It was completely dark and very cold, with the fire he had lit emitting only a small waning light, when Merlin woke to dimly sense someone shaking his shoulder.

"Merlin!" Gaius repeated for what was probably the twentieth time. He sounded urgent and more than a little annoyed.

"Sorry," he mumbled to the physician, rolling upright and looking around him. "You found me, then..."

"You're just lucky I'm the one who came after your signal," Gaius chided him. "Really, Merlin. How could you have been so irresponsible?"

"I did the best I could with the time I had," Merlin said simply. "Which wasn't much. What are we going to do about Arthur?"

"Unlike someone I know," Gaius said pointedly, "I brought horses with me. We'll carry Arthur back into Camelot as quietly as we can and just hope nobody notices."

"That's it?" asked Merlin, but then a better question occurred to him. "Shouldn't he be awake by now?"

"He hasn't woken since you rescued him?" Gaius checked.

Merlin shook his head. "He wasn't breathing when I got him out of the water. It was way too close a call. I only got there just in time." He shivered at the thought of what might have happened if he'd been any later.

Gaius had moved away from him and was examining Arthur. He raised one of his eyelids experimentally as he spoke. "He seems to be all right. He'll probably wake up by the morning."

"That's good, at least." Merlin pushed himself to his feet, trying to shake the last vestiges of tiredness away from his body; the world spun sickeningly for a few seconds before falling back into place. Together, Merlin and Gaius managed somehow to sling Arthur over the back of one of the horses. Merlin looked down at the horses' hooves and was relieved to see that Gaius had thought to tie the hooves with cloth, muffling the clatter they would make against the flagstones of Camelot. He loaded Arthur's gear into the saddlebags of the horse they'd put Arthur on, and clumsily knotted the arms of his jacket around the prince's neck so that the too-small garment could still offer some warmth.

Merlin mounted another of the horses and guided it to the side of Arthur's horse, placing one hand firmly on the prince's back to make sure he stayed in place. Gaius mounted his horse - Merlin was impressed, not for the first time, by his agility - and led the way back through the forest.

"So, what happened exactly?" Gaius asked as they led the horses steadily through the forest the way Merlin had come. "It could be important."

"When I arrived at the lake, Sophia was already standing in the lake with her hand over the water, and Aulfric was chanting something. I couldn't see Arthur. I saw one of the staffs on the ground, so I summoned it and used it to...well...blow them up," Merlin finished a little sheepishly. It wasn't the most elegant thing he had ever done, he knew. "Then I fished Arthur out of the lake. The rest you can more or less see."

Gaius nodded, looking sharply over his shoulder at Merlin for a moment before turning forward in his saddle again.

Merlin's heart was in his mouth the whole way back through Camelot, but Gaius apparently knew all the back ways and somehow they managed to enter the city more or less unnoticed. Merlin frowned at the physician when he turned the horses towards the stables instead of the palace.

"How are we going to get Arthur back to his rooms?" he asked, worried.

Gaius shrugged as he and Merlin slid down from their horses. "We'll have to manage it somehow. We can hardly lead the horses through the castle. We could try to carry him, I suppose - "

Merlin thought of how hard they'd had to work to even get Arthur onto his horse, then considered the armor they also had to somehow carry, and decided that while it was feasible, they could do better. He muttered a few words under his breath, and suddenly Arthur was floating in midair between Merlin and Gaius.

Gaius stared at him. "Why didn't you just do that before, Merlin?" he asked, exasperated.

"Um...it would have looked suspicious in daylight?" Merlin tried. Gaius just stared at him. "I don't know," he admitted, suddenly angry. "I didn't think of it, all right?" He turned to take Arthur's things off his horse, not looking at the older man. He was confused and angry with himself. He knew himself well enough, or thought he did, to know he should have at least thought of the possibility much earlier. How had he overlooked it?

He struggled silently with the question as he floated Arthur down the hallways of the castle to his room, took back his jacket and helped Gaius get Arthur into bed. He just left Arthur's armor in a pile in a corner of his room. He knew he might get into trouble tomorrow, but somehow he just couldn't bother himself to put it where it was supposed to go. Instead, he only looked at Arthur for a few moments, reassuring himself that he was going to be all right, before following Gaius back to their rooms.

He'd felt exhausted all night, but somehow he found he couldn't sleep. He ended up waiting until the physician was asleep, then, for lack of anything better to do, poking through the books on magical creatures that Gaius possessed, searching for the book with the chapter on the Sidhe, and returning to his room to read it when he'd found it. He'd meant to read through the entire section, but he ended up shoving under his bed before he'd read three pages and staring irritably at the ceiling, waiting for either morning or sleep to come and wondering why he still felt so uneasy about that which should have been over and done.