The marketplace flowed around Arthur like tide water frothing against a pitted, rocky shore. A moderate blanket of snow muffled most of the racket that Arthur normally associated with the lower town, his people bundled up against the cold, subdued as they rushed to finish their business outside. The chill bit through the early morning air, sharp as wolf's teeth, and though the snow had stopped, the sun remained hidden behind heavy, ominous clouds. Everyone seemed eager to retire back indoors to their families and hearth fires just in case another storm came.

Everyone except for Arthur. Yes, the amount of snowfall was odd for a typical Camelot winter, and yes, his cold feet ached in his boots just like anyone else's, but he wasn't in any hurry to go back to the castle. Merlin was probably still sleeping under George's watchful eye now that the medicine deliveries were done, and if Arthur were cooped up in there, the temptation to roust Merlin from his sorely needed rest just to keep Arthur company might have overcome him. Restlessness itched beneath Arthur's skin, though it could have been his actual skin that itched; the arid cold of late winter seemed to leave everything dry and cracked, even people sometimes.

Just to break the relentless churning of his thoughts, Arthur remarked, "The days are getting longer."

Leon kept a steady pace with him, dressed casually but fully armed except for chainmail or plate. "Yes, sire. We could do with some stronger light, if this snow ever lets up."

"Mm." Arthur nodded as he passed a shivering spice merchant. It made him think of mulled wine or hot cider, which led to an odd yearning for Merlin to just appear with a steaming mug for no other reason than to bring Arthur unexpected cheer. He scratched rather too vigorously at his scalp to distract himself from yearning after sweet drinks, considered the merits of a hideously wooly hat to stop his ears turning red with cold, and then ignored Leon's concerned glance. "Not that I don't find talk of the weather scintillating, but I was hoping to have your thoughts on the other thing."

Leon made a reluctant but considering noise at the resumption of their earlier conversation. "I think perhaps that Dyfedd must refer to Merlin himself, no? He is its heir, and there isn't a kingdom left. So it must be him. Or his mother?"

"Let not Merlin tremble before the council of Albion?" Arthur rolled that over in his mind for a moment, wondering how it might place in with all the rest of the strange things Merlin had pronounced the previous night. "I mean, I suppose he does get twitchy in dangerous situations, but I'd hardly call it trembling." Shaking in his boots, maybe. But Arthur would only describe it as such to Merlin's face, and then only to infuriate him. He did like to get Merlin all puffed up and indignant, though lately, it was less good fun and more honest fury.

Leon shrugged and continued eyeing the random people passing on the street; he seemed jumpy today. "A reference to his illness, perhaps?"

Arthur made a face at the side of his head. "Seems rather too on the nose, doesn't it?" When Leon didn't offer any follow-up thoughts, Arthur asked, "And who are the Mercian firebrands? The way he said it sounded like they were against the rest of us at some point. Mercia is our ally."

"We've not heard from Mercia this winter," Leon pointed out. "Not since his emissary abandoned our court at Samhain. They would have arrived back in Mercia well before Yule, which may be why Bayard didn't send back our tidings for that either. It's possible he intends to break with us over the treaty violation."

Meaning the legalization of magic in Camelot. Arthur grimaced, but only with half of his face. It was a possibility he'd considered more than once, if fleetingly, given the strained peace that existed between the kingdoms. In truth, Arthur didn't think that Mercia gave a fig about magic, legal or otherwise; it was more the principle of the matter. Bayard had never liked the Pendragons, and as far as Arthur was concerned, the historic border dispute acted as little more than a façade covering Bayard's true impetus toward hostility, whatever that might be. Personal dislike of Uther, maybe? Or perhaps he really did just feel cheated of land and resources in the peace accords following the final defeat of Vortigern's Saxon allies. Mercia had ceded some territory, after all. Not that it was valuable land for anything but the symbolism of concession - rough, unlivable terrain and old forests, mostly. Petty to hold a grudge all these years over it, but many nobles were petty, and it wouldn't surprise Arthur if that were truly the whole story. In any case, Mercia represented a threat come spring. He would have to think about that soon.

Leon didn't seem to be stuck in the same dire thoughts with which he'd inadvertently saddled Arthur. "Sire, who exactly are we looking for?"

Arthur hooked his thumbs on his sword belt as he shook off concerns for uncertain wars. They couldn't do much about Mercia in the dead of winter; the campaigning season would bring news on that front, if any. "I'll know when I see him." He had to sidestep a woman who ran out from a cross street, and then attempted to look as he weren't well aware of the fact that he was in the way of all sorts of people. It might have had something to do with how he just sort of weaved and plodded down the middle of the road, taking up the whole thing like he owned it. Which he did. Which was not the point. Arthur sighed and moved to one side, off the main thoroughfare. "Firebrand," he mused aloud. "Is it a euphemism? Light bringer? Burning thing, marker, sigil… Or a literal firebrand? Maybe it's a reference to dragons. Do you think there could be more of them in the mountains of Mercia? Could they be in hiding?"

Leon shook his head and asked, "Why does this trouble you so? I didn't think you even believed in prophecy."

Too quickly, Arthur replied, "I don't." It sounded defensive in his own ears, and he sighed as he amended that to, "Not exactly." Arthur quirked an eyebrow in Leon's direction and retorted, "Why does it trouble you? I can see what your face is doing under all that hair." Arthur made a mocking gesture at his own face as if to fluff a mirror image of the thick beard that Leon wore.

"It doesn't trouble me." Leon glanced uneasily at the surrounding townsfolk, who regarded them back in kind, and added, "We should try to be less conspicuous, sire."

It was unusual for Arthur to be about in riding clothes like this, especially in such cold, snowy conditions, and alone with a single guard. In his younger days, he had gone about like this quite a lot, but there was a difference between a young boy prince galivanting around town without any armor on, and the king trying to do the same. Of course, people would notice him. "How on earth do you expect me to be less conspicuous?" Arthur spun around to walk backwards so that he could face Leon. "I can hardly hide the fact that I'm king."

"You could at least dress appropriately." Leon nodded at Arthur's lack of a cloak. "It would help you stand out less."

Arthur shrugged that off. "It's not that cold."

Unimpressed, Leon pointed out, "Is that why you are walking about with your hands stuffed in your armpits, sire?"

In an obvious mockery of himself, Arthur retorted, "I don't have to explain myself to you." A few lazy, fat snowflakes drifted down around them, likely dislodged from a roofline by the breeze up above. Arthur quelled a shiver with a harsh shake of his shoulders, as if he could feel the chill on him from cold water and a muddy shore. "It's the way he said it." Arthur grimaced and turned aside to peer at the browned, mushy snow covering the street. "There was something in his eyes. His voice. It just…felt true."

Leon lowered his eyes in a gesture of apology for his coming words, though when they came, he sounded as if he were trying to hide irritation. "Sire, you said yourself that he'd just suffered a fit and didn't know where he was."

Arthur tapped his foot against a hitching post, then pivoted to lean against it. He grimaced around at the mostly empty street, filth and mud obscured by an unevenly pocked blanket of snow. A few trails showed pathways tread by the folk down here, but little else.

"And I know that there is an urge for men to look for meaning after stressful events – "

"Oh for god's sake." Arthur tugged his hands free from his armpits so that he could throw them vaguely at Leon. "I'm not having a crisis of belief. You weren't there; you didn't hear him."

"Sire, with respect, we all know that Merlin has not been all that steady of late." Leon said it quietly, perhaps to muffle it from Arthur as much as from passersby, his beard and mustache blending over his lips for how hard he pressed them together. "I'm as fond of him as I ever was, and he's a wonderful physician. But he isn't well, and I think that we are all aware of that right now."

Arthur flared his nostrils and tossed a few flickering glances Leon's way, in between scanning the intersections of nearby cross streets in hopes of spotting his quarry. Not well, his balls. Even Merlin himself would have thought that understated, had he been there just then. "Fine; I see your point."

Leon shifted and tried to look casual, which didn't work for a man accustomed to standing at attention all day. "Please don't toy with this, sire."

"Why does it matter to you?" Arthur demanded, turning his head to face him. "If it's delusion, why insist I stop considering it?"

Leon grimaced out into the snowy street, shaking his head as he did so. "It goes in hand with madness, whether it's true Seeing or not. And to be honest, I can't tell anymore if there is such a thing as soothsaying. I didn't used to think so, but magic doesn't seem so simple anymore."

Arthur cocked his head at Leon and examined him for tells that he knew he likely wouldn't find; Leon could be cagey when he wanted to be. "Your father?"

Leon nodded and frowned at his hands. He picked at the dry skin of his cuticles for a moment, and then admitted, "Find the queen. He has his...ticks, if you will." He bit his lip and let the pull of teeth ruffle his mustache out of shape as he peered out again at the nearby buildings. "That was one of them. For the past few years, his senility has been predictable. Turtle mouths, and pockets, and odd rhymes. And a repeated insistence that someone remember to find the queen. We never knew what it meant, and he couldn't tell us."

"Coincidence, or design?" Arthur shifted to lean more comfortably in place. "Makes you wonder, doesn't it?"

"No," Leon replied. "It makes me worry. What will such things do to all of us, if we let them? Seeing has all but destroyed Merlin's bloodline, and laid ruin to his mother's house. And now it turns its attention to you."

"I don't think that's a new development," Arthur remarked offhandedly. You are destined to become the greatest king that Albion has ever known.

Leon nodded, but said, "And look at what it's done so far to your own house. Your mother's death, your father's ruin, your sister's madness." He paused as if to reconsider the wisdom of speaking, and then continued, though more hushed out of respect. "Your – "

"Don't," Arthur warned. "Do not go there."

"Forgive me, sire." Leon bowed his head to underscore that. "I have overstepped."

