Chapter XXVI: The Night of Falling Stars

Princess Elena's face was drawn with grief. She hugged herself, hands clutching at her sleeves, but she'd grown up in a king's court. She did not break.

Lancelot waited in silence until she was able to speak. "Thank you for telling me, Sir Lancelot," she said, only wavering a little.

"Are you all right, Your Highness?" he inquired gently.

"I will be." A muscle jumped in her neck. "I will be. I just need some time to… wrap my mind around this." A deep breath, in and out. "Grunhilda was… someone I thought I could trust."

"Would you like us to leave?" Leon asked.

She thought it over for a few moments, then nodded. "I think that would be for the best, sirs. Thank you again, for the truth and for my freedom." Her smile was wavery but real.

Lancelot smiled back. "You are very welcome, Your Highness."

Later, Merlin would wonder if some secret intuition had guided his mother that day, telling her to find a way to keep them out of the water. He would contemplate whether the gods themselves had led her to serve wine rather than water at dinner. If they had all of them drunk from the poisoned cistern, if he had been incapacitated….

But as it were, only one person at their table took ill from Uther's scheme. Only one person wouldn't take wine, fearing its effects on her unborn baby.

Only Hunith was poisoned.

Dinner started out well enough. They were all cheerful, happy. Conversation was light and airy, ranging from names for the red wyvern (which had been making himself at home here on the Isle) to Gwen's adventures in smuggling. Everybody wore a smile.

The first sign that something was wrong came when Merlin noticed her rubbing at her throat. "It's nothing," she assured him, a little raspy but still cheerful. "Just a bit of a sting." But she didn't stop rubbing, and a few minutes later, she turned green-white and excused herself. She didn't get out the door before she was on her knees, retching onto the floor.

Half the room was at Hunith's side immediately. Balinor knelt next to her as she emptied her stomach entirely, undigested food giving way to bile. Gaius pressed a hand against his niece's brow, feeling the thin layer of sweat, the fever beneath her skin, and something else, too. "Your heart," he murmured.

Hunith ran out of things to throw up. Balinor scooped her into his arms, carried her down to the rooms that Gaius was using as their clinic. Hunith groaned, her head lolling, her pupils dilated.

"What are your symptoms?" Gaius asked her softly.

"Stomach hurts," she choked out. "Throat. Head, too. Nausea. Can't move." She didn't seem to realize that she was trembling slightly. "Yellow tint to vision." But here her eyes fluttered shut, face clenching in pain, one hand curling over her belly.

Merlin's blood turned to ice. He could almost hear the fluttering of wings.

"What healing spells do you know?" Morgause asked softly. Merlin had been a little leery of inviting her, but she was Morgana's sister and he'd finally figured out just why Hunith was so intent on making certain that they got along. "I don't know much about poisons."

Gwen, Tom, and Morgana sucked in breaths. Balinor and Merlin went rigid. But Gaius was unsurprised. "When magically healing poisons, you need to know what that poison is." He didn't say that they might not have much time to find out what exactly coursed through Hunith's veins. "Merlin, get my spellbook. It might be foxglove."

The book flew over to them, flipping open to the proper section. Gaius grabbed it out of midair, pulled it to his face. His eyes scanned the pages at lightning speed.

"Might?" muttered Balinor, stricken. Then the dragonlord flung back his head and roared. His voice echoed through the room, through the walls, all the way to wherever Kilgharrah was leading Uther's soldiers on a merry chase. The dragon would hear and come, but Merlin didn't know how far he was, how long it would take him to get here.

Hunith gave a sudden cry, jerking around her stomach. A great ripple seemed to run through her.

Gaius bellowed a spell, his eyes flaring gold. Hunith's shaking slowed for a few moments before resuming.

Liquid dripped to the floor, a sound as loud as a scream. Her water had broken.

Merlin met his father's horrified eyes. At the very most, Hunith's pregnancy was a bit more than two-thirds of the way through. Was Ganieda old enough to survive outside the womb? Was she strong enough to even live through this poison-induced birth?

"Are there spells to stop childbirth?" whispered Gwen.

"I don't know," Merlin choked.

"There have to be other spellbooks," Morgana said. "Come on." She and Gwen practically pounced on Gaius's collection. After a moment's hesitation, Merlin and his father followed suit. Tom remained by Hunith's side, apparently trying to keep her as comfortable as possible.

Gaius and Morgause were chanting spells, not even bothering to read them. That frightened Merlin more than anything.

"How far is Kilgharrah?" he demanded. Surely Balinor could sense where the dragon was. They were closer than just two creatures of magic, they were kin—

Kin.

