The King's Wizard Read online

  Her life was not hard. Just as it had been at Avalon, her life at Pendragon Castle was circumscribed with prayer and study. Though here at Pendragon the omnipresent threat of death hung over her, Nimue found she did not fear death as much as she feared never having lived. Would she grow old here in her stifling stone cocoon, a caterpillar who never had the chance to become a butterfly?

  If Uther took the throne, things would be different. Uther would unite the land and bring it under Christian rule once more. Nimue longed for his coming the way the nuns at the Abbey longed for the return of the Grail. When Uther came, there would be peace and justice at last.

  Suddenly her thoughts were interrupted by the clatter of the gates being dragged open, and the shouting of many voices. Someone was coming to the castle—from the sounds of it, a large party, and Nimue knew that the king was not expected to return to Pendragon for some months yet. She sprang to her feet and ran to the window, leaning as far out as she could in order to see. She blinked as her eyes adjusted to the dark.

  The first thing she saw was the glitter of torches stretching in two lines up the road as far as she could see. It was an army! For a moment her heart leapt—had Uther come?—before she realized that the castellan would never have opened Pendragon’s gates so easily to Vortigern’s enemy. If there was an army outside Pendragon’s gates, it was the king’s. But why was Vortigern bringing his army here?

  The outriders clattered through the open gates holding their torches high. The light glittered on the gold crown Vortigern wore upon his armored helm. She could see him plainly as the horsemen milled in the castleyard beneath her window, and Nimue drew back a little in fear the king might see her as well.

  Vortigern had a new prisoner with him. Nimue watched as soldiers pulled the unconscious man from the back of the horse over which he had been tied like a sack of meal, and held him between them. Nimue could see that he was moving feebly—Vortigern could see it too, and took a torch from one of his men, thrusting it toward the prisoner’s face as he examined him closely.

  Her fear forgotten, Nimue leaned out her window again, peering into the frigid dark. The prisoner bore an elusive familiarity, though he must be a peasant, dressed as he was in rags and animal skins. Who was he? How did she know him?

  Satisfied with what he saw, Vortigern turned away and strode into the castle. The soldiers followed with their prisoner.

  “My lady! My lady!”

  Nimue barely had enough time to move away from the window and sit down again before Mistress Olwen burst into the room. The lady in waiting was agitated, her cheeks flushed and her wimple askew.

  “My lady—it is war! Uther has landed and attacked Winchester—and they say a Pagan wizard saw it all and predicted it at the moment it happened!”

  A wizard! Suddenly Nimue remembered where she’d seen Vortigern’s prisoner before. They had met in a forest, many years before.…

  “Merlin.…”

  It was amazing, Merlin reflected gloomily, how much difference being able to leave a place made to one’s feelings about it. While it was true that his tiny cell was dark, wet, and freezing, he’d happily poked around in caves that were just as inhospitable. The only difference between the two was that he could have left the cave at any moment, and here an iron door barred his escape.

  Merlin glanced toward the tiny window set high into one of the cell’s slanting walls. It provided the only light and air the chamber got, though at the moment all it admitted was moonlight and frost. It, too, was barricaded with a grille of cold iron, but, like the door, it could provide no real obstacle to magic.

  Magic.

  The power of the Old Ways could free Merlin in an instant, whisk him back to his woodland home and protect him from the king’s anger. Merlin could feel its power pulsing at his fingertips, just waiting to be used. A word, a gesture, and he would be free… and lost. The moment he used his magic, Merlin placed himself more firmly in Mab’s power, there to become her tool for every sort of evil.

  A flicker of darkness appeared at the edge of his vision. Merlin turned, unsurprised, to see that Frik, Mab’s gnomish servant, had appeared in his cell.

  Mab always likes to keep a close eye on her triumphs.

  On this occasion, Frik was not wearing any of the disguises he so loved, and his plain, close-fitting black cowl and garment made his pale face and long curving ears seem to float like disembodied shapes in the dimness. He smiled grotesquely at Merlin.

