“Sir Lancelot, Knight of Camelot!”
The crowd lost itself in wild cheering.
Merlin felt cold, despite the riotous bonfire. Ari was safe and the Arthurian legend was back on track. He should have felt hopeful, but between sending Jordan back and seeing this moment, it felt like he was being sealed in the tomb of this story.
They were supposed to leave.
Not stay.
Merlin grabbed Lam’s arm, suddenly desperate to rid himself of a thought. “Did you know that time circles are possible? Down in the oubliette, I was thinking about it. The later scientists of Old Earth called them closed temporal loops. Most lives march from past to future because that’s what the human brain requires to understand things. But time itself doesn’t care about human rules.”
“So you’re saying… the Arthurian cycles are one big loop?”
“I thought Ari and Gwen couldn’t be in the story at both the beginning and the end. But if we’re stuck in a circle, there’s no reason they can’t be. They sort of have to be.”
“That’s wild,” Lam said.
“It’s worse than wild,” Merlin whispered. “I think it might be my doom.”
Soon his magic would be drained, his life reduced to the rubble of childhood, and all of his friends stuck in the past. He’d never end the cycle. It would dump him here, back where it started, and leave him for dead.
But Arthur’s spirit had given him hope that this story could end. Maybe it was still possible. Merlin had to get his hands on that chalice and get them out of here. Now.
“Carbuncle!” The word scraped against the air. “Carbuncle!” Somehow Old Merlin had picked the least musical, most anatomically upsetting word in the entire language as his nickname. “Come here, boy!”
“I wouldn’t keep yourself waiting,” Lam said with a pitying look.
Merlin pushed his way across the courtyard, looking for hints of the chalice everywhere he went. It didn’t seem to have surfaced yet. He reached Old Merlin, who was conducting the party—literally. His hands waltzed in neat patterns, his magic ferrying goblets and cheese and great hunks of meat. People snatched them out of the air, cheering.
It all looked whimsically adorable.
It made Merlin sick.
“There are too few game pies,” Old Merlin said, without so much as tilting his pointy chin down at Merlin. “Tell the kitchens to double their output.”
“What’s the magic word?” Merlin muttered—and then everything stopped.
From all directions, women flowed in, like cold streams moving through warm water. They had Merlin’s full attention, and he wasn’t the only one.
The enchantresses of Avalon commanded the crowd more fully than the king of Camelot had. Most probably feared them, but Merlin was struck with awe at the sight of these magical women. There was an untamed pride in their gazes, their bodies. They ranged in age from early teens to the most wizened eldress, and while some were as white as a stereotypical unicorn, light browns and dark skin tones were also present. Magical ladies had been known to come from all over the world to gather in Avalon. Merlin was surprised—and yet not surprised—to see that a few of them might not have been assigned female at birth. Avalon always had been ahead of its time.
Why hadn’t he remembered that when he thought back on this closeminded past?
The enchantress at the forefront went to the fire, knelt by it, and whispered a few words that made it claw toward the sky.
Merlin tugged at the neck of his robes as heat flared, muttering, “Nice pyrotechnics.”
The young woman who’d caused the conflagration stood tall. Her name wafted to Merlin on a wind from the past. Morgause. He hadn’t seen her in literal ages. Crashing hair, eyes dark as omens. She was vibrantly powerful and wondrously beautiful, and the firelight sang on her soft brown skin. Still, Merlin couldn’t help but feel the pinch of loss. Some small part of him had been hoping to see Morgana.
But she wasn’t part of Arthur’s story yet.
And in the future, she was finally dead. For the first time, Merlin’s stubborn heart admitted that he might never see her again. They’d been bound together for so long that he’d taken for granted that she was part of his story. Maybe this was just one more sign that it was coming to an end.
No. Morgana had fought to send him back here for the chalice. And he was going to take it—for her as much as anyone else—the second it was out of Arthur’s hands.
“Where is Arthur?” Morgause asked, and the people of Camelot gasped. Some of them shouted, “King Arthur!” But the enchantresses of Avalon recognized no king. Their power came straight from the earth. The pure stuff.
Arthur stepped forward from his pack of uneasy guards, Gweneviere on his arm.
“We are honored by your presence,” he told the enchantresses.
“And we are intrigued by your notion of peace. Here, an offering to guide your venture.” Morgause held out a cup. It was a small thing in life, smaller than Merlin had made it in memory. Dirty white, not the pure cream he remembered. Lined with gold, a temptation to the lips of anyone who held it. This was the chalice Arthur had sent them back to find.
This was the key to taking down Mercer. To ending the cycle.
“For a man who visited our shores without pretense,” Morgause said. “A vessel made of the bones of a dragon who was slain in an attack on his city. We tracked the creature back to its cave, where it died. There are so few left, and it is deeply wrong to let such a being pass out of the world without honoring its life and preserving its magic.”
Old Merlin harrumphed loudly from the back of the crowd. “You want the beast to keep attacking us from beyond the grave?”
“I’m not convinced that dragon was acting of its own free will,” Morgause said. “Arthur might have enemies
