Enter the Maiden
They were found that night. Shouldn't have built that fire.
Arthur was awoken by shouts and frantic movement in the corner of his blurry vision. A scuffle, and not a pretty one. He didn't know how he'd managed to sleep through the start; he'd been illogically tired for the past few days. He was on his feet in less than a second.
There was a fight going on on the other side of their current clearing, illuminated by the orange flickers of the fire about ten meters away. Gwaine was a whirling dervish in the center, striking out with his broadsword at no fewer than eight soldiers who danced around him in a confusion of limbs and metal. Two more armored men lay on the ground nearby. Merlin was nowhere to be found.
Drawing the first knife he could find as well as his sword, Arthur leapt into the muddle. Gwaine almost took his head off, then recognized him at the last moment and grinned a little manically. "Victor!" He grunted as he took an elbow to the side of the head for the lapse in attention, ducked down to slash at his assailant's legs, and then popped back up swinging and seemingly unaffected. "Nice of you so show up, deadweight! Sleep well?"
Arthur crouched low to stab at a loose-looking armor tie, cringing when his knife glanced off chainmail with a sort of rustle-screech sound. These guys weren't screwing around. "For your information, I slept exceptionally well and would have continued to even if you'd died," he rejoined. "Where's Merlin?"
The guards were experimenting with pile-on tactics, using their superior numbers to edge inward and limit their opponents' range. This was working out well for Arthur, a close-range fighter, but Gwaine was once again struggling to use his massive broadsword. They caught each other's eyes and went back-to-back. "Stashed him in the woods before they showed up," the tavern-keeper whispered over his shoulder. "That's why I didn't have time"–whomp, another soldier fell–"to wake you."
There was no more time for chatting as the knot of combatants stumbled over to the campfire and Arthur found himself concentrating on not melting his boots as well as not taking a blade to the throat. Full-body armor rather than just some concealed chain mail would have been really nice right then. He snatched the end of a soldier's cape and used it to spin her around, putting her off balance so he could knock her over into the dying coals and stomp a boot down viciously on the back of her helmet, smashing her face into the embers. There was a muffled scream as she frantically rolled away, cape aflame. The remaining flickers of fire finally snuffed out. There were three guards left, circling and eyeing the two warily.
Suddenly, one of them shouted something, and they all backed off a step. Arthur raised an eyebrow at Gwaine, who shrugged and pressed his advantage, bashing another man down with a wound-up blow to the side of the head that actually crumpled his helmet. Arthur swung to face one of the last two, breathing heavily, and froze.
Three more yellow-caped soldiers had entered the clearing, just barely visible in the grey light of almost-dawn. The one in back had an arm around Merlin's chest and–Arthur squinted–a knife to his throat. Crap.
Arthur backed up a step and grabbed for Gwaine's arm without looking, missing twice before catching it in a rigid grip. Gwaine swung around and swore loudly.
The one in front, who seemed to be the captain, quite unnecessarily shouted, "Stop! We have the asset, and we will kill it. Put your weapons on the ground."
Gwaine came up next to him and glanced over, a question in his eyes. Arthur shook his head minutely. Neither moved to put down his weapon. The captain and her cohorts paused, unsure of what to do. They hesitantly advanced a few meters into the clearing. Arthur had ended up standing next to the unmoving body of the soldier whose face he had pressed into the campfire. She was laying on her stomach, crumpled cape twisted and dirty. It was still burning a little. The smell of smoke and burning flesh drifted diagonally through Arthur's subconscious mind, and he squinted to keep the ash out of his eyes.
The captain cleared her throat again. "You hear me? We'll kill him!" It provoked no reaction. (Outwardly, at least. On the outside Arthur looked like a stained glass window of Saint George dragon-bound. His internal monologue ran somewhere along the lines of "Crap crap bloody hell they've got Merlin they're going to kill him they're going to kill us we're screwed—"
This close he could get a better look at the threatening party despite the gloom. The remaining two guards from the scrum had sought the safety of anonymity and numbers behind their compatriots. Merlin was straining to lift his chin out of the way of the blade, exposing the vulnerable planes of his throat. However, while he looked as shaky as Arthur felt, the air wasn't charged with the rabid-animal fear from the other day. No miraculous save was coming from that quarter.
