AN: Just a little idea I had. I miss Gilli's character (the writers really need to bring him back, since they only had him in that one episode in season 3) and I thought he and Sefa would be cute together. Plus also, my guess is that Sefa, if she comes back on the show, will probably be against Camelot (though, I could be wrong, and I actually kind of hope I am); so I wanted to write a little story where she had a chance to stay on the good side.
Implied pairings: Sefa/Gilli, Arthur/Gwen, and somewhat one-sided Merlin/Sefa.
Sefa crouched down beside the boulder, unable to carry on any longer, her knees giving way. She had been running through the forest, trying to put as much distance between herself and Camelot as possible since her father died.
It was still dark, the sun had not yet risen, and she'd tripped over a tree root, fallen right into a pool of sticky, freezing cold mud that clung to the skirt and bodice of her dress, ruining it. There was even a series of small mud-clods rolling down one of her temples to the side of her chin.
Somewhere, possibly her arm, she was bleeding, because a bramble had scratched her.
All this, and still she pressed on. All this, moving endlessly, and she felt nothing. Nothing but numb, that is.
My father is dead, was for a good while the only thought that could come to her foggy, mist-filled mind. Then, finally, now that she was collapsing, another came: The queen hates me.
Her father hadn't hated her; he'd told her he would always love her. Queen Guinevere did, though, and Sefa supposed she had a right. After all, it was Sefa's betrayal that had put King Arthur and his knights, and even his manservant, Merlin (who Sefa was actually secretly very fond of, and was sorry she wouldn't be seeing him again), in peril.
Maybe they were all already dead.
If they were, Queen Guinevere definitely had some reason for resentment.
It wasn't that Sefa had wanted to hurt Arthur, exactly...the Pendragons, much to her father's disbelief, had been good and kind to her before all this...all she'd wanted was to make her father proud. More than that, she'd wanted to make others proud of him; she wanted his magical talents to be respected. He'd been so gifted, her father... When she was little, he had used to entertain her with little tricks, trifles really; making things float so that she'd giggle...
Still, Guinevere hadn't even allowed her to beg for her life! The death-sentence had stood. Her father had come to rescue her from her forthcoming execution.
Had the queen known he would, or at the very least might, do that? Was that what she'd truly wanted?
Did that make them enemies?
The queen was responsible for her father's death. But, then, her father was responsible, and her, too, having given him the information he needed, for Arthur's and all his men walking straight into a trap.
Arthur Pendragon was the queen's husband; she loved him, and worried so much about him whenever he went away.
Once, Sefa had seen the king, sometime after a late evening meal, looking sleepy and irritable, like he'd had the weight of the world on his shoulders all day and couldn't take one more second of it, only to change completely, smiling warmly and affectionately, when Guinevere entered the room and walked up to him.
"Gwen," he'd said softly, reaching out to touch the side of her face.
Sefa had wanted someone to look at her like that ever since.
Once or twice, she'd even set her sights on Merlin, thinking one day he might look at her like that, but had been too shy to vocalize her interest in him; and he, for all his kindness and patience towards her, had seemed rather oblivious, so that had not come to anything.
It was so hard to reconcile the no good Pendragons her father used to speak of to those she'd actually known. Before all this, the queen hadn't ever so much as raised her voice at her. There were mistresses who shouted all the time, were impossible to please, and threw things at their maidservants, Sefa knew. She had even expected Guinevere to be like that, from all her father told her. Only she hadn't been. Not even a little bit. The queen even told her she understood better than anyone that there were so many things a servant needed to remember and that it was not always so easy. Merlin told her that Gwen had been a maidservant before she married Arthur and he made her a queen. Supposedly there had been a great deal of ado about that. But it was, of course, long before Sefa's time at the court of Camelot, so she knew of it only from Merlin's stories and the occasional offhanded comment from the queen.
She didn't want to hate the queen, but she felt so terribly alone without her father. If it had been a trick, he'd fallen for it. And it was the queen's trick. She was in charge of the guards while King Arthur was away. The men who'd struck her father down where he stood for trying to break her out of the dungeons would have been acting on the queen's orders.
Sefa wished he hadn't come, hadn't died for her like that. At the very least, she wished he hadn't been so badly wounded that he couldn't use his magic to heal himself. She sobbed harder. Her head ached and her throat had gone bone dry. What would she do now? Where would she go? What was left for her?
She could try to join the magic-users that were rising up against the Pendragons, try to make herself feel hate enough towards Camelot, longing for a better life, so that she could do what she must on their behalf; only her heart wasn't in it.
But who else was going to protect her? Anyone who found her and was not against Pendragon rulership would surely turn her in, and then her father would have died for nothing.
Stumbling, she tried to make herself stand. She had to keep moving, after all. Sooner or later the knights would be sure to reach this spot. Her cheeks felt like they were on fire. She slid back down along the line of the boulder, weeping all over again. She had gone and made herself sick with crying; now she was all but completely mad with grief and fever.
Sefa leaned her head on the side of the boulder. It felt so cool against her flaming temple.
Oh, if I'm to die, if it was all to be for nothing, she thought, brokenly, let me expire right here and now, where I can find just this little bit of rest and comfort.
Over the sound of her sobs and whimpers and the throbbing in her ringing ears, Sefa had not heard a twig softly snapping under approaching, carefully-placed footsteps.
