“Kiss her, for gods’ sake!” Merlin shouted, then clapped a hand over his mouth. Apparently he’d reached the part of being eleven where he blurted out things he was supposed to chant uselessly in his head.
Gwen and Ari broke apart to stare at him.
Merlin—who knew far too much about holding back from a perfectly good love story—wanted to sit them down and give them a stern talking-to. Would Ari take relationship advice from an eleven-year-old? Probably not, and yet he had plenty to give.
It’s not as if Gwen and Ari were aging in opposite directions. They were at the mercy of a political marriage. They were two girls who loved each other in a vicious time. Those were barriers that no love story should have to overcome, and yet Merlin knew Gwen and Ari could. He believed in them as much as he’d ever believed in Arthur, or Camelot, or the magic at his fingertips.
Ari just quietly kissed Gwen’s shoulder, as if that was the most they could have. Maybe hoping for more had finally started to hurt. Maybe being ripped apart from each other so many times had torn something inside. The cycle had stopped them far better than Arthur ever could. Which meant that those tears could be traced directly back to the Lady of the Lake. When he finally broke this fucking cycle, Nin had a great deal of misery to answer for.
A giggle erupted from Merlin.
Val and Lam shot him genetically identical looks of disapproval.
“Fucking cycle,” Merlin whispered—and giggled again.
Oh, this was far too much.
Nin was going down.
An hour later, Merlin was an owl. A baby owl, to be specific.
His feathers puffed out, beady eyes trained on Old Merlin.
“I thought that if I shifted you out of human form, the curse might lose its hold,” the old mage said, by way of explanation. “But you’re just as young as a bird as you were as a human.”
“You think?” Merlin asked. It came out as a series of pitiful, high-pitched screeches.
“He still doesn’t know you two are the same person, does he?” came a rich, hooting voice. Merlin turned to find Archimedes glaring at him. He’d flown over from his perch just to make Merlin’s life worse.
“How did you figure it out, if you’re so smart?” Merlin asked.
Archimedes shrugged with his entire rich, brown-black body. “You’re both ridiculous, and you smell the same.”
Merlin hopped away from the miserable old bird—leaping off the high table and finding, with a series of desperate flaps, that he couldn’t fly.
He hit the floor, stunned but unsurprised.
Of course he couldn’t fly.
He was a mere chick.
Old Merlin picked him up, his tiny owl body encompassed by the hard ridges of those ancient, cold hands. Did the vile old mage ever trim his nails? They were unevenly long, stained various colors by magical concoctions.
Merlin gratefully found himself growing, unfolding back into his eleven-year-old body, then hopping into his clothes. He bent over awkwardly as he slid his pants into place. For some reason, the concept of being naked in front of his old self was more painful than a time paradox.
“All right, carbuncle,” Old Merlin said, not paying a speck of attention to the wretched state of his apprentice. He was too wrapped up in magic. He turned to a dusty red cloth that he’d hung over a portion of the tower, pulling it down with a magical flourish. Behind it was a free-standing copper tub, and a series of buckets flying in through the tower window. “I have another idea. This one took a bit of preparation, but perhaps it will reveal the truth of your condition.”
A magical flying bucket tipped over, water hitting the copper tub with a gut-sloshing sound.
“What is this?” Merlin asked. “You’re going to… bathe me? You’re the one who needs a serious drubbing!”
Old Merlin gave him a thunderous glare.
His newly loosened tongue was going to get him killed if he wasn’t careful.
“This water is from the lake near Avalon,” the old mage said. “It has curious time-related properties, which might help us determine what ails you. It seems the way you experience time has been reversed by some great act of magic.” Old Merlin tested the water with his hand, like a nervous parent making sure it wasn’t too hot for their precious child. But Merlin was nothing of the sort. He was an experiment, and he could feel his old self getting testy the farther they went without making any real breakthroughs.
The old man dodged a flying bucket, frowning back at Merlin. “It would help to know your lineage, in the event that one or both of your parents has some kind of time magic. You don’t have even the smallest hint as to how you ended up this way?”
A swallow seized up in his throat.
Merlin thought of the accusations that Val had listed in his driest tone: all the ways that he was like Nin. Their caves, their portals. In the midst of bargaining, she had even offered to reveal the identity of his parents. Had she planned to admit that she was his long-lost mother? A horrific ta-da moment?
“I have no idea how I got like this,” he said weakly.
“Then it’s into the tub,” Old Merlin said, cracking his knuckles.
Merlin couldn’t imagine undressing again, so with his robes still on he stepped into the waters of time, daintily. He didn’t want anything to do with them. These were Nin’s waters, after all.
She was the problem to be solved. The callous enemy to be stopped. The mother of the cycle. Definitely not his mother.
The moment that Merlin had settled against the bumpy copper bottom of the tub, Old Merlin set a palm to his skull and pushed him under the water. The air rushed out of his nose, hard. His ears
