They hear the screaming and sobbing before they get within two hundred paces of the house. It reverberates off the walls they walk between, buffeting them with a staccato dirge of wretched suffering as they trudge over pools of icy mud toward the site of the death.
Outside the small, thatched hut are a woman and a toddler. They cling desperately to each other beneath the gently falling snow, their screams making their breath gather and curdle in the air above them. The mother clutches her baby to her chest, making the child's whole body move with every gasped breath and choked sob. In her arms, the baby wails, clutching at her mother's apron and headscarf, searching for some kind of purchase.
Arthur hangs behind as Merlin approaches. Arthur tries to make a show of studying the guards, the house, the little bed of flowers outside the front door.
Around the weeping pair are members of the City Guard, all of whom stand awkwardly, faces and halberds pointed meaninglessly toward the gawking crowd gathered around them. The crowd is still and quiet, witnessing this mother's misery. No one approaches her.
No one but physician-like Merlin. He goes to her sure-footed and stone-faced. His hand finds her shoulder as he leans forward and whispers in her ear.
Another high keening noise comes from the woman. Merlin's jaw works, held tightly and strong, as he murmurs at her ear. She huffs a huge, shaky breath, and nods, once. Merlin takes her by the arm and helps her stand. The trio moves as one to the nearest guard, who looks on nervously. Merlin trades some low-voices words with the man before the armored knight takes Merlin's place and leads her away up the street.
Merlin watches them go for a moment before turning to look at the house as Arthur had been pretending to do. His eyes glance over the exterior, stopping for the briefest of seconds on something that catches his attention before moving onward. His face betrays nothing.
He turns to look at Arthur and inclines his head slightly toward the door. Arthur starts forward, somehow only just reminded of his purpose there, and crosses confidently toward the door of the hut. Merlin follows closely behind. As they enter, each is peripherally aware of the city guard moving backward a few paces, tightening the circle of onlookers and more fully protecting the king's back.
Arthur opens the door to find he cannot step forward without splashing into a pool of blood. The scent of it hangs heavy in the air, acrid and metallic. Dirt though the floor is, the hard-packed and well-swept floor has done little to absorb the blood. This room, just as the last one-room hut the pair had observed, looks destroyed. Furniture upended, crockery smashed, walls scraped.
The body here belongs to an older man, tall and broad, with a full beard and a broad nose. He lies in the middle of the hut, face turned at an extreme angle to look at the ceiling. His right arm is contorted awkwardly beneath his torso. His chest seems an open cavity, and his entrails are strewn from near the hearth until they disappear into the black-red cavern of his open belly. Where his eyes should be, there are instead two empty sockets, staring into nothingness. One still weeps with blood.
Arthur hears Merlin gag, which the manservant covers with a cough. The king does much the same.
"Merlin," Arthur says, his voice low. "You can leave."
Even Arthur isn't sure whether the sentence is a command, an offer, or a statement of fact. Merlin doesn't acknowledge it anyway. Instead, Merlin walks forward, picking his way around the sea of blood on the floor until he reaches a dry spot near the man's head. He crouches to study the body. Arthur watches him, disgust mingling with a strange pride and even stranger horror.
Merlin's face is carefully blank. Arthur has to look away after just a few seconds.
I've seen more than this before, Merlin's face says. I can handle it.
It isn't right, that expression. Merlin should be teary-eyed. He should be angry. He should be horrified. He should be vomiting in the bushes outside, ready to ambush Arthur when he exits with a litany of apologies and questions.
Instead, he looks. Studies. Takes it in.
"Disembowelment is a difficult process," Merlin comments. His voice is low, dark, and slightly strained.
Arthur throws a look at the physician's apprentice. He isn't sure whether it's bewildered or questioning, but either way, Merlin does not look at Arthur long enough to decipher it for him.
"Difficult for whom?" Arthur asks.
Merlin shrugs a shoulder. "Both of them, I suppose."
"Both?"
"The murdered and the murderer."
"So this was a murder, then," Arthur says. The words fall flat until they're a statement rather than a question.
Merlin finally looks up at him, the physician's mask still in place.
"Would you imagine this man did it to himself?"
Arthur sighs. "No."