Arthur thought of his lovely Guinevere, as that was surely where Leon had been headed. Her face stuck in his mind still, undimmed, but this time, it wasn't her poise as queen or the dignity as she held up her head that flittered about his thoughts. Instead, it was the bittersweet longing with which she used to look at him when he was still a prince, and they both thought that loving each other was impossible. Turned out that in a way, it was. They'd had so little time, after all. Not even enough for a child. Arthur shook his head to rid himself of that thought, as it was an odd one for him to have. He'd never brooded over the production of an heir before; it wasn't important to him the way that it probably should have been, or the way that it definitely was to others. He frowned, and wondered why Guinevere never brought it up either. Shouldn't a queen worry about such things?

"Sire? Please, forget I said anything. It wasn't my place."

"It's alright, Leon. Sometimes I forget…" Arthur watched his boots for a moment, ground his toe into a mound of slush and then smoothed it out beneath his sole. He didn't forget, though. He remembered her face when she had thought that he might marry another to please his father, and still, somehow, loved him for it and refused to say that she would move on from him. Instead, when he asked her what she would do, she told him that she would watch him grow into the king that Camelot deserved. She died, though, before he made it that far. And yet, some part of Arthur did believe that she kept watching. That she saw him on Samhain, before the last living part of her faded and left. That it was the moment she needed to see before she could let him go. Or perhaps before she could let go of the last part left of herself.

Arthur's lungs filled with the depth of the breath he took, as if to remind himself that he did still breathe. When he raised his eyes to the marketplace again, whatever else he might have said went unspoken. Arthur saw the man he had been hoping to find stride past the end of the street on which they loitered. "There!" Arthur pointed and shoved himself off from the hitching post. "There he is."

"Sire?" Leon hastened after him, boots sticking in the mud.

Arthur ignored Leon and raised his voice to call out, "Oi! You there."

Several people paused and turned toward their king, including Arthur's target.

"Yes, you." Arthur pointed, but only briefly; he didn't want to be rude. Or more rude, as it were. Shouting probably didn't help that cause. "It's alright," he proclaimed far too loudly for a situation that really was alright. In an effort to demonstrate that there was nothing amiss, he held his hands up, palms forward. "I just want to talk."

The man looked much the same as Arthur remembered him from Samhain, though pale from the cold and less anguished. And he had a child with him – a little boy. "Sire." He bowed lower than was required, and then stayed there, peering up. "Please, sire." He kept his voice low, presumably to avoid being overheard by other common folk even as they seemed to melt into buildings and generally scurry in off the streets. "Let my boy go home. He's done nothing wrong."

Arthur let out an uncomfortable laugh. "Neither have you. This isn't an inquiry." When the man's eyes darted past Arthur to where Leon stood, Arthur sighed and turned as well. "Leon, go try to look less intimidating. I'm fine here."

Leon's gaze flickered between the obeisant man and Arthur before he nodded and retreated. Somehow, he just ended up intimidating a boarded-up market stand instead.

Arthur let out a muted sigh; Leon deserved every accolade he received, but sometimes, Arthur despaired of his obviousness. Shaking his head, he turned back to the commoner. "I apologize for worrying you. Please, stand up." Arthur gestured at him to stop stooping over there near Arthur's knees. "And tell me your name."

"Geraint, sire." The man gradually unfolded until he stood at a height with Arthur, his hand out at his side to continue shielding the little boy, who appeared no more than five as he peeked around Geraint's leg to gape at Arthur.

"Geraint," Arthur repeated. "Good. Is there somewhere we can speak privately? I'd rather not drag you back up to the castle and give people the wrong idea."

"What idea, sire?" Geraint stepped in front of the boy, outright blocking him from Arthur now. "Why me? I've done nothing wrong, sire. Nothing, I swear. I am loyal."

Arthur had to acknowledge the man's fear at that point, and also his own neglect of the mood of his people over the long, ponderous winter months. He softened his voice and his stance, and leaned onto his back foot in the hope that he would appear less confrontational that way. "I know you are. I remember you from Samhain. You were near the front of the crowd, and the first to fall to your knees." Arthur swallowed and attempted to project a humble air. "At the moment, I require an alternate perspective on things to do with magic. And other than Merlin, you are the only person I could think to recognize who almost certainly has it, and probably won't try to kill me right away." Arthur grinned to underscore that last bit as a joke.

Geraint stared at him for a moment, horrified, and then down at his boy before casting a troubled glance around the now deserted street as if to find help somewhere.

"Right, that may have been in poor taste." Arthur grimaced when even to his own ears, he sounded more irritated than sorry. He couldn't help thinking that Merlin would have laughed, or at least glared in good-natured, feigned affront. Not that Merlin was in any way a suitable yardstick for the behavior of normal people. In an effort to deflect from his failed levity, Arthur held his hands up for peace. "My word as king: I only want to talk."

Finally, and perhaps only because no one appeared to rescue him somehow, Geraint offered him a resigned nod. "My home is this way, sire." He held his fingers out in the direction of the perimeter wall that stretched around the majority of the lower town, then pushed his son ahead, careful to keep his own body between Arthur and the boy.

"Thank you, Geraint." Arthur waved at Leon to follow, but not too closely. It probably didn't matter that the big knight with the sword kept a discrete distance, since Leon's face was well known and he was, well, not all that discrete at all owing to his stature. It wasn't quite as bad as Percival lumbering around like a giant muscled tree, but only barely. Still, the gesture must count for something, at least?

Geraint led them along the main thoroughfare, and then down a narrower lane that bordered the perimeter wall. The homes here were small, built of stone with low thatched roofs and thicker walls than most since they served as a defensive line in addition to housing. Arthur made a note to perhaps relocate the families here to safer places deeper inside the citadel, or else to follow through on his father's vague notions over the years of building another wall beyond the moat to act as the primary defensive line. Arthur didn't think that the collections of rooms down here had ever been meant as habitations, but Camelot had grown by hundreds of people after his father's ascension to the throne, and in spite of some of his harsher policies. However demoralizing the thought, Merlin had been right all those months ago to point out that while Uther never cared for those with magic, he at least cared about everyone else.

Unfortunately for the poor among Camelot's citizens, that did not guarantee prosperity in any way; only the provision of necessity. These squat buildings appeared to have been barracks at one time, or supply huts converted to living space due to lack of other accommodation within the walls. It was overcrowded, and the multiple attacks on the wall in recent years showed in cracked foundation stones, pits in the rock faces, and rebuilt doorways with new timber cut and notched in haste to rehouse displaced families. And there were so few windows in any of the houses here. Maybe Arthur was spoiled by the privilege of his rank, but he thought it sad to know that families lived in these featureless, dark huts - that children played in the heavily fortified streets where the sun did not often shine.

They passed beneath one of the watch towers, and Arthur looked up at the guards patrolling the battlements. On this side of the citadel, the stone thick but lower than those nearer the royal house, the forest stretched beyond, deep and dark. Ramparts of fitted stone, pocked from wars and weather, served as first and last defense for the people in this part of the town. And it was a weak point. Of course, Merlin would worry about vulnerability – of how easily this section of wall could be breached by someone sneaking into Camelot with ill intent.

Without meaning to speak, Arthur asked, "What does it feel like?"

Geraint slowed his steps and then followed Arthur's eyes up toward the battlements. "Sire?"

Committed now, Arthur clarified, "The wards. What do they feel like?"

Geraint frowned back at Arthur, prodding his son to keep moving ahead of him. "Oppressive, sire."

"Oppressive, how? Like weight?"

Something opened in Geraint's face as if having it acknowledged, and then being asked made some kind of difference to the caution he had otherwise shown. "If magic were sound, sire, we might call it deafening. It is always there. We can always feel it, and covering our ears does nothing to lessen the roar. Some have trouble sleeping at night, up against it. Others have left the city to winter over at neighboring farmsteads."

Arthur swallowed, uneasy. "It's unpleasant, then."

Even though Arthur didn't see what Geraint should be sorry for, the apology came out clear in his tone as he replied, "Yes, sire. Such kinds of magic usually are. But we bear it for Camelot's sake."

Arthur waited until Geraint faced forward again, and then shook his head as he averted his gaze from the walls.

They navigated the muddy streets in silence from then on until Geraint turned down toward a collection of small stone houses. They ringed the perimeter of a pocket of open space formed from an angled bow of the western wall where it zigzagged around several outcroppings of stone and a well pump, set back flush against the battlement stone with a watchtower in one corner. Arthur looked around at the various evidence of human occupancy – tools and buckets, a few low fences hemming in hogs or goats, and some chicken pens where birds peeked out of coop doors as they passed. Arthur had been here before, but from above on the walks to the watch towers, and though in his idealism, he often mentioned and championed the poor, he had never really bothered to look much at the commonfolk beneath him. The poverty here was stark, and it struck him much the same way that Merlin's home had in Ealdor: hard as the packed dirt that they slept on.

The perimeter walls loomed above the rooflines, and Arthur observed a few lone sentries stood shivering against the cold, surveying the bare winter woods. They had rigged a few pulley systems in the spaces between buildings, and Arthur watched a tattered poor woman send a bucket of water up to a waiting sentry. With everything so close together, and the soldiers basically right on top of the inhabitants below, it appeared that an informal cooperation had formed between guards and common folk. Arthur watched the soldiers up top haul the bucket onto the ramparts, examine it briefly, and then start hooting and waving their gratitude to the woman below. She blew them exaggerated kisses, and they made a ridiculous show of trying to catch her imaginary favours. Not water then. Arthur smiled at the small kindness shown by a common woman who didn't need to be nice, and likely couldn't afford the indulgence, yet still chose to do it.

They reached a small hovel near the end of the housing row, and Geraint knocked before pushing the door open. The little boy tripped inside, eager to yell out to someone that they had guests. Geraint threw Arthur and Leon one last uncertain glance, and then bowed them through the door before him.

