Merlin kept his mind firmly on Ari and Gwen and Val as he was sucked along through the dark. Maybe it had been the influence of Nin’s magic, but the portal to Camelot had felt like a ferocious, nauseating carnival ride. This was more like the little portals Merlin had created, softly dark as a night without stars.
Just as Merlin was getting used to the feeling, a clammy hand pulled him out of the darkness. When he blinked his eyes open, he was in Nin’s cave.
“No!” he cried, stamping his feet. “No, no, no.”
“I see you’re in a hurry,” Nin told him as she wisped into existence. She looked the way she always had to him—long, flowing hair to match her gown, a pleasant softness to her smile. “I won’t keep you long.”
She pointed to a bier that arose from the center of the lake, streaming water from the rock, a ghostly figure atop it.
“Oh, you want me to see Arthur’s body so you can gloat?” Merlin cried.
“I had Arthur for centuries and you never so much as guessed it,” she answered matter-of-factly. “But this is too good to hide.”
She gestured to the body again, and somehow Merlin was transported onto the rocky little island, right at the side of the dimly glowing spirit. He knew this girl’s scowl and dark hair better than he knew the inner workings of his own magic.
“Ari.” The name squeezed out of his throat before he could stop himself.
Nin laughed deeply. “Arthur’s spirit was exhausted by his failures. I do wonder how long Ari will last before giving out.”
“Is she…”
“Dead?” Nin asked, stroking Ari’s incorporeal cheek. “Yes, and also not quite.” The Lady of the Lake was taunting him. She fed off his terror, his anticipation of fresh hurt.
“I won’t let you begin another cycle,” he shouted, filling every crack of her cave with strangled hope. He roared out magic, a fire-dragon like the one he’d pointed at Old Merlin. Nin sighed, batting it away with one finger. The movement sent Merlin flying backward as if he, too, had been struck.
He landed in the cold water. Nin had extinguished his best magic without even trying.
“You’ve always used magic like a child.”
“And you’ve hidden down here like a lake monster,” Merlin shouted, voice spiky with youth and pain.
“Don’t be jealous because you have to live the human way,” she said. “All that work to stop your backward aging and now you have to age forward in time because of that silly little body of yours.”
“I could make my body older in a snap!” Merlin swam for the nearest shore, dragging himself out of the viscous black waters. “I even have practice.”
“You know that won’t work,” Nin said. “Fast-forwarding the body does not age the spirit, which only changes as time moves and wisdom is gained. You’ve just given Kairos an amazing case of soul-lag. It will take him decades to catch up. But you know that already, don’t you? You remember how miserable you were… don’t you?” Merlin tried not to fume and give away exactly how right Nin was. “Still, go ahead and give yourself a teenage body and a child’s mind before you reunite with Val. I’d love to see that festival of misery.”
It was a sharp reminder that Nin was watching him. Always watching.
That was the next thing to fix.
Merlin threw every protection spell in the book around himself at once. Nin couldn’t see him anymore—her eyes slid out of focus. She wouldn’t be able to watch him. She could comb through time all she wanted.
“Cloaking yourself won’t help,” she said. “I know your next move. You’re going to the future to save your headstrong Ari. It won’t work. But it’s going to be quite the show. The grand finale.”
“Why do you want to watch it so badly?” he asked. She stared blankly, as if there was no answer to that question stored in her magical, glowing mind. “Why are you doing any of this?”
There had to be a reason, even if it was buried so deeply in the past that the enchantresses of Avalon couldn’t find it. Morgause had told him no one knew how she became the Lady of the Lake. Nin was the biggest blank in the Arthurian cycle.
Merlin might be able to fight her. But he would never beat her while she was still a perfect mystery. And if she wouldn’t tell him why, he’d have to find out for himself.
“I don’t want to keep you,” Nin said dismissively, while Ari’s bier lowered back into the lake. The cave dissolved around him. Merlin was back in the portal, hurtling toward the future. Nin’s voice grew faint. “Don’t worry about me. I have a front row seat to Ari’s final moments.”
Merlin wanted nothing more than to save Ari, to tell Gwen the truth about who he was, to fight his way back to Val. But he was done playing Nin’s game. He turned around in the portal and, with a great deal of magic, swam against the tide, back toward the actual beginning.
Ari landed in Ketch on her feet. Her legs sank up to the shins in the shifting red sand, but she recovered fast.
The night was on fire. Smoke stained each breath, and her eyes stung until she could barely take in the sight before her. She’d come out of the portal in the dunes outside of Omaira. The cityscape was lit up against the night: red, orange, and harsh white devouring flame. Exactly as it had looked following Old Merlin’s magical blow that tossed her into Nin’s lake.
“Gwen! Val?”
“Ari!” Gwen’s shout cut across the wind. Ari tried to yell back, to peer into the darkness of the desert around her. Instead, her eyes watered beyond sight and when she rubbed them, she irritated the burn across her cheek—the one that wouldn’t even be healed by the day she died.
Fuck.
“Ari!” This time it was Val. She willed her feet to move, starting
