“Without a trial?” Merlin growled. “Without a hearing? Who has turned you against me?”
Uther allowed emotion to peek through as he snarled, “You’ve done that yourself with your disdain, your drunkenness, and your disloyalty.” His voice shook. “When you came to this court, we were ten years old. Do you remember?”
Merlin’s voice was soft. “I do.”
Uther’s eyes shone with memory. “We had heard such incredible tales of the great Merlin the Magician. How we awaited you. You see, we never knew our father. There was no one to teach us how to be king.” He chuckled. “So we sat at our window for days, searching the hills for you. We wanted to learn the secrets of the world. We wanted to be wise.” Uther’s smile faded. “The day you rode through the gates, we raced out to see you. And you fell off your horse. You stank of sweat, and your beard was stained with wine. They had to carry you.”
Merlin sighed. “You have every right to be disappointed in me, Uther, but if you want the Sword of Power, then killing me is madness. I have it on good authority that the sword is coming to me. Give me one week—”
“I’m sorry, Merlin. But the mob awaits your head. Seize him.” Uther turned away, and his heels clicked down the stone corridor as the jailers unlocked Merlin’s cell door and the footmen lifted him to his feet.
“Uther!” Merlin cried as they unshackled him and dragged him out of the cell. “Uther, I need more time!”
But moments later Merlin squeezed his eyes shut against the blinding sun as he was led out of the tower dungeon and onto a scaffolding above an assembled mob in a wide courtyard of Castle Pendragon. As Merlin’s eyes adjusted, he saw Lady Lunette peering down from her castle window, a satisfied smirk on her face.
King Uther was pale and beads of sweat wet his bare upper lip. He kept glancing nervously to his mother’s tower as the footmen forced Merlin onto his knees before the bloodstained executioner’s block.
“Uther, you’re not thinking!” Merlin fought with his captors.
Uther snapped, “We tire of your words!”
The king nodded to the executioner. Merlin’s neck was pressed into the groove of the chopping block. The king looked up to his mother again. She nodded. Uther took a deep breath and turned to the assembled mob. “Merlin the Magician, you are hereby sentenced to die for the crime of treason against our person!”
Merlin could smell the rusted blood soaked into the block. A resignation overtook him. He chuckled joylessly. In seven centuries, the only pure truth he knew was that death was ugly, sad, undignified, and empty of meaning, and despite what had seemed like great evidence to the contrary, he was proving no exception to this rule. And what difference did it make? In many ways, Merlin was already a ghost. Without his magic, he was little more than a player in a theatrical, pretending to be the great Merlin the Magician to a less and less believing audience. He could not even find anger in his heart for Uther Pendragon, a boy who had never been anything more than a pawn for his cruel, ambitious mother and, to a lesser degree, for Merlin himself.
But as the executioner lifted his ax, an unfamiliar panic swept over him like a rogue wave, a primordial, even embarrassing, scream for survival, and he swung his arms wildly to free himself. But the soldiers held him fast. The blade glinted in the sun and a burst of feathers threw all into chaos.
The executioner stumbled backward from the diving kite as the ax dropped onto the block a whisker from Merlin’s nose. The crowd gasped and dozens made the sign of the cross as the raptor lunged and dove at the executioner, ultimately driving him from the scaffold.
Uther had not the slightest idea of what to do. He looked up at the window to Lunette, who gestured to finish Merlin, but before he could order his axman back to his post, the kite landed on the chopping block, a tiny scroll tied to its leg.
“A message, my liege!” Merlin barked, head still pressed to the block.
Uther wanted to escape. His moment of strength was unraveling. Sir Beric took a few tentative steps toward the kite, and his eyes widened.
“It’s true, my liege. There is a note!” Sir Beric repeated, compounding the king’s misery.
With a sneer, Uther said, “Well? Read it.”
Sir Beric hurried over to the bird and carefully extricated the message from its leg. He unrolled it and held it to the sun, his jaw slowly dropping as he read silently.
Uther had had it. “For mercy’s sake, Beric, what does it say?”
Beric sputtered, “It is a letter from the Wolf-Blood Witch, sire, offering to bring the Sword of Power, the—the Sword of the First Kings, to Merlin the Magician!”
“Tell her I am indisposed!” Merlin called out.
Uther could feel his mother’s eyes burning a hole in the back of his neck. He dared not look up. He bit on his lip, fantasizing about Merlin’s severed head falling into the crowd, but he knew when he was bested.
“Get him up. Get him up!” Uther spat as he shoved Sir Beric and a few footmen out of his way and stomped back into the castle, ignoring the jeers and complaints of the mob denied its blood.
The soldiers lifted Merlin to his feet, but he pushed them off and bent over to study the kite, which stared at him with indifferent black eyes. Merlin reached out to stroke the bird’s wing and it bit him on the thumb, drawing blood. Yanking his hand away, he realized, “You’re one of Yeva’s, are you? You tell that old crone this changes nothing between us.”
The bird watched him with disinterest as the soldiers pulled him to his feet and led Merlin away.
THIRTY
A STEADY, UNFORGIVING WIND CHAPPED faces and sandaled feet as Father Carden led a grim procession of thirty Red Paladin horsemen into the foothills of the Pyrenees, where cottonwoods and tall pines had pushed over the marble ruins of Bagnères-de-Bigorre, a Roman outpost favored by the rich for its warm springs. They crossed uneven grassy slopes dotted with boulders that were split by wide, shallow streams filled with brown trout. Even the low peaks of the mountains were snowcapped and were unrelenting funnels for the December winds. Carden gritted his teeth to prevent them from chattering, mindful of being an example to his monks.
The Weeping Monk rode beside him, eyes covered by his draping hood.
As the terrain grew rockier and the slopes grew steeper, the paladins entered a green valley of high firs and a small blue lake, the shoreline of which had been claimed by a massive encampment, declared by the enormous banner of gold and white, the colors of the Vatican. It hung from a crossbeam like the sail of a ship, atop a papal carriage. Several large, red, oval tents, also flying the Vatican colors on long lances, surrounded a grand pavilion, sheltered up the shore from the lake and protected from the wind by a row of old pines.
Servants in religious robes with buckets on long poles ferried hot water from the nearby springs into the pavilion.
The pavilion doors were guarded by the black-robed Trinity, Pope Abel V’s personal guard. As Carden and the Weeping Monk rode up to the pavilion doors and dismounted, they could see their warped reflections in the Trinity guards’ ghoulish golden masks. Each mask was cast in the likeness of papal death masks, so each Trinity guard was given his own unique death identity. The dead golden faces of previous popes stared back at Carden and the monk with their strange closed eyes.