The following evening, Freya snuck back to Merlin's tower just after dinner. He needs to know, and he needs to know soon, her mind had whispered to her all day, before it's too late. But she tried not to linger on the last thought. She glanced over her shoulder, then reached for the dragon-faced doorknocker on Merlin's tower door. She lifted it, then,

"I thought you might."

She gasped and whirled around. The doorknocker thudded against its rest, but the sound seemed quiet next to her pounding heart. She flushed in fear and something deep in her gut screamed at her, run.

For a while, Valas only glared. Freya's mind was reeling. No! He can't find me! How does he always find me? How dare he? How can-

"I would not keep at this, if I were you." His hand was bruising steel on her arm, and he didn't blink when she pulled away from him and punched his chest. His voice grew low and sinister. "You know it's useless."

She punched him again.

"Come along then, daughter," He may have looked old, but Valas had the strength of a knight in his prime, and Freya's shoes slipped against the stone floors as she tried resist.

"Let go of me!"

"Don't make a scene," He hissed at her, pulling and flinging her forward down a hallway. Before she could make a run for it, he caught up and cornered her into the set of rooms that had been allotted to them. Just as he closed the door,

"You can't do this to me!" She growled, hair tangling about her mouth.

"I believe I am. So I can. And I must, by the looks of it. Why must you be so difficult?"

"I just wanted to see Merlin," she began,

"Merlin? Do you, could you mean Emrys?" His voice was like a whip. She tried not to look at him. He stepped right into her face, and she still didn't look. He could see her jaw muscles tighten. "You may be tempted to think that you have a choice now that you're out of that puddle, out of that curse, but do try and remember why you're here. You have a job to do,"

"I won't."

"I daresay you will. Are you forgetting who, exactly, it is that holds your hell at bay?"

She didn't look up at him when she spat, "You can't kill me, you need me."

His reply was instant: "Your mistake is thinking that I have to kill to give you hell."

"You're going to give me hell later anyway – why should I care?"

"Correction: you'regoing to give you hell later. I only have to make sure that you actually follow through with it."

"I won't."

"Oh, you will. I'll make sure of it. And when the deed is done, you'll thank me."

Then, she did look up at him. She spat in his face.

His rage was inhuman, but not alien to her. She knew what came next, but it didn't fight the satisfaction out of her eyes.

"Witch," He rounded on her, and raised his arm.

She'd tried to cover it up, but Gwen, she'd learned quickly, was sharp-eyed as well as sharp-minded.

"Freya! What on earth happened?" Gwen had invited the younger lady over for breakfast, but looked completely unconcerned with eating when Freya arrived at the terrace where they'd planned to meet.

"Oh, it's nothing," Freya smiled sweetly and touched her bruised cheekbone absently. "It's terribly embarrassing, but, last night as I was walking back to my rooms, well, I…" She willed to blush, and hoped it worked. "I found out that it is, in fact, possible to fall up a flight of stairs."

Gwen let out a small noise between humor and pity, and reached over to inspect the swollen, purplish bruise sporting on the side of Freya's face.

"It must hurt," Freya smiled, trying not to show that it really, really did. "You should see Gaius about it later."

"Gaius?"

"Oh, you've not been introduced? I thought that with you and Merlin being, well…" Gwen paused and cleared her throat, "That is, I thought you'd have been introduced by now. He's the Court Physician here. He'll have the bruise gone in no time."

"Oh. Well, I might go and meet him, then. First, though, I think that egg sandwich is calling to me. Do you have coffee?"

Gwen smiled and they continued on with breakfast. Still, a haunting suspicious hid in the back of her mind. Something, she thought, wasn't quite right, even by Freya's strange standards.

Thankfully, no one dared to stare at a lady, no matter what shades of purple and yellow adorned her face. Finding Gaius' rooms was simple enough, after asking a few guards for directions. Freya knocked and, finding the door open, cautiously stepped into the room.

"Hello? I was told I could find the Court Physician here," She looked around the door, "I was told his name was," she froze when she looked into the room proper. "Merlin!"

Physician and Sorcerer looked up. "Freya!"

Gaius looked between the two. "Wrong on both counts. It's Gaius, actually. Nice to finally meet you. Lady Freya, I suppose?" She nodded at him. He smiled kindly and went to greet her. When he got close enough to see her face clearly, he frowned. "Oh dear, what's this?"

She did blush, then, mostly because Merlin was in the room and was looking at her with an increasing potential for mother hennishness. "I'm afraid I had a run in with a flight of stairs," She said, and smiled. "Quite literally."

"Oh, dear," Gaius's hands were gentle as he probed the injury. "Let's see if we can't take care of that. Do, come in, milady." As Gaius retreated toward the back of the room, Merlin came up and looked alarmed when he saw the extent of the bruise.

"For the love of – Freya," He put a hand to her face, and she pretended it didn't affect her the way it did, "What on earth-"

"You do have quite hard stairs in Camelot." She made light of it, but behind her smile something in her shrank. With quite hard hands and quite hot tempers. Merlin wasn't smiling as he ran a finger down her swollen cheekbone. A small cut shone at the corner.

"Well," Gaius returned with a sigh, "It seems as though I'm out of the usual balm I use for bruises. You can thank Percival's rather vigorous jousting for that. But, uh, Merlin, I just had a thought." The pair turned to him.

"What?"

"Why don't you try to heal it? With magic?"

Merlin blinked. Oh, of course. He turned to her with a kind of surprised, 'aha' look on his face that made her want to giggle. Even after a year or more, Merlin still seemed slow to recognize that yes, he was a sorcerer and, yes, he could use his powers for things like bruises.

