On a peninsula they called an island, Myrddin Wyllt sat in front of a cave. The seer had visited the place many times. Spent hours squatting in its dark mouth waiting for the tide to come in, a seed daring to be swallowed. For when the cave drank the sea, the future washed over him. Not today, though. Right now, Myrddin needed the winter-weary sun. A pile of books lay in the sand next to him. They were strange to the grain. They were written in a script Myrddin had until now glimpsed only in visions. Their paper was white as pearl, yet painfully thin and flimsy. His fingers kept tearing the page corners. He could tell the text within wasn’t the work of human hands. A monk could spend a year on the thinnest volume and not produce such miniscule, immaculately consistent marks, with less than an ant’s width between each letter. And some of these books were more than a thousand pages long. Myrddin knew this for a fact. They put numbers on them. Had men forgotten how to count?

Myrddin did not like much of what he read. The world he’d slept through was a swamp of pain and violence. Wars that would once have consumed hundreds or thousands now boasted deaths in numbers Myrddin had never needed to know. Human craft now surpassed even his greatest magics. Now men could end the world by accident. Worse still, some would do it on purpose. Who should be able to boast that power but God? One god, though men today were afraid to use the word, had tried to take away that power. Tried to save every man, woman and child in this world.

They’d killed him for that.

Right now, Myrddin was reading about himself, albeit under the name the Romans had given him. When he was young, he would have been thrilled to hear men sing of him. Every bard wished for that. To be transfigured from singer to song. Now it was a cruel joke. It wasn’t even the slander. Calling him a cambion, the fruit of diabolical outrage. People had been whispering that behind his back for years. Fools who could only think what their priests told them. The kind who couldn’t name what came between day and night. It was what had happened after Nimuë put him in the earth.

Myrddin watched the dusty silver waves crash onto the shore. He remembered the morning they’d carried a naked babe to his feet, warm and alive in those cold waters, his red shock of hair a flame they could not extinguish. He remembered raising the child to the sky and weeping. “Here is an heir for Uther!” Tennyson had him shout.

The poet was wrong. Uther—Uthyr—couldn’t have been further from Myrddin’s mind. All that mattered was that he had a prince. A prince who would bring peace to the land. Myrddin wasn’t surprised that people called him a devil. Easier to believe his power and madness—and Myrddin had gone mad—was born from the pit, not mere human violence. From watching his lord and his brother be slaughtered in front of him. Myrddin’s allies and beneficiaries claimed his visions came from God. That He had given Myrddin leave to practise his magic. Myrddin couldn’t believe that. Not unless God lived in the shadows of trees. In silence so deep, Myrddin could hear his tears hit the ground.

All his efforts. All his sins and miracles. They had not lasted a single lifetime.

Myrddin felt something rushing towards him across the sea—

A boy with a mask like a bandit stood in the surf. His skin was concealed by short, black-striped orange fur, a cat’s tail waving behind him. He was holding a sword shakily above his head. Caledfwlch. Myrddin slowly got to his feet, dropping the Idylls of the King. His mouth fell agape. In the same moment, Caledfwlch slipped out of the boy’s clawed hands into the water.

“Sorry, sorry!” cried Billy St. George. He looked about the beach. “Um, excuse me, sir, am I still in France?”

Myrddin ran into the water, embracing the strange child.

Billy patted the man’s side awkwardly. “Ah, hi.”

Once more, the world had delivered Myrddin a prince. Once more, he wept.

“Are you okay mister?”

⬗

The gaol on Bròn Binn wasn’t meant for long-term confinement. It was a simple brick building with five cells, each with an old-fashioned iron barred door. Any member of Roundtable could’ve torn it apart all on their lonesome. Metropole could even politely ask the cell doors to open themselves. It was a drunk tank, a place for hot tempers to cool. If the Ministry of Paranormality needed to properly imprison a superhuman, they had another island for that, a bleak place between the Outer Hebridees and… somewhere else. Today, though, escape was impossible. At least, if Allison Kinsey said it was.

Sir Cai sat brooding on the cell bench. They hadn’t given him back the helmet. He liked the helmet. Sir Cai itched without it on, like there were archers aiming for his head. A weakness inherited from the flesh he wore. He’d spent a few minutes experimenting with the strange water-powered latrine, until he heard the red-eyed girl laughing at him. He had tried to stop for the sake of his dignity, but it became a compulsion as urgent as breath. His actions weren’t his own. Sir Cai could not even beg for release. He was only able to pull himself away when the witch-child tilted her head and wrinkled her nose, as though a ghost had whispered a bad joke in his ear.

“Come on,” said Allison. “Just tell us what you were doing in the forest.”

The girl looked like Nimuë’s spawn. Bloodless as a fish. Bending men with only a touch and her voice. Sir Cai wanted to see the girl’s bones break from the weight of the air on her shoulders. He wanted to bury her in the rubble of this building. But his new magic lay still inside him, as though an iron horseshoe had been hung around his neck. Glaring back at the girl and her black-clad companion was all the spite Sir Cai could muster.

Allison rolled her eyes. Alberto was going to gloat for days. “Spit it out.”

“I was left to guard the sword,” Sir Cai blurted, unable to stop himself.

“And why did Merlin stick his magic sword in a French rock?” asked Mistress Quickly. “Seems like a waste of good metal.”

Sir Cai grit his teeth. “His name—isn’t…” He screwed his eyes shut, tremoring, before the answer fled his lips. “…It was our land before the whore put Myrddin in the earth. He didn’t realize that had changed until he drove Caledfwlch into the stone. Said he didn’t have time to pull it back out…”

Sir Cai flinched at Mistress Quickly’s laughter. It was the mirth of wasps. “Oh, I’ve been there, mate.”

“And they just left you. All by yourself.”

Sir Cai stood tall. “Only I was worthy.”

“Did they tell you where they were going?”

Sir Cai frowned. “Great Britain, of course.”

Allison huffed. “Did they tell you where in Great Britain?”

“…I did not need to know.”

“Course not.” Allison squinted at Starry Knight’s mind, bricked up behind the edifice of Sir Cai. Anthony Peake was trapped in a ship that shouldn’t have existed for nearly fifty years, beyond the reach of one world and falling short of another. The stale, four day old air stank of sweat and fear. Warning claxons blended with screams. Over and over, they fell to Earth. A memory prison built of despair and self-recrimination. Merlin hadn’t lacked for building materials.

“You know,” said Allison, “I’m not surprised Myriddin left you to guard the sword.”

Sir Cai smiled. “I see my reputation has not withered with the ages.”

Allison shrugged her shoulders. “You mean people still remember you’re a prat? Yeah, they do.”

Anthony Peake’s lips and eyebrows twitched as Sir Cai searched his host’s vocabulary. His face went red when he realized what the girl called him. “Mind your tongue, you pale little slattern!”

“Oh come on, everyone knows you were a dickhead.” Allison glanced up at Mistress Quickly. “Mistress, do you remember what Robert Graves called our guest?”

“Afraid I don’t, Allie.” It was the truth, but Maude tried to make it sound ironic.

Allison smiled acidly at Sir Cai. “A buffoon. The chief of cooks.”

Sir Cai’s hand flew to a sword that wasn’t there. “I’ll have his head!”

“Remember when Percival broke your shoulder? Because you slapped a lady!”

“She had it coming!”

Allison tutted.

“No wonder your dad liked Arthur more.”

“That’s a lie!”

That was one use for precognition: knowing what insults would land.

“Is it?” asked Allison. “While you’re answering questions, why’d ya kill Loholt? Your own nephewPrevious ChapterNext Chapter