What Merlin neglected to mention was that the Shadow Lords had become a far greater danger to him than to the king. That he had earned untold enemies within the organization, that they smelled weakness and decline, that rumors of his lost magic were swirling alongside rumblings of assassins and black bounties on his head.
And Merlin’s response to all this?
More wine, he mused darkly, weary of it all.
Servants entered with a tray of food for the king, who was still quietly stewing over the mention of the Shadow Lords. The butler announced, “Supper, Your Majesty.”
Uther rose from his throne, eyes never leaving Merlin, and walked to the table, where he sat as the lid was lifted from the tray, revealing medallions of steak on his plate. Upon seeing his food, Uther’s mood did not improve.
“We asked for doves,” he growled to his butler.
“Deepest apologies, Your Majesty,” the butler soothed, “but we seem to have an issue with the dovecotes. Some, ah, dead birds were found.”
Merlin frowned at this. “How many birds?”
Unnerved by Merlin, the butler’s voice shook slightly as he answered, “Um, nine, sir.”
Even a man struck blind can still remember the color blue in his mind. So it was that Merlin, a man robbed of the Sight, recognized an omen.
Nine doves.
Nine was the number for magic but also for wisdom and leadership. The dead doves were a powerful warning of shattered peace and coming war.
Uther sighed. “How appetizing. Go.”
The butler and the royal footmen hurried out of the throne room.
King Uther sawed into his meat. “A bit late for your enchanters to help us now.”
“Not necessarily, Your Majesty. With the right encouragement, they could—”
Uther slammed the table with his fist, rattling his plate and frightening his hounds to bark. “Drought! Famine! Food riots! We cannot afford to look weak to our enemies! Do you know the Ice King and his northern raiders prowl our coasts, waiting for the right moment to strike? Do you? We want rain, Merlin!”
Sir Beric bowed his head, fearful of Uther’s wrath.
King Uther turned to Merlin, eyes aflame. “To hell with your Shadow Lords. Mother doubts they exist at all.”
Unfazed, Merlin folded his hands into the long sleeves of his robes. “I would assure the Queen Regent they are all too real. But His Majesty requires rain, and so we shall redouble our efforts.”
“Yes, do,” Uther bit. But as Merlin headed down the hall in a swirl of blue robes, the king added, “We know how you value your privacy, Merlin. It would be a pity if the wider world learned that you were serving us. Who knows what enemies might crawl out of the woodwork?” Merlin nodded at the warning, and the great doors of the throne room slammed behind him.
However, once he entered the serpentine corridors of Castle Pendragon, he sobered up quickly, no longer swaying, his senses returning and as keen as a fox. He drew a torch from a sconce in the wall and swept into a dark passage. After several steps, he paused and listened. Somewhere up ahead of him there was a scraping sound, followed by small bursts of air. Merlin strode ahead and rounded a corner, his firelight falling upon a magpie, spinning in a desperate circle on the floor, flopping about in its death throes. The magpie was a powerful omen of witchcraft but also of prophecy. Merlin’s fathomless eyes drifted toward the ceiling.
Minutes later, his lungs burned as he labored up the last remaining stairs of the castle’s highest tower. As he climbed into the turret, the first thing he noticed was the silence. Then he saw the dead birds littering the floor, some of them still twitching. Though the quantity was itself alarming, it was their arrangement that was most disturbing of all. The magpies had all fallen and died in ten impossibly precise patterns of three. Ten arrangements of three.
Ten: a rebirth. A new order. Dead magpies.
The end of prophecy?
Nine doves.
Merlin’s thoughts swirled. A great magical leader. A new dawn. A great war.
All of it was coming.
Dellum the physician had long fingers that sewed flesh together with the precision of a seamstress. Due to the high humidity in his chambers of black stone, sweat dripped from his long nose onto the corpse he was stitching back together. The ceilings were low and without windows. The only light was from two oil lanterns at opposite ends of the room, which shone dully on six wide tables, four of which held naked bodies in varying states of decomposition.
“I’m told you are a collector of sorts. Is this true?”
Dellum yelped. He dropped his instruments onto the floor. “Who goes there?”
“I do.” Merlin stepped into the yellow light.
“How did you—?”
“The door was open.”
Dellum wiped his sweaty face with a grimy rag that hung on his belt. “You’re Merlin the Magician.”
“You haven’t answered my question.”
Dellum’s eyes dodged about. “I don’t—I was told to not collect—I’ve stopped all that. Everything is aboveboard here.”
“Pity,” Merlin sighed. “I was willing to pay handsomely to see some of your more”—he searched for the word—“obscure items.”
“Is that so?” Dellum scratched his hands. He glanced to a heavy oak door near the back of the chamber. “What, eh, what sort of item were you looking for?”
“The number three,” Merlin answered.
Dellum frowned at this, but after a moment his face lit up. “I may have just the thing.”
The heavy door protested as Dellum pushed it open. Merlin stepped past him into a smaller chamber. The lantern he carried spilled light over shelves and shelves of dusty, grim little jars. He gagged at the smell of spoiling meat. Dellum crossed the room. He eagerly scooped a bundle into his arms and brought it over to the examination table for Merlin’s inspection. The object was wrapped in a greasy cloth.
“It arrived three days ago,” Dellum explained. “Born to a peasant family in Colchester.”
He unwrapped the specimen. As usual, Merlin betrayed no emotion. The infant was probably a week or two old, withered and pale green from rot, its small arms curled, tiny fists balled. Its head was divided evenly into two faces, though each shared a misshapen eye just above the two noses.
Merlin turned to Dellum and raised an eyebrow.
“Allow me,” the physician purred. He lifted the dead baby from the table and turned it over as though to burp it. This revealed a third face pressing out of the child’s tiny back in a silent scream, like a creature trapped between worlds.
“That will do,” Merlin said quietly, his thoughts far away.
Dellum gently wrapped the baby back in its cloth. “Might I, ah, inquire as to your interest in the number three?”
“Three is where the past, the present, and the future meet,” Merlin said, almost to himself. His robes swirled behind him as he headed for the door. “Something terrible and powerful has awakened. You should be afraid. We should all be afraid.”
The door slammed behind him.
SEVEN
NIMUE AWOKE WITH A START to piteous cries. How long have I been unconscious? she wondered, her thoughts sticky and slow. Jolts of agony forked across her skull, and her hand went to a wet patch of hair and a knot just below her left ear where the iron ball had struck her. Numbly, she pulled herself from the woodpile and took in the chaos: village elders roasting on fiery crosses, red robes everywhere, children crying in the mud, every village hut aflame, dogs sniffing dead bodies in the road.