Arthur held his arm out to block Leon and nodded to his sword. "Leave it out here. No weapons."

Leon merely inclined his head and removed his sword belt, though Arthur could tell from the tightening of his jaw that he lodged a silent protest. After Leon leaned his weapon upright beside the door, Arthur went to do the same.

Geraint stopped him. "With respect, sire. Your sword should stay at your side."

It occurred to Arthur to be suspicious of what sounded like a veiled warning, but instead, he only felt puzzled. "I have no wish to intimidate your household."

Geraint nodded with a shadow of a smile - or an attempt at one, at least. "Your sword is not merely a length of sharpened metal, sire. It has magic of its own. It protects you. I would not ask you to set it aside for me."

Yes, it did have magic, but Arthur always assumed that it was magic like the spells on his armor: passive and easy to overlook. Arthur peered down at the mostly innocuous, if beautiful length of forged metal. He nodded since this seemed important to Geraint, but he took the hanging trailer of leather from his belt and knotted it about the hilt so that he wouldn't be able to draw it on a whim.

Geraint nodded at the compromise and stood aside to allow them entry to his home. They had to step down as they entered, onto a dirt floor lined with threshing and dry straw to soak up the mud and damp of a peasant dwelling in winter. Arthur waited for his eyes to adjust to the gloom and then nodded his head to the woman who stood beside the fireplace, her face turning pale even as she drew herself up straight in recognition of her guest. She dropped in an unsteady curtsy, nearly fumbled the kettle she held, and then hurried to set everything down. Arthur offered her an awkward smile before noticing two more small children sitting on a cot nearby, munching on bread and bits of dried fruit along with the boy who had been out with Geraint. Arthur wiggled his fingers at them, and the smallest tried to hide behind a blanket as a clear prelude to screaming his head off.

Geraint motioned at the children and, presumably, his wife. "Take them out. I'll call when we're finished."

Predictably, the squalling erupted a moment after, and the woman rushed to quiet the child while simultaneously managing to gather the other two, wrestle boots onto the middle child, and then pile them all into cloaks and hats. She refused to look at Arthur or Leon as she tried to rush the pack of children out of Arthur's way, or perhaps just get them safely away from him altogether. Arthur felt his stomach sink at the evidence of a faltering trust, and stepped in front of her as she finally hustled everyone to the door. "Please," Arthur implored. "Please accept my apology for intruding. I didn't mean to turn you out of your home."

The woman paused and met Arthur's gaze briefly. A muted fear shone in the unshed tears that she seemed to be fighting, but a different light crept in as she looked at Arthur, and read the sincerity on his face. She turned her eyes to her husband afterwards, and both seemed puzzled now rather than lingering over wariness. Finally, the woman bowed her head to Arthur and replied, "It's no trouble, sire."

"The children will be alright? It's rather cold outside."

"I - yes, sire." The woman stepped back as if to view him in a different or better light. "We'll be fine. They like to make men out of the snow."

Arthur made an assenting gesture and replied, "I've seen children do that. It looks like fun. I might have to try it myself someday."

She blinked at him, and consternation carved several furrows into her brow. "You've never made men in the snow before, sire?"

From beside the fireplace, Geraint hissed, "Enid!"

"Never," Arthur told her. He smiled at Geraint in the hope that he would calm back down. "The years when we had enough snow for it, I couldn't seem to find the time." And it never would have occurred to him, assuming that his father would have even allowed it. He wondered if Merlin would indulge him later, and come frolic about like an idiot for a while.

The woman - Enid, apparently - smiled back sadly. "I'm sorry to hear that, sire."

Arthur nodded, but the way that she smiled seem to convey some of her formless sadness onto him, because he felt an echo of something that he thought should ache in his chest. It didn't, though; not quite. Without meaning to, he murmured, "So am I."

Enid bent her knee to him again, and that seemed to be the end of it. Arthur watched her herd the children outside. Excited squeals filtered back in through the closed door as they made their way down the street, the children no doubt romping through the snow. Arthur shook himself, exchanged a look with Leon, and then faced their host. "Thank you for taking the time to speak with me. I know that you must be busy, given the season."

Geraint didn't answer right away; he seemed to be studying Arthur anew, now that they were alone and he had the leisure to do so. The magic became apparent a moment later when his gaze strayed and then flickered around the edge of Arthur's face the way that Merlin's sometimes did. Only, Arthur didn't feel as exposed when this man did it, and Geraint seemed not to see the same depth of things that Merlin usually did, if that even made sense. It wasn't as if Arthur had ever asked what he saw when he did that.

Finally, Geraint nodded, though he still seemed discomfited. "I am happy to help you, sire. In any way that you may require."

"Thank you." Arthur took a breath, unsure of how to start. "I'll be plain, shall I? There have been certain tensions since Samhain, which run counter to my intentions. I would like to find a way to alleviate that. When I lifted the ban, I thought that it would be freeing. Perhaps that was naïve of me, but at the very least, I thought that the fear would subside."

Geraint swallowed, though it did not appear to be nerves that caused it. Softly, he admitted, "So did we, sire."

Arthur sighed and looked down. "I was unaware of the more subtle repercussions of what I did. I admit that. My lack of forethought was unwise. It's a failing I have been cautioned against before. I find myself out of my depth and uncertain how best to move forward. It occurred to me that those with magic have no voice at my court. That's why I'm here. I hoped that you, and perhaps some others would be willing to comment on the situation. Offer advice, if you have any. Participate in your governance."

Geraint shook his head. "I don't understand, sire. You have Emrys beside you. His advice is far superior to ours."

Arthur looked past Geraint to the back wall of the room in which they stood. Threadbare, unadorned tapestries covered the stones of the perimeter wall against which this small home was built. He had a choice now, he knew: to do the politic thing and protect the integrity of his court and its image to the people, or else throw Merlin under the cart wheels, as it were. Neither option pleased him, but a tempered truth must win out in this situation. "Merlin tries his best, but he suffers many of the same fears and misconceptions that I do concerning magic. He came of age in my father's court, after all. With me. And he has been subjected to my own prejudices besides. Like me, there are ideas he simply cannot conceive or understand about the place that magic should have in a world where it is not vilified." Arthur shifted his gaze back to Geraint, to see if his words had any sort of impact at all, for good or for ill.

Something in Geraint's face seemed sorrowful, even if the confusion showed more prominently than anything else. "Why come to me, sire?"

In an effort at bare honesty, Arthur replied, "Your reaction in the crowd; it struck me. It was for people like you that I made that announcement, and yet when I finally find you in the lower town, you react as you might have done before. As if I may be here to arrest you. And while I cannot blame you for that reaction, it is not what I wanted."

"What did you want, sire?"

Slightly put off by the man's directness, for which Arthur really couldn't fault him, he admitted, "I…don't really know. I imagined that things would simply happen. I wasn't thinking beyond the moment, and the…" He shook his head, none of his words quite adequate. "…the magic I could feel in the air. I wanted equality. Justice, fairness... I wanted unity - real unity. Not the kind my father achieved by inventing an enemy to act as an artificial point of common fear." Arthur forced himself to stop pontificating as he were at court, self-conscious about how saying these things might make him sound. Pompous, or maybe stupid. Out of touch. His father's remembered derision at Arthur's softer inclinations lingered as a dull sting within him, even now. He pushed it aside. "The crux is that I have never lived with magic the way that you have, and neither has Merlin, for all that he's practically made of it. Neither of us know what it means to live with it the way that most folk do, nor can we guess how to normalize it. To make it common. And as a result, we have both misstepped."

Geraint considered that while peering off to one side of the room.

Arthur followed his gaze again to the wall backing the battlements. Since he would have to address it substantively at some point, Arthur offered, "Merlin has the best of intentions, but he can be overzealous about my safety. In the past, that has saved my life. And it is difficult to come back from so many years of such vigilance. To act as if they never happened."

For a few brief heartbeats, Arthur thought that Geraint may say something disparaging, but he ended up looking down instead.

"I want to be clear," Arthur added. "Merlin has my complete confidence, and I won't sanction him for this in any way. I am the one responsible for the actions of my nobles, and any fault for this situation should be mine. I know that whatever impression he gave, it was not his intention to cause fear or to taint our efforts at integrating magic back into Camelot."

Geraint lifted his chin. "If that is true, he would never have done such a thing to us. A barrier like that is not an overture. It is not an effort at freedom – it's not even a reliable safety measure, as there are other ways to pass the boundaries of the citadel. It is simply a show of power, as none of us would be capable of matching or breaking that magic. When we look at it, we do not see a mistake. All we see is a threat and a reminder not to cross him."

Arthur ticked his tongue off the roof of his mouth as he tried to find words quickly enough that it wouldn't seem as if he had no good answer. "He may not entirely realize what it does." Arthur winced the moment it left his mouth.

"But he made it," Geraint countered, his tone an accusation.

Arthur nodded and held up a hand to urge patience. "Yes, I know, but please hear me out. It sounds ridiculous when I say it that way, but he's not exactly trained to...do things - I'm making this worse." Arthur heaved an overlarge breath and scrubbed his hands through his air in spite of how it looked - the king, flustered, un-regal. But maybe human? Earnest. Not that he was crafting his reactions for their effect, but being a little bit more accessible might help. Guinevere taught him that as much as Merlin did. "He's a mule in a glass shop, alright? And his magic is instinctive. If it feels like a barrier to him, then he probably assumes that's what it is. I doubt there's much craft to it, just brute force, but he doesn't know any better - no one has ever tried to show him or teach him the finer details."

Geraint scoffed, tried to hide the unacceptable reaction to the statements of his king, and then flipped over into pensive as if shoved there. Incredulous, Geraint asked, "He had no teacher?"