  “Hello, Frik. How are you?” Merlin said easily. Frik was his only pleasant memory from his time in the Land of Magic. Frik had genuinely seemed to care for him. The gnome was Mab’s servant, but he’d never tried to trick Merlin as Mab had. And he’d never killed anyone Merlin loved.

  “Overworked and underpaid—how terribly sweet of you to inquire,” the gnome answered with a toothy smile. He turned away, examining Merlin’s cell fastidiously. “How did they ever make a vulgarian like Vortigern king?” he mused, with a moué of distaste for Merlin’s surroundings. “You mortals have no sense of the fitness of things; how appalling.”

  Merlin shrugged. Frik drew himself up, seeming to recollect his purpose. “Anyway. I’m here with a message from Queen Mab.”

  “Naturally,” Merlin said with a faint bitter smile.

  “She’s going to punish you,” Frik announced portentously.

  “She hates me,” Merlin explained kindly. Perhaps the explanation was even necessary—human emotions were largely a mystery to the Fair Folk.

  “No,” Frik corrected him with schoolmasterish fussiness, “but she’s rather disappointed that you’ve refused to use your magic powers. Why won’t you use them, Master Merlin?” Frik asked mournfully.

  “Because Mab wants me to!” Merlin snapped. The hot force of his anger surprised even him—after so many years, he’d thought his feelings for Mab had hardened into a cold hatred. He turned away from Frik, staring up and out through the grille, yearning for the open air. The night was clear and bitterly cold.

  “You will in the end, you know,” Frik said, with what almost sounded like compassion in his voice. He touched Merlin’s shoulder gently. “She’s a terrible enemy, Master Merlin, and a very poor employer. Well, I mean, I could tell you stories…! But enough of my problems—” There was a ripple in the darkness, and Frik was gone in midsentence.

  Merlin stretched his cramped arms, then blew on his fingers to try to warm them. Mab thought that confinement in this dismal prison cell would do what Merlin’s self-imposed forest exile had not… but she was wrong.

  If Mab is a terrible enemy, Frik, then so am I. She’ll see that before this is over. I will not rest until my dead are avenged—the dead, and the living as well. …

  Princess Nimue slipped along the castle wall. Pendragon Castle seethed with activity, and the news that Winchester had fallen to Uther had seemed to madden Vortigern. Nimue’s father was one of Vortigern’s captains, loyal to him since before he became king. But after Vortigern executed Hawdes and Aerlius on the mere suspicion of treason, not even those who had been loyal longest dared to do anything that might anger him.

  It had been a relief to everyone when Vortigern had finally ridden out to inspect the army massing a few miles away on the Downs, and Nimue had seized her chance. Vortigern’s special prisoner was sure to be somewhere in the dungeons, and with winter coming on, the worst of the cells were the ones that were open to the outside air.

  The first few cells Nimue checked were empty, but at last she came to one that was occupied. At the bottom of the narrow slanted shaft she could see a man dressed in deerskin and rude homespun lying on a crude cot.

  “Merlin?” Nimue whispered softly.

  He roused at the sound of his name and saw her. As he climbed from his bed and made his way stiffly to the window, Nimue could see how pale and haggard he looked. Ill as he was, though, his face lit up at the sight of her.

  “Nimue!” he said.

  If he climbed the rough wall as far as he could and s
tretched toward the sky, and she knelt and thrust her arm down between the bars of the grate, their fingers could just touch.

  “Merlin—it is you!” Nimue said, holding his fingers through the harsh iron bars. The years had turned him from a boy into a man, and there were new lines of care and worry in his face. “You said we’d meet again,” she said, remembering that long-ago day. “I thought I recognized you last night when they brought you in… they said you were a wizard.”

  “I am,” Merlin said, before he remembered Nimue was a member of the New Religion. Christians hated wizards with a special intensity because of the power of the Old Ways that flowed through them. But no shadow of that prejudice touched Nimue’s face.

  “Not much of one, if you can’t even escape,” she said, teasing him gently.

  “I can, but I won’t,” Merlin said. “I’m Vortigern’s prisoner, and so I’ll stay. But why are you here, Nimue?”