. . .
Wait. Merlin had done that the other day because Merlin had magic. Merlin was the asset. They wouldn't actually kill him.
God damn it! Arthur wanted to pound his head into the nearest boulder. How had he been this stupid? He'd actually forgotten that Merlin was the bloody asset! Of course it was a bluff.
He didn't have time to die a little inside due to the shame. He needed a plan. Gwaine and Merlin were both looking to him for a plan.
When in doubt, follow orders.
He drew back his dagger into throwing position and showed his teeth. "No. You won't kill him. But I will."
The rear guards shifted stance with a slight shuffling of feet, sending up puffs of dirt to join the haze of ash in the clearing. They knew he had good enough aim. The soldier's knife actually cut into Merlin's neck a little bit, and his quick inhalation was the only sound to bounce around the clearing, pinballing between silently vibrating molecules.
The captain gave a wild, high, undulating battle cry and charged forward. Arthur and Gwaine responded in kind.
~o8o~
Ten minutes later they were running again, back to the now-familiar helter-skelter breathless dash through the shrubbery with the dim outlines of tree branches whipping their faces and phantom brambles clawing their ankles to shreds. Gwaine and Arthur each had a hand on one of Merlin's shoulders.
Suddenly, Merlin gasped. "Wait. That way. We need to go that way!" he sputtered out, pointing off to the left before tripping and almost falling over yet another shrub.
Screw it. Why not. They veered sharply to the left. A snail trail of sweat made it a ways below the back collar of Arthur's shirt before absorbing into the fabric, leaving a cool wet spot expanding just between his shoulder blades. Why was it so hot?
They scrambled through the fronds of a toxically green fern–and into blinding light.
What?
This time, it was he and Gwaine who misstepped and tumbled to the ground, dragging Merlin and his surprised yelp down with them. Conveniently, the ground was now free of all underbrush, even though he definitely hadn't seen a clearing on the other side of that fern. Heart pounding, he stumbled to his feet and whipped around, blinking, knife at the ready.
Gwaine got up much more sedately, unrolling his lanky frame with a deliberately casual flourish like a carpet salesman's, but despite his dazed expression his body was all taut lines. He blinked repeatedly. "Bloody–what happened?"
Merlin was, predictably, the last to his feet. "What is it? What do you see?"
Arthur searched the sky. Yep, there was the sun, edging down toward the western treeline. "It's...daytime," he said slowly. "And we're not where we were."
"Guards?"
"Can't hear 'em," Gwaine supplied. "And what's behind us doesn't look like the same forest we just ran through."
"A sorcerer's trap?" posited Arthur hesitantly, drawing three fingers wonderingly through the saw-edged leaves of a hip-height stalk of something. He ignored the surly look from Merlin and his mutter of "Rude."
Gwaine backed up a few paces, trying to identify same spot they'd just passed through. "Was it this fern? Or that one?" Arthur half-expected him to disappear, but he just wandered about ten meters away before jumping up and down and waving both arms frantically. His voice drifted on lazy ripples in the clearing air. "Can you see me?"
Against his instincts, Arthur felt himself coming down off of the adrenaline high. "Yeah, and you look stupid," he shouted. Merlin snorted.
And then all the adrenaline was back, sour like vinegar in his bloodstream, as a voice spoke from behind them: "You know that's the wrong fern, right?"
Arthur spun, no hesitation, and had a knife at the person's throat in a tick. He was unconscious in another.
~o8o~
He woke up in a tent and was somehow okay with that.
What he quickly realized wasn't okay was the fact that he was okay with that. But it was fine, it was great. He'd just wait here until someone came through that sun-speckled flap of white canvas right there, and maybe he'd hold them at knifepoint for information (and why did that sound vaguely familiar all of a sudden?) and maybe the person would be nice and just explain without the bother of the knife. Did he have a knife? Oh, he didn't. Huh. Well, that was okay; he knew a whole lot of ways to hurt people without one. Or talk to them nicely. Would he usually think something like that? He couldn't really remember. But that was okay, too. He could just get whoever was doing it to stop. Everything was going to be fine.