"No," Arthur replied. "Other than Gaius, of course, but my understanding is that Gaius's magic was always limited. He didn't have all that much skill to teach."

"You...know about Gaius." Geraint straightened as he sucked in an uncomfortable breath.

"Yes," Arthur replied, droll. "Probably more than I'd like, honestly."

Geraint's eyes flickered over to him, and then he sighed. "He survived the purge from within Uther's own circle. That alone is telling."

"Yes," Arthur said again.

"As did Master Merlin."

More slowly this time, as it seemed a more gravid acknowledgement, Arthur nodded and replied once more, "Yes. He did survive." He watched Geraint stare at him, eyes hard but no longer quite as judgmental. And that was a positive step, at least. "Magic has tried to destroy this kingdom. Or at least, that is the reality that Merlin knows. It is, unfortunately, much like the false reality that my father espoused, and that even I have pushed at times. The attacks we've survived, and the loss of friends has damaged Merlin's ability to trust magic. Because of that, he is perhaps too cautious, and too quick to shield Camelot from it, no matter the form it takes. Can you understand that?"

"No," Geraint replied, his voice sharp only because it was decisive. "Magic does not have a mind of its own; it does not destroy or attack or betray. If evil was done, it was done by man or woman. He should blame them."

"Not always."

Arthur nearly leapt from his skin at the unexpected voice behind him. When he twisted to look, he found a woman standing there. She must have entered through a back room, because Arthur hadn't felt any draft at the door. Self-conscious at his reaction to a perfectly innocuous, unarmed woman, Arthur peeled his fingers from his constrained sword hilt. Behind her, perhaps a half-dozen more men and women of varying ages peered through the doorway at Arthur and Leon.

Turning to Geraint, the woman explained, "Enid told us to come."

Geraint flicked his eyes to Arthur for a moment, and then backed down from the newcomers. Leon drew close to Arthur's side, but Arthur signaled him back again to make room for the others. They brought the stale scent of static air with them. Magic. Arthur tried not to regard any of them with suspicion, but he didn't think he liked the manner in which Geraint ceded the room to them in a silence much like Arthur's own: wary, and resentful at the interruption.

"We brought drinks, sire," the first woman offered, holding up a stoppered jug. Several others behind her did likewise.

Arthur narrowed his eyes at her. "I know you, don't I?"

"No, sire." The woman stepped further into the room, which seemed to act as permission for the others to fan out, stand out of the way, or lay their drink offerings on the table. "Though you may yet recognize me."

Arthur felt a chill run from the base of his skull, down to lodge around his tailbone. "You're the Mother. One of the disir. You showed me your face in the cave."

The woman nodded, but then shook her head. "I was the mother for them. I'm not, anymore. Another has taken my place now. So, yes, while you have seen me before, we've not actually met. It is not a woman who dwelt there. Only the goddess was present then."

Arthur glanced at Leon, who crossed his arms and tried to look less as if he might have been officially named Sentinel of the Corner.

Facing the woman again, Arthur admitted, "I'm afraid that the distinction is somewhat lost on me."

The woman smiled, wide and friendly, and also false. She possessed a coldness of manner, but it could have been reserve that made it so, rather than enmity. "No worries, Arthur Pendragon. The old religion is strange to those not raised in its ways."

Arthur thought for a moment that he saw a ghost in her face of the strange goddess he had spoken to once, over a year ago. He remembered this woman warning him of the pain of knowledge, and wished that he had thought to listen better when he had the chance. Hesitantly, he told her, "I am willing to learn of it." Though when he heard his own words, it sounded more like a question than a statement.

"I fear you may yet," the woman replied, cryptic in everything from her words to the tilt of her head. "You wish to speak of magic?"

Arthur blinked at the conversational detour, and then noticed a much younger woman holding out a horned cup for him. Arthur took it and caught a whiff of strongly brewed cider within. It was still warm, though whether by magic or coming fresh from the fire, he couldn't tell. He held the cup without drinking, his mind flashing onto Merlin's disapproving frowns about food he hadn't tested for Arthur. With a murmured word of thanks regardless, he nodded to the mother woman. "You'll have to forgive my ignorance. Are you a leader of magic folk?"

"I am a priestess," she corrected. "In your understanding, it is much the same thing. I can speak for those with magic for the purposes of this conversation."

"No," Geraint broke in. "I speak for myself. Not all of us follow your order."

The woman glared at him, but Geraint did not seem intimidated in the least. "For the purposes of this conversation," she repeated.

Geraint shook his head. "You are not my mouthpiece. Or Hers anymore. You speak for no one."

One of the other newcomers, an older man, touched Geraint's arm to calm him. "Let it go, lad. Someone has to represent us to the king."

Geraint pursed his lips but eventually nodded, backing down against a pile of firewood.

Arthur shivered a bit and then occupied his troubled mind with taking a seat at the head of the table in the center of Geraint's small room. Leon slipped into place over his shoulder, the top of his head brushing against the low ceiling beam above them. With a nod to those accompanying her, the former disir woman sat across from him while the others located perches or sat on the small bed in the corner. They all looked like normal people - large and small, dressed in various styles of differing wealth. A man covered in either plaster dust or flour stood content beside a merchant trying too hard to flaunt his means with baubles that winked in the firelight. One woman even took out a pair of knitting needles and stood working on some kind of bonnet.

"Did you expect us to have hooked noses and green skin?"

Geraint scoffed and looked away, shaking his head as if embarrassed to be associated with her.

Arthur shifted his attention back to the woman across from him at the table. "Is that your way of hinting that you're all actually fairies?"

The woman blinked, taken aback.

"No? Ah, what other green things are there. Trolls. Goblins? Or maybe you're just very big, enchanted frogs."

The woman's face broke slowly and then turned wry his response to his cheek. "Point taken, sire. You associate with Emrys, after all. You know better than silly superstitions."

Arthur smiled back, but it was a fleeting and unamused thing, irritated as he was by the insulting nature of the assumption she had made about him. "What should I call you?"

"Byrdde, sire." She inclined her head to him.

Arthur gave a curt nod, and then admitted, "I expected a title, actually. Is there some formal address that I should use, according to your ways?"

Byrdde hardened the line of her mouth, the expression kin to a smile, though far less warm. "I do have formal address, sire, but it would not be proper to ask it from you."

"I see." Arthur narrowed his eyes at the fact that from her quirked eyebrow, Byrdde obviously knew that he didn't see at all. He cleared his throat and changed tack. "Why were you replaced?"

"I am of that age where I can no longer be a mother. Another was needed who can be."

That made an odd kind of sense, even if it was strange to him. Arthur frowned at the warm cider cupped in his hands. He wanted to sip at it, but something held him back. He didn't suspect any of these people of ill intent, but Merlin's paranoia had a way of infecting the people around him. Rather than dwell on any of that, Arthur shifted and brought his thoughts back to the interrupted matter at hand. "Fine then. Yes, I wish to speak of magic. About ensuring that people with it may feel free to use it as they see fit, in public or otherwise, so long as it breaks no other laws. I am aware that many are still wary about showing themselves to be sorcerers, and that there is some…doubt, shall I say, about my intentions for the future." He held a hand out in Geraint's direction, who stood still as a statue beside a wood stack near the door. "Geraint has been kind enough to give me some insight already."

The way that Byrdde angled her face toward Geraint without deigning to actually look at him made the slight clear. Without acknowledging him, she confirmed to Arthur, "Your court sorcerer has put many on edge."

"He is not my court sorcerer," Arthur corrected, leaving aside any number of other comments or denials he might have made. "He is my court physician. I don't need a court sorcerer. Magic is not a thing I can count and log and use to my satisfaction like arrows or grain stores."

Byrdde blinked, and Arthur felt a sharp satisfaction at having taken her unaware again. He knew this was a test of some kind, and this gathering less motley than it appeared. And he had no intention of ceding any ground to them. Hesitant now that the discussion seemed to have headed in an unknown direction, Byrdde replied, "That is wise, sire." Her tone turned up at the end, though, as if that comment tried to be a query just to spite her. She seemed less open as she watched Arthur now.

"My father is a cautionary tale," Arthur told her quietly. He kept his voice cold, inflectionless on purpose, the way he might have done at court to address an emissary of unknown intent. The effect, he knew, could sound like a lecture, and that was exactly his aim – to put her in her proper place. He didn't think that he liked this woman all that much, and never mind his prior history with the thing that she had been. Yes, he wanted peace with her kind, but this was still his kingdom. Not hers. Any peace or allowance came by Arthur's grace, and she seemed too full of her unrevealed titles and her religion to know that. "He used magic – used sorcerers – as he saw fit. And the moment they became inconvenient, he felt justified in discarding them. I won't make the same mistake. There must be true cooperation between us, the old ways and the new, freely, if we are to coexist. And I am committed to that course."

Several of the other random people in the room shifted and glanced at each other, their faces inscrutable. Byrdde hushed them and looked at Arthur as if seeing him from an unexpected angle. "That is wise, sire. Thank you for that assurance."

Arthur nodded and forced himself to relax where he sat. "About Merlin," he began slowly to avoid fumbling any of his words. "Leaving aside the misunderstanding about the perimeter wall, it troubles him – and me – that many of you seem to fear and avoid him since I named him family. I had thought that his relation to me would act as a bridge between myself and your kind, or at the very least, that my acceptance of him as a member of court would serve as a sign of my honest intentions."

Byrdde nodded and straightened in that particular manner of someone who hasn't quite caught the true thread of a conversation, and knew it. "He is a bridge of sorts, sire, but I fear that you may have misconstrued his place in your kingdom, and exactly what it is he bridges. Our caution is not to do with his place at your court. Emrys is your protector, not ours - as he should be. No one wants him to mistake us as a threat to you."

