Chapter 6: Midwinter
They did not speak of it.
They came down off the ridge in the morning into a white, silent world and found the column camped at the ford, Leon grey with worry, and rode home in two days without saying one word to each other that anybody else could not have heard. When they came in under the gate the king was waiting in the courtyard. He came down the steps and took Merlin's gloved hands in both of his and looked at his face. Then he looked over Merlin's head at his son, who had taken the king's consort over the ridge road and lost him in a snowstorm, and said nothing at all. He did not need to.
After that Merlin was never where Arthur was. He was in council at the king's left hand, at the king's Thursday table, in Gaius's workshop, in the lower town with two guards behind him. If Arthur came into a room, Merlin had just left it. It was as neat a manoeuvre as any Arthur had seen on a field, and he would have admired it if it had not made him want to put his fist through a wall.
He put a practice sword through the quintain instead, and broke another over a fence post because it had been looking at him. He knocked Leon down three times in one morning and was not sorry. He told George the shirts were folded wrong, and George said, "Very good, sire," and folded them again exactly as they had been, and Arthur threw the boot.
Midwinter came in with hard frost and the yule log dragged up from the lower town by forty men on ropes, and the great hall was hung with holly and ivy until it was a wood. Arthur sat at his father's right hand and drank water, because Leon had poured it, and watched Merlin at his father's left in a dark blue coat with the circlet in his hair, laughing at something Morgana said and not looking down the table.
Then the king rose, and the hall went quiet, and he spoke about the spring. The raiders would come again with the thaw. This time Camelot would go out to meet them, and the command would go to Lord Agravaine, who had fought on the Essetir march in the old king's wars and knew the country.
Arthur put his cup down.
Every spring campaign since he was twenty had been his. He had an axe-mark on his ribs from one of them. Down the table Agravaine bowed his head with every appearance of humility and smiled at his plate.
"My son is not ready," said the king, as though someone had asked. He turned his head and looked at Arthur for the first time that night. "He has spent this winter otherwise engaged. He went to Ealdor to play at farmers, and carried sacks with his shirt off for the village, and on the way home mislaid my consort in a snowdrift."
Somebody laughed. Then a good many people laughed, the way people do when a king has made a joke and they are not sure it was one.
"Sire." Merlin was leaning forward, a hand half raised. "The escort was my idea, and the snow was nobody's, and if the prince hadn't—"
The king laid his hand over Merlin's on the cloth. He did it gently. He did not look round.
"Not tonight, Merlin."
Arthur looked at his father's hand, long and pale and careful, covering Merlin's, and at Merlin's face above it, which had gone very still. Then he stood. His chair scraped back on the flags and every head in the hall turned, and he walked out of his father's Midwinter feast down the whole length of the hall with three hundred people watching, and did not look back.
Outside, the snow was blue in the dark. He stood by the well in his feast clothes with his breath smoking, and looked up at the king's wing because he could not bear to look at anything else.
He knew which window was Merlin's. He had counted along to it from his own, across the court, on more nights than he would have admitted. Every other chimney in that wing was smoking. Merlin's stood cold against the stars, because every servant in the citadel was in the great hall or down at the revels in the lower town, and nobody had laid his fire.
The king left the feast early, looking tired, between one course and the next. He paused by Merlin's chair on his way and put a hand on his shoulder. "Don't sit up for these fools," he said, low, which was the first thing he had said to Merlin all evening that was not about the order of the toasts.
Merlin waited a decent while, and then went too.
His rooms were dark. The grate was swept and empty, and the cold had come in through the tall windows and settled into every corner, so that the stabbed men on the tapestries had frost on their faces. He could have lit it. One word, and the logs in the basket would have been burning before he had his gloves off. He did not say it. He had not said one word of magic in the king's wing since the night before his wedding, and he would not start tonight, with the guard going past every hour and the king two doors away. He sat down in the chair by the empty hearth in his coat and gloves and pulled his feet up under him.