He got up from the ground and trotted amiably over to stand next to the flap where the shadow of a tree would hopefully hide his silhouette from those outside. He noticed that his hands were bound in front of him and quickly dislocated a thumb to slip out. He kept the rope–free weapon! Nice.
Something was definitely up with his emotions, but he couldn't bring himself to care or feel any other way about it than pleasantly contented. He was just happy that his trained-in thought process wasn't impaired. Hopefully he wasn't hallucinating or anything; that would be annoying to work around.
Maybe twenty minutes later he caught the murmur of voices outside of the tent. A hand moved the flap, and he prepared to strike, holding the rope wrapped around his hands like a garotte.
Wait. He recognized that voice. "Merlin!"
The shadow of the person with his friend squawked and scrambled away from the tent. Merlin's hands felt out the edges of the opening before he continued stepping through, not seeming surprised. "Arthur. Let me guess: I should be really glad they took your knives?"
"No, I was going to strangle you. How are you doing?" He stepped back to the center of the tent and grinned.
Merlin turned back to the entrance. "What did you do to him?" he asked, sounding amused.
"Emotional magic. We have blocked off his fear and anger channels. When the spell wears off you probably should stay away while the built-up emotion vents." The owner of the voice stepped warily inside, lifting one sandal high when it almost tangled with a rope on the dirt floor. He was maybe in his forties, pale-skinned with a few gray hairs in his receding hairline and lines around his mouth. Slightly big ears, thick nose. He wore a simple yellowish-brown robe with an odd-looking belt and chose his words with clinical precision. Oddly enough, he had that same hint of an accent that Merlin slipped in and out of.
"So you all...specialize? In that kind of spell?"
"Yes. That is how we obscure this place. Outside of a certain radius the wards convince interlopers that it is day when it is night and night when it is day. You might have felt abnormally tired if one of your nights was drastically shortened, but other than that it harms no one."
Gwaine chose this as the time to wander into the tent and conversation as if he'd been there all along. Oh, so he hadn't gotten the magic happy drug treatment. Merlin Arthur could understand, but the teenager with the sword longer than his leg? Well, that was okay. And then again, maybe Gwaine was bewitched to be unreasonably, idiotically cheerful and Arthur just couldn't tell. "Wouldn't we have noticed if a night was really short?"
They all considered for a moment. Slowly both Gwaine and Arthur turned to face the third member of their group. As if feeling their gazes, he scowled defensively. "Hey, you were the ones who had the bright idea to put a blind guy on watch! How am I supposed to tell time?! I'm not exactly good at this yet."
Gwaine threw back his head to dump the contents of his cupped hand into his mouth and crunched down. Arthur's stomach grumbled loudly. Between chews, he asked, "Why go to all that trouble, though? Aren't there easier ways to hide and protect something? Like, I don't know, a magical wall? We stumbled right in."
The druid seemed slightly annoyed, though the emotion seemed filtered out of his smooth, low voice. He licked his lips, a lightning-quick motion, and shifted stance. Yellow robes rustled. "We still are unsure of how you found this place. As for your question, it's difficult to change the ways of nature. Far easier to just change men's minds."
Merlin looked fascinated. "Really? I'd have thought it was the other way around."
Arthur frowned for the first time since waking up. Given, it was a half-lazy, confused sort of frown, but still progress. "But how does making it seem like a different time actually protect your camp?"
Jean, who had ducked his head out of the flap to check the position of the now-declining sun, sighed impatiently and reentered. "If you differentiate an area enough from another, the magic that flows through the trees and the ground will recognize the areas as different and unconnected. The currents will bend around the space, and so will the movements of men and beasts."
Gwaine raised an eyebrow. "But...you said didn't change the actual area physically. You just changed it in human minds."
"Your point?"
