The King's Wizard (10 page)

Sir Gilbert and Sir Egbert were at his side, awaiting the command to charge. The sky lightened, and still Vortigern did not
give the signal to attack. It was as if the king was waiting for something.

“Look!” Sir Gilbert said, pointing toward the enemy host. “Lord Ardent! The traitor—he has changed sides!”

The king shot Gilbert a look of disgust and raised his arm. The sword he held flashed in the rising sun.

Uther waited, resplendent in his red-crested Roman armor, every muscle tense. If he attacked too soon, the battle would be
fought on the far bank of the river and in the dark, and Merlin had assured him that victory would come only if he fought
Vortigern
on
the surface of the river itself. He must trust the wizard’s advice. It was the only advantage he had against an army three
times the size of his own. Compared to Vortigern, Uther had no cavalry worth the name, and a mounted knight could cut a foot-soldier
to pieces within minutes.

At last the first moment came when there was light enough. “Loose!” Uther shouted, and the air was filled with arrows.

The volley of arrows rattled through Vortigern’s line like a shower of pointed hail, claiming few casualties. Though one of
the victims was Sir Egbert, Vortigern did not flinch as the man beside him fell from his saddle.

“Charge!” Vortigern bellowed, bringing down his sword. The shout was taken up along the line, and within moments the army
was in motion, charging down the hill.

Uther’s pikemen ran forward to meet the foe. He’d had to give the order—he could not have held them back in the face of the
oncoming cavalry. Quickly, the young prince gestured his troops forward,
and heard a whooping cheer run up and down the line. He drew his own sword and ran toward the frozen river, shouting his battle
cry.

Vortigern hung back only long enough to select his targets. Ardent first, just to warm up with, and then that upstart boy
who wanted his throne. And then Merlin, just to spite the lynx-eyed serpent, Mab. All his enemies would be dead before nightfall.
Vortigern spurred his warhorse forward.

From his vantage point upon the hill, Merlin saw the king’s white stallion charge forward. He began to walk slowly down the
hill, Excalibur flashing in his hand.

In the moment that the two armies met, Uther saw the wisdom of the wizard’s plan. When the horses reached the ice they went
down. Vortigern’s cavalry was useless. In moments the battlefield became a tumult of screaming horses and shouting men. The
momentum of Vortigern’s charge was broken, and the fallen horses were doing more damage to their own side than to Uther’s.

In the distance, the Young Prince saw Vortigern galloping toward him. Hacking around him with his sword to clear his way,
Uther began to forge through the tumult of fighting men to meet him.

The stallion fell the moment its hooves touched the ice, trapping the king beneath its flailing body. Three of Uther’s soldiers
turned toward what they
saw as easy prey, and in a moment Vortigern was buried beneath a pile of soldiers stabbing and hacking at him.

But if he had been that easy to kill, the king would have been dead long ago. Groping around with his free hand, Vortigern
seized a spear that had been dropped by its former owner. He used it as a bludgeon, and in moments he had fought his way free,
killing all three of his opponents, and was able to retrieve his sword from its sheath on his horse’s saddle. Standing alone
over the bodies of his foes, Vortigern saw Ardent a few yards away, fighting gallantly against zealous foes. Eager for prey,
Vortigern waded back into the battle that raged all around him.

Ardent saw the king and rushed toward him, his sword at the ready. For half his life he had groveled and toadied to Vortigern,
serving him faithfully, guessing at his moods, and the king had repaid him for his care by feeding Ardent’s only daughter
to the Great Dragon. Now he would do what he should have done years ago, and kill the Saxon usurper.

“Vortigern!” he shouted.

Vortigern closed with Lord Ardent, who quickly found that righteous rage was no substitute for regular sword practice. In
moments Vortigern had beaten through his guard and bludgeoned the older man to the ground. Setting the point of his sword
carefully into the center of Ardent’s armored chest, Vortigern hammered its point home with heavy blows of his
mailed fist. In moments Ardent lay dead, his blood spreading through the snow beneath him.

“Ardent,” Vortigern said softly.

Merlin strode through the middle of the battle, paying no attention to the carnage around him. He wore no armor, only a close
helmet of leather and bronze upon his head and his usual long feathered cloak. His lack of armor did not distress him. He
had eyes only for Vortigern, and as if Fate itself had decreed that nothing should prevent their meeting, none of the other
soldiers’ combats touched him. It was as if Merlin moved through a world that held him alone.

At last he reached the king.

Vortigern stepped over Ardent’s body and sneered mockingly when he saw Merlin. “Are you going to use some of your magic on
me, Merlin?” he asked tauntingly.

“I’ll kill you any way I can, Vortigern—but I will kill you,” Merlin answered evenly.

In that moment Vortigern swung at him. Instinctively, Merlin raised Excalibur to block the blow. The sword hummed sweetly,
and there was a ringing sound as the swords met. But Excalibur only shuddered in Merlin’s grip. Vortigern’s blade was sheared
off at the hilt.

King and wizard both stared at the enchanted blade. When Merlin looked up, he could see the knowledge of defeat written plainly
on Vortigern’s face. As Vortigern began to step backward, Merlin raised the sword high above his head and brought it
down again, but this time Vortigern was not his target.

The tip of the sword touched the ice gently, and the ice exploded away from the blade. In moments a deep fissure appeared
in the frozen surface running directly toward Vortigern, and widening as it ran. The surface that had been so solid a moment
before gave way beneath the king’s feet, and Vortigern fell through the ice into the icy black water beneath.

