Sword in the Stars (Once & Future #2) - Cori McCarthy Page 0,94

to begin another cycle, of course—it was that Merlin used his magic like a child.

Living in these antediluvian woods without any Arthurs to take care of finally gave him time to figure things out. Of course, he only had a few years to master magic that Nin had been wielding for centuries. The pressure perched on his shoulders, clawing like Archimedes in a foul mood. He started out by building a shelter, impermeable to the elements but transparent, like a thick plastic tent. He fell asleep looking at the moon, dreaming of the future when he would be up there, meeting Ari.

He woke the next morning with magic on his lips. Music still felt like the best way to control it, perhaps because music itself was a measure of time. The first thing he tried to create was a sandwich. Naturally. He could feel himself borrowing matter from pockets of time where it was fallow, unused, and putting it to work.

And then it was sitting in his palm—turkey and cheddar and pickles and glory.

He never took his eyes off Nimue for too long. Every day he changed himself into a falcon and circled over the forest, keeping watch on her village with little rounded eyes. Taking on a different form required reaching for a time when his atoms didn’t hold their current shape, when they could be combined with other atoms in new ways.

These were small marvels of intuitive magic, but intuition wouldn’t be enough to take on Nin. He needed purpose, patience, ambition. And as the cherry on top, he needed whatever made her so much stronger.

He spent a year practicing before he smacked into puberty: forward, this time. In the torrent of those first months, his magic fluctuated as much as anything else. He was constantly turning himself into a toadstool without meaning to. His face sprouted reddish hairs, finally replacing the ones he’d lost, which should have made him proud, but why were they so damn patchy? Merlin became nearsighted again; and he allowed himself the indulgence of glasses—snatching a pair of horn rims from some future century, off the nightstand of a person who hopefully wouldn’t miss them. He put them on, fussed with his hair, and hoped that Val would approve of the style.

That was the other distracting bit of becoming a teenager again. Merlin lost entire weeks thinking about Val. But he wouldn’t save his once and—hopefully—future boyfriend by looking nice in specs. Val would tell him to be organized and systematic. To push forward to the more complex aspects of time magic. Merlin had been ripping time with a great deal of passion and very little precision, but what else was possible?

“Let’s start here,” he said, picking a flower, a small white variety that must have gone extinct; it didn’t look like any of the ones he knew. Merlin glared at the petals, the sepals, the fuzzy pollen. He hummed like an angry bee.

Nothing happened.

You’re making that poor flower self-conscious, he thought, channeling Val.

Merlin tried again, less pushy this time. He let the flower be a flower.

He let the song be a song.

He waited for the perfect moment, the one when everything changed. When it came, he hummed a little harder, and the flower wilted in his hand. He hadn’t killed it, he’d simply sped past its prime. Now he hummed lighter, softer, making the flower white and lush again, then taking it all the way back to a seed. Then he had to take several naps in a row.

He could still exhaust his magic, although the longer he trained the more stamina he built. But there would always be an upward limit, it seemed. One of those irksome limitations of having a body that Nin liked to pester him about.

Not to be deterred, Merlin tried a tree next. A white oak. It should have been the tallest in the forest, its rounded leaves maroon with the deep blush of autumn. But it had fallen long ago.

“Change, you woody beast!” Merlin shouted.

That’s definitely going to work, a voice sprang up in his mind. Now you’re a pimpled mage with an attitude problem.

“Oh,” Merlin whispered, dropping his hands. Here was a person he hadn’t talked to in a very long time, even in his own head.

Kay.

His impossible, cycle-doomed father. The one who would have sprayed all the chips out of his mouth if he’d learned this particular, parental twist.

“Kay was my father,” Merlin stated. Even the trees around him seemed dubious. “Kay is my