The four professors stared down at Myrddin from their seat at the high table. The man on the far left-Salazar, he thought his name was-spoke in what sounded like some sort of Latin.
"Beg your pardon, sir," Myrddin stammered, in his most deferential Welsh.
"He asked who your parents were," said the woman seated besides him. Rowena. "Were you of magical blood?"
"I...I don't know," he admitted. "My mother, she is wise and knows all the herbs of the wood. But my father was a wanderer, and I do not know his name."
"There is no need to be afraid," said Rowena. "All are welcome in our walls. We only wish to know who might teach you best."
"If it please you, Mistress, I was hoping to learn from you, as I know your speech."
The man at the other end of the table, whose name Myrddin did not remember, gave a hearty laugh.
"You will learn much of magic," Rowena said. "And there are many words that give it form. Might we cast a spell on you?" He must have looked concerned, since she went on, "It is quite harmless."
"If you think it will help," he said.
Salazar spoke more words, and light burst forth from his wand. Myrddin's hands felt briefly warm, as if at the height of summer, and then cooled.
"He says he will teach you," Rowena said. "And you will learn more than his language, in time."
Almost all of Salazar's students had grown up with some knowledge of magic, borrowing their parents' wands or cavorting with unusual beasts. This, in turn, guided their hopes for what they would do after attending Hogwarts.
One young woman spoke of brewing potions that might heal the sick. Another wanted to travel the world and meet with wizards in other lands. A lanky man spoke of wanting to teach at Hogwarts himself. "Magic is powerful, aye, but even we do not live forever," he said. "Someday our professors will pass on, and they will need others to follow after them."
"If they're dead, how will you decide who teaches whom?" queried the would-be voyager.
"Suppose we'll have to argue amongst ourselves, won't we? Or failing that, each take turns."
"We have to have separate dormitories," argued one of Godric's students. "We wouldn't all fit in one!"
As the professors had promised, Myrddin had grown to understand his fellows, speaking in a complicated hodgepodge of magical Latin and the isles' native tongues. "I'm not sure what I want to do," he confessed one day. "Maybe I'll just go and dwell among Muggles."
"You could rule over them!" enthused another classmate. "Control their minds with power, make them do your bidding."
"That wouldn't be right," said Myrddin.
"Whyever not?"
"Well-because-" He broke off. In any language, how could he explain what was right or wrong?
"Muggles aren't any better than we are," one of Helga's students piped up. "Just because they do things the slow way, they still make wars and hurt each other."
"They aren't any worse, either," Myrddin said.
"We're the first generation that's ever been to a school like this one," someone else pointed out. "Our children will be wiser, with what they've learned from us."
"How do you know? Maybe in foreign lands there are ancient schools. Lycea and suchlike."
"My father's a Muggle, and he never heard of any such school..."
They were mere humans, Myrddin knew, students and professors alike. Magic did not grant them wisdom nor immortality. Yet surely he could use his powers to better the lot of those around him, wizard and Muggle alike?
He put the thought out of his mind as he took his leave and paced down the hall; he was supposed to give an oral argument the next day about the nature of Transfiguration. At least Salazar wasn't making them write term papers and cramping up their hands.
"Salazar?" Myrddin asked. Though it would once have awed him, he could not pinpoint the day when the professors had shifted from addressing him as a mere child to a peer in the world of magic.
"Yes, dear fellow?"
"How is it that one can Apparate?"
"Well, 'tis merely a matter of concentration."
"But I mean, the theory that undergirds it?"
"You are not conjuring up matter out of thin air, nor Vanishing it into oblivion. For every drop of blood and scrap of skin that disappears from one location, the same flesh emerges into another. Thus, the weight of the cosmos is unchanged."
"So it's all a matter of focusing?"
"Yes indeed. Though of course, you must know the place you are trying to reach-if you cannot call it to mind precisely, your mind will...wander, and that could be quite perilous indeed."
"Know it in your memory. From having seen it in the past."
"Certainly!"
"Then why is it that we cannot journey through time in the same manner?"
"Journey through time? 'Twould be preposterous. For who among us has seen the future?"
"Perhaps not," Myrddin said. "Yet we can focus on our memories of the past. Why should that not allow us to return there?"
"Ah, you should seek out Helga. She has been working on a most wondrous device that will let her wander back into her memories, as clear as when she first lived them."
Myrddin took this as a hint to leave Salazar in peace, but Helga was no more helpful in terms of practical advice. She was, however, brewing a wide assortment of potions to infuse her crystal ball with; Myrddin watched a milky grey cauldron simmer for half an hour before returning to the dormitories.
It was foolish, he knew, to dare to think he knew more than the witches and wizards who had been immersed in magic all their lives. Yet no generation had dared to found a school before the Hogwarts professors came together. Surely, for every great tool, there was someone who had conceived of it for the first time.
