Page 20 of The Dragon Ring
If I could have bristled any more, I’d have looked like a hedgehog. “Where I come from, women get a choice in whom they marry, thank you very much. I’ve no intention of marrying anyone. And my boyfriend, who has a name– Nathan– is very important to me, even if he isn’t to you.” I paused. “And he’ll be looking for me by now, and he’ll probably have called the police. I want to go home to him. Right now.”
“That’s impossible.”
Frustration coursed through me. He had to be lying. “It better hadn’t be,” I snapped. “For a start, then, you can tell me exactly how it was you got me here. Because if I came one way, surely I can get back using the same method?”
He shook his head. “I don’t think you can. There was but one moment when you could pass through the tear in time. Yesterday morning. Now the tear is healed. It no longer exists. Your passing plugged the hole.”
A tear in time. A tear that had linked the twenty-first century with the fifth, just when I’d come too close to it. A tear that somehow had mended when I passed through it. A bit of a coincidence. Did I believe him? If he thought there might be a way back, would he even tell me?
“How did the tear come to be made? I saw you at least twice in my world, so either the tear lasted for ages or there was more than one.”
“Time is ragged.” He had the air of someone choosing his words carefully. “But it’s tied to lives. Seventeen years ago, when I served Arthur’s father, the High King, and Arthur was just a boy, I found the ragged edges of time in Ynys Witrin’s stone circle and knew that you would come. The tear was tied to you. It opened when you were in Ynys Witrin in your world, and allowed me through so I could find you when you were a child.”
I seized upon his words. “Then if I go back to the circle it might open again. If I stand in the middle of it.”
He shook his head. The wind caught his long brown hair and whipped it across his face so he had to put up a hand and push it back, a gesture that reminded me of Nathan.
“No. That’s not how it works. In fact, even I don’t know exactly how it does. But I do know you’re now where you’re meant to be, so there’s no need for a tear to exist.”
“But you don’t know it won’t. Take me back to Glastonbury and let me try to get back to my world.”
He shook his head again. “I can’t. I brought you here for a purpose. To fulfill a prophecy. Because whenever I use my magic to see what lies ahead for Arthur, I see it lies with you, his future intertwined with yours.”
I frowned in frustration. “Magic? Is that what all this is? Are you trying to tell me you got me here bymagic? That doesn’t even exist.”
Merlin gave a shrug. “Call it what you will. I was born with power. But I don’t fully control it. It comes and goes when it’s needed. It’s hard to explain.”
“You mean you have real magic?”
He smiled, almost apologetically.
I paused, thinking about what he’d just said, but it proved very hard to get my head around.
“Wait a minute. You said you were serving Arthur’s father seventeen years ago. So, how old are you?” He looked young. Well, older than me, but still young. Definitely not old. Surely seventeen years ago he couldn’t have been much more than a boy himself. There were lines about his eyes from squinting against the sun, but not a gray hair on his head, and he moved with all the suppleness of youth. It was hard to believe he was a day over thirty.
His smile became a wicked grin. “Old. I served the High King’s brother, Ambrosius, before him, and before that I was with the wise men of Guorthegirn. I’m older than you think.”
I had no idea of the time spans he was talking about. But I could see he looked too young to have done all that. Yet something in me accepted what he’d just said as truth. If he’d used magic to bring me here, then why not to keep himself young? None of the laws of physics seemed to apply to the situation I found myself in.
The feeling of being trapped was overwhelming. “You’re not going to let me go back, are you?”
After an awkward moment he made a sweeping gesture with his arm across the plain toward distant Glastonbury Tor.
“If you escape and go to Ynys Witrin to try to find a way back, we will come after you. We can’t let you perish in the marshes, which you most certainly would. And even if by some lucky chance you could find your way through the marshes, you wouldn’t be safe. The Abbot controls the island, but his people are superstitious and already think you either a spy or a bog spirit.”
I preferred fairy to bog spirit. “Then help me.”
He turned around and leaned on the palisade wall, his back to the Tor. Four grey-haired horsemen clattered down the cobbled road toward the gates. He raised a hand in salute, and they all shook their spears back at him and shouted friendly greetings. Then they were through and riding down the steep path away from the gates toward the plain below.
He looked back at me. “I’ll help you as much as I can, but not back to your world. There’s very little possibility what you want to do would work, anyway. I’ll help you settle in, adjust to the changes you’ll meet. And one day soon, you’ll be a queen to Arthur’s king.”
At this rate I couldn’t see how I could avoid it. I had one thing that Merlin didn’t have though, visions of the future or not. I had all the knowledge of the twenty-first century. I knew Arthur was remembered as a great king, I knew the list of his supposed twelve battles, and I knew what would happen to him at Camlann, his last battle, when his nephew Mordred would betray him, leading to both their deaths. But I also knew that by Arthur’s side all that time was his wife, Queen Guinevere. A woman who, according to legend, was destined not to help him, but to betray him with one of his closest friends. A woman I’d been named after.
I changed tack. “If you want me to marry Arthur, I think you’d better tell me all about him.”
Merlin’s face changed. Was that relief I saw flash in his eyes? Did he think I was about to capitulate? He didn’t understand independent twenty-first-century women if he did.
“What do you want to know?” he asked.