Merlin nods, once, and goes back to looking at the body. He studies it for a moment, then stands. Arthur watches as he does and clears his throat.
"You aren't going to close his eyes or something?" Arthur asks. He curses himself for the question directly after, faced with the full brunt of Merlin's raised eyebrow.
"You've seen enough dead bodies, Arthur," Merlin says quietly. It isn't gentle, but perhaps it's meant to be. "Do you really think they'll stay closed?"
Arthur chooses not to respond. Merlin paces the room, looking at everything carefully. He spends his time doing so; in Arthur's estimation, a good ten minutes pass as Merlin nudges broken glass with his toe, runs gentle hands over threadbare mattresses, digs through ashes in the hearth with a fire poker.
Merlin turns back to him, finally, and says, "I don't see any poultices or poppets."
"So?" Arthur asks.
"No evidence of a curse or enchantment, sire," Merlin explains.
Arthur gives him a curt nod. He feels out of his element here. Normally, the city guard takes care of these kinds of things, rare though they are. Arthur is more at home dealing with petitioners, initiating searches, trying suspects. His manservant's odd, withdrawn, and professional behavior just compounds the strangeness.
If Merlin were to be showing his distress, even in some small way, Arthur would feel on more solid ground. He could tease Merlin, send him away, anything but rely on the other man's expertise and that damning demeanor. I can handle this. And he can. And it horrifies Arthur in some deep way that he can't properly understand at the moment.
"Very good," Arthur says. His voice falls flat against the backdrop of their surroundings.
Merlin gives him an indecipherable look and turns back to the body. They both spend a minute or two in silence.
"He's young," Merlin says finally.
"Yes," Arthur replies. He thinks of the woman and child outside and asks, "That woman–was she his wife?"
Merlin nods.
"We should interview her, then," Arthur says.
"I sent her to Gaius's," Merlin informs him.
"Was she injured?" Arthur asks, hating the way his face flushes, despising the fact that the thought hadn't occurred to him before.
"Not physically," Merlin answers.
"Isn't Gaius on his way here?" Arthur asks, turning his chin. He doesn't look at Merlin, his courage failing him.
Merlin turns toward the door. "Yes. We can let him look around again. He might find something we didn't."
"Like what?"
"I'm not sure," Merlin says, his voice straying from that terrible, dark monotone back toward something approaching normal: wary, uncertain, broken. When he speaks again, it's in his physician's voice, the voice that Arthur has quickly learned he despises. "In the meantime, this man's wife and daughter will be somewhere safe and private."
Arthur nods. "We should go."
Merlin opens the door for the king and follows him outside. They both ignore how peoples' heads turn and crane to get a glimpse inside the hut. The city guards take a few steps forward, pushing the crowd back to allow the king more room.
Arthur nods to one of them–no one in particular, but just one to acknowledge their work–and walks toward the edge of the crowd.
"Gaius is coming," he tells someone at the edge of the crowd. He knows every one of the names of the men assigned to the city guard, but cannot for the life of him summon the man's name. "Keep this place guarded and allow him entry. He should be followed by the undertaker and the undertaker's apprentice. Allow them entry as well. Anyone else save for me, my knights, and Merlin should be turned away."
The guard nods his understanding, then bows to the king.
People in the crowd make way for Arthur and, by extension, his servant. Merlin ghosts along behind him, quiet and thoughtful as they walk. The journey to the physician's chamber seems longer than normal.
The sound of sobbing reaches them long before they get to the door. It's a horrible mimicry of when they approached the hut itself. Arthur pauses before the heavy oak door, bracing himself for the grief and anger of the woman inside. Merlin waits patiently beside him and, bless him, chooses not to comment on how long it takes for Arthur to regain his composure.
The woman sits on the patient's cot inside. Her baby wails next to her, sitting on the thin wool, its slight body making the smallest of impressions on the stretched fabric. It is ignored in her misery.
Leon sits beside them. One of his hands is balanced on the woman's shoulder, the other desperately trying to gain the attention of the child. He knocks the toddler's chin, rubs its back, pulls gently at its ear. When he looks at them, the Head Knight's eyes are desperate and thankful.
Once again, Merlin strides forward, full of purpose and determination, while Arthur hangs back, filled with a sudden and unexpected uncertainty. Merlin kneels next to the patient's cot and places a hand on the woman's arm.
