Disclaimer: I do not own Merlin.

She waited.

Waiting didn't usually bother her. She'd been in hiding for so long that she almost could not remember her life before. Had she ever truly had one? She just remembered…waiting. Long periods of waiting with short and intense bursts of action that left her exhilarated and alive and awake and enough to keep her from going insane from the waiting as it all started over again. She had to be patient. Impatience led to recklessness and recklessness led to death and defeat. She'd learned that lesson the hard way. Irresponsibility was unacceptable to the hunted.

So she waited and she kept waiting, as she always did.

Although it was worse this time, and she thought that she knew why. She'd sent off her letter more than a week ago, and she knew perfectly well that it would probably be another week until its addressee received it. Plus, for all she knew, it would be a week before he would have the presence of mind to open it. And then the journey…Camelot had the fastest and strongest horses in the five kingdoms. It would still take him a fortnight—at least—to meander his way to the designated meeting place. It wasn't as though it was exactly recorded on every map ever drawn. And there was the likelihood that he hadn't come alone, no matter how clearly she expressed the necessity of that term. No, he wouldn't come alone, but she wasn't sure whether that would hasten his journey or slow him down. She only hoped that he had the sense to travel without a flock of knights or a retinue or anything equally foolish. Speed was of the utmost importance, and she thought that she'd expressed that well enough.

Which is why it had caused her all but physical pain when she'd had to send off that oh-so-important scroll to the king of Camelot via messenger, no magic. He had insisted on that. And, as had become the routine as of late, he hadn't told her why. The very first time that he asked her to do something rather risky without explaining the reasoning behind the request, she had been appalled. A lad younger than herself, displaying no magic, sitting and giving orders!

Now, months later, things were different. She would have felt rather pathetic obeying the orders of a lad younger than herself who displayed no magic if it were not for the…sinister darkness that somehow shone out from his eyes. He didn't need to ask politely to give impressive demonstrations of magic. She knew that he had it and she knew that he had more than she did and so she did as she was told.

A fact which frightened her more than almost anything else ever had. She had thought that she was a figure more than capable of taking over—or at least, taking out Camelot, the kingdom that had initiated the magical persecution that had spread out into all of the others—but then, they had found each other. Or had he sought her out? That was another question that he'd refused to answer her. She only wondered, rather hopefully, whether or not he was more powerful than the mysterious Emrys who haunted her dreams and, increasingly, her days.

She still did not know which of the two she was hoping for.

Emrys…how could a name somehow be so threatening to her? She supposed that it would have been helpful if any of the others of her kind that she had encountered in her travels had had any more information about the sorcerer than she did. But no one knew anything. Just that there was Emrys and, depending on the loyalties of each particular informant, a man dreamt of or dreaded, or even considered a legend never to be realized. Of course, she'd had the impression from every Druid that she'd met that, frustratingly, they all somehow knew. It wasn't anything that they said—whenever she got one to talk to her, he or she usually just said that "Emrys is Emrys, and he is everything that you are not" or that "Emrys is Emrys, and he is the light to your darkness" or, most frighteningly, "Emrys is Emrys, and he is the darkness to your light." She'd wondered briefly if perhaps he was Emrys, the young man barely past boyhood beside whom she know stood with fearful loyalty, but she hadn't dared to ask. It felt almost inconceivable that he could be the man of the legends and, if he was, every fiber of her being did not want to know.

Of course, in the better part of the past year, rumors as to a possible identity of Emrys had been flying about, and they all pointed to the same person. Merlin, they called him. From the stories that she had heard, he had still been manservant to King Arthur when he'd been caught doing magic and later exiled, after a lengthy imprisonment. Depending on the source, she'd heard that he'd been kept in the dungeons for a briefly as a week to as lengthily as a year. Many of the sources seemed to agree, however, that Merlin was a likely candidate. She hadn't believed it for an instant. Even if he was a sorcerer, how powerful could he have been that he was able to be imprisoned and then forced out of a kingdom by a mere man? She could have escaped from a cell in minutes, and she had to concede that Emrys—if he was real—was more powerful than she. If Emrys was real, he was not a man whom any cell could contain or any king could exile.

Others had argued with her, not knowing who she was. Otherwise, would they have dared? So they argued. They said that he must have some significant powers if he was able to remain at the side of a magic-paranoid monarch for nearly a decade without being caught, that there had to be some sort of powerful enchantment used on the king that he had chosen to exile the sorcerer rather than execute him, as the laws of Camelot had dictated. She just couldn't accept that. From the less biased reports that she'd heard, she felt that it was far more likely that King Arthur was an idiot—if admittedly brave—and therefore not difficult to fool and that he had too weak a stomach to execute a former servant, especially if that servant didn't seem so powerful that he was any real threat to his lands. Merlin the manservant as legendary Emrys? Wherever and whoever the real Emrys was, she imagined that he had to be insulted by the idea.