For a moment it seemed as if he would drag himself onto the ice again. His mailed hands scrabbled at the edges of the ice
as he strained to save himself, but the cold leeched the strength from his limbs as the weight of his armor pulled him inexorably
down into the chill lightless dark. He screamed as he sank from sight, and his last despairing scream echoed through the icy
air, unnaturally loud, startling the men who fought around him. The ice closed over him as Vortigern struggled desperately
to reach the air once more, entombing him like a dragonfly in amber.

As the men around Merlin realized what had happened, the fighting stopped. Men lowered their weapons, turning to stare at
the spot where the king had vanished. Slowly the clash of weapon against weapon died away, until the entire battlefield was
silent, waiting.

Merlin stared down at the shining blade of Excalibur, and at Vortigern’s dead face gazing up at him from beneath the ice.

“Surrender!” The cry was taken up by others; it rippled through the soldiers like wind over summer wheat, and men began to
throw down their weapons.

“That’s a mighty sword,” said Uther—King Uther, now.

Merlin had not seen him approach. The force of the rage that had sustained him ever since the moment he’d seen the Great Dragon
attack Nimue had ebbed at last, leaving him hollow and sickened by what he had done. He had used his magic, or the sword’s,
to kill—and in this moment, standing in the cold bloodstained snow, Merlin could not remember why killing had seemed so important
to him.

“It’s Excalibur …” Merlin said. He offered the sword—still unstained by blood—to Uther, who took it reverently. Swords like
Excalibur were for executioners and kings, and Merlin did not wish to be either.

“It can only be used by a good man in a good cause,” Merlin said, though even as he spoke he knew that was not true. Excalibur
would grant victory to any who held it, but they must look elsewhere for wisdom.

“I understand,” Uther said. He flourished the shining sword in the air, and his men closed around him, cheering his great
victory over Vortigern as if Uther had won the day by force of arms alone.

No one in Uther’s Christian army wanted to congratulate Merlin, and he was able to slip away, unnoticed, from the king’s side.
He walked steadily, empty-handed now, through the men and the horses, the reddened snow, and the vast landscape of the dead.

Vortigern was dead. Only one tear had ever been
shed for him, and his pride had cast it away. In the end, he had paid for that pride with his life.

Now Uther was king, and his Christian rule would heal the scars of the land and so defeat Mab. Merlin could return to Avalon
Abbey, and Nimue.

Merlin looked back toward the frozen river, and saw that the men were carrying Uther on their shoulders, cheering as lustily
as if so many of their fellows did not lay dead at their feet. Now they would crown their new king. The Red Dragon had defeated
the White, and the prophecy that had called Merlin from his forest home was fulfilled.

But a strange sense of uneasiness filled his thoughts, as though—somehow—he was wrong.

D
eep under the Hill, in the Land of Magic, Mab gazed into a scrying crystal that showed her only ice, and a battlefield long
cleared of bodies. She felt a curious pain in the place that had once been her heart at the knowledge that Vortigern was dead.
The two of them had fought from the moment they had met. Mab had tangled the threads of his life and denied him the chance
to found a dynasty, but now that he was dead, she would miss him. Of all her cat’s-paws down through the centuries, Vortigern
had been the only one to go to his death clear-eyed and accepting.

She waved her hand over the surface of the glass, and the scene changed. Now the crystal showed a nun’s cell in Avalon, where
a Healing Sister helped Nimue to take her first unsteady steps. The heavy bandages were gone, and the girl’s face was veiled
in a
hopeless attempt to conceal her scars, even when there was no one to see.

So Merlin’s love hated the very sight of herself, did she? That might prove useful, as time went on. Mab smiled as she waved
her hand to clear the glass once more.

Now the scrying glass showed her the makeshift chapel at Pendragon Castle. Its stained-glass windows cast rainbows of light
over the nobles standing to watch their new king being crowned. Mab’s gaze wandered over the crowd until it settled on the
Duke of Cornwall. His lovely dark-haired wife Igraine stood beside him, holding the hand of their only child, a girl who’d
had the misfortune to be born with a cast over her left eye. Her pious father naturally assumed that such misfortune was due
to divine—or infernal—punishment, and reproached both his wife and his daughter frequently for their imagined sins.

Yes, here was something she could use to pull down Merlin’s puppet king and show him he must take the power for himself. Mab
smiled as she raised her hands above her head.

Igraine would do what Vortigern had not. And Merlin would not suspect his doom until it was too late for the knowledge to
matter. …

The coronation took place at Pendragon Castle on New Year’s Day.

Word of Uther’s victory had spread across the land with the speed of summer lightning, and the nobles of Britain hurried to
do him honor—or to fortify their castles—according to their natures.

The Bishop of Winchester was to have his early loyalty rewarded by being the one to crown the new king in the name of Holy
Mother Church. Old King Constant’s crown had been lost with Vortigern’s body beneath the winter’s ice, and so Uther had ordered
a new one fashioned, its band carved with symbols drawn from the Christians’ Holy Book—loaves and fishes, stalks of wheat
and spring lambs. Upon the brow was the image of a rising sun. A Christian crown for a Christian king, and Merlin thought
that if Uther had the perspicacity to rule with a light hand, the people of Britain would do for love what they never would
have done for fear, and Britain would become wholly a Christian land at last.

And that would be Mab’s destruction.

The Great Hall at Pendragon had been decked for feasting. It was filled with tables laden with delicacies to the point of
collapse, and with nobles arrayed in their best clothes and largest jewels. They had been at the church earlier, with their
wives and their brothers and their families, to see Uther crowned, and in every heart, Pagan and Christian, was the same prayer:
Please let him be a better ruler than the old king
.

At the top of the room, Uther seated himself upon his throne as his nobles cheered him. His rich vermilion robes gleamed,
but not as brightly as the wide band of carved Welsh gold that sat upon his brow. Excalibur was by his side, and his hands
lingered upon its golden hilt.