Chapter 2: The King's Price
There was no time to think, and Merlin did not try.
He said a word under his breath. It sat in his mouth like a stone warmed in the sun, and as it left him his eyes went hot, and ten feet away the blade of the fish knife turned the dull red of a horseshoe in the forge.
The rush-seller screamed and dropped it. Merlin was already moving. He had a tray of honey cakes in one hand and a small boy attached to the other, and he shook off the boy and went at the man shoulder first, as though he had tripped over his own feet, which everyone in Camelot would believe, and they went down together into the rack of barrel staves with a noise like the end of the world. Staves clattered, a barrel rolled, the apple-seller's cart went over, and in the middle of it all the knife lay hissing in a puddle where nobody would ever know it had been hot.
Then there were guards, a great many of them. Somebody hauled the rush-seller out from underneath Merlin, sobbing and kicking, and when Merlin got his breath back and opened his eyes he was lying on a bed of apples with a honey cake stuck to his ear, and Uther Pendragon was standing over him.
Merlin had been in Camelot two years and had never been this close to the king. There were deep lines beside his mouth, and his eyes were a pale, washed grey. He looked at the knife in the puddle, and then at Merlin, and something moved behind his face, slow and cold, like a pike turning under ice.
"You," said the king. "You are my son's servant."
"Yes, sire. Sorry, sire." Merlin sat up. An apple rolled off his chest. "About the barrels."
Behind his father, Arthur had gone the colour of tallow. He came round Uther without asking leave and took Merlin by both shoulders and hauled him to his feet, and then he didn't let go. His hands went down Merlin's arms, hard, and over his ribs and round to his back, and his face was white and furious.
"Are you cut? Merlin. Are you cut anywhere, you absolute halfwit, he could have opened you up like a—"
"I'm fine. I'm sticky." Merlin tried to step back and couldn't, because Arthur's fists were knotted in the front of his jacket. "Arthur. People are looking."
Arthur let go of him as if he'd caught fire.
People were indeed looking: the whole bottom end of the market, the apple-seller and the cooper's wife, the children with honey on their faces, the man from Mercia and his bear. For a moment nobody made a sound. Then the woman who sold Merlin his thread, a broad red-armed widow called Agnes, put two fingers in her mouth and whistled and shouted, "God bless the honey-cake boy!" Somebody began to clap, and then the whole square was clapping and cheering, and someone threw a cabbage in the air for no reason anyone could afterwards explain.
He looked for the king. Uther was not watching him at all; he was watching the crowd. He turned slowly on his heel and took it in, the clapping and the faces and the cabbage, and he had the look of a buyer at a horse fair who has seen, in a pen he would never usually trouble with, exactly the animal he came for.
Then Merlin glanced down and saw that he was bleeding. A barrel hoop had opened the heel of his hand on the way down, and he hadn't felt it, and the blood had run down his wrist and into his sleeve and dripped, quite neatly, onto the toe of the king's boot.
"You don't jump on a man with a knife," Arthur said. "You shout. You shout 'knife', and the twelve armed men whose whole purpose in life is to stand round my father getting stabbed instead of him deal with it. That's what they're for. That's what you are not for."
"I tripped."
"You tripped." Arthur slid down in the bath until the water came up to his chin, and glared at the ceiling. "Over what?"
"A boy. There was a boy."
"There's always a boy." He lifted one foot out of the water and inspected it. "More hot."
He had demanded the bath the moment they were back inside the citadel, because somebody in the market had thrown a cabbage and most of it had come down on Arthur. Merlin had hauled the water up from the kitchens himself, eleven trips, without one word of complaint, which ought to have been Arthur's first warning. Now the tub stood steaming before the fire, and the room smelled of woodsmoke and the rosemary soap Arthur favoured because it was the one that made Merlin sneeze.
Merlin tipped in more hot water from the kettle. Arthur yelped and kicked, and half a pint of bathwater went over the rim and into Merlin's lap.
"Thank you," said Merlin.
"You're welcome. Back."
"Your back is perfectly clean. You stood behind your father the whole afternoon. The most strenuous thing you did was nod."
"I hauled you out of a barrel."
"You hauled me out of some apples."
"It was very strenuous. You're heavier than you look. Back, Merlin."