But he did not seem to share her borderline obsession with the true identity of Emrys. She had decided not to let that bother her; after all, it was almost a fad amongst what few clumps of open magic-users could be found to speculate about the identity. It was just another expression of blind hope, and if there was one thing that she had learned from him, it was that "hope" was just another word that the lazy used for "imagination."

Besides, he was awfully associated with the Druids. Perhaps he already knew.

It wasn't like he would tell her if he did. The looks of silent disdain that he threw in her direction whenever she began to even think of Emrys in his presence were enough to chill her to the bone. She had to struggle, now, to conceal her thoughts. It seemed to be working. It usually left her strangely exhausted, but she felt like she was building up a tolerance.

And it was an honor to be his right-hand woman. If she had to suffer headaches every once in a while, so be it. Even if she was, at this point, far more interested in solving the mystery of Emrys than she was of any particularly destructive mischief, she was more than willing to help him. After all, hadn't her fleeting glimpses of and her brief encounter with Emrys shown her that the sorcerer had some strangely vested interest in Camelot? Perhaps his plan would be enough to bring Emrys out of the woodwork, to reveal himself. Perhaps Emrys would even be the one that Arthur would bring with him.

Probably not, though. One of the few things that he had told her before she had so reluctantly handed the scroll bearing the summons off to a messenger—a messenger!—was that the king's traveling companion was more likely to be a manservant, past or present. From the way that his eyes had so strangely shone when he'd spoken thusly, she'd had the impression that he was hoping for the "past" of the two menservants. She figured that this was because, if the king was to bring any magical assistance, it was better for it to be that Merlin of his than anyone else more powerful. Besides, one of the few ideas that nearly everyone that she had spoken to had agreed upon was that the king and his pet sorcerer were strangely attached to each other in what amounted to one of the most unlikely friendships in the five kingdoms. That was good. Affection was a weakness.

That was probably why he had seemed so strangely satisfied. She had envied him that; how could he have already found any satisfaction before anything had started? They were waiting. Even he hadn't bothered starting in earnest on any of their carefully planned preparations yet. Considering the travel time of the messenger and then the travel time of the king—assuming that he would come—it would be at least a month before he and anyone whom he had decided to drag along with him would have found their way to where they would be waiting.

She did wonder if he would come. It was one of the thoughts that she strived her hardest to conceal from him, but she wondered. Would the king suspect a trap? It would be hard not to. The whole thing stank of trickery. She herself had been astounded when he had told her that he meant exactly every word that he had dictated to her, himself unable to read or write any script that was not inked in such beautiful calligraphy on what few scrolls that he carried and that she had not been permitted to try to read, save for what few glances she'd been able to steal whenever he'd pored over them. Whether they were spells or the plan written or something that had drawn him out of his own hiding and initiated the whole plot, she did not know. And she tried not to wonder.

But she was afraid. She was afraid that the king wouldn't come, that the reasons written to him wouldn't be enough, that he'd be so wary of a trap that he wouldn't bother taking the risk of springing it, not with no one left in Camelot but a peasant queen and no heir; she was afraid that they wouldn't get the support from the others of their kind as they might have before the king had apparently gone through with his plan the legalize magic in Camelot; she was afraid that Emrys would come and that he would not be able to defeat him; she was afraid that Emrys would come and he, in fact, would be able to defeat him; she was afraid that the contacts that Merlin had made during his months of exile, the magical folk most ardent in their beliefs that the errant manservant was truly Emrys, would rise up in his defense, the passion of their hopes being more than sufficient to flock to his metaphorical banners, even if he was not the intended target of the whole plan and if he was just a plain old average sorcerer, as she steadfastly believed; that the king would leave behind a queen with child and ruin everything before it had even begun; that he would turn on her before doing as he had promised her, just as she had turned on so many others before; that it would all be for naught and all of her waiting would have been useless and have led to nothing and that she would start to hope and then it would all be over for her.

Suddenly, he entered the room, soundlessly and startlingly treading upon the broken rocks that littered the stone floor beneath them, the dappling sunshine that shone through the holes in the roof playing across his face in a peculiarly lovely vision. Unsurprisingly, he did not speak. So she raised her eyes to his, repressed the familiar shudder that was a mix of respectful awe and dread that there was too much in this boy than there should have been in anyone, and she closed her mind and smiled.

And she kept waiting.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

Sequel time! So, this one isn't nearly so much a sequel to my previous stories as "Comes Around" was to "What Goes Around"—it should be able to stand alone.

To any new readers, I hope that you stick around—if this chapter seemed vague or boring, it's because almost everything is important for later and will come back, in some capacity.

Thank you for reading, and reviews are always welcome!