"Merlin is harmless," Arthur protested. Except he wasn't; he could be a bit terrifying. Since Byrdde was giving him that dubious look again, and opening her mouth to backtrack, Arthur flapped his hand for her to hold her peace. "Yes, alright. I understand why you would say that. But unless you have actually done something suspect, I don't see why there is any risk from him." He paused, leaned back a fraction, and then felt warily compelled to ask, "Do you want to harm me?"

Every single one of them glanced around at the others, save Geraint, who shook his head with a sigh before saying, "No one here wishes you harm, sire."

Arthur believed him, but only in speaking for himself. "I would understand if that weren't the case," he replied, but he faced Byrdde again instead of continuing to speak to Geraint, and chose his next words carefully. "Camelot has inflicted much pain and suffering onto magic users. Perhaps some wounds run too deep."

Byrdde pressed her mouth into a thin and uncertain line, her eyes trained on the table for a moment too long to disregard. Eventually, however, she met his gaze again, reserved and considering in much the same way as he was, as if watching a snake and wondering whether it were venomous or not. "Perhaps it is fair to say that neither side is blameless anymore. Peace requires the sacrifice and forgiveness of all parties, however difficult or distasteful. At some point, mutual hurts must cancel each other out. Grudges must be set aside, no matter the pain, lest we simply burn each other to the ground and all perish."

Without hesitation, Arthur replied, "I am willing to set the past aside if you are."

"And is Emrys as willing too?"

Arthur sighed into his undrinkable, probably perfectly safe cider. "Merlin will follow my lead." Probably. Eventually. "But I would ask a favor in return for that." He lifted his gaze to brush everyone in the room before resting once again on Byrdde. "Talk to him. Interact with him. Let people see that there is open and peaceful communication between common folk of magic, and the royal household." He bit the inside of his lip as he looked down and dug his thumbs into the enamel of the cider cup. "Let him into your world. More even than me, he needs to see that magic is a good thing, and the burden of showing that falls on you, fair or not. He is still suspicious of others wielding it, and I cannot fault him for that given the many attacks he has deflected over the years. If you are troubled by the stance he has taken, then you can demonstrate his error by setting a better example than those who came before you. Will you try to do that?"

Byrdde blinked, made an indeterminate oval with her mouth, and then asked, "You wish us to…befriend Emrys?"

"No," Arthur snapped. "I want you to treat Merlin as if he isn't some kind of druid pariah. He's a man like any other, and I don't want him ostracized just because you lot refuse to recognize him as anything other than a – a creature of magic. And yes, I do know that you call him that, and that it is not always done in kindness. At least acknowledge the hurt in that."

No one spoke for a long moment of stunned silence, and Arthur had to visibly calm himself after his outburst. He hadn't meant to react with such passion, and it may have led him to reveal too much.

Byrdde swallowed and appeared ashamed, but only briefly. The expression lingered longer on the faces of the others in the room, at least. "Sire," she started, then stopped again. "Sire. To be clear, those in this room are not druids. The old religion has many facets and many followers, but we are not all the same. They are a different people. Their understanding of Emrys is unique to them, though we share parts of our mythologies with each other."

Arthur nodded, filing that information away for later, but stated, "My comments stand, regardless."

"Yes, they have merit," Byrdde replied. She considered a small cider cup of her own, but like Arthur, did not drink. "It is not maliciousness that drives us - any of us, the druids included. They claim Merlin as one of them, and love him as their divine leader Emrys, but they are not as numerous as we, and we do not hold him in the same kind of regard. To us, Emrys is separate. He does not lead us, and he is not one of us."

Several of the onlookers shifted, and Arthur looked up to find Geraint and a few others scowling. So that was a point of contention. Arthur wondered how many factions or different belief systems this small group actually represented.

"It is not that we wish to be cruel," Byrdde continued, seemingly oblivious to Arthur's distraction. "Please understand that. Whatever your Merlin is, Emrys is dangerous. I know the dichotomy can make it difficult to understand, because we refer to different things when we speak of Merlin alone versus Emrys alone, and yet they are the same being. To avoid the notice of one is to avoid the notice of the other."

Arthur hid his sneer in a rather violent frown directed at his hands where they squeezed more tightly around the cider cup. When he looked up, he tried to find some opposing opinion on the faces of the others arrayed about the room. Except for Geraint, however, they all nodded, most of their faces pink or upset at the admission. Geraint himself glared at Byrdde for a moment, strafed his gaze over Arthur, and then sank further back onto his wood pile. The knitting woman glanced at Geraint, frowned at nothing in particular, and then murmured something presumably soothing to him. Whatever it was, it made Geraint sigh and look away from her as well. If Arthur were in a more charitable mood, he would find this divide interesting; it showed how fractured the old religion really was. Or what was left of it, at least. But as it stood in that moment, the only thing Arthur felt was annoyance and perhaps affront, though whether on his own behalf or on Merlin's, he wasn't sure.

Turning back to Byrdde, Arthur remarked, "So you admit that you shun him on purpose. What does that serve, exactly?"

"We're talking round in circles now," Byrdde told him. "It serves to keep us safe." Her voice seemed kind on the surface, but there was an edge to it. Not like with the disir – nothing like that. But it still carried that air of prophecy to it, stagnant and musty and cold.

"Merlin doesn't wish you any harm," Arthur returned, incredulous but unnerved by the echo of her voice in his mind, overlayed so clearly with that of the strange woman who spoke to him once in a damp, old cave. It was the same voice, and yet clearly not. They spoke with a different cadence, a different accent – even the choice of words and the ordering of them differed. All except for the tone. The actual sound of it. "Not as long as you don't wish it back on us. And to be clear, you owe your freedom to him. Not to me. I would never have come to regard magic as I have, if not for him. He has done terrible and wonderful things both in defense of this kingdom, for all of us, as some debt to you lot that he didn't actually owe, and that frankly, I'm not sure all of you actually deserved. And in response, you refuse to show him even a sliver of kindness because of – what? – some ridiculous ravings spouted by old, dead madmen?"

"They are not ravings," Byrdde snapped. She subsided immediately, though, as if rebuked by the heat of her own outburst. "Or madmen. They are prophecies, spoken by Seers. Many Seers, over the course of centuries. They have provenance."

"Provenance," Arthur echoed flatly. He snorted, more a thing of his throat than his nose. "Like a holy relic?"

Byrdde seemed to make an effort not to look up from her hands on the surface of the table, as if that were a focal point for calm. "It is nothing like this new god that you prop up in empty rooms with tall ceilings. The old religion does not need morbid bits of dead holy men's fingers to pretend its legitimacy."

One of the men, silent up until now, cleared his throat, clearly uncomfortable at the whole thing. "We mean no disrespect, sire, I'm sure. We do have relics of our own. Just…not actual…" He swallowed, and appeared to be wishing himself back in time so that he could have never spoken. "…fingers."

Arthur opened his mouth, closed it, and then leaned into Leon's space. He twiddled a few fingers in a vague come down here for a moment gesture. Once Leon lowered his head down near to Arthur's, Arthur murmured, hopefully soto voce, "We don't actually have a collection of fingers, do we?"

It took far too long for Leon to answer, and when he did, it was only to say, "Not us, personally."

Somehow, Arthur reserved his natural reaction and merely swayed upright in his chair again as Leon withdrew. "Yes, alright," Arthur conceded to Byrdde and the other man who had spoken. "Fair point on the…fingers. Evidently." How was this his life? He cleared his throat and tried not to linger over how on earth to address this apparent morbidity with the priests that served the new god. "Setting that aside, I don't see what Seers or prophecy actually has to do with this. I am not asking you for foresight – no one is. This is about the present."

Byrdde nodded, but said, "Foresight starts in the present. Prophecy is a thing of the present. That is what forms it."

Arthur sighed and scrunched his face up in frustration behind the shield of one hand. Into his fingers, he grumbled, "You sound like that dragon." Arthur dropped his hand with a sigh and fixed his gaze on Byrdde, who appeared startled at the comparison he drew. "So fixated on prophecy, and blind to the fact, that you neglect what is right in front of you. It hurts people when you do that. It causes them pain."

That gave Byrdde pause, and she cast a sour glance into her cider. "Sire, I respect the fact that to you, the old religion is strange and full of superstition in which you find it difficult to believe. Please respect in kind that these beliefs are sacred to us. They shape our lives in ways you cannot comprehend as an outsider."

"This isn't about the old religion," Arthur countered. "This is about magic, and the sorcerers that live in my kingdom. All of them."

"You speak as if those are different things," Byrdde returned, insistent. "They are not."

Arthur shook his head and looked away to gather his thoughts. Instead, he recalled the last conversation he had with Gaius, where he'd been told much the same thing – that magic and the old religion could not be unwound. One is the other. "I didn't change the laws of this land because of prophecy or destiny, or some archetype that your kind insist on thrusting onto the shoulders of a man who didn't ask for it. In this instance, magic and the old religion are not the same. It is not magic setting us at odds now."

"No," Byrdde agreed, though her tone did not echo that. Her face turned sardonic as she continued, "It is your personal attachment to our so-called archetype which is doing that."

Arthur gave her an unappreciative look. "I rather think it is your prejudice. I am starting to see that as much as my family persecuted certain peoples in this kingdom, you do the same in your own way. Call your motives what you will, but the effect is no different, is it? He hasn't done anything to you, and you shun him. Why? His birthright, maybe. Or his name. One that you give him."

"We shun no one."

