Leon took first watch; Lancelot took second. Arthur stopped him before he could wake Percival for the third watch.
"Let him sleep," he said. "I'm up anyway."
Lancelot nodded—what was there to say?— handed him the unlit torch he carried, and lay down on his bedroll. Arthur tossed another chunk of wood on the fire and watched it burn.
After spending the first part of the sleepless night trying not to think, he finally let himself take the events of the evening and look squarely at them. They weren't any prettier in retrospect than they'd been at the time.
As much as he hated to admit it, Leon—and Lancelot—had been right. Sacrificing himself would have left Camelot in shambles; his father was in no fit state to govern, and Morgana would obviously stop at nothing to take the throne she thought rightfully hers. She might even have been counting on his willingness to lay down his own life for his people to remove the last obstacle in her way.
That didn't make this any easier.
"Why couldn't you be more like other servants? Why couldn't you just... clean my chamber and polish my armor and leave it at that? Saving my life was never supposed to be part of your job, and I will never understand why you seemed to think it was. You shouldn't have had to. Especially not like this. Why do you keep doing this to me?"
He poked the fire, a bit harder than strictly necessary. Sparks rose angrily from the coals. "All I wanted was a servant. Not a friend. I can't afford friends. Then you turned up, insolent and incompetent and incorrigible… damn you, Merlin! What am I going to do when servants are all I have left? How am I supposed to go back to that?"
He didn't get an answer. He didn't expect one. He didn't think there was one.
The night dragged on just short of forever, and the morning still came too quickly. As the sun peeked above the horizon, Arthur was almost disappointed to see that Merlin was still alive, and that, if anything, his breathing seemed a little more even. Still shallow, still slow and unsteady, but it had lost much of the pained rasp they'd been listening to for the past two nights. It figured. Merlin never could do things the easy way; why should this be any different? If he'd just had the courtesy to die peacefully in his sleep, Arthur wouldn't be facing the prospect of don't think about it don't think about it don't think.
As the others started to wake up, Arthur was carefully putting out the last embers of the fire. He flicked a hand at the stewpot. "The leftovers from last night are still warm; anyone who wants some, eat quickly. The rest of you, pack your gear. I want to be on the road in twenty minutes."
They all looked around, pretending that they weren't checking on Merlin, and then got very busy rolling up their bedding and stowing their gear. Breakfast, it was clear, was about the last thing anyone wanted.
"I'll see to the horses," said Gwain, mostly to pretend for a moment that he could saddle his horse and just go, somewhere, anywhere that wasn't the Isle of the Blessed. Alone.
"I'll help," said Elyan, neatly putting paid to that, and they walked over to where he'd picketed the horses the night before. Gwaine heaved his own saddle into place, began tightening the girth.
Elyan started with Arthur's mount. "Gwaine… If you want to—"
"Don't," Gwaine cut him off. "Whatever you were going to ask… don't."
Elyan nodded. They worked in silence for a few minutes.
"Life seemed… easier as a blacksmith," he finally said. "Maybe I'm remembering it as rosier than it was, but I don't remember as many choices with no right answers."
"Try being a sellsword," Gwaine said sourly. "No choices more complicated than 'which side of the fight offers better pay' and 'which tavern shall I visit tonight.' Turns out I didn't know when I was well off."
He moved on to Percival's horse, checked the hooves. "Since the day we met, Merlin kept on insisting that Arthur wasn't like most royalty," he said. "The only reason I'm here, instead of Mercia or Nemeth or somewhere, hungover and trying to decide where to go next, is because it seemed like Arthur kept proving him right."
"He is right," said Elyan. "You know that, Gwaine."
"The hell I do. If he's going to go through with this, maybe I don't know as much as I thought I did."
Elyan fastened the last buckle. "Maybe. Knights have harder choices than blacksmiths. I'm just glad I'll never have to find out how much harder a king's choices are than a knight's."
"Words. You know this isn't right."
"No, it isn't," said Lancelot, walking into the clearing with an armload of gear, just in time to catch that last. Guessing the topic of conversation was not difficult. "None of it is right. It's just the… least wrong we can manage."
"That's not saying much."
"And that's true, too," he said. "Now stop talking about it. Percival's bringing Merlin over, and he can still hear just fine. Listening to you raking Arthur over the coals isn't going to help anything."
Elyan half-smiled. "As if he didn't say worse twenty times a day."
