Nin’s words doubled in intensity. Merlin couldn’t help thinking they weren’t only about him. They were echoes of that day when she’d tried to save her people. The day when she’d been stopped instead of hailed as a hero.
She changed, skin shading darker and hair growing shorter until it was cropped nearly to her skull. Her smile stretched until it was Merlin’s favorite smile in the universe—stolen right off Val’s face. “You know who’s easy to get along with? Percival. I really did enjoy his company. How long has it been since you’ve seen him?”
“You know,” Merlin said, hands spitting sparks.
“I just want to hear you say it,” Nin said, spreading her hands generously wide. “You and I have all the time in all the worlds.”
“It’s been fifteen years,” he ground out, trying to keep more magic from exploding out in a fireworks display of anger.
“Such a lovely, round number.” When Nin smirked, she looked exactly like Val. And when she came nearer, Nin’s fingers on his neck felt exactly like his. “If you left now, you’d get a whole mortal lifetime together.”
The temptation of seeing Val again, of truly having a future with him, was almost too much. “I don’t run away anymore,” Merlin said, clenching so hard he thought he might break. “And I’ve stopped taking your bargains, remember?”
Nin changed once again, as it she was rifling through a deck of cards, looking for the ace. She settled on a face that Merlin’s heart had always known—a face that held secret hints of his own. Dark curls tumbled down as Nin grew curves. She adopted a scowl, half serious and half sweet. “What about your lovely mother? Shouldn’t you get back to her? Haven’t you waited all this time to return to her? She would hate to think of you here, watching this new cycle be born.”
Merlin gasped, terrified at just how good she was at this game.
“I told you I knew who your parents were,” Nin said. And then her face changed again, and somehow she was Kay, cocky and stalwart and wearing those mythical cargo shorts.
“Gwen and Ari gave me a great gift when they brought you to my lake to be born. You were the perfect window to watch humanity fail itself. Your dedication to these little Arthurs has been deliciously comical. Your suffering has brought me so much life… such as it is.”
Nin gestured down at herself, her true form flickering. “You can’t hurt me, Merlin. You can’t even touch me. You might as well go now, because it’s about to get much sadder. You thought you knew tragedy? Imagine how much worse this will be with a girl like Ari. She’ll pick the strongest, the bravest, the stubbornest as a home for her spirit. She’ll search for her lost love. But it won’t work, Merlin. You know that. Every single one of her would-be heroes will fall.”
She glanced toward Ari with Kay’s face, but Nin’s terrible calm. The Lady of the Lake was going to take Ari now, claim her.
Merlin’s throat seized around tears. “Can I… can I say good-bye?”
Nin shrugged Kay’s shoulders.
“You know, Kay hates when people borrow his face,” Merlin muttered.
“You have two minutes,” Nin said, gesturing toward Ari’s prone figure. “Don’t disappoint me. Make them truly awful, Merlin.”
He nodded, tears blazing down his face. As he passed Nin and she could no longer see his expression, he nearly broke into a dance of glee. He’d time-magicked those tears, stolen them from a moment when he’d been truly sad. Because Merlin had glimpsed the truth behind Nin’s gloating. She would only be messing with him this intently if she were afraid. That meant there was still a way to stop her. He only had to find it.
Merlin walked to Ari on the bier. He kneeled at her side, blinking at the dried blood on her shirt. Merlin peeked and found that the spot where Ari had stabbed herself had all but healed. The Mercer pill must have worked on her wound. But she still wasn’t breathing.
And Nin was still a big, immortal problem.
Merlin laid a hand on Ari’s heart, hummed, and sparked. She jolted up, then quickly went back down. No breath.
The winds in the cave picked up, blasting Merlin away from Ari. Nin looked furious. Good. He wanted her furious. He wanted her small and petty and fighting and caring and… human.
Merlin closed his eyes, in the grips of a new idea. He sang as loud as he could, filling up every crevice of Nin’s cave with his deepest contralto, belting out the beginnings of Cher’s masterpiece, “If I Could Turn Back Time.”
“What are you doing?” Nin seethed, as her glow dimmed and flared.
Merlin kept singing her backward, the same way he’d brought the tree in the woods to a seed. This whole time he’d been assuming he had to become as powerful as Nin, to step up to her level of existence. But what if he had it all backward, in true Merlin fashion? What if he didn’t need to be less human to fight Nin? What if he needed to bring her down to his size?
As Merlin hit the chorus, Nin started screaming. Her face contorted, its perfection dropping away. Her golden hair was back to its reedy paleness, her skin the sort of milky blue-white that would have occurred naturally if she’d spent too long in a cave. She dropped out of her gentle float, hitting the rocks. Her hands came up bloody and Merlin gasped.
Nimue was back.
But Nin was still fighting to regain every second, every year, every century.
“You know, this was much easier with Morgana,” he gritted as he fought.
The cave spat rocks like bloody teeth. The water started to boil.
Merlin reached the end of the song, and Nimue was still Nimue: the young woman who’d lost herself in her
