Chapter 14: A Time of Magic

"Why did I ever agree to do this?" Father asked dismally.

We were standing in the courtyard of the castle, Father, Uncle Merlin, and I, with a much too excited Aithusa prancing in front of us. Father was about to take his promised dragon flight.

"Trust me, she's perfectly safe," Uncle Merlin told him; he had grown much less worried about letting people fly on his dragon after taking countless flights with me. "She's pretty indignant that you're so worried, actually."

"I just don't think being that far up in the sky with not even a saddle is a good idea," Father protested.

Aithusa stopped her pacing to shoot Father a very fierce glare, and also a tiny flicker of flame. "She didn't like that comment at all," Uncle Merlin translated, looking as if he was trying very hard not to laugh at whatever Aithusa had just communicated to him.

"Yes, I got that, you idiot!" Father retorted, exasperated. "I'm not entirely clueless, you know!"

"Are you sure about that?" Merlin asked lightly, but when Father gave him a very fierce glare he laughed. "Alright, alright. She's perfectly safe to ride, Arthur; she says the only way you could fall off her is if you were enough of a dollophead to throw yourself off her back, and she'd catch you even if you did that. She said that, not me!" he added quickly.

"And who taught her that dollophead was a word?" Father demanded suspiciously.

"It's idiomatic," Uncle Merlin said in a tone that indicated Father should already know this.

"If you're the one who defines what idiomatic means, maybe," Father grumbled.

I could never remember seeing Uncle Merlin so lighthearted before Father came back, and when Aunt Freya crossed the edge of the courtyard and Uncle Merlin didn't even bother replying to Father because he was too busy smiling at her, I thought for the thousandth time how much more of a home Camelot had become since everyone had come back.

"Aithusa is perfectly safe," I reminded Father. "I've flown her more times than I can count, and I'm still alive."

Father looked at me, and capitulated. "How do I mount?" he asked, looking at Aithusa's wings and spines and frowning.

It took the joint efforts of me, Uncle Merlin, and Aithusa to get Father into a place where he actually thought he might not fall off; then Uncle Merlin helped me clamber up and get comfortable in front of Father. He wrapped his arm around my waist like Uncle Merlin always did when I flew with him, except it was a much more muscular arm – and it was also trembling just the slightest bit with nervousness.

Uncle Merlin stepped back, grinning his full, bright smile. "Have a good flight!" he said cheerfully.

"Wait, you're not coming with us?" I asked, feeling rather blank. I had never in my life flown without Uncle Merlin.

"You've flown often enough," he told me. "I trust you and Aithusa to initiate Arthur to the delights of the sky. Off you go!"

"Wait—" Father began, but Aithusa had already lifted off the castle courtyard. Father gave a most unmanly yelp as we began to get airborne, but I didn't comment because those first few moments of flight, when the dragon's wings are going up and down by your ears and the whole world is bouncing up and down and one moment you feel like you'll sail off into space and the next you're slamming into the dragon's back are rather terrifying. But then Aithusa cleared the courtyard, got away from the castle, and we were truly flying.

She went very mildly at first, giving Father a gentle, safe ride. "I admit it," Father commented after a few minutes, his voice rumbling against my back. "This is actually rather brilliant. The view –" he trailed off, but I understood. Watching the kingdom sweep away beneath us as the dragon flew was a very unique feeling.

"We can go a lot faster," I offered, a very obvious hint in my tone.

Father tensed a bit, but he was never a man to back down from a challenge. "Why not," he agreed. "Do your worst, Aithusa."

That was a very bad choice of wording, because with Aithusa in the playful mood she was in she took it very literally and took us on the wildest ride even I had ever taken. She soared up into the clouds, drenching us both by flying right through the middle of a very large one – then swooped straight down, making me feel as though I'd left my stomach behind, to skim the grass with her wingtips – only to shoot straight up into the sky again at full speed, wings beating wildly in our ears.

I was whooping with delight most of the time, but I think Father's shouts had more panic than delight in them.

He was panting by the time Aithusa leveled out and began skimming along again, just above the treetops. "Well!" he exclaimed, and his voice cracked sharply. He cleared his throat. "Well," he began again, "at least I think I trust that we're not falling off after all that."

Even though I didn't have nearly the bond with Aithusa that Uncle Merlin did, I could feel the smug contentment radiating off her at that moment.

"You didn't tell me your dragon was a daredevil," Father accused Uncle Merlin, when we dismounted back in Camelot.

Uncle Merlin groaned and shook his head at Aithusa. "You were showing off, weren't you?" he scolded her. Aithusa only tossed her head saucily.

"You see?" Uncle Merlin said to Father. "I don't control her. If she decided to show off to you, that was all her. Nothing to do with me. Nothing whatsoever!" he protested quickly, when Father gave him a hard look.

