Chapter 2: Child of Councils
I grew up in the council room. Uncle Merlin says that when I was a baby, Mother carried me everywhere with her, even to all her meetings. That didn't stop when I began getting older. I dimly remember sitting on the train of my mother's dress as a toddler, listening to the comforting hum of familiar voices over my head as my mother and uncles (and sometimes other people) discussed things I paid no attention to. I would be playing with a collection of toys, and whenever I would get bored one of them would unexpectedly move – would pounce on me or slip away and lead me on a chase after it or jump from hand to hand without my doing anything. If any of the adults talking were annoyed by my childish squeals of pleasure, they had the good sense never to mention it.
Even more dimly, I remember catching a faint glimpse of gold in Uncle Merlin's eyes.
It would be a long time before I would look back on those memories and realize that Uncle Merlin had been keeping as close an eye on me as Mother ever did, and that he was good at enchanting toys to keep me from boredom.
I think Mother knew he was doing it, too.
When I was old enough to get a tutor, that annoying man and Mother made me bring my homework to the council meetings instead of toys. The first time I was decidedly sulky about it, and sat at my new desk a bit back from the table glaring at the papers I was supposed to be practicing letters on. Uncle Merlin, of course, was sitting where he could see me, and suddenly my quill rose up and wrote a whole row of practice letters across the top of the page.
I glared at Merlin, but he wasn't looking at me then at all. The quill, however, inked itself and hovered in front of me. Wanting nothing more than to snap it in half, I snatched it up and began copying letters.
Some of Uncle Merlin's letters, though, were like no letters I had seen before, all fancy swirls and complicated lines, and they were fun to copy. Uncle Merlin kept stealing my quill and writing new rows of letters, both ordinary and fascinating, for me to copy throughout the meeting. When I showed my tutor my work later, he stared at it blankly and declared that this wasn't the work he had set me at all.
"I know!" I said gleefully. "But what are all these strange letters?"
My tutor rubbed his forehead tiredly (it was something he did pretty often, considering that I was a very impatient student). "I'm not sure I recognize them," he told me. "They can only be the letters of the language of spells."
As soon as my tutor let me go, I was in Uncle Merlin's chambers, begging him to teach me how to write his letters.
I was frustrated. I was old enough to be on the council and help decide what was going on – I was! Yet here I sat at my desk across the room, supposed to be writing a summary of a chapter of boring history.
"This is wretched," I wrote on my parchment instead. "I'm old enough to help out!"
I jumped when my quill wrenched itself from my hand and wrote a sentence across the page in the flowing old language Uncle Merlin had taught me. "Those old enough to truly help do not sit griping in corners because they cannot."
It sounded like something he said when he looked like he was trying to be wise but wound up making me laugh instead. This time I grinned in spite of myself – then something suddenly occurred to me, and I dashed out a line in the old language. "How did you know what I was writing from over there!?"
There was no change in the way Uncle Merlin was sitting, but the letters that the quill inked across my page had a decidedly smug look to them. "I have very far-seeing eyes, young prince. You would be wise to remember that."
I knew Merlin was using magic somehow, because there was no way anyone could see my paper from the angle he was at. "You're cheating! You're using magic," I wrote.
"Using magic is not cheating," the quill wrote back. It inked the word "not" twice.
I huffed and dragged my history book dully toward me, unable to think of a really good comeback to that. A moment later, though, to my surprise, the quill began writing again, this time in ordinary letters.
"I'd take history over this council meeting, Little Dragon. We're discussing the prices of wheat. Deadly dull."
My lips twitched, but I promptly wrote back, "This chapter of my book is dull too! It's all about treaties and negotiations. There's not even a good battle in it."
The quill jumped out of my hands almost before I finished the last letter, and wrote Uncle Merlin's response with an odd intensity. "Battles are not good, young prince. If you are lucky, you will spend your kingship dealing with treaties and negotiations and rarely see a battlefield."
"But I want to fight!" I wrote back before I realized how whiny it sounded. After all, what was the point of all my training with Leon if I was never going to fight?
"You won't after you find what it means to kill a man," the quill wrote back sharply, this time in the old language. And at the table, Uncle Merlin shifted, resting his face on his hand and half-covering his eyes.
That made me feel bad. Usually I could prod and tease with Uncle Merlin and he would laugh along with me, but there were moments like this that flashed out and I remembered that he was broken, that there were things in his past he never told me about for all his storytelling.
"I'm sorry," I wrote shyly after a long moment.
Uncle Merlin didn't move, but the quill did, slowly, still using the old language. "In time, I hope, you will come to see that you need to know how to defend your kingdom with your life, but you use every avenue of diplomacy open to you before you declare war or do something that will cause war. It was a lesson Arthur had to learn as king."
That sobered me thoroughly, and I nodded earnest agreement and opened my history book with determination to make this summary the best I had ever written. But when I turned back to begin writing it, I found that the quill had added another few lines, this time in the usual letters.
"I still think you're lucky, getting to read history over being in on this boring meeting. Arthur could get bored of meetings very easily. He got me to cover for him a few times, which usually ended with me in the stocks. But that was mostly when he was besotted with Sophia . . . "
I chuckled at this without meaning to, and was rewarded with a glare from some councilmember. But I knew I was forgiven now, and the dots at the end hinted that it will be easy to drag the story from Uncle Merlin sometime later.
I never figured out for sure how Uncle Merlin can read what I write on my papers, but we have had plenty of conversations with my quill during council meetings. We have a running contest over who can make the other laugh; it isn't fair, because Uncle Merlin is quite good at not laughing. When I demand why, he simply says, "Try keeping your face straight while serving the king and a prince who is making up a story about a beast with the body of a lion, the wings of an eagle, and the face of a bear."
Eventually I begin listening in on the meetings, and find myself agreeing with Uncle Merlin – they really can be boring. But it makes me feel like a prince, and some day future king, to add a comment here and there.
It also means that no one, not even Mother, thinks of sending me from the room when the councils discuss dangerous things.
Like when the Saxons begin marching against us.
A/N: Hope you enjoyed! The next chapter should appear on Monday and will be called "Of the Lower Town."