On his father's side, Merlin was kin to dragons, to lords, even to Cornelius Sigan and Bruta Pendragon's bastard brother. His mother, though, his mother was a foundling, taken in by Gaius's childless brother and sister-in-law. But there was the possibility—slight, but present—that her birth parents had been Sidhe trapped in human flesh.

And the Sidhe were excellent healers.

It was a slim chance, but he was starting to think that it was the best chance they had.

"Gaius," he said, "what are her chances?"

The physician didn't answer, and, Merlin thought, not only because he was so focused on slinging spells. His silence was answer enough.

"I have an idea," the warlock announced, striding over to his shaking, dying mother.

Gaius, Tom, and Morgause stepped aside. Perhaps they thought he had remembered some spell that they wouldn't know; he'd read more of Sigan's grimoire than either of them.

He incanted the teleportation spell in a tangled rush of words, too quickly for the others to react. Gaius cried out his name as the whirlwind whipped up, but it was too late.

The Lake of Avalon was still and calm and beautiful, its center veiled beneath soft white mist. The last vestiges of sunset tinted the waters red; the trees speared black and tall from the mossy ground. A few early night-birds serenaded the first sprinkling of stars, the waxing silvery moon, and a lone meteorite (the first of many, he didn't doubt) that burst through the darkness.

A globe of silver-blue light coalesced at Merlin's shoulder, summoned without conscious thought. He carried his shuddering mother to the lakeshore. The water flowed over his boots.

"Sophia!" Merlin called, wading deeper. "I need to speak with the Sidhe elders!" His voice broke. "Please, Sophia, my mother and sister are—" A sob rose up in his throat. Tears rolled down his cheeks, dripped into the water. "Please."

There was silence save for his gasping breaths, the quiet splash of water as he kept going. He was up to his waist now, Hunith's skirts skimming the surface.

There was silence, and then….

Wings.

Merlin stopped, head jerking up in sudden hope. The Sidhe hovered around him as bright as sapphires, their gossamer wings stirring the mist. Their black eyes fixed on him and on the shaking woman in his arms.

One small form detached from the great fluttering cloud. Her face was small and blue and faintly alien in its cast, but she had Hunith's eyebrows.

"Niamh?" Merlin whispered.

"No," said the Sidhe woman. Her voice was rich, melodious, and full of sorrow. "Niamh was my daughter, and this my granddaughter." She hovered gently over Hunith's face, drinking in her features. "She looks like her mother did, after she and Fergus were bound in mortal flesh."

"She's been poisoned," Merlin said. "Her and my sister, Ganieda, and now Mother's giving birth, but it's too early and she can't survive outside the womb, and… please, Great-Grandmother, help us."

Black eyes met teary gold. The Sidhe shook her head. "Do you know why I banished your grandparents, Emrys?"

"Whatever they did, my mother was innocent." Hunith was so limp, so still. Merlin pushed her outside of time. She would remain frozen in this second for as long as he could keep her—and here at the Lake of Avalon, he could preserve her for a very long time.

"Niamh tried to overthrow me," the Sidhe continued. "She sought the throne for herself, and so I banished her. Traitors' blood runs through your veins."

"Through yours as well, if one of those traitors was your daughter," he retorted, "but you're not a traitor. Neither is Mother. Ganieda hasn't even been born yet!"

"And yet you are all three of you a threat to me."

Rage scorched Merlin's heart. "I'm only a threat to you and yours if you hurt me and mine."

His great-grandmother's face broke into a smile, as sudden and unexpected as a cloudburst. "I'm glad to hear it. Put our kin down, and our people will save them both."

Relief weakened Merlin's knees, nearly made him buckle into the water. "Thank you," he whispered, and lay Hunith on the placid surface of the lake. She did not sink, though she did resume panting and shaking as she slipped back into time.

A cloud of wings descended, the Sidhe talking quietly among themselves. Merlin caught the names of not just one but five poisons: foxglove and cuckoo pint, wolfsbane and nightshade and hemlock. Someone had tried very, very hard to murder his mother and unborn sister.

A cold, deadly wrath crystallized in his belly. It flooded his blood with snowmelt, stiffened his spine, drew his lips back into a snarl.

Someone had tried to kill his family.

Someone was going to die.

"The healing will take time," his great-grandmother told him. She knew the look in his eyes. "Come back in three days, and your mother will be well." She glided close to him on her thin, delicate wings. Small needle fangs glinted in her mouth. "Now go. Find him."

"I will," Merlin vowed, there in the midst of these wild magical beings. "And he will answer for what he's done."

He stepped into the whirlwind and was gone.

Balinor gave a soft cry as his entire family disappeared into the ether. His wife was sick, poisoned, his daughter on the brink of premature birth, and his son had taken them away without a single word of explanation.