He had been cold all month. In Ealdor he had run about in January in his shirt; now he sat by every fire in Camelot with his hands out and could not get warm. Gaius said it was the fever. Gaius had begun to say a good many things were the fever, with the eyebrow, in a voice that meant he did not think so at all.
The knock came at the panel by the wardrobe.
Two knocks, not loud. Merlin went and stood with his hand on the cold iron of the bolt, and did not draw it.
"Merlin." Arthur's voice, through the wood. "I know you're there. I can hear your teeth."
He drew the bolt.
Arthur came up out of the dark of the stair sideways, because his arms were full: an untidy armful of split logs and kindling and a bundle of straw, a bottle in the crook of his elbow, snow in his hair. He looked past Merlin at the black hearth and said, "You'll catch your death," in the voice of a man who had practised it all the way round the citadel.
"There's wood in the basket."
Arthur looked at the basket. "Well. Now there's more."
He knelt in front of the hearth and built a fire.
He did it so badly that Merlin, still holding the bolt, forgot for a while to be anything but fascinated. Arthur laid the big logs in first, at the bottom, like bricks, and put the kindling on top of them, and stuffed the straw round the sides where it would do no good to anyone, and struck the flint seven times before he got a spark, and then sat back on his heels a foot away and blew at it, hard, as if he were putting out a candle.
The straw flared and died. A thin thread of smoke went up from the kindling and thought better of it.
"It's damp," Arthur said.
"It isn't damp. You've built it upside down."
"I have not. This is how you do it. I've seen you do it."
"Two years," said Merlin, "you've watched me do that every morning."
Arthur went on looking at the fire. The back of his neck had gone red above his collar.
"I wasn't watching the fire," he said.
Merlin stood very still.
Then he came and knelt beside Arthur on the cold hearthstone, not close, and while Arthur struck the flint again and bent to blow, Merlin looked at the sulking kindling and said one word inside his mouth, not even a word, only the warm shape of one. He would not have said it for himself. He said it for Arthur, who had walked out of his father's feast in front of three hundred people and carried wood up a dark stair, and should not have to fail at this as well.
A small flame woke in the kindling, and caught, and held. It was not a good fire. It was a low, smoky, sulking fire that burned on one side only, but it burned. Arthur sat back and looked at it with enormous satisfaction.
"Damp," he said. "I told you."
He had forgotten cups, so they sat on the floor with their backs against the end of the bed and passed the bottle between them. It was sour red Midwinter wine, and it was the best thing Merlin had tasted in a month.
For a while Arthur said nothing. Then he said, "Agravaine," and drank, and said a great many other things.
Merlin let him. Arthur talked to the fire in a low, furious voice about his father and the campaign and play at farmers and the hall laughing, and his hands moved as he talked, and once he picked up a log to throw it, and Merlin said, "You'll miss," and he put it down again and went on. Merlin passed the bottle and said nothing much, until the words ran down and Arthur sat with his elbows on his knees and his head hanging.
Then Merlin put his hand in his hair.
"Don't," Arthur said.
Merlin's fingers moved: small slow circles at the crown and out to the temples, the way they had in the armoury, and in the bath before that, and on a hundred bad nights before either. Arthur's hair was cold from the snow. He held stiff under Merlin's hand, and held, and then let go all at once and leaned sideways until his head was on Merlin's shoulder and his whole weight with it.
Merlin sang, very low, the way you'd sing to a child half asleep:
Hush now, my heart, for the tide's running low,
the boats are drawn up where the sea-pinks grow...
Arthur lifted his head and sat up, and Merlin's hand fell away, and the song stopped.
"No," said Arthur. "Wait. I came up here to say something, and if you sing that I won't be able to."
Merlin waited.
Arthur looked at the fire. When he spoke it was to the fire, slowly, as if every word were a stone he had to lift.