Merlin sighed the long sigh of a man much put upon, which Arthur enjoyed more than anything else that had happened all day, and took up the cloth and the soap. Arthur leaned forward in the water with his arms round his knees and shut his eyes.
He liked this part more than he would have admitted under torture. Merlin washed a back the way he did everything, thoroughly and badly and with a running commentary: shoulders first, in slow firm circles, then the long muscles either side of the spine, then down. His hands were always cold at the start and warm by the end. Tonight there was a hitch in the rhythm, a hesitation every so often, and Arthur, drowsy with heat, put it down to nerves and leaned back into it.
"You've got a bruise," Merlin said. "Here. From the boar."
"I know where my bruises are."
"It's the size of a plate." A cold fingertip touched it, very lightly, low on his ribs, and gooseflesh ran over Arthur from his neck to his heels. "Does that hurt?"
"No."
"Liar."
"Princes don't lie. We misremember." Arthur cupped a handful of water and flicked it back over his shoulder without looking, heard it land, and heard Merlin splutter. He grinned at the fire. "Rinse."
The window by the bed was the one that never shut properly, and on the draught through it came a thin noise of singing from the lower town: a tavern tune, many voices, most of them drunk. Behind him Merlin's hands went still.
"What is that?"
"Nothing. Don't."
"Is that about you?" Arthur twisted round in the water to look up at him. Merlin had gone pink to the tips of his ears. "They've made you a song."
"It's about the barrels, mostly."
A line of it came up clear for a moment over the rooftops, and Arthur's eyebrows went as high as they would go. "They rhymed 'honey' with 'bonny'."
"It's for the tune."
"It doesn't rhyme."
"It's the lower town, Arthur. They're not fussy." Merlin picked up the jug. "Head."
Arthur put his head back against the rim. The warm water went over his hair and ran down his neck and into his eyes, and Merlin's fingers followed it, working the soap out at his temples and behind his ears, slow and firm, round and round, and somewhere above him Merlin began to hum. It was a slow, swaying tune, nothing like the one from the tavern. Arthur knew it. He knew it from so far down that it took him a moment to find where: a dark room, a rocking chair, his old nurse Bethan's lap, her voice gone thin with age.
"Where did you learn that?"
The humming stopped. "What? Oh. Gaius hums it over the mortar. It gets in your head."
"Don't stop," Arthur said, before he could think better of it, and after a moment Merlin didn't.
Arthur lay there with his arms along the edge of the tub and his eyes shut and thought, with deep contentment, that he would have Merlin do this every night for the rest of his life, and that it was nobody's business but his own.
When he opened his eyes there was a thin red thread curling through the bathwater by his knee.
He stared at it. It spread, faint and pink, and another drop fell into it from above and bloomed. Arthur looked up. Merlin was holding his right arm a little away from his body, and the cuff of his sleeve was dark and sodden, and not with bathwater.
Arthur sat up so fast the water slopped over the rim. He caught Merlin's wrist and pushed back the sleeve, and there it was: a cut across the heel of the hand, not deep but ragged, with a flake of rust still in it from a barrel hoop and the blood running down from it to the elbow.
"What," said Arthur, "is this."
"It's nothing."
"You're bleeding into my bath."
"I didn't mean to. The water opened it up again." Merlin tried to pull his hand back. "It's fine. You wanted a bath."
Arthur looked at him. He thought of eleven trips up the kitchen stairs with full buckets. He thought of the hitch in the rhythm on his back, every time, and how he had put it down to nerves.
"Sit still," he said, in a voice that came out a good deal lower than he'd meant.
There was a cup of wine on the stool by the tub. He poured it over the cut, and Merlin hissed and jerked, and Arthur held on. He picked the rust out with the point of his own little knife, holding Merlin's fingers flat under his wet thumb. Merlin's hand was cold, as it always was, with calluses along the inside of the fingers from buckets and brushes and the straps of Arthur's shields, and a faint blue vein crossed the wrist just under the skin. Arthur looked at the vein for longer than the cut required. Then he reached for the clean shirt Merlin had laid out for him on the chair, tore a strip off the hem, and bound the hand up, round and round, sitting there in the cooling water with his hair dripping on both of them.
He realised he was still holding it.
"If you bleed on my rug," he said, letting go, "it's coming out of your wages."
"Which wages?"
"The ones I'm docking for the shirt."
"You tore the shirt."
