Lam and Jordan drew back.
“I can work with that,” Ari muttered. When the dragon dropped toward them, claws opening like a vile black flower, Ari leaped onto the dragon’s outstretched leg. She climbed the thing like a gangplank, reaching the beast’s massive head and straddling its neck.
“Go!” she yelled at Merlin as the dragon reared into the sky, Ari on its back.
The sounds of catastrophe followed Merlin as he flew down the corkscrew of the stairs, watching snippets of the battle through each window as he went, always afraid to see that the story had ended prematurely with Lam pitched from the tower, or the dragon snatching up Gwen, or Ari gushing blood.
Instead Ari got a crude sort of control over the dragon by wrestling with the scale-ridge that crested its head. It pitched wildly as she rode it toward the courtyard, crashing it in a way that skidded the stones up like a bunched rug.
“No wonder Lancelot gets a reputation so quickly,” Merlin said on a half-breath.
He bolted across the castle, toward his old tower. Guards and knights were running, a flurry of confusion as they tried to figure out what was attacking this time—and why. He caught a brief and yet heart-chilling glance of his old self headed toward the courtyard.
“Douchebag!” he sang.
At the very back of the castle, by the kitchens and the cold cellars, he found the door of his tower: a hearty concoction of wood, metal latches, and magic. He pushed, banged, hit the thing with a flare of blue sparks. But as he flailed, the truth came back in a slow-developing Polaroid sort of way. He’d infused the oil in the hinge with a spell. There was a magical password, one he changed every fortnight. If someone caught him before he guessed it, Ari would be killed and Merlin would be thrown to the dragon as a palate cleanser before he could say…
“Persnickety!”
He tried the door. It didn’t budge.
“I really thought that would work,” he said. “Fewmets! Paragon! Ensorcelled! Ovate! Scale-rot! Mange!” When none of his favorite words worked, he dumped out everything in the two-thousand-year-old junk drawer of his mind. One word shone in the midst of the mess, like a coin he’d lost long ago.
“Kairos.”
The door pushed itself open.
He tossed himself into a darkness that felt as familiar as an old coat. He lit his fingertips with magic; they shone white like a string of holiday lights as he ran up a treacherous staircase, riddled with switchbacks. He’d designed it long ago to stop people from bothering him before they’d even started.
He reached the steepest bit of the stairs—nearly vertical—and scrambled upward, the word kairos fuel to his fires. It meant that all stars had aligned, and now was the time to act. “This is our moment,” he’d said, giving that word to Arthur, a birthday gift for a young king to explain why he was fated to lead Camelot out of the Dark Ages. He was the right person, at the right time.
Just like Ari was in her age.
Now she was stuck here, about to be crisped like a marshmallow set too close to the fire. And it was his fault. Arthur might have tempted Ari back to this time with visions of the chalice, but Merlin was the one who had to keep his friends from being killed by his wicked old self. Proving they were part of the original cycle meant one thing: their problems had gotten much bigger than stealing from the Arthurian legend.
Now they had to survive it.
He burst into the room at the top of the tower and ran to the single porthole of a window to check on Ari. She was still fighting, her arms starting to wilt with the effort of striking endless blows. The dragon had left scorch lines in the ground, great black gouts. A crowd had gathered, but Merlin couldn’t tell if they were cheering on Ari or the dragon.
He turned back to his tower. Spell ingredients covered every inch of the room and were stacked upon each other. Back in the olden days, he’d hoarded as much magic as he could, testing how it worked and if he could use it. This wasn’t the cozy home of an eccentric old man. It was an arsenal.
Merlin tossed aside books and stones, mortars and pestles, a set of magic-binding manacles that made him shiver. No sign of dragon-based enchantments. Outside, the cheers flared—which meant someone had gotten wounded. Judging by the size of the cheer, it wasn’t mortal. He kept looking, pitching around enchanted jewelry and ogham stones.
Another cheer. More bloodthirsty, this time.
He ran to the window. Ari was on her knees, head bowed, as the dragon lorded over her. Its open jaws revealed rows of teeth. A few knights had rushed to Ari’s side, but the dragon ignored them as they hacked uselessly at its ankles. The beast was on a mission.
Arthur dithered, his hand at Excalibur’s hilt. “Pull the sword, you fool!” Merlin shouted. Of course, Old Merlin was right at the king’s side, whispering poisoned nothings in his ear; he couldn’t have Arthur dying because of his own plan to remove Gweneviere and Lancelot. Merlin’s brain trembled. How could he be both trying to kill Gwen and Ari, and trying to save them at the same time? Was he the true bad guy of Camelot? The hidden good guy? The about-to-split-apart-from-time-paradox guy?
A figure burst through the crowd from the castle. Jordan pelted into the courtyard, red-faced from running all the way down from the tower, her sword brandished, hacking at the dragon with an unrestrained fury—every unspent iota of rage she must have built up over months as a handmaiden came out now, her sword hitting the scales so hard the metal sparked. The dragon finally swiped at her with a lazy talon, but Jordan ducked, stabbing the dragon’s leg.
It turned
