I am so sorry for the wait for this chapter. I could give you a long list of excuses about how I've just started a new school and how the workload there is horrible and how it takes me about an hour and twenty minutes to get home and how I have only a little time to write in the evenings, but instead I'll just ask you to give me suggestions on how I can punish myself for my tardiness. Hopefully I'll make up for it with this slightly longer than usual chapter.

Another thing I've been doing this week instead of writing this is going back over the first couple of chapters of TSoaA and editing bits. A big thank you to guest reviewer True North for all your suggestions!

Updates will now be slower seeing as I'm back at school, but I will preserve! Expect updates to be quicker at the weekends.

Well done to those of you who knew where the quote came from. It's from "A Game of Thrones", the book, not the TV series. Although it might be from the series, I've never watched it so I wouldn't know.

The more observant of you may have noticed that I've changed the story's genre to angst/suspense. This does not mean that I've changed the plot in any way, I just think that it describes the story better considering my obsession for cliffhangers.

Merlin stared at the druid girl for a few moments. That was impossible. Completely impossible.

Yet there she was, standing before him, blood in her body and a pulse in her neck. She was alive.

He stepped forwards, reaching out a hand to touch her cheek, just to see if she was real. His fingers brushed against her skin and he felt her warmth. Yes, she was definitely alive.

"Freya," he said again, and then he rushed forwards, enveloping her in a hug.

She stiffened suddenly and he loosened his grip a little, worried that he'd hurt her, but then she threw her arms around his body and hugged him back.

As he held on to her, he tried to work around the impossibility that she was alive. She should be dead. He had held her in his arms and felt the life leave her. He had cremated her body. She had been dead. Yet somehow, she was here, right next to him. Alive.

He knew it wasn't impossible to reach those who had left this world. He had seen Freya after she had died in the Waters of Avalon and had been able to speak to her, and then there were shades and the Drocha, but he had never thought that someone could actually come back with a beating heart.

The two stood together, locked in their embrace for a few more moments before pulling apart. He suddenly found standing next to her slightly awkward, especially with all the knights watching. Each of them were staring at him and Freya with expressions of confusion on their faces, trying to figure out if they knew the girl. Arthur was the first to speak.

"Who –?" he began, but Merlin cut him off.

"This is Freya," he said, looking to each of the knights. "She's an old friend."

"More than a friend I'd say," Gwaine whispered to Percival behind his hand.

Merlin glared at him, but the knight just smirked back.

"Are you alright?" Arthur asked Freya.

She nodded shyly, her hand resting on her elbow, just beneath her cut.

"Maybe you should apologise, Gwaine," the king said, nudging him in the arm.

"Oh, right," Gwaine stepped forwards and adopted an apologetic expression. "I'm sorry for shooting you. Does it hurt much?"

"A little," Freya said, looking at her feet.

"Here," Merlin said, taking off his neckerchief.

He tied it around her arm gently and wiped a small trickle of blood off her skin with a shaking thumb. He tried not to stare at her, but found it impossible. After all, she was meant to be dead. How could she be here?

He tore his gaze away from her face and found Arthur and the knights all staring at him. Suddenly quite conscious of how close he was standing next to her, he stepped backwards a little.

By this time, the other beaters had chased the game into the range of the hunters and were congregating a short distance away. Some of the other knights were coming over to see what was happening. They looked confused to find a girl in the midst of the king and his most trusted knights and a couple of them started asking Sir Leon questions. Arthur saw this and said loud enough for everyone to hear, "There will be no more sport today," and then quieter to Freya, "Come, you need to see a physician."

They began to walk back towards their horses, Merlin slightly shakily. He took a few steps forwards, Freya staying close by his side, and then tripped over his own feet. He heard a few titters of laughter behind him as he stumbled, quickly righted himself and tried to look dignified. Freya gave a slight giggle and looked at him fondly. He smiled at her and tried to ignore the way his stomach was doing back flips.

The journey back to Camelot didn't seem to take as long as it had on the way there, but maybe that was because his mind was preoccupied. Freya was sitting with Gwaine. The knight had volunteered to share his horse with her, possibly as a way to apologise for shooting her, and seeing as Merlin was on foot like all the other beaters he couldn't complain.

She leaned back against Gwaine's chest and fell asleep on the way back, it seemed that she was exhausted. Merlin was a little disappointed by this, he had wanted to speak to her about the complete impossibility of her existence, but he wouldn't have been able to anyway, not with so many people around and Gwaine within such a close proximity.