"Right." He said, and blinked again. "Uhm, then, eh…" He looked to Freya for leave, and shrugged. "Shall I?"

"Please," She smiled at him, and he had to look elsewhere. Carefully, he positioned his hand alongside her face. She closed her eyes, and he screwed up his brow in concentration to find the right words.

"Ágíeme anwlæta éaðnes ádl,"

She opened her eyes just enough to watch his turn gold, and then a tingling sensation overcame her face. The pain disappeared and her immediate reaction was to feel the place where the bruise had been. She frowned when she felt the flesh was still swollen.

"It'll take a while to fade," Merlin explained. "Bruises are basically broken blood vessels, bleeding inside flesh tissue. With the spell, I've healed the vessels, but there's still some blood leftover." She wasn't sure if he wanted to sound smart, or if he was rambling. Either way, she didn't mind it. He ran a finger over the bruise as though to indicate, and she found it odd that she could hardly feel it, as though her cheek had gone numb. "It'll be gone by tomorrow." He smiled at her. She smiled back.

"Thank you, Merlin," She said, and subconsciously reached out to grab his hand in gratitude. He seemed to feeze, and looked down at their hands with an unreadable expression. After a moment, he squeezed her hand and smiled back at her. Freya's mind was catapulted years into the past, to the first time she'd seen him smile. For whatever reason, she found she couldn't look away.

Gaius watched them from over his shoulder and smiled sadly. Freya couldn't have known it, but Merlin was only at Gaius' chambers so he could consult Gaius on the very matter of Freya herself. For such a powerful, wise warlock, Merlin was confused like a hurt schoolboy over her. Gaius, always the father figure, offered him advice and comfort.

Although uneasy with the exact circumstances behind her presence, Gaius couldn't help but feel pleased with Freya's appearance in Camelot. He knew that Merlin believed everyone to be grossly ignorant of their Court Sorcerer's loneliness, but Gaius was like Merlin's father. He'd known about it for a while, but had never wanted to hurt his former ward further by bringing it up. Merlin needed someone, and now he'd rediscovered the only someone he'd ever wanted to have. Gaius was happy for him. He only hoped that it would all last.

"Make sure you clean up after yourself, and give the Lady Freya some cream for the swelling. I need to go see about some ingredients for more bruise poultice," Gaius told Merlin. Of course, both men knew that Gaius was really leaving to give the young couple privacy, but neither felt bothered by the fact that they could pretend they didn't.

When he was gone, Freya asked, "Does it feel strange?"

"What?"

"Your magic – does it feel strange? When you cast a spell?"

Merlin hadn't ever thought of it. "Not really," he told her. "It feels…" He frowned, then settled on a word. "Warm."

"Warm?"

"Yes, warm. Like a fresh apple pie, or the sun on your back, or holding hands with-" He stopped himself awkwardly and looked down at their own intertwined hands.

"It sounds nice," She said, running a thumb over his knuckles.

"It is, very." He looked back up and tried to swallow and smile at the same time. He let go of her hands and moved to hold her forearms tenderly over his.

Unexpectedly, Freya winced, and the mood shifted considerably in an instant.

"What?" He frowned, and looked down at the arm he held. He recoiled at what he saw. "Freya!" He took her left forearm into both hands, "W-what happened?" His initial thought was how very hand like the bruise was, how it wound all the way around Freya's arm. Something in him began boiling.

"Nothing," She snapped a bit too quickly, and he looked up at her. "Th-that is, the stairs when I fell… I hit my arm too."

"The stairs did this?"

"Yes."

"They wound all the way around your arm?"

Their eyes met, and they both knew it was a lie. She cracked.

"No," She breathed. She grabbed his hands back. "No, Merlin, it… It's about what I was trying to tell you that night, after the dance,"

"Who did this, Freya?"

"I was trying to tell you how I was here, and I couldn't, but the magic, like I was trying to say,"

He watched her carefully as she tried to say a thousand different things at once, but his mind just asked, who?

"At the lake, that day, when I was dying, you said you could save me… Then I… But now, Camelot, Valas, he-"

"Valas? Valas did this to you?"

"No! I mean, well, yes," He tensed, "but no, oh, Merlin, it's just… Valas is-"

"Gaius?" It was an elderly gentleman knocking at the door. "I've come for me medicine, for me ears," The way he shouted, he probably did need an ear remedy.

"Damnit," Merlin hissed at the door. Freya quieted and looked down.

"Of course," She whispered. "Take care of the man, Merlin. I will talk with you later." Merlin couldn't object as she walked away, but he couldn't hold back his angry sigh, either. Freya was in trouble, and he had to play pharmacist. They'd talk, Freya had said. But with all the interruption and confusion, Merlin began to wonder if they ever would.

"Please be careful," He told her just before he let her hand go, and the way she didn't look back at him frightened him in a way he wouldn't admit. The cloud that had settled on his mind the past weeks darkened with thunder. He felt as though he was stuck on the tip of an iceberg, with untold monsters and icy cold depths waiting for him below. If he were to fall in, he wasn't sure if even magic would keep him warm. But then, he didn't feel like he had much of a choice.

Feeling each second tick by, Merlin went to attend Gaius' patient. The worried crease in his brow didn't go away.

A/N: You know, for knowing exactly what is going to happen, I really have no clue what is going to happen. That is, I really need to become more organized when writing up plot outlines so I know what will go in what chapter. I feel as though my pacing is all over the place. Please tell me if its unbearable.