"I've been a pig to you," he said. "For two years. I knew I was doing it. I told myself it was a joke, and you laughed, so it was all right. The chores. The names. The salt." He swallowed. "I called you a coat. I said he'd never look at you, and I knew when I said it that it was the cruellest thing I could think of, and I said it anyway, because you'd asked me for a reason and I hadn't got one I could say out loud. And then I bowed to you in front of the tailors and called you Stepmother. And in the yard." His jaw worked. "I'm sorry, Merlin. For all of it."
"It's fine," said Merlin.
"Stop saying that." Arthur turned and looked at him. "It isn't fine. It was never fine. You've been saying it for two years and it's never once been true."
Merlin opened his mouth and found he had nothing to put in it.
"I'm in love with you," Arthur said.
The fire hissed. Far below, in the lower town, people were singing.
"I worked it out in the long gallery," Arthur said, "with you up on a stool in that blue thing and a circlet in your hair and three tailors stuck full of pins. I stood behind the screen and knew. And I was six days too late." He laughed, a short miserable sound. "Six days. I counted."
Merlin did not move.
He thought of the king's hand on his at the feast, gentle, and Not tonight, Merlin. He thought of the rushes and the gloves and a grey mare leaning her head on his chest, of a fire laid in this grate every night by someone he never saw, of a rusty laugh over Ygraine's chessboard, and a man walking away down a corridor to his own rooms and bolting his door, two doors from here. He knew it was all on his face. Arthur's eyes went over it once, and something in them flinched.
"If you stay," Merlin said, and his voice was not steady, "it's because you want me. Me. Not because he has me, and you can't bear him having anything you had first. I'm not a shield on a rack, Arthur. You can't win me back off him."
Arthur flinched again, as though Merlin had found the old axe scar on his ribs and pressed.
"You were never his," he said. "You were never mine either. I know that now." He did not reach for him. He sat on the cold floor with his hands open on his knees, palm up, and looked at Merlin. "I'm not taking anything. I'm asking."
Merlin looked at him for a long time: at the open hands, and the snow melting in his hair, and his face, frightened and stubborn at once, like a boy's on top of a wall.
"Then stay," he said.
Behind Arthur, the sulking fire caught all at once and went up the chimney with a roar, every log alight, tall and gold and clean, throwing their two shadows huge across the stabbed men on the walls; and Merlin shut his eyes, quickly, before anything could show in them.
Arthur woke at dawn because he was warm.
He lay for a while without opening his eyes, trying to work out why. The bed was too soft and too wide. The air on his face was cold, the deep still cold of a big stone room in winter, but the rest of him was warm right through, and there was an arm round his chest, and a knee behind his, and someone breathing slowly against the back of his neck.
He opened his eyes. Snow light came grey through the tall window. The fire had burned down to a red bed in the grate. On the wall opposite, a man in a green hat was being stabbed through the middle, with every sign of enjoyment, by a man in a blue one.
Merlin's face was pressed into his neck. Merlin's hand was spread flat over his heart, and every time Merlin breathed out Arthur felt it on his skin, warm, and then cool. He lay very still, in case it stopped.
It stopped anyway. He felt the moment Merlin woke: the breathing caught, and the hand on his chest went tense, and did not move away, but did not stay as it had been either. Far off in the corridor somebody went by whistling a carol.
"It can't happen again," Merlin said into the back of his neck.
Arthur shut his eyes.
"Not here. Not with him two doors away." Merlin's voice was low and steady, the way it went when he had decided something and was holding on to it with both hands. "He's been good to me, Arthur. He's been better to me than anyone since I left home, and he's never asked me for one thing, and last night I forgot he was there at all. I can't do that to him again."
Arthur said nothing. There was nothing he could say that was not please, and he did not know yet how to say it.
He got up and dressed by the grey window in last night's clothes, with his back to the bed, and picked up his boots and did not put them on, because the corridors would be waking and the servants' stair was stone and rang under every heel. Merlin had sat up in the bed with the blankets round him. His hair was all on end, his face pale in that light, and he looked at Arthur with such misery that Arthur could not stand under it, and went to the panel and opened it.