Gwaine slowed his horse slightly, dropping back from the other knights to travel alongside Merlin.

"So Merlin," he said. "Where do you know Freya from then?"

He had been preparing himself for this, people would want to know the back-story between them, so he had quickly prepared something just in case.

"We first met a few years ago when she came to Camelot, visiting friends. I met her when she came to Gaius for a remedy for something. She was a good friend of mine," he said, hoping he wouldn't get caught in the lie.

"That's it?" Gwaine said, clearly disappointed with his tale. "It doesn't explain why you looked at her like you'd seen a ghost."

"For a moment there I thought I had," he replied.

Gwaine looked at him questioningly and he elaborated.

"I heard that the village where she lived got attacked by bandits, I didn't realise that she had survived."

He had decided to stick to the truth as much as possible, it would make it easier for him to lie to people, and this version of events would explain his reaction to seeing her and hopefully wouldn't raise awkward questions.

"Why didn't you say anything?" Gwaine asked.

"It was before I knew you," he replied.

They were silent for a few minutes, in which Merlin quickly filled in the details in his mind of Freya's story. He hoped that when she woke up she wouldn't object to his new version of her life.

Every now and again he would glance up at her, he tried to be discrete about it, but Gwaine noticed.

"There wasn't something going on between you two was there?" he asked, slyly.

"No," he shook his head and avoided eye contact.

"Are you sure?" he wheedled.

"Yes," he ducked his head, but couldn't stop the blush from creeping into his cheeks.

"Aha!" Gwaine exclaimed. "So there was something between you two!"

"There's no need to shout about it!" he said, irritably. "It was only a short while anyway."

The knight smiled smugly, pleased that he had got a reaction out of his friend.

The rest of the journey passed quickly, with Merlin walking along in a kind of daze, trying to figure out how Freya could possibly be alive. She couldn't be a shade could she? But shades didn't have their counterpart's memories, and Freya had recognised him, no one else knew that Merlin had helped her. People had suspected it and Gaius had known, but no one could possibly know about how close they had grown, not even his mentor knew.

So if she couldn't be a shade, what other explanations were there? Not many as far as he could see. So perhaps it really was her. Was she even alive? Yes, she had a pulse and she could bleed. She was definitely alive. But how?

No matter however hard he concentrated, however hard he thought, he couldn't come up with an explanation. The whole way back to Camelot he went through every single scenario he could think of, but none of them made sense. By the time they walked through the gates of the citadel he had exhausted all his ideas and had a throbbing headache.

The plate was set upon the table with shaking hands. Morgana looked up at Tanwen to see the grey eyes avert themselves from her face to look instead at the floor.

She had grown used to her maidservant's attitude. She suspected that she was afraid of her; it wasn't surprising, many people showed fear in her presence. They frequently avoided her as though she was contagious and no one would walk alongside her in the corridors.

She looked at the plate of food in front of her and found that she really didn't fancy it. She felt sick just looking at the rich food. She pushed it away from her and said, "I'm not hungry."

Cautiously, Tanwen pushed it back in front of her.

"You must eat," she said quietly.

"I don't feel like eating," Morgana replied.

"You need food, milady," she persisted.

Resigning herself to her fate, she nibbled the end of a strawberry.* Her stomach clenched and she felt nauseous. She put the fruit back down and said, "I can't eat, I feel ill."

Tanwen took the plate and said, "Is there anything else, milady?"

Morgana waved a hand.

"No, you can go."

The girl left the room a little too hurriedly. Morgana wondered if she would ever stop being afraid of her.

She sighed and walked over to the window. She could hear hooves on the cobbles and when she looked down on the courtyard, she saw that Arthur's hunting party had returned. She watched them for a few moments. Arthur jumped off his horse and called out an order to someone. To Morgana's surprise, it wasn't Merlin who came to take the kings horse from him. She searched the group for the dark haired servant and eventually spotted him helping someone down off a horse, a young woman. Morgana frowned and leaned closer to the glass to see better. She was pretty sure that they hadn't gone out with any women, so why had they come back with one?

The girl seemed to have a blue piece of cloth tied around her arm, perhaps she was hurt. In that case, Merlin would be taking her to see Gaius. She watched him guide her over the cobbles towards the castle; it certainly looked like he was heading towards the physician's chambers.

Deciding that she would go and find out who the girl was, she turned her back to the window and walked from the room, telling her guards that she wished to visit the physician on the way out of her chambers.