  “I’m a hostage,” Nimue told him. She smiled wryly. “Vortigern wants to make sure my father doesn’t join Prince Uther. The cage is bigger, but other than that there’s not much difference between us.”

  “What difference there is, I’m grateful for,” Merlin told her softly. She was more beautiful than he’d remembered, the lovely young girl having ripened into a desirable woman. He could almost be grateful to Vortigern for having brought them together again. “It seems I said the wrong thing when I told him Uther would defeat him.”

  “Oh, I hope you’re right!” Nimue said, lowering her voice even further. “If he comes soon, I think there is hope for both of us.”

  Merlin wanted to ask what she meant, but a sudden sound behind her made Nimue rise to her feet. “I must go,” she told him hurriedly. “I’ll come again.”

  * * *

  Merlin lost count of the passing days, but Nimue visited frequently, growing bolder as her visits went unnoticed.

  Without Nimue Merlin would have died. She brought him food in secret, but though the winter nights were icy, and frost had begun to form upon the walls of his cell, she dared not bring him blankets, or anything his jailers would find. Merlin shivered without cloak or covers to warm him, but a worse torture than the cold was the imprisonment. Merlin was a creature of the wild open spaces. The man-made walls seemed to loom inward, crushing the life from his body, until he began to wonder if Vortigern had simply forgotten him, leaving him to die here alone.

  Other than Nimue, Merlin’s only companion came from his visions; as he grew weaker, he drifted in and out of dreams, seeing jumbled meaningless images of events yet to be.

  “Merlin!” Nimue’s urgent whisper roused him.

  He blinked, gazing upward toward the light. His body felt heavy, as though it were turning to stone in sympathy with the walls.

  “Merlin!” she called again.

  He wanted to tell her he heard her, but when he tried to speak, no words would come. He raised a hand weakly, and realized he could move no more than that. His visions always told him he would not die here, but lately he was coming to doubt them. And if he died here, had Mab won? Or had he?

  “Merlin, what’s wrong?” Nimue’s voice was filled with unshed tears. “What has he done to you?”

  “Nothing.” Speech was an enormous effort, but somehow he managed it. “I just need… space to breathe. These four walls are suffocating me, Nimue.” He looked up toward the window he could no longer reach.

  “I won’t allow that.” Nimue’s voice held a hardness he’d never heard before. “The king is back. I’m going to demand that he release you.”

  “Nimue!” Fear for her did what fear for himself could not—but by the time Merlin had gotten to his feet, Nimue was gone.

  It felt good to be at war again, the king decided. Vortigern was far more cheerful than he meant to let his captains know as he called them together in Pendragon’s Great Hall for a council of war. When the two armies clashed next spring, the slaughter would be glorious. Uther had taken Winchester, and the Celts and Picts of the North were rising for him, but Vortigern held the South and the West. The Anglos, the Saxons, and the Cornish would fight for the crown like demons, and the Welsh archers could put an arrow through the heart of a sparrow on the wing. Vortigern had nothing to fear. He had a trained army and years of experience. It would not be that hard to defeat a callow youth in his first battle, and in the process Vortigern thought he’d be able to get rid of a number of troublesome political enemies on his own side as well.

  But in order to win his war, he first had to inspire his captains.

  “Now…” Vortigern said, leaning forward on his throne.

  At that moment there was a commotion outside the Great Hall. Suddenly the doors flew open and a young woman in a coronet and dark velvet mantle marched in. After a moment Vortigern recognized her: Nimue, Lord Ardent’s daughter and one of the royal hostages.

  “I didn’t send for you,” he observed.

  “That’s why I’m here,” Nimue said calmly. His words didn’t seem to faze her.

  “I’ve killed men for such insolence,” Vortigern said. All around him, the chamber was filled with the stifled sound of battle-hardened warriors trying not to be noticed.

  “And women?” Nimue asked. She really wasn’t afraid of him. Vortigern found this astonishing.

  “Yes. And children,” he said, smiling his predator’s smile as he stalked toward her.

  Astonishingly, Princess Nimue laughed. “See? I’m trembling,” she said, holding out a steady hand.