This time, Merlin is close enough for his words to reach Arthur and Leon, as well as the woman he speaks to.
"I know," Merlin whispers. "I know. And I know it's a lot to ask, but I will need a few more moments of composure from you. The king needs to ask you some questions. And afterward, I will look after your child as long as you need until you can again. Do you hear me?"
The woman's body seems to convulse with the power of her sobs. Arthur stands, an unwelcome feeling of respect overcoming him. Because he knows. He knows Merlin would watch over that child for an entire year if it meant this woman could recover in peace.
The woman is either overcome with memories of her husband, who could no longer watch over their child, or because Merlin's solid words of comfort and assurance affected her so, and she doubles over, crashing into Merlin's chest. And the respect continues, because Merlin holds her ever so paternally against her chest, his face still carefully blank but one of his hands holds one of hers, and his other reaches to run soothing patterns over his back.
"I'm here," Merlin tells her. He grabs her hand and places it against his chest, at once too familiar and impeccably professional. Totally calm and terribly compassionate.
"Do you hear my voice?" Merlin asks.
The woman manages a nod.
"Okay," Merlin says. The word isn't praising or cynical. Simply an acknowledgement that the woman responded. "Do feel my chest under your hand?"
The woman's breath stutters before it catches and turns into a keening wail. Merlin nods, and rubs her arm.
"Can you feel my hand on your arm?" Merlin asks.
The woman pauses in her sob to inhale again. Merlin rubs at her arm with a bit more force, but never more than firm. Never worse or better than gentle. The woman inhales without breaking into a scream, and nods again.
"Good," Merlin says quietly. "Feel my chest. I need you to do what I do. Breathe in," Merlin tells her. He takes a deep, measured breath in, keeping one hand on the woman's arm and the other keeping her palm to his chest.
The woman tries to copy him. Merlin inclines his head toward her, blue eyes trained on her face.
"And out," he narrates. He pushes the air from his lung in a woosh that brushes the hanging around her face.
Again, the woman does her best to imitate him.
Merlin takes his time talking the woman through her breaths until she sits next to him, breath hiccupping and cheeks shining with tears. But she isn't mindless with grief anymore, at least not at the moment, and her eyes are locked with Merlin's own calm, placid gaze.
"What's your name?" Merlin asks quietly.
"Heda."
"And your child's?"
"Amanda," the woman gasps, then looks around with a heavy, tired gaze.
Merlin reaches out to catch her chin and turn her face back to his.
"Your child is safe, right next to you, being entertained by Sir Leon."
Arthur glances at Sir Leon, just now remembering the other man's presence, as well as the child's. Even the child has calmed somewhat, sitting in the knight's lap and watching its mother with wide eyes, thumb in mouth. Even Sir Leon seems startled at the reminder he has a child in his lap.
"She is?" Heda asks.
"I promise," Merlin says. He releases her chin, and Heda nods, her bottom lip trembling.
"Heda," Merlin says. "I know I am asking much of you, but the king and I have some questions for you. If it gets to be too much, you tell us, do you understand?"
Heda manages another shaky nod.
"Very good," Merlin says.
Arthur recognizes the words for what they are and drops into a crouch where he stands. Heda glances toward him only for a moment before focusing her eyes back on Merlin.
"Heda," Arthur says quietly, "were you at home when… when it happened?"
Heda nods again.
"What did you see?" Arthur asks. He tries to keep it as vague as possible. He tries, gods help him, to emulate Merlin's demeanor. Calm, compassionate, firm. To ask important questions without pushing the woman too far.
"He–" Heda starts. Her voice is high and sweet. Too young to be speaking of such things. "He was seeing visions, sire."
"Visions?" Arthur repeats.
"Yes," Heda says, the word becoming a series of cries and stuttering breaths.
Merlin guides her through a few more breaths. When he pauses for longer than normal, Arthur takes the cue to ask another question.
"What kind of visions?"
Heda begins shaking. Merlin nods at her and breathes with purpose and depth. Heda–consciously or not–follows his lead.
"Heda," Merlin says, his voice low. "You said your husband was seeing visions."