"Where did they go?" the dragonlord demanded, gripping Gaius's arm.

"I don't know," the physician replied. He was pale, waxen, unsteady on his feet. "But—he said he had an idea."

Gwen gasped. "Unicorns!" At everyone's startled confusion, she explained, "Remember when Arthur was bitten by the Questing Beast? He must have brought Hunith to the unicorns in Gedref."

Balinor's heart slowed a little, its pounding slightly quieter in his ears. Of course. Unicorns, with their healing magic, could save his wife and daughter. Of course his brilliant, wonderful son had brought them to the unicorns. The dragonlord's lips stretched into a smile. He could have laughed with the sudden relief.

Then a frantic cry sounded in his mind.

"They're sick! Someone help, my family is sick!" There was no finesse to the call, no particular target. The woman was screaming for someone, anyone, to hear her.

"Yours too?" a second mind-voice asked. "What spells are you using?"

"I tried the wite geblin," supplied yet another mind-voice. A third person, just barely within range, who had seen someone beloved fall to an unexpected malady.

It wasn't just Hunith who had been poisoned, though that would have been heinous enough on its own. This was an attack not on any one person but on the Isle of the Blessed and all those who dwelt within it. Someone must have slipped poison into—

"The water supply!" Morgause's thought-speech roared. She was a powerful sorceress; her message reached the minds of every citizen on the Isle. "Don't drink from the water! Someone has poisoned it!" Aloud, she hissed, "Gaius, which spells worked on Hunith?"

"Foxglove was one of the poisons."

"One of the poisons?" the priestess echoed, appalled.

"There was more than one," he confirmed.

"I'm going to Gedref," Balinor announced. "Merlin doesn't know to bring the unicorns back. Have people bring the victims to the center of the city."

Morgause nodded.

Balinor had been to the Labyrinth of Gedref twice. He'd been ten the first time, a curious boy with hardly a care in the world. The second, he had been a bitter man, broken by a friend's betrayal and the deaths of his kin and the way he'd left Hunith of Ealdor behind. He delved deep into those memories, picturing the entrance to the huge hedge maze as best he could. Then he was there, staggering slightly from the effort of teleportation but too full of desperate fear to be truly tired.

"ANHORA!" he roared, and repeated the shout with words spoken aloud. "WE NEED YOU!"

Thank all the gods, the Keeper of the Unicorns was in range. He appeared in mere moments, the druid Blaise at his side. "What's going on?"

"Hunith's not the only one who's been poisoned," Balinor explained. "We need unicorns on the Isle, as many as you can bring."

"Poisoned?" Anhora cried.

"Hunith?" demanded Blaise.

Balinor's heart stuttered. "Merlin didn't bring her here?"

The other men shook their heads.

If they weren't here, then where the hell had Merlin brought them? And if a unicorn wasn't saving Hunith right now, then—no, no, he couldn't think like that. He was the Lord of the Isle. He had responsibilities, and right now, those responsibilities demanded that he bring unicorns to his people.

Besides, if Merlin's non-unicorn-related plan fell through, he'd bring his mother and sister back to the Isle. Better to have the healing magic already there.

A pair of unicorns cantered out of the maze, their pale hides aglow in the nascent moonlight. They halted at their guardian's side, huge dark eyes inquisitive.

"I can manage one of them," Balinor told Blaise as Anhora explained the situation to his charges. "But I don't know how many teleportations I'll have left after that."

"I can manage two trips, maybe three," the druid replied. "You'll need to recruit transport."

"I know that Morgause will help," the dragonlord muttered. He thought of Morgana's incredible raw strength with a wince. If she'd had more training…. No, no, he couldn't focus on what-ifs. Morgana could take over communications; he needed someone powerful enough to reach the entire island, and she fit the bill.

"I need to stay here and recruit as many unicorns as possible," Anhora told the others. "Bring these two to the Isle, then come back with other spellbinders."

A good plan.

Balinor laid a hand on the unicorn nearer to him, forced out the words of the teleportation spell. He was no mage, just a wizard, and transporting creatures of magic was difficult at the best of times, which this day most assuredly was not.

Blaise and his unicorn weren't in the makeshift clinic when the dragonlord arrived—they must have teleported to another site on the Isle—but Merlin was. He stood in the center of the room, loudly projecting incantations in thought-speech.

Hunith was nowhere to be found.

No. No, no, no, no….

"She's fine," Gwen assured him. "Merlin found other healers."

The unicorn trotted out the door, his ears pricked in attention.

"The Sidhe," his son supplied.

"The Sidhe?"

"Apparently Mother's grandmother is surprisingly high-ranking."

Balinor remembered (with no small amount of disbelief) his family's pet theory that Hunith's birth parents had been Sidhe trapped in mortal flesh. It would seem they'd been right.

