A/N: I am almost done writing this fic! I only have one more chapter to write! All in all, there will be 17 chapters. It's nowhere near as long as TBAK, but overall I'm quite pleased with it.

NOW HERE'S THE CHAPTER YOU'RE ALL REALLY LOOKING FORWARD TO. =D


The little traveling party reached Ealdor just before supper of the next day. Merlin reined in his horse at the forest's edge, looking out over the familiar sight. Raime and Cecily came up on either side of him, eager and curious.

"So this is where you grew up?" Raime asked, sounding a bit skeptical.

"Yup," Merlin said. "Born and raised right here in this tiny farming village caught between two kingdoms that don't care about it in the least."

"I would never have guessed that you came from such humble origins, sire," Cecily said.

"Wait until you see the house I grew up in," Merlin said. "One room. I never even had a bed to sleep on as a kid."

"Wow," Raime said. "You weren't exaggerating with that story you told the court when you pardoned Derrick, were you?"

"Not in the least," Merlin said.

He smiled, thinking of the young boy who had been dragged before him for theft and had received a job rather than a punishment, much to his councilors' surprise. Stealing food for one's family was a cry for help, not a malicious act, Merlin had argued. Derrick showed great promise in the stables and was hoping that the Stable Master would take him on as an apprentice if he worked especially hard.

"Well, humble beginnings or not, you have taken to your role like you were raised to it," Cecily said graciously.

"Thank you, Cecily," Merlin chuckled. "But I'll always be a simple country boy at heart, no matter how many titles you give me."

Raime spurred his horse forward, glancing back over his shoulder at them. "Come on, Merlin," he said. "We rode all the way here instead of transporting just so you could stall some more, but there's no more putting it off now. Let's go find your mum and get this over with."

Merlin groaned but followed down the hill toward the town. It wasn't that he didn't want to see his mother again—it had been a very long time since he had had the chance and he was more eager to see her than he had ever been before—but there was a crown in his saddlebag and a signet ring on his finger and stories to tell that would probably make her cry. He had always hated making his mother cry.

Merlin pushed ahead of Raime to reach the road first and dismounted, the others doing the same when they caught up. They led their horses through the village, drawing a bit of a crowd considering the townspeople probably hadn't seen three visitors all on horseback in years. Murmurs and whispers sprung up in their wake as the townsfolk recognized Merlin but not the fine-spun clothes he wore nor the blue-cloaked Lady-Mage at his shoulder, so different from the knights in red that he usually had trailing along after him on the rare occasions that he came home for a visit.

It didn't take long for word of his arrival to spread and Hunith was already waiting for him at the door when they got there. Merlin handed Llamrei's reins off to Raime and happily let his mother wrap him up in one of her best and most encompassing hugs. He held onto her tightly, marveling as he always did when he came home at how small she seemed to be now that he was grown; as a child he had always thought her larger than life, big enough to shield him from the whole world and then some.

Now her head tucked neatly under his chin and his arms wrapped all the way around her thin shoulders. Her hair, where wisps of it had escaped her headscarf, was grey and there were wrinkles on her face that hadn't been there when last he had seen her. But when she pulled back to smile at him, her eyes were as sharp and as kind as they had ever been. He smiled back, warmed through.

"Merlin," she said, patting his cheek. "Look at you! The beard is new."

Merlin laughed. "There's a long story behind it, actually."

"The same one behind the nice clothes and the young lady in chainmail, I presume," Hunith said with a raised eyebrow.

"The young lady in chainmail is Cecily," Merlin said, and Cecily offered up the half-bow-half-curtsey motion that was customary of the Lady-Mages. Hunith smiled at her politely, though it was obvious that she was confused. "And this is Raime." Merlin gestured to his manservant, who gave his biggest and most disarming smile, but he offered no further explanation for the two of them. That would come later.

Hunith took his hand. "You didn't write to tell me that you were coming," she said, "and I don't see Arthur anywhere in tow. What's brought you here, my love?"

Merlin sighed. "More long stories, I'm afraid," he said. "A lot of them. And not all of them easy to hear."

Hunith's sunny expression faltered. Merlin squeezed her hand.

"Let's go inside. We have much to talk about," he said. He sent Raime and Cecily off to stable the horses in the only sorry excuse for a stable Ealdor had and then led his mother inside and closed the door behind them.

"What's going on, Merlin?" Hunith asked, concern coloring her tone.

"Mum, do you still have the ring?" Merlin asked.