Heda keeps her eyes trained on the man in front of her. When she blinks, large tears drop from her lashes onto her cheeks. Merlin passes the hand that had been rubbing her back over her hair. Once again, too familiar and impeccably professional. Totally calm and terribly compassionate.
"He was shouting," Heda tells Merlin. "About war and death and terrible war machines that could cut down entire platoons."
"Experience as a knight?" Merlin asks. Arthur notes that he doesn't mention the man by name. He notes how Merlin avoids using the past tense–or any tense-when he asks the woman questions. He keeps his words neutral. "A soldier, or a guard?"
"No," Heda whispers. She swallows, thick and pronounced. "No, a tradesman."
"Which trade?" Merlin asks.
"Lumber," Heda tells him. Her eyes are slightly unfocused now, lost in some memory. "Not a lumberjack, or a merchant or anything. He, um. He organized the transport of lumber from other cities to Camelot."
"Are you from Camelot?" Merlin asks. His tone is conversational, even as he cradles a perfect stranger and recent widow in his arms.
Arthur thinks it's the wrong tone, but the woman responds to it. Rather than devolving into tears once more, she sniffs heavily and answers, "Yes."
"Okay," Merlin says again. Not praise, or punishment, but simple acknowledgement. "You were telling us about the visions."
Heda takes another shaky breath.
"He was screaming," Heda tells him. "Screaming about visions and war and death and misery. And then he went still."
Her eyes unfocus slightly as she recounts her husband's last death. Merlin's free hand travels to her back again to rub small circles across her shoulder blades.
"And he was quiet for a long time," Heda continues. "And then. Then he just said…"
A long moment of silence passes.
"What did he say, Heda?" Merlin asks, voice so soft it's practically a caress.
"He said, 'Please,'" Heda tells him. Her gaze becomes searching, desperate. Her hand on his chest pulls into a fist, grasping at Merlin's thin wool shirt and tightening it into a knot. "He said please."
Merlin holds her hand where it twists into his tunic.
"How did he say it?" Merlin asks.
Such an innocuous question. Such a strange thing to ask. He could have asked her a million things: how did her husband die, did he have any enemies, did she see the murder. But instead, he asked how did he say it.
"He was begging," Heda answers, her eyes welling with tears again.
"I'm sorry," Merlin says, and it sounds like he means it. It sounds like he knows.
Heda leans forward to cry into his shoulder. He picks up his purposeful breathing again, touching and patting the woman until she comes into the present again.
"You're doing so well, Heda," Merlin tells her. "Can I ask a few more questions?"
Heda nods, pulling away from his shoulder.
"How did he die, Heda?" Merlin asks quietly.
Once again, Arthur expects her to devolve back into gut-wrenching sobs and blood-curdling screams. But Merlin just murmurs it's important, and Heda looks into his eyes, and Arthur can see her trust him. He watches as she sees something in Merlin's gaze amd trusts that he understands, trusts that things will be looked after, to trust that no matter how hard it must be, trusts that it's important she tells them how her husband died.
How her husband had come to be disemboweled on their floor.
It's a decision, a leap, and Arthur witnesses as it happens. And he wonders at what has happened to Merlin to make him so trustworthy. Such an expert on grief that he can pull someone else out of its worst throes and its ugliest face to pull questions out of a widow. He wonders why Heda would trust Merlin over Arthur that someone understands and that someone can help. If only she could answer.
"He said… he said, 'Please,' and then…" Heda starts. She bites her lip to stop another keening cry from escaping.
Merlin keeps his eyes locked with hers. "And then?"
"And then a spot of blood appeared on his stomach," Heda whispered. "And it grew…"
Heda screams and collapses in Merlin's arms. The physician's assistant cradles her easily, keeping the woman's entire weight in his arms. He glances at Leon first, then at Arthur.
It's a clear dismissal of both. I have a patient, the looks says.
And so Arthur and Leon rise to their feet. Merlin looks at Leon again, then pointedly at the child, then even more pointedly to the door to the manservant's own room. Leon nods, picking up the child and carrying up the stairs. No doubt to follow the manservant's non-verbal command to put the child to sleep in his own bed.
Arthur would marvel at the command and acquiescence if he wasn't so focused on following his own unspoken order and following it to exit the room.