In the end the ritual involved a great deal of treelore. Wands and galls and hidden hollows, digging up roots and spitting on them. Myrddin had never been enthusiastic about Herbology, and had promptly forgotten all the secret names of leaves he'd been forced to memorize in three different languages. But he was diligent, and enjoyed experimentation.
That was good, he thought to himself, because the distant past was surprisingly boring. Yes, there were Muggles tramping around and going on quests, but they weren't interested in listening to anything he had to say. Most hustled by and paid him no mind, while a few patted themselves on the back for deigning to toss a small coin at him. "Lo, in such guises angels appear to us!" one boasted to his friend, as he galloped away. "What fortune that a simple hermit has blessed us with his countenance."
Myrddin, in no mood to debate, let them ride.
As he prepared to jump earlier, he spent many days on the banks of the Ruban, a narrow lake halfway up a mountainside. At first he thought he was alone, out of sight of the questing knights and struggling laborers below, but as days turned to months, he saw the shadow of someone watching him, someone who knew the Ruban well.
"Come and speak," he said. "I mean you no harm."
It was a young woman, her eyes bright, and Myrddin realized how Salazar and Rowena must have felt on that day so many years yet to come-faced with the wonder of a magical child who did not yet know her true power. She gave her name as Nimue, and looked incredulous when Myrddin explained his purpose.
"But never mind that," he said. "I can journey when it suits me. If you allow it, I would teach you what I know of magic." What a pity she had been born too early to study at Hogwarts!
"Why?" she challenged. "You have your reeds to gather, and I have my lake to guard."
"Whyever not? I am alone here, and it is a joy to find someone else who shares my gift."
"You flatter," said Nimue. "But many strange men will say whatever they please to win a lady's heart."
Myrddin laughed. "If it were a heart or a bosom I desired, there are many simpler folk to enchant. I would meet you as an equal, no less."
Nimue gave a thin smile. "I will hold you to that."
It quickly became clear that although Nimue had no training, she had internally come to control some of her magic in ways even she could not fully explain. She grew gillyweed even when the climate was intemperate, allowing her to delve beneath the water for hours at a time. With Myrddin's guidance, she quickly learned to assemble her own wand from a willow tree, transformed fishhooks into majestic swords, and foretold rain and sunshine along the Ruban.
"Why would I want to go and live among the plain-folk?" she asked him one day. "I have all I need here."
"You could guide them," he suggested. "Teach them right and wrong."
"If it were that easy, you'd have made your fortune doing it," she pointed out.
They both knew it was not a fortune he was after, since he could have turned rocks into gold and spent them at his leisure. Still, he felt it was not yet the right time for him to move among the Muggles below.
To his surprise, Nimue gradually grew more emboldened, putting on stunning displays of her magic that served no purpose but to announce her power to the world. Flocks of birds swarmed around the mountain; fires raged, but did not consume the grass; unearthly songs rang from the lake, then fell silent.
The Muggles near the Ruban told stories of the fearless witch that called forth power from her hands. But then, they also told stories of the ageless man who had come from nowhere and shook the world.
"It is always the way," Nimue murmured, shaking her head. She had met him in a cave lower on the mountain, where he stored most of his gathered materials. "A stranger in their midst does great deeds, and they will never believe it is the simple lake-watcher who wields magic of her own."
"You sell yourself short," he said. "I will leave this place, and you can boast of your own achievements."
But she merely planted a kiss to his forehead. "Forgive me."
And she did not look back as she left the cave, a complex spell sealing the entrance behind her. It was a charm as wondrous as any she had conceived, Myrddin could sense, even if the Muggles would never hear of it.
He set himself to the reeds and bark he'd accumulated, throwing in some of the tiny mushrooms that grew in the cave. The past awaited.
The merrymaking of the feastday showed no signs of waning, and when Bors collapsed in a flagon of wine, Merlin (as Arthur insisted on calling him) decided to take his leave before he was doused. "As-pleasant as these proceedings have been," he demurred, "I ought to retire. A blessed Pentecost to both your majesties."
"You'd go mad in an instant without us," Guenevere noted, "and you know it."
"Your judgment is as shrewd as it is benevolent," he said, bowing slightly, "but sometimes I do wonder why you keep me around."
"Anyone can remember the past," Arthur noted. "It's remembering the future that's the trick."
"You rate your fellows too highly," said Merlin. "I suspect very few of them remember the extent of the carousing at New Year's, and so much the better." If he'd happened to see Queen Guenevere escorted to her room by a decidedly non-regal figure, well, he had more important things to be about.
"None of them can promise me whether crops will fail or enemies will conquer. You have foretold one Britain, a united Britain. That is as much as I can hope for, centuries after my reign ends."
"It's not very united," Merlin pointed out. "It took me years just to learn all the professors' languages."