She frowned. "What ring?"

"The ring my father gave you," he said. "You used to wear it around your neck when I was little."

Hunith frowned more and said, "I didn't think you would remember that."

But she dug a small wooden box from underneath her pallet. It contained a number of small objects, trinkets, some of which Merlin recognized and others that he didn't. There was a sparkly rock that he distinctly remembered giving to her with a proud flourish when he was maybe four years old and a brightly colored feather that he had carried around with him for days when he was seven.

She rooted around in the box until she drew out the ring, still strung on its leather cord just as Merlin remembered it. She proffered it up and gave him a questioning look. Merlin took a deep breath and pulled the signet ring off his own thumb, holding it up alongside the first. Hunith took it from him and examined the two side by, her forehead pinched in concentration and confusion.

"Where did you get this?" she breathed.

"The same place that Balinor got his, I imagine," Merlin said. "The royal forge of Carthis."

His mother looked up at him, wide-eyed and uncomprehending.

"These are signet rings, mother. Noblemen wear them as a symbol of their status. They use them to press their seal into wax on official documents and correspondences," Merlin explained. He took his ring back and slipped it onto his thumb where it sat comfortably. He forced himself to meet his mother's eyes directly.

"This seal is a special one, though," he said. "It signifies the House of Ambrosius. Balinor's House, and now mine."

"Balinor was of the nobility?"

"All Dragonlords are, apparently, which was news to me too when I found out," Merlin said, trying for flippant but too nervous to pull it off convincingly. "But, um...this one is more than that."

Hunith waited. Merlin swallowed hard and took his mother's hand in both of his own, curling her fingers around Balinor's old ring.

"These rings bear the royal seal of Carthis," he finally said. "Balinor wasn't just nobility—he was royalty. And so am I."

There was a very long silence as Hunith tried to parse his words into something that made sense. Merlin understood that very feeling well. When Gerund had lured him out of Camelot to tell him of the throne that awaited him, he had nearly laughed until he cried. That had seemed the appropriate reaction to what was clearly a joke, and yet here he was four months into his kingship. The surreal feeling of it all had passed, for the most part, though there were still mornings when he woke up expecting to be in his rickety little cot in Gaius' spare room instead of on a feathered mattress in the castle he had inherited.

"Royalty?" Hunith whispered. She shook her head, disbelieving. "But how? I don't— He certainly wasn't royalty when I knew him."

Merlin led her to sit down at the small table and sank to his knees in front of her, never letting go of her hand. Then he explained how Thalia and Tibalt had shown up in Camelot claiming a dragon attack, how it was all just a ruse to find him, and everything Gerund had told him about Balinor's history and the queens his sisters had been. He told her how the empty throne had fallen to him and he had taken it.

Hunith had just opened her mouth to ask for confirmation of what exactly that meant when the door to the hut creaked open very slowly. Merlin turned back to see Raime peeking his head through the gap, grimacing and looking very apologetic.

"Sorry, sire," he said, almost whispering, as if speaking quietly would somehow make it less of an interruption. "We, um...we're finished with the horses. Old Man Lewis kicked us out of the stables."

Hunith stood up abruptly, sniffing and smoothing down the wrinkles in her skirts. She smiled brightly and pulled the door open all the way.

"Come in, come in, of course," she said, ushering Raime and Cecily into the little house. "There isn't much by way of seating, I'm afraid, but you're welcome to make a seat of whatever you'd like."

"Thank you, my lady," Cecily said as she took the only other seat at the table. Hunith blushed at the deferential form of address, the same way Merlin had done for weeks before he had gotten used to it.

"So," Hunith said, still sounding a little flustered. She cleared her throat. "The throne, you say? When's the coronation?"

Merlin grimaced as an intense awkwardness engulfed the room. Cecily tactfully fixed her attention on the tabletop while Raime looked back and forth between Merlin and his mother without so much as blinking, not wanting to miss the drama.

"Right, um, yes, the coronation." Merlin got to his feet and brushed off the knees of his trousers. "Well, you see—the thing is—that, er—that sort of happened already."

Hunith blinked at him. "Oh. I'm...sorry to have missed it then."

Merlin wondered frantically if he could get away with just leaving it at that, but then Cecily shot him a very dirty look that warned him against being a horrible coward and he quickly stammered out, "It was sort of a while ago, actually."