Suddenly, there was a voice above her. "Girl... Why you crying?"
It was a nice voice, with the slightest trace of a speech impediment, and the person standing above her appeared to be rather smallish and wore no armour.
Unless, that is, she was delirious with fever and it was really a knight of Camelot, preparing to take her in, or else nothing but a crazed dream.
In the bit of moonlight she had to see by, Sefa saw that the speaking person, real or apparition, had short-cropped sandy-coloured hair and was dressed plainly, like a commoner or a servant.
It didn't matter. She looked down into her lap and rested her head on the boulder again.
"What's your name?"
Perhaps it was rude not to answer, even if he wasn't really there. "Sefa," she murmured, her voice little more than a trickle of a whisper. "My name is Sefa."
He crouched down beside her. "Gilli."
She looked up, straight into his eyes. It was madness and exhaustion, perhaps, but she found in herself the unexplainable urge to tell this complete stranger everything; to answer his question, with fully honesty, as to why she was crying.
A wrapped object fell out of the satchel he had flung over one shoulder and Sefa's quick fingers grabbed it first and pulled back the fabric, revealing a ring bearing a symbol of the Old Religion on its seal.
It was magic, Gilli's conduit, or channel, for his powers, but of course Sefa couldn't know that. What she knew was that he either had magic himself or else was an ally of the Old Religion.
She could trust him.
Or, at least, if she couldn't trust him so much on his own merits, she could trust him more than the knights of Camelot or anyone else she might meet up with in these woods.
With trembling fingers attached to a shaking hand, Sefa gave him back the ring, to show she meant no harm.
Gilli slipped the ring onto his middle finger for safe keeping.
"I haven't got a father anymore," Sefa told him. "That's why I was crying." Her whole body shuddered violently. Saying it aloud had made it all the more real and she wasn't sure she was truly ready for that yet. "I was crying because I haven't got a father anymore." He's dead... He's really dead and gone...
"Neither have I," said Gilli, shrugging the now slipping satchel back over his shoulder.
Sefa wiped at her eyes with the back of her wrist. "What happened to yours?"
"Killed," said Gilli. "A long time ago. He had three men on him, in a fight. There was nothing else he could have done." His gaze shifted briefly from Sefa to the ring on his finger, lost in a quick yet somber memory.
Somehow, Sefa seemed to understand what he left unsaid along with what he told her. "My father had magic, too."
"I'm sorry." Gilli's eyebrows raised in simultaneous sympathy. "Really and truly I am."
"Are you a rebel?" Sefa whisper-hissed urgently, looking both ways, though no one else was there. "Are you against the king of Camelot?"
Gilli shook his head and, reaching out, wiped the mud off her face with the back of his sleeve. "No. I haven't got nuffin against Arthur Pendragon. I hated Uther, once. But a friend told me that, one day, as impossible as it might seem, magic will be permitted in Camelot once again. We'll all be free then, yeah?"
"But," sniffled Sefa, thinking of her father's hatred for the Pendragons, "you don't think those with magic have to fight back to make that happen?"
"I did, years ago," Gilli admitted. "It was almost five years ago, I think... Almost... Almost I had the chance to kill Uther in a fight. I won, but I was goin' to kill him anyway. Someone changed my mind."
Sefa's eyes widened. "Who?"
"The friend I spoke of." He smiled; he had not seen Merlin from that day to this, but he still remembered him fondly. "A very good friend."
Sefa felt as if she knew this friend of his, somehow. "Did he have magic, too?"
"Yes," said Gilli. "Believe me, he understands what it's like to be picked on."
She dropped his gaze.
"And so do I."
"Are you on your own?"
"Yeah, for the moment. I was just in Camelot to get supplies." Gilli sighed. "We... We're wanders."
"Who?"
"A small group of magic-users who don't want to kill Arthur Pendragon but have found no peace among ordinary, non-magical people in Camelot as of yet. We have to stay hidden from both sides of the argument. Like the Druids do, sort of. Most of 'em, anyway."
"That sounds..." Sefa didn't know what she meant to say. Safe, maybe. It sounded safe... As much as she felt her father might have wanted her to carry on his fight, maybe he'd wanted her to be safe even more so. He had died, giving up his cause, for her life.
"You could join us," Gilli let her know.
"You would take me away from here?" she breathed, scarcely daring to believe it.
"Course," said Gilli kindly.
"Why would you do that for me?"
"We kin," replied Gilli, offering her his hand.
"Kin," she whispered, taking it, his ring feeling warm as a coal against her ice-cold, nearly ghost-like hand. I'm sorry if this isn't what you wanted, Father, I only ever wanted to make you proud... But this is what I must do: I must go with him, with Gilli, now.
Gilli picked up an oil lantern he'd left behind a knobby root when he'd approached her.
In the light of this lantern, as he looked back at her, Sefa thought she saw the corners of Gilli's mouth turn up in a smile.
That smile wasn't quite like the one King Arthur had given Queen Guinevere, but it wasn't unlike it, either.
Perhaps someday it would be.
If it was, if that kind of smile could be shared between them, in the future, it would be like a sort of magic.
And, maybe, just maybe, that sort of magic would be freely permitted in Camelot, between them, one day, too.