"Are we not united, even though we are not all the same?" Guenevere gestured across the circular table. Palamedes had dark brown skin, while Bertilak was a vivid shade of green, yet they swigged from the same cup and groaned in unison at Dinadan's terrible rhymes.
"Besides, if you were to leave us, I would not be able to threaten to have you turn my nephews into snakes when they play the fool," Arthur pointed out.
"I could not obey such an order, even were you to give it," said Merlin. "Your belief in using might for right extends even to wizards, does it not?"
"True," said Arthur. "But my nephews don't know that."
Kay ran across the village square, gasping for breath as he lugged an unwieldy scabbard behind him. "Merlin! Merlin?"
"What is it?" Merlin asked. "How fares the tournament?"
He had tried to always be generous to the young boy, transfiguring squirrels into pillows and back again to amuse him, or Summoning sweets from the cabinet when his parents weren't looking. He dropped by to mentor Arthur, of course. Even if he could not pass on magic to the young heir, he could at least try to teach the lessons that the older king had heeded so faithfully. But he did not want to make Kay feel second-best.
There would be more than enough risk of that later. Perhaps quite soon, if the scabbard was what he suspected.
"The tournament?" Kay said. "Oh! I disarmed the young fellow from Wessex, but then a brute from Wales beat me about the head-"
"Are you hurt?" Merlin interrupted. He didn't seem to have been addled, but a small healing spell would not go amiss. Assuming that Kay was already eliminated. It wouldn't do to go playing favorites, even in a silly tournament.
"No, no. Listen, can you read printed words?"
"Some," said Merlin. "Even I do not know all the languages of the world."
"That stone over there, by the church, what does it say?"
Merlin took his time walking to the stone that lay against the churchyard gate, as if he had not cast the spell himself to decorate it. "Whoever pulls this sword out of this stone is the rightful king of all England."
"That's my sword!" Kay grinned, producing it from the scabbard. It was larger than the one he normally wore; he was no mere child, Merlin thought, to have adapted well enough to win his first round. "I pulled it out-I'm the king!"
"Did you?"
"Yes!" said Kay. "Er, I'd forgotten my sword, I think I left it back home, but-but I went back to find the first one I could, and there it was. Does that mean I'm the king?"
"Perhaps. A true king must be brave and skilled with a sword, as you surely are. But he also must be fair and honest, even when it is not easy, and always use his power to help those in need."
Kay's face fell as he replaced the sword back in the stone, then tugged on it again. It did not move.
"I-I sent for Arthur to pick it up. How can he be the king? He's just a child!"
"'Tis a long story," said Merlin. "But you will always be his elder brother, and a worthy knight in your own right."
"You just say that because you're a magic man," Kay sulked.
"I am," Merlin admitted. "But I also know you."
The baby screamed as Merlin rode through the rainstorm. By the time night fell, he had yelled himself hoarse, and settled for wimpering in hunger as Merlin made camp. His memories of having done so as a Muggle child so many years later, looking for food and shelter amid the damp grass, were as dim as they were unenlightening. He was grateful for all his magic as he dried off a clearing, made his blanket impervious to water, and transfigured a bottle of wine into milk that the child could suckle at.
Donning a pair of warm gloves that he'd "borrowed" from Tintagel, he made a fire and set to work. Conjuring up a piece of metal was relatively straightforward, but honing it and crafting it to the necessary shape was tiresome even for him. The delicate charm he overlaid it with was one of Godric's tricks; Merlin was grateful that that much had stuck with him.
He doused the fire and waited for the sword to cool, which was not difficult in the rain. Then, still wearing the gloves, he walked back over to the sleeping child and lightly lowered the sword to his clenched hands. The baby woke and began to cry again as Merlin stowed the weapon.
The next morning, they arrived at the home of Sir Ector. The lord had mocked Merlin's "conjuring tricks" on their prior meetings, but his subjects spoke well of him, and that was as much as Merlin could ask for. His wife, Lady Natime, was anxious over the fate of her own son, whom she had recently relinquished to a wet-nurse.
Rather than try to assuage her with the knowledge of the nuisance and swordsman Kay would become, Merlin merely pledged that his young charge was of noble birth, and if she could help raise him, she would be rendering the kingdom a great service. Natime and Ector boldly assented, and Merlin bid his liege farewell for the first and last time.
He Apparated back to London, and hid the sword with the flesh memory within the hollow tree where he'd found it years later, working on his Herbological collection. He left a note for his later self, and then glanced out, taking in the Muggle buildings, the hustle and bustle of their everyday life.
For the first time in countless years, he was alone, unsure where or when to travel. He was old, even for a wizard, but there was still life and magic in his veins.
Merlin recited another complex spell, and a few moments later, a hawk emerged from the tree, tilting and wheeling in the open sky.