Hunith's eyes narrowed dangerously as she caught on to his shifty behavior; she had always been able to tell when he felt guilty about something, and she had always managed to get the reason out of him one way or another. That suspicious look of hers still made him squirm.

"And how long ago was it, exactly?" she asked, her tone dangerously polite.

Merlin scratched at the back of his neck, trying his hardest to look innocent even though he knew that was a losing battle for so many reasons. "A few, er, months," he said. "Four, if you want to be specific. I mean, give or take a week or so."

He most likely would have kept babbling on for a while if Hunith hadn't brought a hand up sharply to stop him. She had her eyes closed. Merlin waited, breath held. Then Hunith very deliberately pointed to the only corner of the room that didn't have anything in it. Merlin's mouth fell open, equal parts horrified and indignant.

"What?!" he squawked. "No! No, mother, I am a grown man and there is no way that I am—"

"Merlin!" Hunith said sharply, an undeniable warning in her tone. She pointed more forcefully.

"Oh, come on," Merlin said, almost whining. "You can't possibly expect me to—g"

"Sit."

Merlin cast a look at Cecily and Raime, both watching the exchange with interest, then back to his mother. "Mum—" he started, pleadingly this time, but his puppy-dog eyes had never gotten him out of this before so why should they work this time?

Hunith made a sharp shushing noise and Merlin's mouth snapped shut almost of its own accord. She gave him a hard, expectant stare. Merlin shifted on his feet, chewing his tongue and considering refusing outright, but in the end he just made a sound of utter defeat. He stomped to the corner, turned around, and flopped down to sit cross-legged on the floor. He was very thankful for the beard, as it helped to conceal how very red his face was.

Hunith, satisfied with Merlin's compliance, snatched up a rag and set about dusting very aggressively, now ignoring him completely. Raime was looking startled and Merlin scowled at him just for good measure. Raime sidled up alongside Cecily, keeping his eyes on Merlin as if worried he might attack.

"Do you have any idea what's just happened?" he whispered to her.

"Not entirely sure," she admitted. Then she smirked. "But whatever it is, I have a feeling that Mordred is going to be very upset that he missed it."

Merlin pulled a face at her too, thanking his lucky stars that Mordred was not here to see this. Or Gerund and Ellison, for that matter. Those two would never let him live it down if they found out about this whole fiasco.

"What exactly is going on?" Raime asked more loudly, glancing at Hunith.

"My son," she said, scrubbing at the tabletop with unnecessary force, "is not allowed to speak at the moment."

"Why is that, my lady?" Cecily asked.

"Because I am very angry with him," Hunith said matter-of-factly. "And when people are angry, they often say things that they don't mean. So my son is going to sit there quietly until I am calm enough to speak to him civilly."

Raime clapped a hand over his mouth too late to stop a snort from escaping. It was followed by another and then he was nearly smothering himself trying to hold in his laughter. Merlin sourly hoped that he choked on his tongue. Cecily was fighting a very persistent smile but at least she sent Merlin a sympathetic look. Raime just gave up on tact completely and laughed out loud, his head thrown back.

Wholly irritated, Merlin used magic to pull Raime's feet out from under him and send him crashing to the floor with a yelp. Hunith came over to smack Merlin around the head with her rag and then promptly returned to her cleaning. Raime positively roared with laughter then, rolling on the floor. Merlin nearly reached out to kick him but he figured his mum would probably smack him again so he just crossed his arms over his chest and sat back against the wall to wait for the indignity to pass.

And the worst part was that Raime was supposed to be helping him. Merlin had told him so when he had first asked to come along on this trip.

"The only reason I'm allowing this," he had said, already certain that he would live to regret it, "is so that you can distract my mother when she gets angry."

"How am I supposed to do that?" Raime had asked.

"You probably won't have to do much of anything, really. You're a scrawny teenage boy, just like I used to be," Merlin had said with a shrug. "Just do something cute and then her mothering instincts will kick in and she'll be too busy pinching your cheeks and trying to feed you to be mad at me anymore."

Merlin tried to get Raime's attention now, looking as pitiful as he possibly could and hoping that his puppy-dog eyes would work better on his manservant than they did on his mother. Raime finally pushed himself upright, still chuckling and wiping at his eyes. Merlin caught his eye and nodded toward his mother, then looked pleadingly at Raime again, who was looking disheartening confused. Then his face lit up and he scrambled to his feet.

