13. Prodigal Prince

Ever since the young Druids had carried an unconscious Gaius into his quarters, Merlin had trouble breathing. "This is my fault. This is my fault" his mind kept repeating. "If I hadn't overtaxed him with my silly ramblings this had never happened."

Rattled by his fear he had given Merco hell when the Llanfair healer had rushed in to look after his colleague, until the physician had confined the fretting warlock to the back chamber most energetically. In vain Merlin had most haughtily insisted that he, after what Antek's men had done to him, had no reason whatsoever to heed anything a Llanfair man said. Like Gaius, Merco knew how to bring his foot down if it was necessary.

Or maybe Merlin wasn't so very good at being haughty and lordly, for all he had had the Crown Prince of Camelot for an inspirational example.

Now the wizard was tossing around on the cot in the corner by the window. There was no thought of resting anyway; Gaius had been all limp and lifeless, a horrible sight.

Desperately Merlin pricked his ears for some clues as to what was going on in the room next door. When he couldn't stand it any longer, he marched back to the entrance, utterly resolved to have a few answers from Mercator, no matter what.

The warlock had hardly made a few steps when he heard someone storm into Gaius' room, strong boots clattering on the stone floor, thudding even on the thick colourful wool carpets that covered most of the ground.

"How is he? Damn you, what are you doing here?"

The young wizard flinched when he heard King Uther's voice and his mood and self-confidence dropped a few more degrees, well beyond zero. Merlin's childish reaction to Arthur's gawky attempt at an apology and reconciliation might well have caused Gaius' relapse in the first place. Surely Uther wouldn't be too pleased to hear about that, not while he was at odds with his son and relied on the two sorcerers to take care of the Prince.

"As Count Llanfair's Court Physician I'm more than capable to look after my colleague, Your Majesty..." Merco began, but the King had no wish to speak to a Llanfair man, not now, not ever. "Get lost!" When Merco didn't stir, Uther lost the last meagre shreds of his patience. "OUT I said, before I'll have my guards on you. Merlin? MERLIN! Where is that wretched boy?"

The warlock swallowed hard and trotted into the room with his head already hanging low, awaiting the inevitable. He came just in time to see a mortified Merco bow and hurry out.

"Ah, there you are at last, what are you dallying back there while Gaius is so ill? Blast it, what kind of a sorcerer are you? Do something about it! Now!"

"You should not have sent Merco away. He's a very good physician..." Merlin objected meekly, but it was no good.

"I know exactly who he is. He's the one who's kept my son as a slave before Anwar handed Arthur over to this bastard Antek. What happened to Gaius, huh? Answer me, are you deaf?"

Merlin looked into the King's angry face and all of a sudden he saw how much Uther had aged over the last few months, how haggard he looked, how much anguish lingered behind all the anger and the arrogant aggressiveness of his behaviour.

"Gaius was at Arenboarth's, just for a chat, but after a while he collapsed" the warlock stammered. "Must have been a relapse, Arenboarth had said he should not get up too early..."

"And where is our most august Lord Druid now? He for one seems to know what to do about Gaius' ailings. Go and fetch him!" Uther sat down at Gaius' side and took the old man's hand, as if it was something very precious to him.

"Yes, Sire." At times there was no other possible answer to Uther Pendragon.

Merlin ran to Arenboarth's quarters as fast as he possibly could. He barely knocked before he rushed in, cursing desperately under his breath when he couldn't find the Lord Druid. Until he reached the library door. It was a bit ajar, light shone from the room into the darker corridor. "Arenboarth? Arenboarth, are you in there?" Belatedly Merlin remembered at least some of his manners. "My Lord Druid? Where..."

The warlock braced himself against the door as it did not open further. He heard something soft but heavy being shoved over the floor when the solid oak door slowly gave way. Curiously he peeped around the wooden edge at what was obstructing the door.

At first Merlin did not understand what he was seeing. Where the door had shoved the heap of clothes, the floor was smeared with fresh blood. The twisted bundle made peculiar rasping sounds while more blood came from somewhere underneath.

With a strangled scream Merlin knelt down at Arenboarth's side, tried to rouse him, spoke to him, finally turned the unresponsive body on his back.

The Lord Druid's eyes were closed, his face covered with blood from his mouth and nose, his every breath rattled in his lungs, gurgled in his throat and finally the warlock realized that he was looking at the severest case of pulmonary haemorrhage he had ever seen.

"Help me. Somebody help me. Marwon. Merco. Anyone..." Merlin only stopped screaming when Marwon and his wife Agneta came rushing to Arenboarth's aid, closely followed by Mirella and her husband Sir Leon. At any other time Merlin would have smirked at that. Apparently not all members of Arenboarth's close circle were at odds with Mirella marrying a Knight of Camelot.

Mirella muttered a spell and the old Druid's bleeding ended while the soft light of her magic still enveloped his chest. At last the terrifying sound of the laboured breathing faded and Arenboarth sank into something like a normal sleep after Marwon and the others had brought him to bed. Mirella volunteered to stay with her father.

"Damn it, it's like a curse" Marwon said while they reluctantly left the ailing man. "First Gaius, now my fath...our Lord Arenboarth." He stumbled over his own words when Agneta gave him a warning glance. Her father in law was very particular about not mentioning the real relationship between him and Marwon. It was something she never accepted but had learned to live with long ago.