Father sighed. "Well, I do have to agree with Amhar that when Aithusa is actually behaving, flying is quite enjoyable," he admitted, making me beam.

"I told you so," I told him, grinning.

"I hope you didn't completely wear yourself out," Uncle Merlin said to Aithusa, "because I might have promised Freya to show her what this dragon flying was all about this afternoon."

Aithusa gave him a look which clearly indicated what she thought of the unfathomable idea that she might be too tired, and communicated something to Uncle Merlin that made him blush deeply.

"No more comments on relationships, Aithusa," he informed her sternly.

Father looked like he was going to ask what the dragon had said, but Freya came into the courtyard at that moment, and Father and I instantly lost any chance of getting Uncle Merlin's attention.

"Are you ready?" he asked, going toward her as she came down the steps.

She was knotting a shawl around her shoulders and looking entirely eager and not really nervous at all. "Very," she told Merlin softly, taking the hand he offered.

Father stood with me and watched as he helped her onto the dragon and gave Aithusa a list of directions and warnings rivaling the one he had given her before he let me fly. When they finally took off and sailed over the walls, Father chuckled.

"I never thought I'd see Merlin in love," he commented approvingly. "Don't look for them to come back for a long time, though."

"Why not?" I asked.

"When I was courting your mother, I would take advantage of every moment I could take to be with just her," Father told me. "I doubt it's any different for those two lovebirds."

But despite how satisfying the flight with Father had been and the joy of having him agree with me that dragon flights were wonderful, there was something empty in me for the rest of the day. Dragon flying had always been something Uncle Merlin and I shared together, but this day we had both flown with someone else, and I felt unsettled.

When Uncle Merlin got back – much later, as Father had predicted – I followed him and Aunt Freya until they finally finished saying sweet nothings to each other and parted until the swiftly approaching suppertime; then I ran to catch up to Uncle Merlin, who was humming again.

"What is it, Dragon?" he asked when he finally noticed me.

I felt suddenly shy. "Take me for a dragon flight?" I whispered.

He raised his eyebrows. "You've already had one with your father, and an exciting one if Arthur is to be believed," he said.

"But it wasn't with you," I told him, staring at my shoes.

I wasn't at all sure he would understand the reason I was asking this when I couldn't even articulate it to myself, but after a moment of thought he put his hand on my shoulder and led me back toward the courtyard with him. "Then we'll take a quick turn around the castle before supper," he said.

Five minutes later, wheeling placidly on a satisfied Aithusa around the castle's turrets, describing her stunt in the afternoon and Father's reactions to a laughing Uncle Merlin, I felt as though all was right with the world again.

There was a tremendous amount of paperwork and council meetings to be done in Camelot around this time, between Father taking back the reins of the kingdom and the ironing out of all the alliances with the kingdoms in Albion, so the hunting trip we had planned to take while marching to Caerleon was postponed for a while. We did have a feast, however, in celebration of the victory over the Saxons; every man who had fought in Camelot's army and survived, along with his family, was invited to it, so the feast spilled from the Great Hall into other nearby rooms in the castle. Father agreed to give all the castle staff two days off afterwards in compensation for working so hard to make the feast possible.

It was the first feast in Camelot where both my parents were there, Mother at Father's right hand and me next to Mother; the first feast where Father gave the speech instead of Mother. He thanked all the men there for their bravery, courage, and honor in fighting to keep our homeland safe.

Then he turned to Uncle Merlin. "Without the aid of magic, the victory could never have been won," he stated. "Without the magic users in our ranks and the dragon Aithusa, we would have lost to the Saxons' sorcerers. In addition to thanking all of you, I wish to especially thank all the magic users who aided us, and my Court Sorcerer Merlin, for their help."

Uncle Merlin smiled at Father; then he stood up as well. "To honor each of you," he said simply, and let his eyes flash gold as he murmured a spell.

A cloth which had been covering a mound of something behind him slid aside, revealing a pile of hundreds of small metal pendants. Under Merlin's direction, the pendants lifted and flew forward, skimming through the air until one lay by the plate of each man who had fought, moving through the air with the precision and beauty I had come to expect of Uncle Merlin's magic. When every man had a pendant, Uncle Merlin said another spell, his eyes flashed gold, and every one of the pendants reshaped itself into the form of the Pendragon crest.

It was an impressive display of magic, but not entirely surprising to me after watching Uncle Merlin perform magic all my life. What did take me by surprise, though, was what I noticed about Uncle Merlin.

Unlike every other time, at least until the recent battle, that I had seen him cast magic in front of a large group of people, he wasn't tense or on edge, neither was he even bothering to try hiding the gold in his eyes. He seemed relaxed and content, even happy, displaying his magic to a tremendous throng of people.

Standing at Father's left hand, with Freya on his other side watching this display with a pleased, shy smile on her face, Uncle Merlin had finally become free of his fear of showing his magic. He was free at last of Uther's legacy of terror.