"Oh, er, Lady Hunith," he said loudly. "Your headscarf is lovely." He pointed to the green wrap she had around her hair. "My mother has one just like it, only hers is red. Well, it used to be red but it's faded to more of a pinkish sort of color by now. But it's still pretty, and yours is too."

Hunith's cross expression softened a bit, just as Merlin had hoped it would, and she smiled a bit. "Thank you, Raime. That's very sweet of you to say."

"I tried to wear my hair up like that once," Cecily said, "but it didn't look nearly as good on me as it does on you."

Hunith smiled outright, though she sent Merlin a knowing look that said she knew his friends were only buttering her up to get him out of trouble. "Well, with hair like yours, it would be a shame to cover it up," she said.

"I bet your hair is really nice too," Raime volunteered with a big grin.

Hunith laughed and patted Raime on the cheek as she had done her son earlier and Merlin let out an internal cheer of victory.

"You're sweet," she said again. "It's almost suppertime. Are you hungry?"

"Starving!"


Kara woke to early morning sunlight on her face and the overpowering, sickly-sweet scent of rotting meat. Her head throbbed and her fingers found dried blood in her hair. She was sick when she tried to push herself upright, retching onto the scorched ground beside her where there used to be a tent. Her ears rang in the empty silence where last she remembered screams.

She was alone, if the last living person in a field of corpses could be considered that. All around her were bodies, lying where they had fallen, horribly pale on top and turning purple underneath as the blood pooled inside them. She did not stop to examine them as she got shakily to her feet and stumbled toward the forest, not wanting to see which of her friends and family had been cut down, but she couldn't avoid them all.

There was Lana, the girl Mordred had gotten the message to. She must have warned the near side of the camp, run on to tell the others, and then gotten caught up in the attack. She was only sixteen. Warren was older, almost to middle age, but he had a wife and two children. Kara didn't want to look around the campsite-cum-graveyard and see if they were among the dead too.

She threw up again when she reached the tree line, as much from the pain in her head as from the gruesome sights and smells. So many dead. She could hardly fathom that they were gone, practically everyone she had ever known and loved.

But not everyone. No, Mordred and his father had escaped. They had left. They had just taken off and left her behind—left all of them behind—so they could run off into the forest and save their own skins.

Kara forced herself to her feet and lurched forward again, not knowing where she was going but needing to put distance between herself and the massacre at her back. She hoped that Mordred had made it out alive, that he had not been tracked down by the knights before they left for Camelot again. She that hoped he lived a long and harrowing life burdened with the knowledge of what he had allowed to happen to his own people. She hoped that he burned alive from the guilt and shame of his own cowardice.

This was his fault, all of it. He could have stopped it and he chose not to. He should have fought. He should have taken a stand to defend his home. He should have killed them all where they stood. But he was too cowardly, too afraid to do what needed to be done. The whole lot of them were! All the witches and warlocks, all the esteemed elders and wise teachers and parents who were supposed to do anything to protect their families, everyone who had done nothing but beg for mercy when they could have used their power to fight back—they deserved what they got.

At least Kara had tried. She had stood her ground and tried to defend herself, even if it had done her no good in the end. If only her magic had not been so damnably weak. Why couldn't she have had powers like Mordred's? Why should the gods have gifted him with such an ability instead of her? He hadn't even been willing to use it!

Damn the gods and all their fickle magic! It had failed her, right when she had needed it most. What good had her magic ever done her? What was the point of it if it couldn't even protect the people she cared about? All it did was give her false hope. It was cruel, really, to have a taste of such power and not be able to utilize it.

Her magic tingled under her skin, taunting her with its presence when it had fled the day before to leave her helpless and vulnerable. She scratched at her arms, dirty fingernails drawing blood as she tried fruitlessly to make it stop, to get it out. She didn't want it anymore, didn't want magic, didn't want anything to do with it. It was a vile and treacherous power that always promised more than it could deliver.

She tripped and fell, skinning her knees and the palms of her hands, but she barely noticed the sting of it. She kept going, pushing herself blindly through the trees until the sun went down and it was too dark to see the ground before her. This time when she tripped, she crawled on until she met the trunk of a tree surrounded by a cushion of dry leaves. She curled up with her back against it, shaking with cold though it was a warm summer night.

She tried to light a fire, something, anything for warmth, but her magic sparked and fizzled out. A hatred like none she had ever known before brought tears to her eyes but she refused to let them fall. Instead, she slammed her fists against the tree trunk until her knuckles were bloody and her arms gave out from the strain.