He woke the next morning with magic on his lips. Music still felt like the best way to control it, perhaps because music itself was a measure of time. The first thing he tried to create was a sandwich. Naturally. He could feel himself borrowing matter from pockets of time where it was fallow, unused, and putting it to work.
And then it was sitting in his palm—turkey and cheddar and pickles and glory.
He never took his eyes off Nimue for too long. Every day he changed himself into a falcon and circled over the forest, keeping watch on her village with little rounded eyes. Taking on a different form required reaching for a time when his atoms didn’t hold their current shape, when they could be combined with other atoms in new ways.
These were small marvels of intuitive magic, but intuition wouldn’t be enough to take on Nin. He needed purpose, patience, ambition. And as the cherry on top, he needed whatever made her so much stronger.
He spent a year practicing before he smacked into puberty: forward, this time. In the torrent of those first months, his magic fluctuated as much as anything else. He was constantly turning himself into a toadstool without meaning to. His face sprouted reddish hairs, finally replacing the ones he’d lost, which should have made him proud, but why were they so damn patchy? Merlin became nearsighted again; and he allowed himself the indulgence of glasses—snatching a pair of horn rims from some future century, off the nightstand of a person who hopefully wouldn’t miss them. He put them on, fussed with his hair, and hoped that Val would approve of the style.
That was the other distracting bit of becoming a teenager again. Merlin lost entire weeks thinking about Val. But he wouldn’t save his once and—hopefully—future boyfriend by looking nice in specs. Val would tell him to be organized and systematic. To push forward to the more complex aspects of time magic. Merlin had been ripping time with a great deal of passion and very little precision, but what else was possible?
“Let’s start here,” he said, picking a flower, a small white variety that must have gone extinct; it didn’t look like any of the ones he knew. Merlin glared at the petals, the sepals, the fuzzy pollen. He hummed like an angry bee.
Nothing happened.
You’re making that poor flower self-conscious, he thought, channeling Val.
Merlin tried again, less pushy this time. He let the flower be a flower.
He let the song be a song.
He waited for the perfect moment, the one when everything changed. When it came, he hummed a little harder, and the flower wilted in his hand. He hadn’t killed it, he’d simply sped past its prime. Now he hummed lighter, softer, making the flower white and lush again, then taking it all the way back to a seed. Then he had to take several naps in a row.
He could still exhaust his magic, although the longer he trained the more stamina he built. But there would always be an upward limit, it seemed. One of those irksome limitations of having a body that Nin liked to pester him about.
Not to be deterred, Merlin tried a tree next. A white oak. It should have been the tallest in the forest, its rounded leaves maroon with the deep blush of autumn. But it had fallen long ago.
“Change, you woody beast!” Merlin shouted.
That’s definitely going to work, a voice sprang up in his mind. Now you’re a pimpled mage with an attitude problem.
“Oh,” Merlin whispered, dropping his hands. Here was a person he hadn’t talked to in a very long time, even in his own head.
Kay.
His impossible, cycle-doomed father. The one who would have sprayed all the chips out of his mouth if he’d learned this particular, parental twist.
“Kay was my father,” Merlin stated. Even the trees around him seemed dubious. “Kay is my father,” Merlin tried. Because that was the way of time—if something had been true once, it was always part of the story.
He didn’t know how to begin missing and mourning Kay as a father. He would never be a child with a bumbling dad who captained the least likely ship among the stars. He would never be taught how to drive that ship by a frustrated and proud parent. There would be no bumbling sex talks while Kay turned magenta.
Well, Merlin had accidentally walked in on Gwen and Kay on Error once, which was even more horrifying with this new layer of meaning. He’d also stolen Kay’s face in order to break into the pantry. That felt like something a person would do with their father. When he thought about it, paging through the moments of his past, he discovered that he hadn’t lost everything he’d once feared missing. Yes, he’d sent Kairos back to become Old Merlin, made it impossible for him to live out a childhood with his mothers, but he had made it possible for him to find Gwen later on Lionel. To steal some golden days on Error with Kay. To stick it to Mercer on a quest with Ari.
He looked up and found that he’d righted the white oak tree while he’d daydreamed about his family. It had rooted itself and spread leaves toward the sun.
That night, when he lay on his bedroll under the manifold stars, he hummed a little song. He thought about hugging Lam good-bye, reuniting with Ari and Gwen, pinballing through space with Kay, kissing Val, even being righteously scorned by Jordan, and the stars spun faster and faster.
It was coming easier now.
Having a grip on this magic meant he could do something he’d wanted to ever since he saw Ari staring at the broken shards of Excalibur. A desire that had sharpened each time he saw her mooning over