"You have always shunned him," Arthur countered, picking absently at the tabletop as he stared at Byrdde. Outwardly, he appeared lax and calm, but it was only by design. A deliberate copy of the lassitude of his father when in truth, inside, Arthur knew that Uther had seethed just as violently as he himself did now. "And by you, I do refer to the old religion. So long as he wasn't doing what you wanted, or wasn't being useful to you, he deserved no consideration. No quarter. If he dared question you, he was ignored. If he had the audacity of an opinion of his own, or a reluctance to do something morally repugnant, he was punished in some manner. He opposed you, and you attacked him. You don't really expect me to think that every single time someone came after him, or after me, it was just some rogue keeper of grudges. So, no. You don't get to sit there and claim that my personal attachment – " Arthur snarled the words as if they were foul. " – is the thing putting us all at odds. Merlin is supposed to be your savior, but be honest. You don't like the manner in which he saves."

Byrdde narrowed her eyes at him. "This ordeal could have been over years ago, if he had done his part. But he liked playing the serving boy more."

Arthur tipped his head and then barked out an incredulous laugh. "Oh, you are…really something else. It's all just pride, isn't it. Your precious Emrys likes tying my boot laces, and you're offended by that."

"People died while he dallied!"

Arthur smacked his hand on the tabletop and shouted, "Then why didn't any of you help him?!" He jerked under the hand that seized his shoulder, but it was only Leon, warning him to calm. And Arthur appreciated that bit of sense even as he shrugged it off.

Geraint sighed into the abrupt wash of silence that rushed to fill the void following Arthur's outburst – a spill of water into a tide pool. "For my part – mine and my family's, at least – we thought it best to stay out of the way. None of us could know the full breadth of what he faced. The risk of interfering, and perhaps undoing some scheme of his, was too great."

"Scheme," Arthur echoed. He shook his head with his eyes closed while he scraped a thumbnail over the irritated furrow of his brow. "Don't you understand? He didn't have a scheme. No one gave him a scheme – no one explained anything to him. He had to guess."

"It is you who do not understand, sire." Byrdde rustled in her seat, and Arthur looked up to find her leaning forward over the cider clasped in her hands. "Emrys does not guess. He is a creature of the old religion – a force of magic in and of itself. A thing made by and for fate."

Flatly, Arthur parroted, "Thing."

Exasperated, Byrdde admonished, "You must stop assigning your Roman values to our ways if you wish to understand them."

Arthur considered trying to explain that he was hardly Roman in any way but lineage, but he doubted it would help.

"The point," Byrdde pressed as if drilling moral lessons into a stone head, "is that there is nothing for us to explain to him. It would be like a child lecturing you on swordplay."

"And I'm telling you," Arthur snapped, dropping his hand to smack against the table with an accidental clap of sound. "You are wrong. Did you ever ask him?" Arthur bit out, mood souring with the force of a battering ram. "Or did you just assume that his mother giving him my cousin's name meant something more than familial affection?"

Byrdde shut her eyes in much the same manner as Arthur did when fighting not to roll them. "Sire." She looked up at him once again. "My assumptions are immaterial. He is Emrys. He will do as he must, no matter what he does or does not know. He can't help himself."

Arthur shook his head, once, curt and just as frustrated as she seemed to be. "So you can disparage him for not acting as you think he should have, and at the same time, spout nonsense about fate as if nothing you do could interfere with him or sway him from it. You do see how utterly ridiculous that is, don't you?"

One of the men standing near the fireplace asked, shaken, "Emrys truly didn't know?"

Arthur took a long breath and shifted his unimpressed gaze to that man. "Merlin was a boy who thought he came to Camelot to be a physician's apprentice. And if it weren't for his mother sending him here, to a family member for safekeeping, he would not even have been that."

Byrdde tipped her head, pointed as she said, "And yet his mother did send him, as and when needed."

Arthur snorted. "Only for you to complain about his timing, apparently."

"His destiny – "

"His destiny," Arthur interrupted severely, "is a riddle pieced out to him on a dragon's whims. And he did the best he could with that. How can you possibly sit there and revere the perfect working of fate, while simultaneously deriding him for not doing it the way you wanted him to? And while we are on the subject, how many of your ilk got in the way over the years with schemes against Camelot, or alliance with my sister – poisoning attempts by high priestesses - you realize you were working against him, don't you? Against your vaunted thing of fate?"

No one spoke while they mulled that over. A log snapped in the fire, sap fizzling in the flames, and one of the men toed a few chunks of embers back toward the grate. Finally, Byrdde drew herself up in her seat and proclaimed, "It doesn't matter. Many were driven to act ill, and their reasons vary. Perhaps their faith faltered; I cannot know."

"Your own goddess tried to impale me with a spear. Did her faith falter too, or was that you?"

"Even the gods are fallible!" Byrdde let out a shuddering breath, and while her temper was obvious, Arthur thought he could also see some hint of discomfiture in her posture too. "Emrys prevailed in spite of us, which is testament to his power and the correctness of his purpose. And if ignorance is the affect that he chose in order to best bring us here, then his wisdom has also prevailed, and we must acknowledge that. Our anger is misplaced, and we will repent of our lack of faith, but it doesn't change what he is."

This was going nowhere. "Right." Arthur sighed off to one side. "Your creature. A bloody archetype."

"Yes." Byrdde relented and looked down at the table's surface. "I forget, sometimes, how we sound to outsiders. Mad, perhaps. Cruel at times, and contradictory. In the old days, before your father or his father came here, most of its followers worshipped and observed the rights of the old religion out of fear. Not devotion. For the world is often a terrible and cruel place where even the gods themselves are subject to its relentless consumption and cycles of years. And those cycles are mindless. There is no motive, only motion seeking balance. The awful truth that we live with is that the old religion has no agenda of its own; it simply is, and we are caught in it. Not even the gods can escape."

Arthur sighed and tried to convey tolerance, since Byrdde did seem to be trying to help him understand them. "You cannot expect me to believe that you have no agenda."

"I do have one," Byrdde clipped back. "Most of us do. But that is a separate thing – a thing of men and women. It sits beside the old religion; it is not of it, and we certainly don't control it, much as we sometimes still try."

Arthur propped his elbow on the table and dropped his brow into his open hand with a sharp exhale that almost graduated to an unkind word. To say that the old religion had no agenda seemed ludicrous to him; something out there seemed to have a very clear agenda. If it wasn't man or woman, then it had to be the magic itself, didn't it? After all, Merlin himself told Arthur that sometimes, the magic wants things. Sometimes, it takes over. That implies a purpose and a thing to drive it. After pinching the bridge of his nose, Arthur slumped upright again in his seat. "Fine. Assume for a moment that I accept this explanation. It doesn't justify why you won't even recognize someone who is like you."

Byrdde drew in a steadying breath. "He is not, though. Your Merlin is not like us. That is the point I am trying to make."

Arthur shook his head and dug a thumb briefly into the bridge between his eyes. "Ma'am, forgive me. But all I hear is that you expect things of him, but refuse to acknowledge him in return. He has delivered you. Is that not what you wanted? Is it not good enough?"

"You have delivered us," Byrdde countered. "And if I may be so humble, you have done so in spite of us and our hostility, which I sadly admit, lingers even now."

"If I did, then you still deny his contribution to that."

"Do you thank the wheat for growing?"

Arthur tried hard not to let the burst of air that he forced through his nostrils become a scornful snort. "Yes! Every year, in fact." Widening his eyes for effect, he added, "On Samhain. I know you know that."

"We are getting nowhere." Byrdde shook her head. "This can hardly matter so much to your kingdom. Can you not just accept our ways, and that they are a mystery, and perhaps an annoyance to you?"

"Can you not just accept that Merlin does not deserve your censure?" Arthur flipped his hand over and gestured, palm open, to the gathering in general. "If nothing else, Merlin is a member of my court. He is royal. He is my heir. And you owe him an allegiance just for that. You cannot give that, as a citizen of Camelot, if you keep calling him things like creature, and avoiding him because of your superstitions."

"You saw the triple goddess, did you not?"

"Yes," Arthur gusted. He was really trying not lose patience here, but all he wanted to do was snap and rail at her for her disrespect. He didn't have to change the laws, after all. And she only benefited now – only had the right to speak to him in peace now – because of how Merlin made him doubt the path that Uther set him on. "Yes, I saw the triple goddess, as you well know."

"Are you certain?"

Arthur angled his head back around and frowned at her. "What do you mean?"

"Did you see the goddess," Byrdde pressed, "or did you see us – my sisters and I?"

"I thought you spoke for her," Arthur replied, his voice low.

Byrdde nodded. "So you saw us – her mouthpieces. But are the mouthpieces also the goddess? Or is the goddess too abstract to ever see with your eyes, or hear with your ears, other than through the reflection – us, the vessels – with which you may interact? After all, she is so vast, and so unfathomed, that it takes three of us to convey even a part of her to you. If not for us, would you be able to know of her at all?"

Arthur shut one eye more tightly than the other, clenched his teeth briefly, and finally said, "Surely this is a question for your priests; why are you asking me?"

"I am trying to help you understand our position towards Emrys, since you will not let it go. Please, sire – try to answer. The distinction is important."

Arthur made a quelling gesture and then slanted his gaze aside, noncommittal. "Alright. Alright, then I suppose, no. I didn't see the goddess."

"But you did," Byrdde countered.

Arthur gave up on his composure and grabbed his hair as an excuse to growl into his elbows. Very regal of him. He didn't care at that point.

Byrdde patted the table, set her cider aside into that spot she'd just touched, and then asked Arthur, "Do you know of a woman called Freya?"

Arthur emerged from his elbows and flared his nostrils, but he didn't release his hair. "No. Who is she?"

Byrdde cocked her head as if she were about to win some small victory. "Your Merlin has not told you of her?"

"No," Arthur replied. "There are, in fact, many things he has not told me, as he does not owe me an accounting of his entire life. What is your point in all of this? Are you trying my temper on purpose?"

"Inadvertently, perhaps," Byrdde admitted. "It is...habit, sire. I apologize if it offends."

Habit? That was the excuse she chose? "It's bloody sophistry. If you hadn't said as much, I would not think you retired from your former vocation at all."