  “What makes you so brave?” Vortigern asked in wonder. He circled her menacingly.

  “Knowing that if you hurt me, my father and his men will go over to Uther,” Nimue said calmly.

  Vortigern grimaced. Kill the girl and he lost his hold over Ardent, and his hold over the fathers of the other hostages was weakened. He could not afford that, least of all now, when Uther waited ready to welcome any disaffected band of warriors to swell his army’s ranks.

  “Yes,” he said consideringly, “that would make you brave enough to face me. So what do you want?”

  “Merlin—the wizard—is sick.”

  “Then get him a physician,” Vortigern growled, once he remembered who she was talking about. The moment was sliding from drama into farce, and if any of the fools gathered in this room laughed he’d have to kill the girl just to save face. Maybe he could feed her to the Great Dragon and kill two birds with one sacrifice.

  “There’s no cure but his freedom,” Nimue announced.

  “I can’t give him that,” Vortigern said. For a moment he wondered if somehow Nimue was in communication with Uther. Christian or not, Uther must know that a wizard as powerful as Merlin would be a great ally in the war to come.

  “Then he’ll die,” Nimue said.

  As if I care, Vortigern thought. A dead wizard could be of no use to his enemy, and that was more important than the aid Merlin could be to him. “We all die eventually,” Vortigern said, sweeping his captains with a menacing glance. “Even wizards.”

  Nimue turned to go, as if she had given up. As she reached the doors she stopped and looked back, as if a thought had suddenly struck her.

  “If he does, you’ll never know about the battle. He’s had another vision. Don’t you want to know how to win?”

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE THRONE OF TRUCE

  Trapped in his cell beneath the castle foundations, Merlin drifted in a dream of banners and clashing swords. Victory for the red dragon … or the white. But which—and when? The sounds of the battle merged with the sound of the key turning in the lock of his cell door, so that Merlin did not truly wake until Nimue knelt beside his cot.

  “Merlin—you’re free. The king wants to see you,” she said, shaking him gently awake.

  “Why?” Merlin asked quietly. Over her shoulder he could see his guards standing in the doorway, regarding him uneasily.

  “I told him you’d had a vision of Uther,” Nimue said, her voice low. “I lied—but you can make something up
, can’t you?”

  Merlin smiled painfully. “As it happens, that won’t be necessary. Help me up.”

  * * *

  The soldiers almost had to carry Merlin up the steps that led out of the dungeon, but once he emerged into the clear winter sunlight of the castle courtyard, strength seemed to seep into him with the sun’s warmth. Though still very weak, he was walking under his own power by the time he entered the corridor that led to the king’s Great Hall.

  The news that Uther had taken Winchester without a battle frightened Vortigern’s men more than Vortigern had expected—and terrified men, the king knew, were difficult to panic further.

  “I have the biggest army Britain has ever seen,” Vortigern said impatiently. If he couldn’t frighten them, then he wanted to refocus their thoughts on his inevitable victory.

  “It may not be enough,” Sir Egbert said nervously.

  Sir Egbert had led the scouting party that assessed Winchester’s defenses, and ever since he had tried to avoid reporting his findings.

  “Uther and his men follow the Christian way.”

  Christians, Vortigern knew, would fight on behalf of other Christians as Pagans would not. Hawdes and Aerlius had been Christians—it was one of the reasons Vortigern had been forced to execute them. “I thought they didn’t believe in killing,” he muttered.

  “They’ll kill in a holy cause, Sire. And destroying you is a holy cause.” Sir Egbert, hearing his own words, looked stricken, but Vortigern couldn’t work up any interest in tormenting him just now.

  “How convenient. They kill when it suits them,” he muttered.

  “As do we all, Sire,” Yvain the Fox said. He bowed slightly when Vortigern’s glance fell on him.

  “What I want to know is: when will Uther attack?” Vortigern asked.

  “Not before Spring,” Sir Gilbert said decisively, and the other lords nodded. It was one of the rules of war: fight in summer, rest in winter. None of them would do otherwise, no matter the cause.

  “Good. Then I’ll use Winter as my ally and take him by surprise.”