Chapter 4: Camelot, Magic, and Merlin

It is a fact that I've known since I was old enough to know any history at all that under my grandfather Uther magic was banned in Camelot.

I've known since I was old enough to know anything at all that Uncle Merlin has magic.

It took me an embarrassingly long time, though, to realize that those two facts together meant that Uncle Merlin being who he is was illegal under my grandfather.


Magic has been legal in Camelot for as long as I can remember. There are plenty of magic users among the guards nowadays, and several among the knights. If you go into the lower town, there are multiple magical peddlers selling goods from the useful to the outright ridiculous, from protection charms to flowers charmed to turn into butterflies when you give them to your girlfriend and say, "I love you." A few of the druids have decided to settle in Camelot; the majority of them are still wanderers, but there are enough around that seeing a druid tattoo is a fairly common occurrence. And there is Anna, who was my first friend with magic, but who has most certainly not been the last.

There are also plenty of healer's houses where the healers use magic to speed cures or cure the incurable. Uncle Percival says that life expectancy is longer since healers started being able to use magic, and since it's Uncle Percival who said it, I believe him. The first man to open a house of healing in Camelot was Gilli, who is Uncle Merlin's closest wizard friend. Once Uncle Merlin took me to Gilli's to be healed of a scratch that had become infected. "I'm not very good at healing," he told me. "But Gilli has gotten a lot better at it since the days when he used to scorch walls when he tried to do it. Isn't that right?"

He said this last with a laughing glance at Gilli, who gave him a friendly glare. "Much better, I'll have you know," he said. "You don't see scorches covering the walls here, do you?" And with that he put his hand on my shoulder, and as his eyes flashed gold, a wave of heat swept through me. When I pulled up my sleeve, the cut was barely a line on my arm.

"That's awesome!" I shouted – magic always intrigued me, and this was really cool magic. "Why can't we do this for every cut I get?"

Gilli chuckled. "We healers would get run into the ground pretty fast if you came to us for every cut," he told me. "Now get along with you, princeling. I have work to be doing."


Almost all the magic I have ever seen is fun or useful. I know there are dangerous sides to magic, though, and part of Uncle Merlin's job as Court Sorcerer is to deal with those things. Whenever someone comes to court with a complaint about dangerous magical beasts or sorcerers, Merlin is sure to vanish for a few days shortly thereafter. Mother can sometimes convince him to take Uncle Leon or Uncle Percival along, but mostly he goes by himself. Mostly he comes back in fairly short order and tells Mother that everything is alright; occasionally this gets spun into new and exciting stories for me. There are times, though, when he comes back wounded. Mother confines him to his room then and hovers over him worriedly, and I tend to hang around in his chambers and keep him entertained until he's on his feet again. It is the times right after these that he is most likely to take Uncle Leon or Percival along, in a concession to Mother's worry over him.


We have our own dragon in Camelot. Aithusa is Uncle Merlin's dragon, and she flies in and out of Camelot quite frequently. She is a beautiful white dragon with light blue eyes, and quite affectionate if you manage to make friends with her, but she is also quite shy and skittish for being such a large and powerful creature. She never talks aloud, but Merlin rarely tires of interpreting what she says in his mind if you want to have a conversation with her.

She is terrifying to fly on, though. Terrifying and exhilarating.

I took my first dragon flight at the age of six after having begged and nagged and begged some more until Uncle Merlin was absolutely sick of my begging and convinced my very skeptical mother to let me take a short flight. He was of the opinion, I think, that he should never have told me he had flown on Kilgharrah, the old Great Dragon who died when I was too young to remember him, because I started pleading to fly on a dragon the next minute and didn't let up. In the end, the next time Aithusa came to the citadel, Uncle Merlin took me with him to meet her in the courtyard.

"Amhar wants to fly you," he told her, one arm around my shoulders, other hand on her face. "So you are to fly very slowly and as gently as you can manage it, and you are not to gain such a great height that he will be badly damaged if he falls – oh, don't tell me that you don't know enough about the internal structure of earthlings to understand that! I'll tell you if you're getting too high. And –"

He went on in a very long list of safety precautions, but I had stopped listening, trying to imagine what the flight would be like instead.