Byrdde's face brightened in surprise as if Arthur had paid her some profound compliment, but she moved on without addressing it. "Then you have not heard the name Freya. Have you heard of the Lady of the Lake?"

Whatever patience Arthur normally had was already gone, so he made no attempt at modulating the heat in his voice when he replied, "I don't see how this is an answer anymore. Stop deflecting from my questions. Otherwise, I am going to wonder why we are speaking at all."

"Do you know of her?" Byrdde pressed.

Since she insisted on this, and Arthur wasn't quite ready to give up his purpose in coming here yet, Arthur drew a sharp breath to calm himself. "If you refer to the spirit of the lake on the road north past the mountains, then yes. I am aware of the stories people tell."

Byrdde nodded. "Do you remember the first time you heard of her?"

Arthur blew out a sharp, aggravated breath and finally let loose his death grip on his hair. "I don't know. A few years ago. My patrols brought back stories about a woman in the water who appeared to fishermen, or retrieved things lost in the lakebed. She supposedly saved a drowning boy who fell from his father's boat last summer. It's not an unusual tale, though; the woods and peasant villages are full of such fables."

Byrdde appeared relieved that Arthur had chosen to engage with her on the subject. "Yes, sire. But not all of them are fables. You are correct that it was only a few years ago that this lady first appeared. Before that, the lake had no spirit in it. No tales, no ghost stories. And nothing of the old religion dwelt there aside from abandoned groves and the usual minor, wild magics." She angled herself the other way in her seat and, as if it were entirely unrelated, told him, "Freya was a young woman whom Emrys once thought he loved."

A dim recollection came to Arthur, overshadowed by what followed, of Merlin telling him about a woman he might have loved in some way, or maybe pitied and wanted to protect. He could all but smell the autumn leaves, and the damp earth of a ravine as they rode through it, the air thick with Arthur's teasing and ill-thought words, and the poignant scent of horse as Merlin tried to awkwardly explain how he had felt once, kissing a girl. "Why is this important?"

"I am answering your question," Byrdde asserted again. "Freya was cursed." Her voice shifted to a tone of legends spoken around campfires even though it wasn't so long ago. "Through no fault of her own. Perhaps he pitied her or felt some affinity for one he mistook as being like him. He may even have thought it love, of a sort, but I doubt that it went beyond a faint philia at best. He only knew her a handful of days. She was, of course, doomed, and her death tragic. He took her to the lake, and put her body in it."

Arthur breathed slowly to obscure any tell he might have that part of this tale was known to him, albeit from the other side.

"The Lady of the Lake lives there now," Byrdde told him. The distance faded from her gaze, and she focused on Arthur again. "She is a thing of the water, as spoken of in the old ways. But she is not only Lady in that lake. She is the Lady of All Lakes. All bodies of still water are her domain."

Arthur swallowed and confessed, "I don't understand."

"In your parlance, he made her a goddess," Byrdde replied. Though her tone remained direct and even reverent, to a degree, something about her face spoke of distaste. "He created something divine out of an infancy of grief, and gave her the waters to bide."

Not distaste, Arthur realized abruptly. Fear. The absent, unthinking kind. The same visceral fear that Merlin had once worn just beneath his skin, so much a part of him that not even Merlin himself really knew it was there. In fact, he still wore it, if Arthur were being honest. Or some part of it, at least. "What… What are you saying, exactly?"

"That you keep claiming that he is like us – that he is one of us – but that one incident alone shows that he is not." Byrdde leaned forward over her hands folded together on the surface of the table. "You ask why we want no acquaintance with him. It is not cruelty, sire. It is self-preservation. Emrys – Merlin – whatever you call him, however you define him to yourself – it is a fact that he took a woman he barely knew, and could not have truly loved, and made her that – that thing in the water. There was nothing in that lake, or those woods, but him. No magic but his, no sleeping force of nature, no holy ground. He took a paltry sorrow, superficial at best, and fashioned a dead, mortal woman into a being that will last forever. She is Lady of the Lake, and she is the lake manifest. Immutable. Elemental. A creature of the old religion."

Arthur looked at the still surface of his cider. He could hear Leon shift his weight again behind him.

"Do you see, sire? If his sorrow at the death of a stranger could alter the elements themselves to bear up a goddess from dead waters, what might he do to those he truly cares for? To those for whom his love or his grief is real?"

Arthur looked up and his chest expanded with fallow breath scented heavily with the cider and alcohol in his untouched cup. He thought, perhaps unkindly, of Guinevere. Of how she was dead, and how Merlin had loved her too. Truly loved her, as his friend and his queen. Byrdde had to be wrong, because surely if Merlin could do such a thing, he would have done it for Guinevere.

Gruff with the tattered remnants of his well-worn grief, Arthur asserted, "I don't believe you. And I object to you dragging him into your bestiaries and origin stories while he still lives to suffer the stigma of them."

"Your belief is your choice," Byrdde allowed, though her tone held no finality. "Be reassured that he doesn't do it on purpose; he likely couldn't. As you pointed out, his affect is ignorance of his own path and power. He has no idea what he's capable of – that it was him who made her what she is now. And there is every possibility that she is not the only one to whom he has done this." Byrdde shrugged to demonstrate her lack of complete knowledge. "We have no way of knowing if there are others until they show themselves, if they show themselves. But surely you see the danger. I have served a goddess - been her mouthpiece - and even I am not so foolish as to wish to be one. No sane person would want that."

Just to be contrary, Arthur sourly remarked, "Freya may disagree, since her other option was death."

"Freya is not Freya anymore," Byrdde rejoined. "She is the Lady of the Lake. She cannot know now what Freya may have wanted."

Arthur rolled his eyes, however rude the gesture. "I understand that this is your way and your belief, but it is not mine. My only concern is my kingdom, and Merlin is part of that. I must insist that you give him the respect due his rank, and nothing you have said here serves to justify your refusal."

The man standing behind Byrdde broke in to swear, "We do not disrespect Emrys, sire. We don't dare." Several other heads nodded, emphatic and fervent.

"And yet you accuse him of - " Arthur flapped a hand about, incredulous, to try to sum up the load of drivel he had just been served. "You know what, I don't even know what you're accusing him of, but it's clear that you are. I came here looking for common ground and compromise - a way for all of us to find a point from which we can move forward, and heal the divide in this land. Do you really want peace with Camelot - with me - or are you so married to this Emrys prophecy that you would undermine your interests at the first step?"

Byrdde shook her head and leaned forward to catch his eye. "We do not accuse. We only state what is. Consider, just for a moment, if what I've told you is true. What does that say about the man you call brother?"

"That his heart is bigger than yours," Arthur sneered. "Since I gather that no one here would have mourned this Freya even superficially."

"We mourn what she became," Byrdde snapped back. "Sire, think of that power wielded in ignorance by a child, for that is Merlin's affect. He doesn't know. And he doesn't ask, because it doesn't occur to him that he should. He looks at a thing like the Lady of the Lake and is not surprised, or horrified, or anything at all because a child sees the world clearly – more clearly than us – and accepts it as it is. They ask questions all of the time but they don't question. They don't have the capacity for deeper thought on the nature of what is real."

"And now you insult his intelligence too." Arthur let his gaze roll off to the side again, pretty much done with this conversation.

"It is not an insult," Byrdde argued, intent. "Childlike innocence is divine, but it does not comprehend consequence, and it cannot be culpable the way that we can be. When we call Emrys - Merlin - a creature of magic, or a thing born of it, that is what we mean. He is not just a mouthpiece, as I was. He is not possessed by anything. He embodies the elemental magic of nature - he is himself a force of it. And there is no thought to a force of nature. It does not question itself. It is terrible and it is fearsome, but it is also innocent."

Arthur picked at the uneven surface of Geraint's table in noncommittal search of a splinter. "It cares no more about you than a flood might."

With evident relief to finally be understood, or at least to assume as much, Byrdde nodded. "And like flood waters, it does not intend to do either evil or good. It simply is. It flows as it must, and it will balance itself when displaced. It will spread with no care for submerged fields or drowned houses, until it runs its natural course. It may have a manifest aspect like the Lady of the Lake, but the water is still the water at the end."

Arthur knew what she meant him to infer here – the water as a metaphor for magic, and Merlin its witless and pointless manifestation – but it was a cold thing, and he still thought it cruel, and it just rubbed Arthur all wrong. "Merlin is not a flood. I would have noticed."

"There is a dichotomy, yes," Byrdde agreed, though it didn't explain anything.

Arthur inflated his chest with as much air as he could manage, and rubbed his hand over his face as he slowly exhaled all of it. "And what of me?" Arthur shook his head and shoved the cup of cider across the table. A wash of orange-brown liquid slopped over the rim of the cup to stain the wood grain beneath it. "Should I fear him as you do?"

With no embellishment, Byrdde simply replied, "He loves you." But she said it in warning, too. "You are his Once and Future King, just as the Great Dragon told him you must be."

Arthur stared at her, his gut a slow-simmering mass of indignation and affront. It would be easy to lash out. He wanted to. He wanted to yell at these people, and expose them for their machinations, because he thought he saw the implication here and it sickened him. But he didn't. It wouldn't serve anything.

"He can define reality," Byrdde told him. "You know this. You've seen it. His will can be the will of the world; it bends for him – life and death, good and evil, despair and hope – and he doesn't even know it. He is the definition of a manifest destiny, as he has, in fact, manifested one for you."

Like molasses creeping down a sloped surface, Arthur reared his head back on his neck. "That is offensive."

"It is," Byrdde agreed. "Though I doubt you find it so for the right reasons."

"I'll hear no more of this." Arthur shoved to his feet. "I will not listen to you malign him for faults that you put on him."