Arthur is halfway back to his chambers when the severity and backward nature of the whole scene hits him. His manservant had ordered the king from a room. And without either having said a word, the king obeyed.
Merlin, Arthur decides, has become too severely a physician and too quickly a battle-hardened man.
He enters his room and looks around, somewhat at a loss for what to do now. Reports sit unattended at his desk, his chambers are in disarray, he was supposed to have been training with his knights two hours ago.
All of it falls away. The scenes of the morning play across his mind. The king sits heavily at his personal dining table, left alone in the scream-soaked silence and the blood-tinged wake of the last two hours.
He thinks.
I know, Merlin has said. And I know it's a lot to ask…
Those exact words. I know, Merlin had said. And... And. He knows what it's like, to be that torn apart by misery and grief, and he knows it's a lot to ask, to press a widow for answers to questions it must be hell to hear.
I know. And I know it's a lot to ask.
Lancelot's funeral comes to mind. Not the first knight's funeral Merlin had attended, but, as far as Arthur knows, the first friend's. Merlin had been as stone-faced as possible, standing at perfect attention behind Arthur. A stray sniffle, nothing more, even as the funeral pyre belched black smoke into the air, and even as the wind carried with it the stench of woodsmoke and charred flesh.
Arthur hadn't thought about it at the time. Arthur couldn't think of an expression outside that of neutrally sad on the man at the time. Only a moment, weeks later, when Merlin was busy cleaning out a closet in the armory as a punishment from Arthur, did the true grief show through.
Arthur had been stalking there toward the training field in want of a gauntlet. Merlin had been standing alone in the armory, his face only half-turned to the entrance and, therefore, to Arthur. Merlin had held the sword Lancelot had used in the few training sessions he had prior to becoming a full-fledged knight. Merlin's face had been crumpled, his shoulders sagged from their normal relaxed sarcasm or raised in by-the-ears-nervousness. No tears escaped, but he looked, for all the world, like he had already lost all of them. Exhausted. Miserable.
He had gone to put the sword away, and Arthur had slinked out of the armory and back toward the training field, unwilling and somehow unable to face his servant in all of his sorrow.
But that hadn't been the first friend's funeral Merlin attended, was it? There was another that came to mind for Arthur. Merlin's sorcerer friend, the young man named Will from Ealdor.
Then, the mask had been more forced, the following joviality and okay-ness more apparent. Arthur had gone easy on him then. Sorcerer or no, Will had been Merlin's oldest and truest friend. Seeing any such person crumbling to ash on a funeral pyre would be hard on the strongest of men.
Merlin had tried to keep a calm, strong facade, but had excused himself partway through the funeral rites.
Arthur had stayed all the way through, and chose not to check up on his manservant until the group was ready to leave Ealdor. Better to leave a man to dignified grief than to acknowledge the hurt and invite a demonstration of weakness.
How far they had come since then. How different Merlin had made him. The words after Uther's death comes to Arthur, ringing in the quiet of the room. I didn't want you to feel alone. Arthur hadn't been.
But even after Lancelot died, after Merlin's second-closest friend walked willingly through the veil, Arthur couldn't bring himself to comfort. Only to cajole, to wish, to force normalcy until Merlin had complied.
Did it really change all that much? Did the physician's apprentice, the king's manservant, heal from the death of his friend? Or did he simply conform into Arthur's desire for normalcy, forcing down his own grief for the sake of the king's happiness?
At the same time Arthur remembers Will and Lancelot, it occurs to him that it's why Merlin's physician face unnerves him. Because it's too far removed from the cocky, arrogant, smart-mouthed, noble and incredibly correct personality Merlin possessed when he arrived. Because it, like the man's demeanor, has become too masked and buried in expertise and misery to summon the same kind of quick decency and boyish charm. Because time has changed Merlin from the man the came to rely on to the shadow in his place.
He is unnerved by Merlin's too-familiar, completely professional, totally calm and endless compassion because it used to be naive and optimistic and true. Whereas now, it seems practiced and controlled, reigned-in and performative rather than... rather than Merlin.
In its stead is an unfamiliar man. One accustomed to violence and death and difficult decisions. One used to comforting widows and plying answers and serving the king.
When did that happen? When did Merlin disappear into practiced sorrow and calm anguish?