"You know the rules. The only one who gets to insult Arthur is Merlin," said Lancelot, with perhaps the faintest hint of emphasis on the present tense. Talking about him as though he were already dead wasn't going to help, either. "And vice versa."
They were on the road well within the allotted twenty minutes.
For an hour or so, they rode in the same gloomy silence as the day before. Then, out of the blue, Gwaine said, "Did I ever tell you about the dispute over the rightful successor to the Towrie barony? What a nightmare that campaign was! They were identical twins, and still each one of them managed to be uglier, not to mention stupider, than his brother."
Percival gave him an incredulous now-is-not-the-time look, but Lancelot forestalled his objection with a quick headshake. "No, Gwaine," he said casually. "I don't think I remember that one. What happened?"
"Well, their names were Mavin and Lavin, to start with, but that was their parents' fault. They must have thought it wasn't confusing enough, so one of them used a crest with a red eagle, and the other used a crest with a red griffin, so you had to really squint at its legs to know which shield was which. On the battlefield, there was no good way of telling the sides apart, especially once the badges got a bit dirty, and you could hardly ask the guy swinging an axe at your head whether he was fighting for Lavin-with-an-L or Mavin-with-an-M, especially since most of the foot soldiers were illiterate."
He got a few lips starting to curve upwards, and even what sounded very like a stifled chuckle from Elyan. Good.
"Half the time, after a skirmish, you just went back to whichever camp was closer. What difference did it make? And if you found yourself eating dinner with someone who'd done his best to kill you that afternoon, well, you'd tried to kill him, too, so no hard feelings. Anyway, about two weeks into it, even the would-be barons got mixed up, which wasn't hard, since they had roughly half a set of wits between the two of them, and both of them happened to go to the same camp after a particularly unproductive sortie. And that's when things started to get really interesting."
From there Gwaine launched into a story involving the feuding twins, a large barrel of sloe gin, the previous baron's seal ring, a steak-and-kidney pie, a mace, and a very nervous sheep that was so utterly preposterous that it almost had to be true.
"…So I said, I'm not trying to stop you, I just want a refill before you go and taint the gin… and I think the sheep needs one even more than I do!" he finished. Even Leon was snickering by then.
After that, Elyan jumped into the fray with a story from his blacksmithing days involving a stallion who liked his old shoes just fine, thank you very much, and clearly did not want to be reshod. It was fairly predictable, ending as it did with the horse kicking him halfway across the stableyard, where he landed in a large heap of manure, but it was good enough. For a little while, it almost felt like any other patrol, the sort where all they had to worry about was bandits or mercenaries— the sort of dangers they understood and were equipped to face. No shrieking ghosts or supernatural gates or mystic sacrifices, just strong arms and honest steel. The sort of patrol where death was an ever-present possibility, not a cold necessity, and anyway it would never happen to them.
The feeling of not-quite-normality lasted until they topped a hill and saw the lake below, and the island in its center. That was when it all came crashing back down on them. They rode to the water's edge in the now-familiar miserable silence.
"I saw what you did back there," Arthur told Gwaine as they dismounted. "It was… well done. Thank you."
"I'd rather die with a laugh on my lips than a tear in my eye," Gwaine said, looking out over the water. "I figured I can't be the only one who feels that way."
"Probably not," said Arthur.
Percival gently lifted Merlin off the horse and carried him to a small boat tied to a stump. It didn't look particularly seaworthy, but then again, it didn't look large enough for seven until they were all aboard, either. It was obviously the only way onto the island, though, and no one was willing to be left behind, so they piled in. Perhaps there was an enchantment keeping it from sinking. Probably. There had to be some sort of magic involved, since it was steering them straight across the water despite the fact that none of them were paddling it.
Leon wished that thought was more comforting.
Percival went to pick Merlin up as the boat grounded itself on the opposite shore. "Wait," said Lancelot. Lowering his voice, he said. "Leave him his dignity. Whatever fate is waiting in there, let him walk to it like a man instead of being carried like an infant."
Percival nodded, and took a step back.
"Arthur, give me a hand." Lancelot took one of Merlin's arms, put it around his shoulder. Arthur did the same on the other side, and between the two of them they got him upright. He hung between them like a scarecrow on a pole, but he was vertical.
With some effort, he tilted his head up from where it lolled against his chest. It was the first purposeful movement he'd made since the attack. "Thanks," he said. "Better than looking… up everyone's noses."
