Irresistible Forces

Flesh, blood, and bone. And power incarnate.

The empty tree screamed.

As the body tore itself free of the massive trunk, shredding strips and.chips of wood, Marian blurted a sound of shock and hastily backed away. A root caught her, and she went down hard. Even as Robin bent to help her up, he halted, arrested in midmotion. Both stared at the stranger who had wrenched himself out of living oak.

He was wild-eyed, breathing hard. From the tree he went to his knees as if in supplication, or perhaps weakness. Splayed hands pressed against the layers of leaves, elbows locked to hold himself upright. Shoulder- length hair, dark save where it was frosted with the first touch of gray, tumbled around his face. Marian could not see his expression now as he knelt, but she heard the rapid, uneven breathing, saw the shuddering in spine and shoulders.

For all she and Robin were stunned, the stranger seemed more so.

She let Robin pull her to her feet. They put a cautious distance between themselves and the man but did not flee: Instead, they stared at each other in blank astonishment, then turned as one to the stranger. Robin's sword chimed as he unsheathed it.

When the man looked up, Marian saw gray eyes clear as water, black-lashed, and pale, unblemished skin. His beard was short and well-tended. He wore a blue robe of excellent cloth, and pinned to his left shoulder was a red- and-gold enameled brooch, dragon-shaped, of Celtic workmanship. When he brought his hands out of the loose, powdery leaves, she saw he wore a gold ring set with a red cabochon stone she believed might be a ruby.

'Robin.' She kept her tone carefully casual. 'Is this a trick of light and shadow?'

Equally casual, he replied, 'This appears to be flesh and blood.'

'We are awake, are we not?'

'As far as I can tell, we are awake.' He tugged her litter-strewn braid sharply. 'Feel that?'

'Yes,' she said crossly, putting a hand to her scalp.

'And I still bleed a little, so this must be real.' He paused. 'My mother apparently told me the truth.'

Marian was amazed at how calm he sounded. She didn't feel calm. She felt oddly detached. Somehow distant from what she had witnessed, and what she was witnessing now. And yet every noise she heard sounded preternaturally loud.

Should I not be running? Or, if she were a proper woman, fainting?

But then, she had not been proper since meeting Robin. Still, Marian wondered why she felt no urge to run. It wasn't fear that the stranger might harm her if she tried; she wasn't certain a man who had been trapped in a tree trunk moments before could harm her. But she found herself immensely curious to know what had happened to him — and to be quite certain she had truly seen him tear himself out of a living tree.

Still on his knees, the man looked over his shoulder at the tree. Except for a hollowed gouge in the trunk, the oak appeared no different. It was simply a tree. But a glance at other oaks still bearing likenesses of other men emphasized the truth of his own presence.

He turned back to face them. With hands now grown steady, he pushed heavy hair away from his face and bared a narrow circlet of beaten gold. He was, Marian realized, only ten or twelve years older than she.

She wondered what Robin was thinking. A quick glance at his face showed grimness, his skin drawn taut beneath the golden stubble and smeared blood. He seemed at ease; but then he always looked relaxed, wholly unprepared to strike when but a moment later the enemy was down. They had lost their bows along the way as they ran but were not unarmed; they had a meat-knife, quiver, and arrows, and Robin the sword.

Oddly, she wanted to say, 'Do not harm him,' which made no sense. She knew nothing of the man save he had, to all appearances, been a resident of a tree. A resident in a tree.

The stranger's eyes fixed themselves on Robin's sword. A sudden light came into them, an expression of sharpened awareness and understanding. He stood up abruptly. Sharply, he asked something in a language neither of them knew.

Robin said something in fluent Norman French. The stranger frowned, plainly impatient, and tried several different languages in swift succession. In each there were words that sounded vaguely familiar to Marian, but he remained a cipher until a final try.

'Latin!' Marian exclaimed. 'Oh, where is Tuck when we need him?'

This time, when the stranger spoke, his words, though twisted, were in an accented English they could understand. 'When is it?'

Robin began to ask a question of his own, something to do with a carved man turning into flesh and stepping out of a tree, but the stranger overrode him.

'When is it?'

When. Not where. Perplexed, Marian said, 'The Year of Our Lord 1202.'

The gray eyes widened. 'So long? I had not thought so' — his tone took on bitterness—'when I had mind again to think at all.' He looked more closely at Marian, then at Robin, inspecting them.

Marian became aware of her disheveled clothing, her braid half undone, bits of leaf and twigs caught in her hair and the loose weave of her hosen beneath the surcoat. Her chin itched from drying blood, and her face stung from scratches. Then the stranger turned to the tree again and put out a hand, feeling the bark. When he brought it away, smeared streaks of red crossed his palm.

'Blood,' he murmured. 'Surely she did not foresee this, or she would have prepared for it. But who would have expected the blood of two Sacrifices to commingle in the Holy Grove, let alone upon the walls of my prison?'

'Sacrifices?' Robin demanded. 'Are we meant to die here, when somehow all of your companions are let out of their trees?'

The stranger ignored the question and looked at Marian. 'The Year of Our Lord, you said.' She nodded. 'You mean the man Christians called the Nazarene?'

Marian blinked. 'Of course.'

'Of course.' He sounded rueful. Then his expression altered. His eyes were once again fixed on Robin's sword. 'There is a task before me. It was mine to do before the enchantment, and no less mine to do now that I am free of it, regardless of how long it has been. Will you aid me?'

'Aid you?' Robin echoed. 'Perhaps you should aid us by explaining what just happened.'

The stranger smiled. 'I see power is no more understood now — whenever this time may be — than it was then.' Absently, he touched the brooch on his left shoulder. 'Vortigern meant me to be the Sacrifice when his walls would not stand; instead, I gave him news of the dragons under the water. When the red defeated the white.' His pupils had swollen, turning eyes from gray to black. 'He is dead. The red dragon of Wales. And so the task lies before me.' His eyes cleared, and he looked at them both as if seeing them for the first time. 'Forgive me. Perhaps it will all explain itself upon introductions. I am Myrddyn Emrys.' He gave it the Welsh pronunciation, tongue-tip against upper teeth. 'Men call me Merlin.'

'Merlin!' Robin blurted.

The stranger nodded. 'The task is to find a sword, and give it back to the lake.'

'Merlin,' Robin repeated, and this time Marian heard adult disbelief colored by a young boy's burgeoning hope.

Merlin had spent his entire life being—different. People feared him for it, distrusted, disbelieved; some of them were convinced he should be killed outright, lest he prove a danger to them. But that life, that time, was done. He faced a new world now, a different world, and far more difficult challenges. In his time, magic at least had been acknowledged if often distrusted; here, clearly, no one believed in it at all. Which somewhat explained the inability of the young man and young woman to accept what had happened.

An enchantment, he had told them as they knelt to wash their bloodied faces at a trickle of a stream, a spell wrought by Nimtie, the great sorceress. He did not tell them his own part in the spell, that he had allowed himself for the first time in his life to be blinded by a woman's beauty and allure, to permit her into his heart. Once she had learned enough of him, enough of his power, she had revealed her true goal: to imprison him for all time and thus remove the impediment he represented to the new power in Britain.

A Britain without Arthur.

He grieved privately, letting no one, not even Nimue, recognize the depth of his pain. Arthur he had wrought