She reached Gaius's chambers in just a few minutes. Knocking on the door, she heard the voices inside fade away. After a few seconds the door opened and she saw Merlin's face appear behind it.

"Morgana!" he said happily. "Come in."

He opened the door for her and she stepped inside, her guards following closely. Once inside, the guards went to stand slightly apart from her. They had learned that she liked her space and didn't want someone breathing down her neck all the time, although they didn't stand so far away that they couldn't spring into action if she did anything.

Morgana looked over towards where Gaius was standing and saw him examining a cut on the arm of the girl she had seen in the courtyard. She and Merlin stood to one side and she said to him quietly, "Who is that?"

"That's Freya," he replied. "I knew her a few years ago. Gwaine shot her when we were out hunting."

"He shot her?!" she exclaimed.

"The cut isn't very deep, she'll be alright," he reassured her.

"Where does she come from?" she asked.

Merlin hesitated, then glanced over her shoulder at the guards. He lowered his gaze and muttered something under his breath. Morgana realised what he was doing and stood in between him and the guards, hiding his eyes as they flashed gold. Once his eyes had returned to their normal colour she risked a glance behind her to see that the guards seemed unaffected by his enchantment. Turning back to him, she whispered, "What did you do?"

"They can't hear us and they won't notice us for the next few minutes either," he replied. "Neither will they."

He jerked his head towards Gaius and Freya. Morgana frowned.

"Why don't you want them to hear?" she asked, confused.

"Because I'm worried about Freya," he said.

"Why?" she asked.

Merlin looked over at the dark haired girl.

"Because she's dead," he said quietly.

Morgana's head snapped around to stare at Freya. What did he mean she was dead? How could she be dead?

"How can that be?" she asked.

"I don't know."

She waited for him to say more, but he didn't, he just continued to stare at Freya.

"What happened to her?" she asked.

He breathed in deeply, then began to speak.

"She's a druid, and she first came to Camelot in a bounty hunters cage. I saw her trapped in there and I just thought … it could have been me. So I freed her and hid her in the tunnels underneath the citadel. I brought her food and light and took care of her," he paused for a moment and directed his gaze towards his feet.

When he spoke again, his voice had become monotonous; he spoke in a single, dead tone.

"But she was cursed. A man attacked her once. She was afraid and thought he was going to kill her. She took away his life in her fear, but the man's mother saw and cursed her to kill forever more. Every night she would transform into a bastet and become a beast of pure instinct. She would kill innocent people. It wasn't her fault!" he exclaimed suddenly. "She never wanted to kill anyone, she just couldn't help herself."

Morgana wasn't blaming Freya in any way at all; she couldn't imagine what it must have been like to be forced to mindlessly kill people. It must have been hell for her.

She remembered the time that Freya had been brought to Camelot. She could recall the bounty hunter that had caught her coming before Uther, telling him that she had escaped. It had never occurred to her that someone she knew had been the one to free her though.

Though all this passed through her mind, she didn't speak, she was afraid that if she interrupted Merlin wouldn't continue.

"I promised that I would take her away, somewhere safe, somewhere with mountains and a lake … But she didn't want me to get hurt. She left without me, tried to escape on her own. She was corned by the knights. It was midnight, so she transformed in front of them, and … Arthur struck her down. She only escaped because I helped her. I took her out of Camelot, away from the city, to the lake of Avalon ... The next morning she died in my arms," as he finished his tale, he kept his gaze on the floor, avoiding eye contact with her.

Morgana was silent for a while. She had never realised that Merlin had been through such heartbreak. He had lost a friend, but she guessed that Freya had been more than a friend to him. What made it worse was that Arthur had been the one to deliver the death blow. His own friend had killed her, and no one had noticed anything.

She knew there was much more to Merlin than met the eye, much more, but she was only beginning to realise just how much "much" was.

"So … how is she here?" she finally asked.

"I don't know," he replied. "I really don't know."

Morgana glanced again at Freya. She was sitting on the bench, letting Gaius secure a bandage around her upper arm. Suddenly, as though she had sensed her gaze, Freya looked directly at her. Even though Merlin had said that she wouldn't notice them, she stared straight at Morgana, her eyes boring into her. That's when it struck her just how dark the druid girl's eyes were. Black as coals.

*I know they didn't have strawberries in those times, but we see Uther eating them all the time and then there's the whole Freya thing, so I'm letting Morgana have them.

Reviews make me want to update faster!