The woman looked at him like he was speaking a babbling baby language. Merlin realized he’d just said all of that out loud. “Fewmets,” he cursed.
“Fewmets?” She pointed to him, then put a hand to her chest. “Aethelwyn.”
“No, no!” Fewmets was a term for dragon droppings and definitely not his name. But what was he supposed to call himself? He’d picked Merlin when he woke up as an old man with nothing but a tiny falcon in his hand. And then there was Kairos, the only other baby ever born in this lake. The time child, the chosen one. Did he deserve to claim that name after he’d dropped Gwen and Ari’s baby at the beginning of a cruel cycle?
He pointed at himself. “Kai.”
“Kai,” the woman repeated. She brought food out of her pockets—dark berries and dried meat—and held it out, luring him closer like a wild rabbit. Merlin ran to her, so hungry that he acted like the desperate little kid he was.
After all of this time, was he going to be undone by snacks?
Aethelwyn only smiled and led him back to her village, following baby Nimue’s procession. The woman had a tiny hovel that she lived in alone. Merlin had years to wait out as Nin grew up, and he aged through time in his mortal body, so he dropped into the little rope bed in the corner and decided to stay. He’d promised Gwen to take care of Kairos, and in a very convoluted way, that’s what he was doing.
As he learned to speak the harsh, ringing words of this time, Aethelwyn’s story became clear. Her husband and children had been killed in a raid, and she was lonely enough to take in a stray. When she asked about his parents, he fumbled for words that fit this era, and also fit them.
“Cwene,” for Gwen. That was easy enough.
But there was no word that seemed to do for Ari. Hero hadn’t been invented yet. Maybe heroes didn’t exist to these people. There were only raiders who were right according to them, and wrong according to those they plundered and killed. They had many words for warrior—but they all meant man.
So Merlin chose wine, which meant friend.
Late one snowy night, when the tallow candles were almost out, Aethelwyn finally asked what had become of his family.
“I don’t know,” he said, the English words slipping out along with a few tears.
Merlin wanted nothing more than to open a portal to check on them. But he knew that if he saw Gwen and Ari and Val in trouble in the future, he wouldn’t be able to stop himself from running—or rather leaping through time—to save them. And he needed to find out how Nin’s story played out. How she went from a time child like himself to whatever she was within her cave. And he still had to learn his new magic backward, forward, and inside out.
So he waited.
And he watched Nin.
It was simple, really, to keep an eye on her. Even though he’d been born an outsider, the village quickly folded around him. It was so much easier to grow up as a boy. He’d always known that, but now he could see it, in the same obvious way that he’d seen the changes in the lake.
From the moment Nin could walk, she chased. From the second she could hold a sword—sweord—she swung without mercy. At eight, she beat every other village child with a sword her father had made. He was head of the village because, in a time of warriors, he made the best swords.
“A supplier of weapons,” Merlin muttered.
Not that he was eager to go up against little Nimue, but she didn’t ask him to fight. Her eyes swung over him as if he wasn’t quite there. One of the funny rules of Merlin’s portal into her past was that they couldn’t seem to interact with each other.
Nimue’s path was set, and Merlin was still cloaked to her.
She beat the last of the boys and ran around crowing. But when the boys sulked, Nimue’s father plucked the sword right out of her hand and gave it to the brother who’d been born quickly after she was.
Nimue’s mother watched this whole mess unfold with a frown. Merlin found himself rooting for this woman to snatch her daughter up and leave. Anglo-Saxon wives were allowed to divorce their husbands, a right that would later be stripped. But Nimue’s mother let the moment pass. She let her small, fierce daughter be punished for her strength.
Merlin saw Nimue’s face cycle through jealousy, love, guilt, hatred, as her brother swung the sword. In the end, she ran behind the huts where no one else would see her, eyes alight with angry tears. Those same eyes would later glimmer at Merlin, empty.
That was the day he left the village. He was twelve now, old enough to convince Aethelwyn he’d be fine on his own, to thank her for all that she’d done, and to carve out his own home deep in the woods.
Nimue needed more time to become the Lady of the Lake.
And he wasn’t ready to face her, not by a long shot.
If there was one thing that Nin had said in the cave that bothered him—besides admitting she’d stolen Ari’s spirit to begin another cycle, of course—it was that Merlin used his magic like a child.
Living in these antediluvian woods without any Arthurs to take care of finally gave him time to figure things out. Of course, he only had a few years to master magic that Nin had been wielding for centuries. The pressure perched on his shoulders, clawing like Archimedes in a foul mood. He started out by
