After all we’ve been through now, I’m not ashamed to tell you that I wept when I heard. The moonlight and your voice—I’d held onto the promise of them for so long, through all the cold nights and muddy battles and encounters with death. And somehow, I’d let the moonlight slip through my fingers. It seemed as inevitable as it was torturous.
I recall that night so vividly. I’d gone down into the woods and was looking back up at Camelot, which was blazing with raucous celebration at Arthur’s homecoming, and I nearly decided not to go back. To leave and go elsewhere, find some other king to serve, some other court where I wouldn’t have to watch you marry another man and bear his children. It even seemed like the night itself was beckoning me on—the breeze blew warm and the trees rustled and the stars glittered and it would have been so easy to walk away from the pain.
But Arthur needed me, and for Merlin the Enchanter, there would be no other king.
I stayed.
The proverbial fatal mistake.
The legends have been wrong about so many things. My age, my magic, my motivations. But this they got right—by your hand, I was spirited away to a remote place and held there.
I woke up one morning not long after the night I nearly abandoned Camelot and found myself in a cave, large and dark and dry. You have to understand, it still wasn’t unusual for people to sleep and even dwell in caves—I did so frequently on my journeys—but it was unusual enough after the comforts of Camelot to be disorienting.
Slowly, I began to fully wake, to trace the outline of the cave’s mouth against a starry field of night sky. There was another light from somewhere, and I realized it was you, sitting next to me with a lamp by your knee and your eyes bright with tears.
“I’m sorry,” you said. “I’m so sorry.”
Your mother was forcing your hand, you told me, she was making you marry Pelleas and you had no wish to. So you did what young people across the world do when they’re frightened and jumpy: you came up with a stupid, terrible plan.
The logic ran like this: you’d run away with me, and then when Pelleas invariably found you—he was doggedly loyal, that one—he’d find you unchaperoned with a man who had the king’s favor, and he’d have no choice but to step aside. To marry a woman who’d compromised herself thus would offend his sense of honor, but he’d never be able to challenge me without losing his tenuous esteem with Arthur. Therefore, he’d drop his suit for your hand and you’d be free of him.
Of course, the one thing you didn’t feel like you could count on was my cooperation, so you drugged me for the ship’s journey to Bardsey and warded the cave with your spells so I couldn’t leave, although it took only the barest probing with my mind to see that I could easily break your spells if I wanted to.
I didn’t want to. I wanted to stay wherever you were no matter what the reason, so I never tried to break them. Never even told you I could.
And by the end, you’d taken so much of my power that I couldn’t break them anymore, even when I desperately wanted to. Such is the irony of life.
Christ, Nimue, if only you’d asked me. If only you’d said, “Run away with me,” I would have left everything behind, even the king I loved but who no longer needed me as he once did. All the drugs and the spells were so unnecessary when taken in view of how much I longed for you.
But why would you have known that? We’d barely exchanged two words
at court, I’d never made my love for you known because I had nothing to offer, and for all you knew, I was barely aware of your existence.
“Why Bardsey?” I asked you after you finished explaining.
“It’s remote,” you said. “And holy. Pelleas wouldn’t dare spill blood on holy ground.”
True.
But it was hard to ignore that however remote and holy it was, it was also my home. They would say later that Bardsey was the island of twenty thousand saints—twenty thousand holy souls interred on this small jag of turf and rock—and that number included the people of the old ways and the Druids as well as the Christians who came after. In many real ways, the island was the source of my power, or, if not its source, its conduit. It was here that I was the most powerful…and the most vulnerable.
Surely that couldn’t have been a coincidence. But I was blinded by how much I wanted you, how much I wanted to be near you, even if it was as your prisoner as you schemed to avoid a marriage you didn’t want.
We were in the cave together for three months. And until the end, it was perfect.
You were innocent, virginal, and let me tell you, it was a heady combination when paired with your inherent joy and merriment. I would get hard just watching you laugh or sing to yourself, harder still when you’d look up and catch me staring and you’d swallow, as if you’d never felt a man’s attention on you before.
You’d blush when we’d accidentally touch, you’d catch your breath when I said your name. The first time I touched your face, you ducked your head and shivered. And you gasped the first time we kissed, stole the air from right between our lips.
“I care for you,” I said, brushing hair away from your face. “Let me marry you, Nimue. We don’t even have to wait for Pelleas to find us. We’ll find one of the holy women here or go back to Avalon—or even a church, if you’d rather do that. But please, let me be your husband.”
You looked so unhappy right then that I pulled back, worried I’d gone too far.
“I can’t marry you, Merlin,” you said, and the tears you spilled were like acid as they dropped onto the place where my hands clasped yours.
You couldn’t marry me, you said, but neither could you stop yourself from falling in love with me—or at least I thought at the time. The kisses grew more frequent, heated and long and slow, until inevitably the kisses begat caresses and then the caresses begat sex. Our first time, I’d undressed you and kissed every part of your body I could, fondled and stroked, until you made a cradle for me with your legs and shyly asked me to kiss you as I lay there. To go inside you.
I did, and it was the first time I shared magic with you.
