Her hands shake as she makes the sword, her hands shake. Every movement has to be carefully planned out to stay within the limits of her strength, fit within what her will can force on her body. Her fingers ache and refuse to bend, her shoulders creak and groan when she works the bellows. Some of her blood goes into the metal, but that's the easiest part; it's the rest of the pain that's half-forgotten, unexpected, traitorous.
Because Mordred betrayed them and ruined the tower, it can't be helped and won't be helped. The grand magic, the glittering stream that ran through all of them is almost gone, and without its sweetness her years are heavy, heavy.
Her face in the emerging blade is deeply lined, the skin crumpled and stained like old paper.
It doesn't matter. She will forge the sword, the sword to wed the king to the land, and with it Uther will bring peace.
"Uther is no more," the Lady murmurs into her ear, "and Excalibur is lost, but the child has been saved. He will turn the tide, or he will not, but how will you know, mage? Your time is running out."
If I had the full power of the tower right now, she thinks, I'd spend it to bring Uther back from under the water and feed him to birds and vermin, alive and slowly.
Noble Uther, complacent Uther, content to let his brother kill at will until it was too late, too weak to protect himself. All her work undone, her people herded and slaughtered like wild beasts, and for what? For the sake of a useless whelp floating down the river, one who'll fail them just as well, when the time comes.
"It does," she says instead of any of that, "and I need more of it. Can you help me, or would I have to call on your sisters in the dark?"
"It might be that you'd like their price more than mine," the Lady of the Lake says. "But if you'd rather pay with your own coin than with stolen, come into my waters this night."
She's known people who searched for the price that she paid out of desperation and duty, who begged and stole and killed for it, and she'd give it to any of them if it was possible.
Granted, it's easier to walk and easier to breathe, and her fingers finally uncurl from their arthritic bend, and her eyesight is sharp and precise again. But this is not magic, not the process she understands - it's the Old Way, the way of water and tides, and so she sheds her life in uncontrollable bursts, one night ten years younger, another ten minutes, and each change hurts, hurts, hurts.
She needs to meet the king when he's revealed, and not be too far along this road by then, she needs to still be able to command attention, to help and shape and harry. And already, although it's a moot point with the tower gone, she can feel the grand magic, the wisdom she hunted, fought, bargained for, slip away, crumble into dust.
She manages to hold onto what was hers in the very beginning - her Sight, her way into animals' minds - but where she was once Merlin, mage of mages, she's now just a mage, one of the few remaining, hiding, biding her slippery, violent time.
It'll have to be enough.
"Mage," Arthur asks her out of the blue, "do you ever sleep?"
She blinks up at him, and he gestures at her face with the hand not holding onto the cane. "The bags under your eyes are bigger than your eyes. I get it, really, sleeping sucks, but take it from me, you still have to do it from time to time."
He lowers himself onto the bench next to her with a quiet, bitter groan, and she bites her tongue and doesn't reach out. She doesn't sleep much, no. The last time the waves took her was right before the sword revealed itself, and she estimates it peeled off about ten, fifteen years, and the pain was bad enough she still sometimes dreams about it. Ever since then it's been small, insignificant jumps, one day, ten minutes, one month, but it's pretty obvious that she's on a schedule, and this schedule is not necessarily her own.
Or his own: she hurried him through the Darklands and it had almost killed him, and was cruel, and necessary, and unfair. It's that last part that makes her tell him, "I sleep enough", curt but politely enough, instead of biting his head clear off.
(Young bodies are volatile, prone to anger, lust, joy; she remembers it from before, hazily, having it, shedding it, growing out of it; she won't have a chance to grow out of it again. It doesn't matter.)
"Enough," he says mildly, "is a very relative term. Is there a potion in your cauldron that will kill us all if left unattended?"
"...It's a pot of herbal tea."
"Then nothing will happen to it if you leave it here now and go get some sleep. You don't have to really get into it, but even a few hours will make you at least look less dead, I promise."
His voice is warm, low, non-threatening. Used to this cadence, this cajoling, the act of gently bullying people into their beds because he notices how they look, how long there was no sleep for them.
She saw and heard him, with the eyes and ears of a prison rat, when he had blithely assured Vortirgern he didn't have or want any power despite it fairly leaking from his pores, and scoffed then at his hypocrisy, but...
"I can even sing you a lullaby," he adds, "although if we're completely honest, you don't actually want to hear me singing."
I wonder, she thinks, if this is how he sees power. If all of us within the reach of his sword are his to take care of now, simply because that's how it is. Will he break under it? Will he not fail me because of it, not like his father did?
Her head is swimming, her eyes are full of sand and grit, and she levers herself to her feet and waits for him to laboriously get up as well. There's a low shelf in the stone wall where she can curl up in the scant hours left until sunrise, but when she takes a step towards it, she sways, the world around her sloshing in great gray waves.
"Steady," Arthur says, "steady, I got you," and there's an arm around her shoulders, and she leans into him instead of away, shuffles along with his limping steps, lets him help her lie down, lets him tuck the blanket around her in a blithely practiced way.
There's no promised lullaby, but she still sleeps without dreams, and wakes up not a minute younger.
On the night before coronation, she watches him pace the tiny room high up in the castle, muttering to himself. His face is haggard, crumpled up in a way that has nothing to do with the recent fighting or her snake's poison.
"Please," he says, "please just stay, at least for a fucking while, Mage, come on, I need you. Be an adviser or a court magician or a Queen or whoever you want to be, but - "
"You don't need me," she tells him, and wishes she still had those two decades of swallowed anger to fall back on. But those burned out; there's not much left.
"It's England!", he shouts at her, pivoting on his heel, "a whole goddamned country you and Bedivere and the rest of them foisted on me! I couldn't keep one tiny fucking brothel safe, and now I have thousands of people at once, and I can't..."
He forcibly stops himself, presses the heels of his palms against his eyes. "Shit, sorry, I can't be screaming at you, it's not your fault, I'm sorry. I'm freaked out of my goddamn mind, and I hoped - I hoped that you would stay."
I think I'm nineteen, she thinks of telling him. I've been nineteen once and it was ugly and promising and I left it behind, and I hoped to never be there again. I might be seventeen tomorrow, or fifteen, or thirteen, or four, or nothing. I forgot my Greek, and my Akkadian, and my runes, and my circles, and I will forget more by the morning. And I am scared, I'm all spent. And if I tell you so, you'll throw yourself into saving me because that's what it means for you, to be a king. And you will fail, and I'm not strong enough to bear that.
Out loud she says, "I can't."
And then, gentler, "You will bear it well. You can't save everyone, but you will try and try and try, and this will be enough."
And then, quieter: "Sing me that lullaby you promised, please." A small, bitter kindness for the end of the road. His shoulders slump, defeated.
He lied about his voice: it's scratchy, breaking up, but pleasant enough. She wonders who of his many mothers taught it to him, is she alive still, or is she one of those he couldn't protect.
She's curled up, tight and unmoving, listening to him, eyes closed, as he sings. Doesn't look at him when he kisses her forehead and leaves.
All done. All done. All done.
The man who's becoming a king stands far above the crowd, surrounded by people who love him, alone, resolute. Only her circling bird sees the tears in the eyes of the king when the crown comes down.
On a green hill far below, she looks away.