It’s funny what being on the edge of death does for one’s perception.
After I finish, I towel off and brush my teeth. When I return to the bedroom, I find the lights on and see that a tray of food has been brought in—an attractive spread of warm bread and slabs of butter and steaming soup. And amusingly enough, there’s now a kilt laid out on the bed, thus solving the problem of how to clothe myself with the cuff and chain on my ankle.
I dress, eat, prod at the ankle cuff. It’s made from reinforced neoprene—impervious to water and other fluids, but still strong enough that I can’t pry or tear it off. The chain and eyebolt in the floor are equally strong.
I have to admire Nimue for her planning. It would take an act of violence for me to escape, and she knows me well enough to know I prefer subtler methods than violence in order to exert my will. I have to wonder though, if she’s planned any violence toward me.
Given our history—the history only I know and remember, by the way, and which she’s not aware of—I should feel undiluted terror at the thought of her wielding violence. And I am afraid, I really am.
I’m also hard, and my heart is beating so fast with anticipation that the clamor of it seems to fill the room.
Some time later, after I’ve finished eating and thoroughly explored the bedroom itself—there’s a dresser full of kilts and several shelves worth of books—the door opens. I can’t reach any closer than four or five feet away from it with the chain, but Nimue still pauses at the threshold before she comes in. In the glow of real light now, she’s painfully beautiful, and my body clenches remembering how she felt against me all those years ago. Nearly a quarter of a century ago.
Fifteen centuries ago.
How strange to be the only person to remember such joy and pain. So much of both that fate nailed our souls together. And so much love that the earth shook with it.
After appraising me for a moment with her cerulean gaze, Nimue apparently decides it’s safe enough for her to come inside the room, which she does without shutting the door. It makes me think that wherever we are, we’re the only ones in this house, which pleases me. After almost twenty-three years, the thrill of being alone with her is a frantic one. I drink in everything about her as she comes closer. Her sky-blue eyes and silky hair. Her long neck and slender hands. The lavender and botanical scent around her, as if she’s just come from a garden.
She perches on the bed, across from where I sit at the small desk with my empty tray. The light catches on a bracelet on her wrist, and I feel its cool power even from this distance.
I also feel its irony. I smile. “Merlinite?”
Nimue glances down at the stones comprising the bracelet: black and white and gray. Stones named after me.
“It seemed fitting.”
“Where are we, Nimue?”
She inclines her head toward a window set deep into the wall. “Have you looked outside?”
“I have. Nothing but darkness and wind. Not unusual for December anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere.”
“You’re home, Merlin. We’re on Bardsey.”
Bardsey.
We called it Ynys Enlli in my first life. The Isle in the Currents—a slope of apple-tree dotted green within arm’s reach of the Welsh coast. Kings and saints are buried in this ground; holy men and women prayed and danced here long before Jesus’s name ever reached our shores.
I too prayed and danced here.
I too was buried.
The fear sounds a discordant note inside my mind again.
“Why? Why have you brought me here?”
Nimue meets my stare with a serenity that is very close to satisfaction. I remember in our first life that she was a daughter of a queen, that she herself would go on to become the queen of Avalon. The Lady of the Lake.
“I think,” says my beautiful, amused captor, “that you have already guessed why I brought you here.”
3
I do not reveal the truth of my life lightly, but standing at the precipice of my death makes me reckless.
“You know,” I state. “You know what I am now.”
She stands up and does something that’s almost pacing, but with her light, dancer’s step, it’s more like floating. “Yes.”