"You made me." Arthur slid back down in the water and scowled at the fire, because that was easier than looking at Merlin's face. "Go and get Gaius to look at it. Properly. And then come back and get me out of this bath, because it's going cold, and that's your fault as well."
Merlin went. At the door he looked back, with his bandaged hand held against his chest, and said, "Thank you," as though Arthur had given him something.
"For what? I'm protecting my property."
When the door had shut, Arthur sat in the cooling water and watched the last of the pink fade out of it.
On the stairs up from the market his father had asked about Merlin: where he came from, whether he was honest. And Arthur, with his hands not yet steady, had said: He's an idiot, Father, but he's loyal. He'd die for this house. He nearly did today. His father had gone quiet and looked out over the lower town, the way he did when a piece on the board had moved somewhere he liked. Arthur had been thinking of something else.
In the market, when Merlin went down under the rush-seller and the barrel staves came down on them both, Arthur had lost sight of the knife. For three heartbeats he had not known where it was, and the whole bright noisy square had gone white and silent around him, the way the world went silent just before a fall from a horse, and a single thought had filled his head from wall to wall: not him, not him, anyone but him. He had not known he could think a thing that loudly. It frightened him more than the knife had. He decided, after some thought, that it was because good servants were hard to come by.
The rest of the torn shirt hung over the side of the tub. There was a rusty thumbprint on the hem, where Merlin had steadied himself. Arthur leaned out and held it over the fire for a long time. Then he let it go, and watched it curl and blacken, and was annoyed with himself for watching.
The council met in the long chamber over the great hall on the following Tuesday, and Arthur, who sat at his father's right hand and was expected to have opinions, spent most of it trying not to yawn.
The grain tallies were bad. The raiders were worse: two more farms burned on the eastern road, a mill on the Essetir side, and smoke seen from the ridge above Ealdor that nobody had gone to look at. Arthur stopped yawning.
"Give me thirty men," he said. "I'll garrison the border villages through the winter, ours and the ones just over it. If we stop them in Essetir, they never reach Camelot."
His father didn't look up from the tally. "Not one Camelot sword crosses into Essetir without a reason I can put before Cenred."
"Cenred can't hold his own border."
"Then that is Cenred's misfortune, and not my war." Uther turned a page. "Find me a reason, Arthur, and you may have your thirty men. Until then, the villages beyond the ridge are not ours to save." And then, without looking up: "When you have a thought that did not come straight off the training field, the council will be glad to hear it."
Someone down the table laughed and turned it into a cough. Arthur felt the heat climb his neck to his ears. He sat back. He had thought of the ridge above Ealdor when he spoke, and of one village in particular under it, and he was glad nobody at the table could know that. It would have been difficult to explain.
Then Lord Agravaine raised the matter he had raised at every council since midsummer.
"Sire. The lower town is restless. There was a bread riot on Tanner's Row on Sunday. The people want something to cheer." He had Arthur's mother's eyes, people said, and none of her softness. "A royal marriage would do it. A queen. My cousin the Lady Elaine has been widowed two years, and her late husband's lands lie all along the Essetir march. She has three grown sons. Your borders would be secure for a generation."
"Her sons would be secure for a generation," said Uther. "Mine would be dead within a year of me."
There was a small, appalled silence. Agravaine smiled through it.
"My cousin's sons are loyal men, sire."
"I don't doubt it. I doubt that they will stay loyal with a crown in reach and only my son between them and it. I buried a queen, Agravaine. I will not put another woman in her chair. That is the end of the matter."
Arthur did not want a stepmother, and particularly not one with three grown sons and Agravaine's smile. His father's flat refusals were the only part of these councils he ever enjoyed.
Below the window, a row of children up from the lower town sat on the edge of the well, swinging their legs and singing. Arthur knew the tune by now. Everybody did.
His father had turned his head to listen.
He was looking down at the children with an expression Arthur had seen perhaps a handful of times in his life, always on the eve of a battle he had already decided to win: a small, private, considering look. Then he turned back to the table, and the look was gone.
As the council rose, Arthur heard his father say, "Geoffrey. A moment. Bring me the old marriage rolls. I want to know what they allow."
Arthur grinned to himself on the stairs. So the old man was weakening at last. Some dull widow, then, or some lord's quiet younger brother, and no sons to worry about.
On the eighth day after the fair, Merlin was summoned to the council chamber.