Lancelot actually laughed at that. "I don't suppose I can argue with that."
"No, but I've met more than a few people who were forever looking down their noses at everyone," said Gwaine insinuatingly. "They never seemed to mind the view."
Arthur assumed that was aimed squarely at him; just now he didn't have the strength to care. "Come on," he said, as something screeched overhead. "We'd better get under cover. Whatever's making that noise, it doesn't sound friendly."
"Pheasants," Merlin said.
"Sounds like it," Gwaine agreed. "At least three, I bet. Just what this trip needed. It was starting to get dull."
Percival blinked. "What?"
"Wyverns," Gwaine translated. "I'll explain later. Come on!"
They all scrambled through the gates and into the antechamber, which didn't provide much cover after all. The wyverns swooped and shrieked; it was clear that driving them away was not going to be as easy as waving a torch at them.
"I've fought them before," Gwaine said, drawing his sword. "They're mean, but they're cowards. Scare them enough, they'll look for easier pickings elsewhere."
Well, that wasn't strictly accurate, on either count, but Merlin hoped it wasn't too far from the truth. He tried to summon dragonspeech—at this point, he was both dying of cold and pledged to be sacrificed; what more could anyone do to him if they discovered he was a dragonlord? Or even a sorcerer? Kill him a third time?—but all he could summon were the words themselves, and his current state made them useless. He didn't have the strength to imbue them with anything like the force they required, not with his stiffened lungs and frozen vocal cords and his exhausted magic.
"Arthur! Go! We'll hold them off!" said Elyan, hacking away at a not-so-cowardly wyvern. Lancelot cursed, dropped Merlin's arm, and leapt towards Leon, who was trying to fend off two of the beasts, with a third poised to join them.
Arthur was not the type to retreat from a fight, even a hopeless one, and he was even less inclined to run while his men were in danger. He spent one endless second fighting with every instinct he had, then, one hand gripping Merlin's wrist hard enough to bruise, and the other holding him around the waist, turned and fled down the passageway, the wyverns' cries growing fainter in the distance, and the toes of Merlin's boots dragging on the ground.
The passage culminated in a courtyard that did not need the weathered stone altar in its center to give the impression of both sanctity and immense age. Generations upon generations had worshipped here, that was plain to see, and something of their solemnities, their prayers of supplication and gratitude, their awe, their joys and griefs, their fear of and love for their deities, had seeped into every blade of grass, every stick and stone.
The torn veil was visible behind the altar. It was… indescribable, although the word 'wrong,' with all its myriad shades of meaning, came close. It wasn't 'dark' so much as it was an absence of light, a negation of light. It was hard even to look at such intense nothingness.
It was a suppurating wound in the flesh of the world, and Arthur could feel the pain of it from where he stood. Or rather, he recognized the pain he, and everyone else, had been feeling, just below the threshold of consciously noticing it, since the moment Morgana had inflicted it.
"It's not often we have visitors," came a voice. Arthur dragged his eyes away from the veil and looked at the speaker. She had to be the Cailleach; nothing living could have had a voice like an echo in a charnel house. And nothing human had ever had eyes like hers; the infinite emptiness in them made looking her in the face nearly as bad as looking at the veil itself.
"Put an end to this," Arthur demanded hoarsely. "I demand that you heal the tear between the worlds."
She shrugged. "It was not I who created this horror. Why should it be I who ends it?"
"Because… innocent people… are dying," said Merlin, still leaning heavily against Arthur's shoulder and kept upright only by Arthur's grip on his arm, but meeting her gaze without a trace of fear.
"Indeed," she said. "The innocent die every day, as do the not-so-innocent, and the irredeemably evil. What of it?"
"You yourself called this a horror," Arthur said. "I cannot believe that you want things to continue as they are."
"What you believe, Camelot's king, is meaningless to me. Think what you will."
"I know what you want," he said, gritting his teeth.
"Do you?" she said. "And are you willing to let me have it?"
"I am prepared to pay… whatever price is necessary," he said.
"Have a care," she said. "It is a fearsome thing to go back on your word once you've pledged it to the dead, and only a fool agrees to pay a price before asking what that price will be."
"I've been called… a fool before," Merlin said. "It doesn't… change my answer."
"You?" she said, taken aback. "You would challenge me here? On my own ground?"
"Challenge? No," he said. "Seal the veil… and you can… do with me… what you will."