reeds, on the verge of a panic attack, when someone crept up on him. Merlin whirled at the footsteps and found he was being watched. A woman with long, light-brown braids approached him with a curious look. “Bearn?” she asked in a low tone.
Had she just called him a bear?
“Hello,” Merlin said, hoping that the greeting translated. “I’m just… here to see the baby. I’ll be going now.”
He didn’t care how nice she looked. He couldn’t trust anyone. And not to sound like a contestant on one of those Mercer reality shows where they crammed a bunch of unlikely roommates in a spaceship together and sent one out the airlock every week, but he wasn’t here to make friends.
The woman looked at him like he was speaking a babbling baby language. Merlin realized he’d just said all of that out loud. “Fewmets,” he cursed.
“Fewmets?” She pointed to him, then put a hand to her chest. “Aethelwyn.”
“No, no!” Fewmets was a term for dragon droppings and definitely not his name. But what was he supposed to call himself? He’d picked Merlin when he woke up as an old man with nothing but a tiny falcon in his hand. And then there was Kairos, the only other baby ever born in this lake. The time child, the chosen one. Did he deserve to claim that name after he’d dropped Gwen and Ari’s baby at the beginning of a cruel cycle?