"And Amhar," the lecture turned suddenly to me and I had to pay attention. "You are to hold on to me and let me hold on to you, and don't lean too far forward, and don't tell Aithusa to go higher, and try not to startle her with yelling, and – and basically don't do anything that will make me – and you! – afraid to see your mother afterwards."

I had a wide, silly grin on my face. "I promise, Uncle Merlin! I promise!" I shouted. "Now let's go!"

Uncle Merlin sighed deeply, but Aithusa lowered her wings, and I could tell by her face she was eager for this too. Merlin settled himself carefully astride her, and I patted her side as he pulled me up and settled me in front of him, one arm very securely around my waist.

"Do try not to fall off, Amhar," he told me. "Gently, Aithusa."

The dragon sprang to the air with quick flapping of her wings, and I was tossed up and down and shrieked with an odd mixture of fear and delight. But Uncle Merlin's arm was secure around me, and I trusted him utterly, and besides, this was really exciting!

Aithusa's flying leveled out when we cleared the city walls. To my disappointment, Uncle Merlin did not let her fly high enough that I could touch a cloud, but we did clear the treetops for a while. I was whooping, arms spread wide; the wind was sharp in my face, blowing my dark curls back, and I blinked to see against it. I could see for miles – I thought the view was even better than the one you can get from the towers of Camelot, and it was changing every minute.

Best of all, though, I was flying – I was in the air like a bird, soaring weightlessly through the sky. I shouted my triumph to the skies.

When Aithusa finally landed in the Camelot courtyard again, I was breathless from shouting and laughing – and very impatient to go again.

Mother was standing on the steps when we got off, and she swept me into a hug as soon as I got close to her.

"You're safe, Amhar," she breathed.

But I had never doubted I wouldn't be safe. "Of course I am!" I chirped. "Mother, you should come sometime! The wind is strong and you can see so far – and it's flying!" There was no other way to sum it up.

Mother glanced at Uncle Merlin; he shrugged and smiled.

"It was fun," he admitted, and then at Mother's glare he added quickly, "Aithusa is a good flyer. I was never worried about his safety." He patted the dragon's head, and she beamed.


Uncle Merlin never lets me fly alone, but he's taken me flying fairly often since then. I'm afraid that flight didn't do anything to stop my begging; I just started begging for more flights. Aithusa was happy to grant them, but it took us a while to get Mother to trust I was safe. I finally managed to convince her to fly once; she wasn't as reluctant about me going thereafter but stated firmly she was going to keep her feet on the ground for the rest of her life.

One morning a couple of months after I met Anna and Galahad, I came down into the courtyard to find Aithusa there and Uncle Merlin talking to her. The moment Anna and Galahad appeared that afternoon, I raced to meet them.

"Aithusa's come!" I shouted. "The dragon! You can ride her with me!"

It took me longer than I expected to convince them that there was actually a live dragon about the castle – I'd forgotten they weren't from Camelot originally, and it took me tracking down Aithusa (she was on top of one of the towers) and showing her off to them before they would believe me. Anna seemed eager to fly, even if she sounded rather nervous about it, but I was astonished at how long it took me to convince Galahad that flying a dragon was not an utterly crazy, irrational idea, as he first termed it. Aithusa listened to our discussion with an insufferable amount of smug amusement on her face.

When I had finally convinced the two of them, I dragged them off to Uncle Merlin's quarters.

"Here you are, Anna," he said as we burst through the door. "I was beginning to wonder –" He glanced up from the book he was looking at and suddenly looked rather weary as he stared at us. "Oh no," he said. "I know that face, Amhar. I'm not going to like what's coming, am I?"

"Anna and Galahad want to ride Aithusa!" I told him eagerly. "Come on!"

Uncle Merlin ran a hand down his face. "I was right," he commented, mostly to himself. "I don't like this at all."

By the time I had convinced him to ask Anna and Galahad's parents if he could take them for a dragon flight ("I am not going to tell them their children died flying a dragon they didn't even know existed!"), I was getting very tired of convincing people my idea was a good one. I was also wondering why no one but me seemed to see its brilliance. I complained about that to Mother that night.

"Darling," she said, smiling, "not everyone shares your enthusiasm for dragon flights."

But it all worked out in the end. Uncle Merlin refused to take all three of us at once, saying that was too many squirming children to look after and it might overload the dragon, but he took first me and Galahad, and then me and Anna.