Emrys, however, seemed absent minded anyway. Curtly, almost coarsely the warlock took his leave from the Druids, muttering that he had to go back to the King. Agneta looked after him musingly. First Arthur's strange behaviour, now this unusual rudeness from his wizard friend. But then she looked at her crestfallen husband and forgot about the others. She had more than her hands full with her own family.

When Merlin broke the news to Uther, the King was not very pleased to hear it, to say the very least. In fact, the vexed Pendragon called all hell to earth - and on his son's head, for bringing him and the others into this mess in the first place. Merlin's ears were ringing when he left the King and the still sleeping Gaius again, this time with the stern order to look for the unfortunate Merco and bring him back, "to drag him back by the hairs if needs be", as Uther had phrased it in his usual bluntness.

However, again Merlin's cause was a lost one from the start. Merco was nowhere to be found. Finally, the warlock put all his pride and anger aside and made for the quarters Antek of Llanfair had been given, if one chose to call the securely locked cottage with the barred windows 'quarters'. The Druids weren't very keen on prisons or other restraints, but this time it wouldn't have needed King Uther's persistence to convince Arenboarth that this young man was better be secured.

The queasiness in Merlin's stomach grew as he approached the house and became outright nausea when he found the door unlocked, the guard gone and the lodgings deserted.

With a sickening feeling of inevitability the young wizard saw the hastily written letter on a table. Arthur's hand. Only a few words. So His Highness had found himself and his fellow aristocrat some kind of a quest. All that was left to do for his ex-servant, ex-friend and ex-protector was to inform the King, the Prince's wife and all the others who had thought themselves to be close and dear, or at least not all together insignificant to Arthur Pendragon, that their Prince had left them without so much as saying good-bye.

Merlin spent the next few hours in the forest near Antek's lodging's, well hidden by the night, the brushwood and a hiding spell for which neither Marwon, Agneta or one of the others were a match. They called for him and Arthur until their throats became sore but he did not stir. Not when Uther roared in anger, not when Gwen anxiously called for them both or when Leon almost touched him when he passed him by in his desperate search.

Finally they gave it up and returned to their homes, talking of starting another search at the first light of dawn.

Agneta was the last one to give up on finding Prince and warlock. She was almost sickened by the thought that she should have guessed what was coming but had done nothing to prevent it. In the end Marwon virtually dragged her back home.

As soon as it had become quiet, when only the furtive sounds of a forest night surrounded him, Merlin rose again. Never before in his life had he felt like he felt now. Abandoned. Hurt. Humiliated. Cast aside like so much dirt.

His head ached and in his stomach a thousand ants were crawling. Kings, Princes, Knights, the whole godforsaken bunch could go and rot for all the warlock cared. Why had he ever thought they were important? They had never given a damn about him, never. He was a peasant, expendable, unimportant. To hell with the arrogant bastards, every single one of them. They had never been his friends in the first place.

But Arthur would not get away with that. He would not let him. He would find the Royal asshole, tell him what he thought about this and then leave him and his bloody destiny for good, never to return. Never, never, never!

Merlin almost lost his way in the dark when his eyes spilled over and blinded him. Naturally he wasn't crying. He would not cry! They weren't worth his tears. Who cared about them and their friendship anyway? Not even Gaius was on Merlin's side, but who cared? Certainly not a young warlock who could go anywhere, do anything he liked.

To think that he should have given up a life with the Druids, with his own magical kind in order to follow the Pendragons. That the great Emrys should have made a fool of himself, even fall out with Arenboarth, to run after a bunch of ungrateful, aristocratic idiots!

Furiously Merlin wiped his eyes again and again. Only in the very last moment he found Uther's quarters and shoved Arthur's letter through the slid under the door, for the King to find the epistle in the morning. Doubtlessly Pendragon would have a few words to say to his son about this as soon as the two would meet again and Merlin felt a deep, black and malicious satisfaction when he thought about this meeting.

The warlock snuffled angrily when he left the village and went into the forest, barely able to see the tracks he followed through the haze of tears, the tracks of three men and three horses who had taken this way before him. He knew that he was following Arthur's footsteps as he had done so often before, hunting, fighting or just walking comfortably together, or so he had thought, soft-headed idiot that he had been.

The Prince had covered their tracks thoroughly but not thoroughly enough for a powerful warlock who happened to know Arthur Pendragon's habits like the back of his hand. Merlin hardly needed his magic to support him while he walked deeper and deeper into the forest.

He never even noticed that the tracks were leading straight towards a place he had thought he'd never go near again. His mind was too busy repeating the words of Arthur's letter, over and over again.

At least the first two passages of this letter. For the third passage the mortified sorcerer had never read. Arthur's urgent plea to his warlock friend to speak to Arenboarth before planning his next steps and the Prince's strong assurance that he relied on his friend to keep his family safe were still unknown to Merlin.

The wizard had not even seen that something had been written on the backside of the parchment.

Too firmly he had believed that he had assumed correctly earlier. Now that the Royal could choose between a peasant warlock and an aristocrat so much closer to his own station in life and upbringing, Arthur had ditched his commoner friend.

The Prince no longer needed him. It was that obvious to Merlin, beyond any reasonable doubt. And again the hot rage and hurt rose inside him, dominating his thoughts and feelings entirely.

Even now, while he walked between the trees and bushes through the night, much escaped the warlock's attention that normally would have caught his ears or eyes, even though Arthur's keen instincts were not there to keep the wizard alert.

Instead Merlin walked on and on, oblivious to his surroundings, until he finally reached the three men he was looking for.

As it was, the warlock never noticed what was going on in his back where slowly but inescapably the Druids' village and all its inhabitants were trapped.