Ari drew light fingers down her cheek. “Nice eyes.”
“Lam taught me. Forever ago.” She tugged at Ari’s cuffed sleeves and biceps. “This is a nice look. Val?”
“I am his living doll. You’ll know I’m back in control of my wardrobe when—”
“You wear the same sword and ripped-up pants for two weeks straight?”
Ari smiled dreamily. “I loved those pants. Although, I come to this date unarmed.” She showed off her waist, belted but unsheathed. Gwen’s hands moved fast, stealing Ari’s hips and pulling them toward her. The hunger in her eyes was momentarily stunning.
“We could go back to my ship,” Ari whispered. “Like right this second.”
“You promised dancing.” Gwen tugged Ari by the hand, pulling her toward the dance floor. Ari watched as Gwen’s gaze skimmed the crowded space until she found Val and Merlin. Val danced with his thin, toned arms in the air, closely shaved head thrown back. Merlin danced like he had yet to be introduced to his lower half, like—
“Oh my gods!” Gwen placed her hands over her face. “He dances like Kay.”
“I see it,” Ari said, laughing as they began to move with a strong beat. “Kinda wish I could un-see it.”
“I know I promised I wouldn’t overly mother him, but someone has got to teach that boy how to dance.”
“We’ll bring it up carefully, but yes, this is a solemn duty we should not avoid.” Ari watched as Val grabbed Merlin’s fist-pumping arm and locked it down. “I have a feeling Val will be all for it.”
A new song started, a slower one, and Ari hooked Gwen’s arms around her neck and pressed her lips to Gwen’s ear to speak over the music. “Is it too weird? Seeing him and knowing he was—is—the same little person we fell in love with on Old Earth?”
“Not weirder than some of the things we’ve been through,” Gwen said, although her tone tilted sad. “I do miss my baby, though.”
“Yeah, but I’ve been thinking about this one. Kai turned into Old Merlin. And when Old Merlin got mad at us, he turned a dragon on us. Perhaps it’s not too much of a loss not to raise a super magical, wickedly headstrong child. He could have portaled us anywhere in time and space simply for giving him a time-out.”
“He could still do that.”
“Yeah, but now Val would make him undo it.” Ari pushed Gwen’s hair back. “How about we have another one. In like six… teen years?”
Gwen laughed. “Sixteen years sounds perfect.”
The song shifted again, tuned to something that seemed to be a particular hit at this club, as everyone screamed and raised their arms. The flicking, whirling colored lights shut off, and a shade over the entire ceiling pulled back, showing off deep outer space. The dancers went wild as the only light in the club came from a thousand silver stars.
Ari kissed Gwen, tasting the past and the future and the wide, daring universe all at once.
Six Months Later
Merlin walked through the bustling market on Ketch, wearing brand-new robes.
His first, ancient set had been confiscated, and the second pair—the one Ari had gifted him—had gotten wet in the lake of time and never dried right. Besides, they smelled like Nin’s cave.
These were his I-survived-battling-an-ancient-tragedy-monster-so-I-deserve-nice-things robes. They were a little bit of every color shimmering together, with planets stitched onto the hems. He swirled them around his feet while he moved between the stalls, as he did every morning, watching an entire world come back to life. At first, the silence had seemed too much to fill. Now the blaze of sunrise had to compete with the shouts of the hawkers and the smells of roasted dijal, a bird that was distractingly delicious when you put it on a stick and smeared it with yellow-orange spice.
Merlin finished up his second breakfast as Gwen and Ari rounded a sharp corner in the market. Ari looked at home here in a way that she never had anywhere else, striding through the market wearing the Ketchan clothing she’d salvaged from her birth family’s home, with the obvious addition of Kairos—the sword, not Merlin—at her hip. Gwen would have looked like her regal self anywhere. She wore a queenly corset over a T-shirt and dark trousers, one thin braided crown wrapped over her head and the rest of her curls hanging loose.
Every morning that Merlin woke up and ran into them in the market felt like walking straight into the dream that had kept him going for all of those years in Nin’s past.
Gwen greeted Merlin with the same hug she did every time she saw him, one that always seemed like it was half for him, and half for the baby he used to be.
“Where’s Val?” she asked.
“He told me he had to go on a secret mission,” Merlin said dryly.
“I’d be fine with no more secrets or missions,” Gwen scoffed, though Merlin knew that wasn’t true. Her missions were only beginning. She left Ketch once a moon to travel to Troy and from there, to other worlds where she brokered trades to the broken universe. Merlin loved seeing Gwen the way she was always meant to be, the way Camelot would never fully let her—wielding political power as smoothly and confidently as Ari swung around those magical swords.
Val, who was never far from Merlin’s side these days, ran over with an armful of glass globes. The returned Ketchans and the Lionelians who now lived here had filled the marketplace with their traditional arts in an effort to keep them from dying out, lost to Mercer’s dark age.
“What are those for, precisely?” Merlin asked.
“For the library,” Val said.
“There is plenty of illumination! The sunlight here does wonders,” he said, trying not to blush at just how much of that last bit was about Val’s glowing muscles, his dark hair that caught the golden light and held it.
Six months had given them plenty