Galahad didn't like flying at all; in fact, he was quite green by the time our short flight ended. "You're beautiful," he told Aithusa, "but I never want to feel the ground fall away like that again."

Anna, on the other hand, shouted eagerly at the first rush of wind in her face, and watched the world intently with a very wide smile on her face as we flew. To my relief, we didn't have to shorten her flight.

She didn't catch my undying enthusiasm for riding on a dragon, but she liked it quite a bit. Enough that I had a partner to help me badger Uncle Merlin into giving me even more flights thereafter.

"I declare," he said once, "there are days I regret you ever met Aithusa or Anna." But his eyes were dancing as he said it, and I knew he didn't really mind at all.


But amid all this magic, Uncle Merlin is decidedly hesitant to use magic.

It took me a long time to realize this, too, but he never uses magic freely if there is anyone besides me and my mother, and sometimes Uncles Percival and Leon, in the room. The only people besides our little group that he seems comfortable doing magic in front of are his apprentices or other sorcerers; around them he will relax and magic will flow from him. That's one of the reasons I enjoy sitting in on his lessons whenever I get the time, apart from the draws of learning about the magic that frankly fascinates me and spending time with Uncle Merlin. He never minds me sitting in.

Around me, he uses magic freely; when he tells me stories he often illustrates them in the flames in the fireplace. He's very good at making magical beasts appear in the coals to show me whatever it is he's talking about.

No matter how I beg, though, he will never make a dragon in the fire.

He occasionally uses magic to help tidy my chambers too, and once or twice he's straightened out my childish sketches with his magic to make them really beautiful drawings, and he never tires of animating my toys. To me, Uncle Merlin is magic and magic is Uncle Merlin, and he's never shy of using it around me.

If there is anyone else in the room, though, even if it's just Mother, he tends to glance their direction as though for permission before he does anything, and the more people there are in the room, the less he does magic. If we're in a larger group, like if he and I are toying with my quill during a council meeting, he will lower his eyes or shade them with his hand to hide the gold they turn.

Of course, being Court Sorcerer of Camelot, he sometimes has to perform displays of magic for grand feasts, but when I got older I realized that he tends to be tense and on edge when he does this, as though some part of him is screaming at him that it's not right. Ever since I realized that, the showers of flowers or the candle flames turning different colors seem less something to be reveled in than they did when I was a young child.

I once asked him why he's so hesitant about performing magic when there's anyone else in the room.

"Long habit, I guess," he told me. "I had to keep it secret for a very long time."

There was a tone in his voice that I've learned to identify as the echo of old pain when he spoke.

It was then that I put it together and realized that under my grandfather he would have been illegal.

"You were here when Grandfather reigned, right?" I asked, puzzled, because I knew he was here when Father was a prince by his stories.

"Of course," he said, and then realizing why I was confused, he added, "That's why I had to keep it secret. It would have been my death if anyone had known I had it."

Right. I had forgotten that under Uther the sentence for magic was death.

"But that's ridiculous!" I exclaimed. "It's not like you could help having magic."

Merlin smiled ever so slightly. "Your grandfather," he said softly, "was blinded by his own pain where magic was concerned. In the process he caused pain to many, many others. I don't think there's a magical family today that wasn't affected in some way by the Great Purge."

"Were you?" I asked.

"Of course," he said quietly, but I could tell by his tone that he woudn't tell me more.

It hit me, then, that Uncle Merlin still carried the pain my grandfather had caused in him. The Purge had made him afraid of showing his magic plainly.

I asked Anna later if the Purge had affected her. She gave me an odd look, then told me, "My father says his brother had magic and is dead. He won't tell us anything more than that, except that it is beyond strange that we seek refuge in Camelot now when he fled from it before."

Strange it may be, but I am so glad that the Purge isn't around to cause pain any longer. Besides, I could never imagine a Camelot without magic; it's a part of her now.


A/N: I certainly didn't intend for the chapters to keep getting longer, but that seems to be happening. Hopefully you're enjoying reading this story as much as I am writing it! Thank you so much to everyone who read, followed, or reviewed! (Sorry if you got two updates about this chapter - I posted it and promptly realized I'd left a few things out, so I had to redo it.) The next chapter will be on Friday - "Without Arthur."