Merlin's mouth half-opened like he wanted to pursue the question further, but Arthur supposed good manners spurted up at the last moment from the back of his mind because he suddenly looked sheepish. "Oh, by the way, Victor, this is Jean. We're in a druid camp. They've offered us protection for the next few days." He was obviously excited to be around other magic users, practically bouncing up and down but managing to keep up a thin veneer of solemnity. He (for obvious reasons) wasn't catching the odd looks "Jean" had been shooting him every few minutes. The man's already craggy brow furrowed further, and his lips turned slightly downward like he'd drunk bad wine. The twitchiness was starting to get to Arthur–it seemed like Jean's face and fingers were in constant motion, rearranging every moment in miniscule ways so that they almost seemed to flow like a fluid less dense than air. Maybe this was just Arthur starting to feel the forecasted side effects of having his mood altered. The thought bothered him a little bit, so he supposed that made sense.
The robed man shook his head, a miniscule moment like he was responding to his own query. "We have to insist, however, that the three of you remain within sight of this dwelling. Now, if you'll pardon my rudeness, I must oversee reinforcement of the border charm. One of our number will bring food and drink shortly." He offered up a hesitant smile (white teeth, very straight), gave Merlin one last suspicious look, and strode out, leaving the tent flap tossing this way and that in the sudden wind.
~o8o~
"You're really friendly for someone who, not that long ago, threatened to kill me."
"It saved your life!"
"Technicalities." But Arthur could tell Merlin wasn't really bothered when he smiled and let the matter drop. (That definitely didn't affect Arthur in any way. It didn't lift a cold stone in the back of his head and blow a puff of warm air over the freezing damp spot below. Of course not.)
"So where actually are we, anyway? More specifically than 'a tent.' Or 'a forest with trees,' Gwaine."
"Hey, it wasn't wrong."
"It also wasn't helpful!"
Arthur broke up their bickering by just answering the question. "We're in a semi-transparent tent about ten meters square. Outside there's a wide-ish clearing, and beyond that it's still like the forest from before but a little more arid. I think we're in the same place, though. The sun's about two hands high, and evening's falling."
Gwaine snorted. "Also, our cheerfully garbed friend Jean is more friendly than Victor but not nearly as smiley as you would expect a man in yellow robes to be. What is his issue?"
By now the spell had fully worn off, as Arthur had been informed that he was back to his apparently "arrogant, crotchety, and just plain irritating" self. Gwaine kept grumbling under his breath about getting their hosts to bring back "the other guy." Arthur shuddered at the thought. Right now, though, he could push the anger at having his mind violated to the back of...well, his mind to instead focus his bad humor on the situation at large. He narrowed his eyes. "Merlin, what did you tell him while I was out?"
"We're travelers from a city a couple of miles north of the capitol. We're fleeing soldiers because Gwaine was discovered to be selling barrel liquor down the river without a license."
Gwaine winked. "Did that once, for a while. Boring as hell. Anyway, I wasn't sure they were buying it, so I beefed up our boy's rather feeble story by implying heavily that I was actually smuggling magicians out in the barrels. Never done that, but I knew a guy who did."
"People do that?" He would have to warn his father to investigate major exporters along the river. The thought caused a little pang, like a harp-string snapping in his chest, that caught him by surprise. He shook it off impatiently.
"Yeah. We haven't been allowed near the camp itself, but I saw it in the distance at one point. Pretty big. Maybe fifty people or so, I'd guess. All tents–they must be nomadic. The weirdest thing, though, was the people we passed on the way here. Saw a couple of groups, but no one was actually talking. Just complete silence, even when they were away from us outsiders. It's uncanny."
Merlin shuddered. "Yeah, and that's not the only weird thing. There's this...humming, in the ground even the air here. It's like...bumblebees, but a swarm big enough that the force of the buzz makes your bones vibrate out of sync with each other. I keep thinking I hear whispers."
Gwaine inclined his chin in acknowledgement. "My bones are actually vibration-free, but I'll take your word for it. Oh, one last thing: they're being really weird about Merlin. No one gave my broadsword a second glance, even though I actually lost the sheath while I was fighting alone at camp"–he shot Arthur a poisonous look–"but they keep looking at him like he's wearing a bard's motley."