"But where exactly is Anhora gathering his unicorns?"

"The entrance to the Labyrinth."

"Never been there. Do you have enough energy to bring me?"

"Yes, but you'll have to transport me back. Morgause?"

"Let's put them in the courtyard," the priestess said. "Easier access." She vanished in a gust.

"Morgana, you're in charge of communications," Balinor ordered.

"Keep giving them the spells," Gaius suggested. He grabbed a quill and parchment, began writing furiously.

"Gwen, Gaius, go out to the courtyard and do whatever you can to help people."

Firm nods.

"Merlin, let's go."

This time, Balinor nearly collapsed when they arrived in Gedref. Spots swam before his eyes, but he grit his teeth and used Merlin's tall frame to steady himself.

"Lady Morgause just took the two who arrived after your departure," Anhora explained. "Another is on her way."

"How many of them are there?" Merlin asked.

"Not quite twenty, and some of them are quite shy. I suspect you'll get a dozen at the most."

Twelve unicorns for however many dozens (hundreds) of people had been poisoned… assuming that they lived long enough to be cured. How many were already dead?

(Dragons dropping from the skies, their lords falling to their knees. Soldiers in Camelot red stabbing emotionlessly, efficiently, cutting his kin down one by one until only he and Kilgharrah remained.)

Balinor shook away the memory. They would survive. Perhaps he couldn't save them all, but he would save as many as possible.

(He'd saved Kilgharrah, and the dragon had languished in a cave for twenty years. Some savior he was.)

Balinor and Merlin were both well acquainted with the way that time seemed to stretch out when every moment counted. They passed the next interval—two minutes, perhaps three—discussing Hunith's situation, with Merlin filling his father in. Then the unicorn pranced out of the hedges like moonlight made flesh, and Merlin's magic carried them away.

The courtyard was already filling with people: male and female, old and young, sick and well. Healers bustled among the victims, magic sparking under their palms as they fought to undo the effects of the poison cocktail. Thought-speech and the spoken word mingled in a terrified hum. The people were so frightened, and not only because their loved ones might die. This sort of thing wasn't supposed to happen here. The Isle of the Blessed was supposed to be safe. They had all felt so secure here, so happy, and now that illusion had been shattered.

They would have to relocate, Balinor reflected as he brought herbs to a poultice-maker. Uther knew about their refuge; it had to be Uther, for who else would orchestrate such a vile attack on the children of magic? Perhaps Merlin could focus all his efforts on restoring a small fraction of Listeneise, a place deep within the Perilous Lands where nobody could ever find them. He'd have to ask once this terrible night was over.

For a few minutes, the dragonlord lost himself in the bustle around him, organizing and ordering, carrying and distributing, doing every single thing in his power to minimize the body count. He was not always successful. A man went completely still as Balinor and Tom carried him to the nearest unicorn, his chest ceasing to rise and fall. When they got to the unicorn's flank, the creature simply gave a mournful nicker and pressed her soft muzzle against Balinor's face for a single fleeting moment. Then she turned away to someone she could help.

Perhaps half an hour had passed since Hunith's collapse when the news arrived, relayed through three separate minds before it reached the courtyard: The poison was not the end of tonight's troubles. Soldiers had come, men in the colors of Essetir and Amata, led by two men in Camelot red. They bore swords and arrows and fire, and their faces fairly glowed with unholy glee.

The message did not specify how many killers had breached their shores. The child who'd observed their landing had died before he could get an accurate count. At least a hundred, probably many more.

They were exhausted already. Grief and exertion took their toll; healing magic was difficult, and even though the unicorns had saved so many people, they were hardly in any condition to fight off an invasion.

"Morgana!" Balinor cried.

The witch ran towards him, face pale, hands filthy with someone else's vomit. "What?"

"Send out the orders that everyone is to some to this courtyard. We'll need to combine our shields to protect as many people as possible until Kilgharrah arrives."

The words were already flying from her mind. "How long until Kilgharrah comes?"

Balinor reached out with his mind, feeling for the familiar presence. "Ten minutes, I think. Maybe fifteen."

"How close are the soldiers?"

"Too close. We need to start building that shield now."

The dragonlords were dead and gone. These children of magic, these innocent folk who dwelt in his demesne, were his people now.

And he would be damned if he lost his people again.

"Kilgharrah, hurry. Please."

Wite=disease, illness, evil misfortune

Geblin= to leave, depart from (imperative singular)

Alternate chapter title: "In Which It Turns Out that Merlin Really Was Royalty All Along, But he Conveniently Left that Part Out of his Explanation and will Hopefully Never Need to Clarify"

Next chapter: May 8. The battle for the Isle of the Blessed.