"Prophecy is a self-fulfilling thing," Byrdde persisted; she didn't even have the decency to stand when her king did. "It lives only because men believe in it, and what he believes has a life of its own."

Arthur took a long breath, lungs pressing against his ribcage, and stood with his eyes fixed on the table where it was safe to look. "I will take care of the wards on the perimeter walls, and so long as you break no laws, I will not object to your ways. Beyond that, our business with each other is concluded."

As Arthur approached the door, Byrdde's voice stopped him. "Do you know what the Once and Future King is, Arthur Pendragon? What they told him you are? What he will one day make of you?"

The greatest king that Albion has ever known. Arthur had clung to that at times in the past when nothing else remained to bring him hope. When his faith in himself faltered.

"He will not let you go. He cannot anymore. The pieces have been set, and he is trapped now too, perhaps by his own device. Do not walk with him blindly."

Manipulations – she all but admitted it. If the old religion, or magic, had no agenda of its own, as they claimed, then this destiny Merlin clung to was a thing made only by men and women, and they used him unwitting to further it. Merlin believed what others told him. What others insisted must be true – impossible, made-up stories spewed out by the dragon and Gaius and druids, and Myrddin, and who knew who else. Prophecies shoved down his throat from the moment he came to Camelot. Things he never would have thought on his own. All contrived by people. Not gods. Reality didn't have to bend for him; Merlin was gullible as a youth, and stubborn, and when he set his mind to something, he really couldn't be deterred. Arthur didn't see any sort of manifest destiny in where they stood now. He saw the lie and the victim of it, and nothing more.

Arthur squeezed his hand into a tight fist at his side and spit with his back still turned, "Your words are foul."

Leon touched the tips of his fingers to Arthur's shoulders as if to ground him, or caution him against the temper he could certainly see flaring in Arthur's darkening countenance. Arthur had fury for himself, too. In the same breath that they denigrated Merlin as a useful idiot, they diminished Arthur with the implication that he was only king, only good, only destined for greatness because Merlin existed. That without him, Arthur was nothing. Could be nothing, would have done nothing. That his achievements were not his, and never would be; that everything Arthur accomplished was credit only to Merlin. It hurt more because Arthur knew he'd be dead now if not for Merlin, and perhaps, considering the great uncle as well, Arthur may have never existed at all. And even setting that aside, had Arthur survived on his own to be king, he wouldn't be the man he was today. He knew that. He wouldn't be good, much less great, without Merlin's intervention. And so he owed his own success to Merlin's victimhood at their hands too.

"Shall I tell you," Byrdde asked archly, "the prophecy of the Once and Future King? Shall I tell you where he believes you are bound?"

Arthur lifted his face to the door before him, thick wood planks that nonetheless let in a terrible draft through cracks that betrayed wan daylight outside. The bear. They're killing the bear. In a field on fire, near a lake. Near...near still waters. Fall by the lake. Let them take you.

Arthur twisted to look over his shoulder, and wanted to rage at the pity on Byrdde's face. "I know where I'm bound," he hissed. "And it is my doing. My choice. Not his doing, and not yours." Just for the comeback value of it, he modulated his voice and added, "I'll give Freya your regards when I get there." Then he whirled and shoved through the door, spending his pent-up violence on the wood instead of on the infuriating face of a woman who now taunted him with fate and destiny and lies for a second time. He didn't dare pause to see how she took that, as any shock she might show on her face would not be near satisfying enough to dampen his temper.

Snow had started falling again while they lingered inside, and Arthur kicked through the accumulation wishing that the knights were practicing this afternoon so that he could hit something repeatedly. Leon hurried after him, his sword in his hand since Arthur didn't leave him time to buckle it back on properly. They were nearly at the end of the street when his frantic voice called out a plea to wait. Arthur slowed his steps, feet slogging in the ankle-deep mush of ice and mud churned up by cart wheels and mules.

"Sire – "

Over his shoulder, Arthur spat, "Do not tell me you warned me!"

Sounding hurt, Leon protested, "I wouldn't, sire."

Arthur ground to a halt in the middle of the street and huffed out a collection of breaths that fogged before his face in the frigid air. When he could be certain of a modicum of control, Arthur said, "I apologize, Leon. You don't deserve my temper."

Rather than address the apology, Leon cautioned, "You need their cooperation and approval, sire. If you truly wish to integrate their kind, and not simply tolerate magic, then it may be unwise to alienate them, even if their notions are offensive."

"If I have to make concessions," Arthur snapped back, "then so do they. I will not allow them to malign others on the excuse of their gods or their traditions, or their superstitions, as that is all they are! They must also learn to cooperate and respect the ways of others, or this endeavor will fail, and I will be glad of it."

Leon stepped closer so that their words would stay private in a snow-muffled street where sound would carry far across ice and cold. His fingers were still occupied with replacing his sword belt. He must have simply grabbed it all up from beside the door in his haste to keep up with Arthur. "With respect, sire, you do not mean that. This is not about cooperation or compromise. If it were, you would allow them their stories and their delusions without care. Instead, you are insulted because they said things you don't like about Merlin."

Arthur sucked in a breath so chilled that he could taste the icy numbness of it on his tongue, but he didn't get a chance to spew out whatever thoughtless vitriol he could feel choking his throat to escape the confines of his mouth. When he turned, it was to find Geraint was standing a few feet past Leon's shoulder, his eyes wide and a shamed expression on his chilled face. He obviously overheard at least part of that exchange.

Arthur stepped in a tight arc until he could face Geraint. "What is it?"

"I know what it's like to be a pariah," Geraint gasped, evidently winded from chasing them down, or perhaps in equal part from building up the nerve to go after him and say anything at all. "I was born with magic too. The common kind. It is nothing like Master Merlin's, but I do know what it feels like to be shunned for something that you cannot help. To be told what you are rather than have the choice. And he doesn't deserve that any more than I did. If they will not see reason – " He gestured behind him to the small collection of people filing out of his house. "Then I will do as you ask. I want cooperation. I will make an effort to bridge the gap between us."

Arthur drew himself up straighter and glowered at the man who had once fallen to his knees and hailed his king with all the breath in his body. "I won't tolerate fake congeniality. And I won't allow Merlin to be insulted by mindfulness born of pity or obligation, even if he would accept whatever dregs he could get."

"It is not pity," Geraint breathed. His voice somehow carried across the space between them, and above the constant din of sound that billowed about the lower town. Maybe it was magic, or maybe just a trick of the wind, which could also, in its own natural way, be magic. "Master Merlin has done nothing against any of us that we didn't deserve. And you're right; the old religion is cruel, and has been cruel to him. Byrdde follows the cult of the Triple Goddess; it comes with its own dogma, but that is all it is. I implore you not to listen, and not to judge us by her words. Priests and priestesses can delude themselves too easily, and they fall out of touch with the world after spending decades in dark places immersed in strict worship. She hasn't the capacity to think for herself anymore. Please forgive her. In her own way, she is also a victim of the old religion, whether she believes so or not."

"So you don't believe in the Triple Goddess?" Arthur asked.

"I don't believe in her mouthpiece," Geraint corrected. "The goddess herself is beyond us."

Arthur shut his eyes and sucked his lips in against his teeth before nodding. "You have been open with me today. And sensibly direct. I appreciate that. Will you take a seat on my council, at least temporarily, so that you may advocate for those like you?"

Geraint blinked and appeared much as he had before Byrdde and her demented ideals sidetracked their conversation. Guarded once again, he said, "Sire, I maintain that Master Merlin is better placed for that."

"I know why you think that," Arthur allowed. "But your views on magic differ from Merlin's in the same way that a merchant's views on trade differ from mine. That is why they have guilds to represent themselves to me. To voice concerns and viewpoints that I may otherwise never think to consider. Magic users have no guild, and while that may someday change, I need guidance now, from your perspective as well as his."

That seemed to affect Geraint in a complicated manner. Picking his words carefully, he replied, "I think I understand what you mean, sire. But I don't wish to offend him."

"You won't." Arthur nodded to show his certainty of that. "He will find your counsel as valuable as I will." By royal decree, if nothing else.

Geraint nodded, though he still seemed worried about it. "Then I would be honored, sire. I will endeavor to serve as you ask."

Arthur nodded to him, and then glanced at Leon for confirmation.

Leon bobbed his head as well, looking pleased after all, and finally settled his belt so that his sword hung the way he liked it.

"Good," Arthur announced. "Then it's settled. A messenger will bring you information on when we meet, and the normal conduct."

"Thank you, sire." Finally, a light kindled on Geraint's face, bright and hopeful again, as it had been on Samhain. "For – for everything. All of it, thank you."

Arthur's mouth wobbled up at one corner, but he felt inexplicably troubled still, and a little bit sad. He didn't know if he should revel in thanks for making a man equal to those non-magic citizens he should have equaled all along. His anger had gone, at least. "Go get your family back inside. It's too cold for them to be stuck out."

Arthur turned away as Geraint bowed, eager this time instead of desperately low, as he had done in the street with son shoved behind the shield of his body.

Several streets away, and back within the claustrophobic, narrow streets of the market district of the lower town, Arthur slowed, pensive. "What she said... The things she said..."

"Ravings, sire." Leon came abreast of him, and stopped when he did. "Earnest ones, perhaps, but still ravings."

Low enough that Leon probably strained to hear him, Arthur murmured, "He told me about that girl once. But not all of the rest of that...rubbish. Only that he thought he loved her, and she died."

"Sire, I don't know what you want me to say."

Arthur glanced up at him, sidelong from beneath a somber brow. "Do you believe her? About what he is?"

Leon responded with silence, and the shamed aversion of his face. Maybe, then. Or maybe not. But he didn't dismiss it a second time as mere ravings.

"I see." Arthur took a gradual breath and nodded as he turned to continue up the street. The squelch of Leon's steps eventually trailed after.

~TBC~