He assumed he was about to be dismissed. He went through his recent crimes on the way up and had settled on the pear by the time the guards opened the doors.
The long table was empty except for the king at its head and old Geoffrey of Monmouth at his elbow, with a stack of old rolls. When Merlin bowed, Uther said "Leave us," and Geoffrey gathered his rolls and went, giving Merlin a look of such mild pity on the way past that his stomach dropped to his boots.
"Sit," said the king.
Merlin sat. The chair was carved with dragons and extremely uncomfortable.
"How is your hand?"
"Oh." Merlin looked down at it. The bandage was Gaius's now, neater than Arthur's. "Healing, sire. Thank you."
"Good." Uther folded his own hands on the table. They were long and pale and very still. "The rush-seller was hanged on Saturday. He will not trouble you again."
Merlin thought of Ewan throwing an extra handful of meadowsweet in with Arthur's rushes every Thursday, because a prince's floor ought to smell of summer. He said nothing.
"My council," said the king, "wishes me to marry."
"Oh," said Merlin. "Congratulations?"
The king ignored this. He laid the matter out the way Arthur laid out a campaign, point by point and without heat: the hungry winter, the bread riot on Tanner's Row, the lords pressing their widows and nieces on him, Agravaine first among them. He might have been setting out the price of oats.
"I will not set another woman in my queen's chair," he said, "nor give my lords a second line of heirs to sharpen their knives over. Geoffrey tells me the old laws are a good deal less particular about birth than my lords are. A king of Camelot may take any consort he chooses, highborn or not, so long as the vows are made before the court. It has been done, though not for two hundred years."
Merlin's mouth had gone dry.
"A consort from among the common people," the king went on, "one who saved my life in the people's sight, and whom the lower town has already made a song about, would quiet that town through a hungry winter better than any grain I could spare. He would bring me no faction. He would have no family worth flattering. And he could give me no children." Uther looked at him across the table. "My son tells me you are loyal to a fault. He tells me you would die for this house, and that you very nearly did. You are, in short, the obvious choice."
Merlin laughed, one startled bark that echoed off the rafters, and then he looked at the king's face and stopped.
"You're not joking."
"I do not joke." Uther did not move. "Your village lies three miles over my border. In August, raiders out of the east burned its grain store and drove off its sheep. Two children are sick with the flux. Cenred's reeve has done nothing, and Cenred will do nothing, because Cenred's treasury is empty and his court keeps poor secrets. I can give your village grain enough to see it through to harvest. I can put a company of my men on the ridge road above it for as long as you wear my ring, and my son can have the thirty swords he keeps asking me for, because the safety of my consort's mother is a reason I can put before Cenred and any other king alive."
Merlin thought of his mother's letter, folded small inside his shirt. We'll manage. We always have. He thought of Elsa and Mair, five and seven, and the miller's wife counting what was left in the crock.
"Those are my terms," said the king. "In return you will stand at my side at feasts. You will sit at my left hand in council. You will smile at the people when I tell you to smile at them, and you will go where I send you to be seen." For the first time something changed in his voice, a dryness, almost a weariness. "I am not asking for affection. I had that once, and I have no use for another. I will keep to my rooms and you will keep to yours. Nothing whatever will be required of you after dark."
He said it to the window, not to Merlin, and for a moment he looked less like a king than a man alone at the head of a long empty table. Merlin, who had come up ready to be frightened of him, found to his surprise that he was sorry for him.
The fire cracked in the grate. Somewhere below, a smith was hammering, steady as a heart.
"May I have a night?" Merlin heard himself ask. "To think."
"You may have until noon tomorrow," said the king, and drew a paper towards him and picked up his pen, and Merlin understood that he had been dismissed after all.
He did not remember the corridor. When he could think again, his feet had taken him where they had taken him every evening for two years, to the door of the crown prince's chambers.
He lifted his good hand to knock.
Inside, Arthur was laughing. It was his real laugh, the one he never used at court, helpless and a little hoarse, and Leon was saying something under it about a horse. Merlin stood with his knuckles an inch from the wood. He could have knocked. He could have gone in and said, Arthur, your father has asked me to marry him, tell me what to do, and Arthur would have stopped laughing and looked at him.
And then Arthur would have said something. Merlin knew him well enough to guess what.
He lowered his hand and went back down the stairs, slowly, while behind him the laughter went on. He had until noon.