I found that there were tears in my eyes as I joined in the clapping.

We did find time to go on the hunting trip at last, when the kingdom was stable enough that the royal family, the court sorcerer, and all the knights of the Original Round Table along with their families could disappear into the forest for a week without worrying about something going wrong in our absence. We spent a wonderful week out in the woods; we set up camp and the women and children stayed there or went on short hikes while at least some of the men hunted during the day. Father gave me my first real hunting lessons; Uncle Merlin told me that I was not allowed to ever crave hunting like my father did; Mother was no use as to which side of the debate I should follow. Uncle Merlin flatly refused to go on the hunting expeditions, more as a matter of proving a point than anything, I think, until Father all but bodily dragged him along on one. Given his wide smile, however, I didn't think he really minded being made to come, and even gave me a few tips on tracking himself.

"I paid more attention than you thought," he told Father when he looked completely shocked at this turn of events.

"You never will stop surprising me, will you?" Father returned, shaking his head.

Uncle Leon's wife and his five children had come along; Kay came along on the hunting trips when I did, and the two of us had way too much fun and probably scared away far more animals than we actually caught. Uncle Percival had also brought his wife, his three daughters who were all around my age, and his very young son. Freya, who was planning her wedding with the other women most of the time, kept all the young girls in her tent with her, and I often felt as though they giggled half the night away. Aunt Freya was not as shy around children, and as she was growing comfortable with everyone on this expedition, she was more open during the trip than I'd seen her in Camelot.

On the second to last night of our trip, the Original Round Table, plus Freya and me, gathered around the fire after the others had gone to bed. We sat there in quiet contentment for a bit, watching the flames; Uncle Merlin was idly making dragons of different shapes in the sparks flying from the fire.

As usual, it was Uncle Gwaine who broke the silence with a rather unexpected comment.

"People are getting used to me being back," he lamented. "There's hardly anyone I can scare with it anymore."

"I should hope that beats spending years in a puddle in limbo," Uncle Lancelot retorted. He was smiling, but there was a bit of an edge to his voice, and I remembered that he had spent longer than anyone else in that spot.

Gwaine clearly heard it too, for he sat forward, his smile becoming determined instead of mocking, and raised his mug. "To life!" he exclaimed.

And we toasted to life, sitting there among those who had been dead and weren't and those who had been deeply affected by their deaths. It had taken those of us who had always been alive quite a while to get used to a new world where the sorrow and pain of the losses of these friends wasn't a continual silent backdrop to every day, just as it had taken those who had once been dead a while to adjust to being alive again, but as we all clinked mugs and drank to life, I thought that we were well on our way to being whole again.

"Tell us another story about magic," Father requested of Uncle Merlin, settling back comfortably against a log. We all knew he meant about what magic had been used in the past that he wasn't aware of.

"You're as bad as Amhar about asking for stories," Uncle Merlin observed, smiling, one arm tucking Freya against his side.

"I'll take that as a compliment," Father replied proudly, squeezing my shoulder and making me feel warm as I always did when he spoke of me in that proud way.

"Tell a story with all of us in it," Uncle Elyan suggested, leaning forward. "There must be some of those."

"A story with plenty of danger," Uncle Gwaine ordered, eyes twinkling.

"Don't all the stories have plenty of that?" Uncle Merlin asked, laughing. "I'll tell the story of when we retook the citadel from Morgana – the first time." He said her name more easily than he had in the past, as if finally finding perfect happiness had enabled him to move past the guilt that used to always be there when he spoke of her.

"That was the first adventure that involved all of us, wasn't it?" Uncle Lancelot said thoughtfully, though he looked quite eager for the story.

"Everyone here was involved, except you, Amhar," Uncle Merlin told us. "You were just a twinkle in your parent's eyes then. You were in it too, dear," he added to Freya.

"Freya was involved?" Uncle Percival asked, eyes widening a bit.

"Certainly," Uncle Merlin answered. He sat up a little straighter in preparation of telling the story, drawing Freya with him. "It all began with the Cup of Life and the reason you're here today, Leon," he began.

And with that, Uncle Merlin carried us away on a story I had heard bits and pieces of since I was old enough to hear stories at all. But it was a very different thing to hear it now, resting against my father's side instead of clinging to every mention of him in the story as I tried to piece together who he had been, all the key players sitting around the fire listening too, instead of half of them being dead. And there was no shadow in Uncle Merlin's eyes as he spoke now, no pain of half-wishing he could go back to that happier past.

It was different to hear the story sitting around the fire with all those the story had once been dedicated to remembering, together again at last. Different – but infinitely better.

A/N: This chapter was just fun to write; everyone is happy at last! I really have loved writing this story and getting all of your responses. The epilogue for this story will be out on Friday: "Once and Future."