At the top of the stair he looked back. Merlin had not moved.
Arthur went down in his stockinged feet with his boots in his hand, the way a boy goes home from somewhere he should not have been, and he had gone eleven steps, counting them, when he heard above him in the dark the bolt go home.
He knocked twice in January.
The first time was a week after Twelfth Night. He went up the stair at midnight with no wood and no bottle and no idea what he would say, and knocked, two soft knocks, as he had at Midwinter, and waited, and nothing happened. He stood on the cold step until he heard the guard go by on the far side and call the hour, and then he went down.
The second time was at the end of the month. He knocked, and waited, and nothing happened, and he put his forehead against the panel because there was nobody to see him do it.
On the other side, a hand's breadth away through the old wood, someone was breathing.
He could hear it: quick and shallow and trying to be quiet, the breathing of someone standing close against the door with a hand on the bolt, not drawing it. Arthur stood and listened to it for a long time. He did not knock again. After a while he heard it catch and break, the way breath does when someone is trying not to make a sound and failing, and he put his hand flat on the wood where he thought Merlin's hand must be.
Then he went down the stair.
On Thursdays he played chess with the king.
He went every week, and ate what was put in front of him, and answered questions about the lower town, and afterwards Ygraine's board came out, the pale squares and the dark and the bone pieces worn smooth by her fingers and then by Uther's. And Merlin sat across from the king in the firelight and played, and hated himself so thoroughly that he could hardly hold the pieces.
Uther was kind. That was the worst of it. Since Midwinter he had been kinder, as though he had noticed Merlin was unhappy and decided, being Uther, to say nothing and do something. There was a fur rug over Merlin's chair at supper now, and a footstool by the fire, and honey cakes, which Uther did not eat, set at Merlin's elbow without comment. And on the third Thursday of January, when Merlin had lost a game in fourteen moves without once trying to cheat, the king sat back and looked at him across the board.
"You did not cheat."
"I forgot."
"You have not forgotten to cheat since October." Uther began to set the pieces out again, white for Merlin, as always. "You are unwell. Gaius says it is the winter."
"It's the winter," Merlin agreed.
The king set the last pawn in its place. Then he did something he had never done. He reached across the board and took Merlin's hand, the one with the ring on it, and held it a moment in his own, and frowned at it.
"Your hands are always cold," he said, as though it were a fault he meant to have corrected, and let go, and moved his first pawn. "Your move."
Merlin moved a piece. He could not afterwards have said which.
That night the fire was laid in his hearth, as it had been every night since Midwinter, and Merlin lay in its light in the great cold bed and thought of nothing, carefully, the way you walk on ice. Somewhere past midnight he heard footsteps in the corridor that were not the guard's.
They were slow, the steps of a man in soft shoes who did not want to be heard, and they came from the king's end of the corridor and stopped outside Merlin's door.
He did not move. Through the oak he could hear nothing at all, not breathing, not a sleeve; only the silence of someone standing quite still on the other side, with his hand perhaps raised, perhaps not. A minute. Two. The fire settled. Merlin found he had put his hand flat on the coverlet over his breastbone, over the warm place there, and was pressing down, as if to keep it quiet.
The footsteps went away, slowly, the way they had come. Far off a door closed, and a bolt went home.
Two doors, and a man outside each of them, and Merlin lay between them in the firelight until the window went grey.
In the first week of February he woke before it was light with his mouth full of water and his stomach turning over like a fish on a bank.
He made it to the basin, just, and knelt on the freezing floor in his shirt and was sick until there was nothing left, and went on retching anyway. When it was over he stayed on his knees, shaking.
Under his breastbone the warm place had woken.
It had lain quiet since the wedding night, banked, a low steady heat he had grown so used to that some days he forgot it was there. It was not quiet now. He knelt with his hand pressed flat over it and felt it beating under his palm, slow and strong, a little out of time with his own heart, as if there were two of them in there keeping time and only one of them was his.