Merlin looked spooked by this, his shoulders hunching as one hand came up to rub the other wrist. Arthur privately agreed. Not good.
Gwaine turned out of the rough triangle they'd formed to face Arthur fully. "So what now, o wise leader?"
Luckily, Arthur wasn't forced to fake his way confidently through a plan made up on the spot because Merlin hissed for quiet. His posture slipped with subtle grace–very different from the awkward too-many-limbs movements Arthur was used to from him–into something more defensive, if that was possible. "Someone's here."
A shadow slipped across the side of the tent, outlined now in an orange glow from the sunset. A hand reached for the opening. The other had something round–a shield?–in a weird hold. This time, Arthur really wished he had a knife.
A figure stepped through the entrance, balancing a tray–the round thing Arthur had seen–on one hand. She maneuvered the tray through the door with difficulty, turning around and fighting to keep the flapping canvas from knocking it down before spinning back to face them and raise an eyebrow at their threatening stances. "Uh, greetings. Správce Jean sent me to bring you all your food."
"And you are?"
Her smile didn't show many teeth. She was a teenage girl, very pale and with long black hair pulled back into plain braids. "Freya. As I said, Jean sent me. He is my uncle." Without further ceremony she set the tray on the ground and took a burlap bag out of her robe (similar to her uncle's but a light, dirty purple with dark green trim inside the hood). She pulled out a small loaf of bread, a wedge of cheese, a few gnarled carrots, and a zucchini. Arthur was forcibly reminded of how hungry he was, but he didn't make any move to reach for it.
Gwaine, on the other hand, eyed it, shrugged, and promptly sat cross-legged on the ground. He reached up and tapped Merlin on the elbow. "Mate, she put down bread and cheese! And actual vegetables! I think I might cry." He tore a hefty piece off of the loaf and then halved that again, handing one part to Merlin once the other boy sat down.
Arthur watched as Gwaine chewed, taking heart when he didn't immediately keel over. Anyway, they were surrounded by people who didn't need poison or even weapons to kill them. (Now, the continuous discomfort that spiked with that thought was entirely warranted!) Finally, reluctantly, he lowered himself to the dirt as well and reached for the cheese. Freya, surprisingly, didn't leave but sat down with them and grabbed one of the carrots.
For a while the only sounds in the darkening tent were those of the wind and enthusiastic eating. Merlin moaned. "Oh, gods. This is incredible. I'd forgotten what good food tastes like."
Freya finished another carrot and glanced at him, tilting her head. She was moving her skirt on the floor with one hand in a lazy pattern. Her smile was soft, hesitant, and still didn't show teeth. "I'm curious. When you say, 'Oh, gods,' to which gods are you referring?"
Merlin looked a little taken aback at her frank interest. "Oh, the Trifecta Pantheon of Ethos, Pathos, and...uh...Loki? Logos. I'm no theologian, but my uncle introduced me to the basics of the Old Religion. Cartwright's sect," he hastily added onto the end.
"Oh. Huh. At least you are not of the Smith's Sect–then I'd be forced to convert you." Nervous laughter, a little high. Merlin hesitantly joined in. "My people are Stonemason's Enclave."
Merlin's nose wrinkled. "Wait, I forget, does that mean you believe magical influence is emotion-driven or based in natural law?"
Freya's face grew very earnest. "Constructs of will and emotion in harmony with nature. But we come of the subsect that does not acknowledge Mab as a new deity."
"Oh." There was a bit of an awkward pause as they both chewed. Arthur cringed a little bit, but Merlin recovered pretty quickly. One side of his mouth quirked up as he jabbed, "O-oh, really? Then how do you explain Oration Theory?" Gwaine caught Arthur's eye with a smirk.
Her grin, which had been slowly gaining confidence, grew wide and predatory. "My friend, I was raised by practitioners in a commune devoted to the Old Religion. You do not want to begin this conversation with me..."
