Page 96 of American King (New Camelot Trilogy 3)
“She said she loved me,” I say. “I feel culpable somehow, although I wouldn’t have done anything differently.”
“What did you say to her when you saw her the night before last?”
I push a branch out of the way as we walk. “That I wouldn’t choose her. That I wouldn’t forgive her. I told her to stay away from my family.”
“She was dangerous, Maxen, and it was time she knew that her antics weren’t working. And you have a duty to the people you love to protect them,” he says. “No one is responsible for her death save for herself.”
“I wish it had ended differently.”
“So do I, but there was no possibility of it. Not this time.”
The way he says it sends a sear of déjà vu sizzling through me. “Not this time?” I ask, and then immediately wish I hadn’t. Suddenly, I don’t want to be in these woods any more, I don’t want to be with Merlin, in this morning. I want to rewind time to last night, or to the last time Embry, Greer and I were together and then just stay in that moment forever, because somehow I know that this morning is going to change something, and it’s going to change it profoundly and terribly.
“Never mind,” I say quickly. “Don’t explain it.”
“Ah,” Merlin says carefully. “But it’s time for me to explain things.”
We’ve come to a wooden bridge that arches over a wide, shallow stream, and I stop in the middle, leaning against the railing and looking down at the water below. “Is this the secret you told me I had to wait two years to learn?” I ask.
“It is, and it’s been two years. It’s time.”
“This secret of yours, will it change anything?”
“It will change everything.”
“And I must know?”
“I can’t see any way around it. No good way at least.”
The last time Merlin hid secrets, I’d slept with my sister. I’d gotten her with child. And that child had been kept from my knowledge for fourteen years.
Merlin’s secrets are not usually good ones.
I chew on my lip, watching the water frill and lace around the rocks jutting above the surface, reaching a decision. It is wrong to be afraid of the unknown—it’s cowardly and ignoble. I take one last look at the water, breathe in a last breath free of knowing whatever he’s been hiding, and then I turn to face him with all the courage I can muster.
“Okay, then. I am ready to hear it.”
LATER THAT NIGHT, it would be the stream I remembered the most. The clear song of it, the ordinary, everyday prettiness of water going where it needed to go. It seemed so normal, so sane, that it was impossible to reconcile its sweet presence with the things Merlin was saying to me. Surely those things were only said in books or in badly scripted TV shows. They weren’t said on a bridge that I’d stood on a thousand times as a boy, they weren’t said in some little nature park in Kansas as the sun rose above the trees and tried valiantly to chase away the near-Halloween chill.
But it isn’t later tonight yet, it’s right now, on the bridge still, and I’m listening to Merlin tell me a secret. An impossible secret. And right now the water below us barely registers as anything other than noise.
“I knew who I was when I was born,” he says, leaning backwards against the railing in an uncharacteristically relaxed and unalert pose. His eyes are fixated on something I can’t see. “As soon as I became aware of myself, as children do, I became aware that I was someone else. Or had been someone else.”
I study him. Throughout our friendship, Merlin has been the definition of pragmatic, grounded, interested in practical details. It’s true that Greer has told me he was very cryptic with her once upon a time; I’ve met Nimue, Embry’s aunt and Merlin’s former lover, and it’s hard to believe that you wouldn’t have to be a little spiritual to love someone who wears as many crystals as she does. But with me, Merlin has always been brass tacks. War, politics, information. We’ve never dealt in the abstract, him and I, and I’m not sure how to react now.
“Like…a past life?” I say. I know my voice is uninflected and open—a skill I’ve perfected while sitting down to make deals with querulous Democrats and Republicans—but there must still be something in my face that makes Merlin smile.
“Yes, I know how it sounds,” he says, amusement crinkling around his eyes. “And it won’t get easier to believe, but I need you to keep listening.”
“Of course,” I say. “Go on.”
Merlin looks back out over the stream. “My grandfather came from a long line of what they use to call cunning folk. He took one look at me after I was born and knew I was born dyn hysbys. A wise man. A conjurer.”
“A conjurer,” I repeat.
He smiles again. “Wizard might sound more palatable to you, if you prefer that. At any rate, the Welsh take these things seriously, or at least they did in my village, and I was put into the frequent care of my grandfather so he could teach me how to train my Sight. Make it useful. See what I needed to see.”
He sounds completely calm, completely normal, even though he’s using words like wizard and sight as if they are common, everyday things. “Like, for example,” he continues, “that it was crucial that the President of the United States find his way to the room of his advisor one night almost forty years ago.”
