The morning sunlight dimmed. The oak and ash trees around the tower were bending, leaning down, surprisingly quick, like an anemone closing around its prey. She tried to dodge, but their cool woody arms snagged her clothes and clutched at her wrists and ankles.

  “Ah well.” Merlin’s voice was already close beside her. “There’s so much I never got to show you, Nimue.”

  “Drink hot piss in hell!”

  She writhed and strained against the branches, but you weren’t going to beat a druid in his own grove. So Nimue whispered a rhyme in Old Thracian, held her breath, and became smoke, a once-a-year spell. She slipped sideways on a light breeze through the massed branches. She knew this breeze—twice a year she left a silver pin on the roof for it. Chuckling softly to itself, it carried Nimue across a meadow and up a hill before she became flesh again, on all fours on the grass, gasping.

  Merlin was still coming. He would never stop. Clouds were gathering over the field with unnatural speed.

  “That’s right, my dear, Taranis is on his way. I don’t believe you’ve met yet.”

  He was calling in favors from the powers of the world. Well, she was owed a few favors too. She’d been hoarding them for years. Her friends were small and lowly, but there were a lot of them. It would’ve been nice if God helped out, too, but something told her He was going to sit this one out. Maybe she’d been supposed to starve to death after all. Or maybe He just trusted her that she could handle this one.

  “Tumbo, you know me!” she whispered into the dirt. “Give me strength!”

  She hadn’t come here by accident. Tumbo was the spirit of the hilltop, a shy one whom she’d treated with many times, his soft rumbling voice issuing from a crack in a great boulder embedded in the hillside. He liked to play rhyming games.

  “I don’t forget,” came the soft voice. “At least not yet.”

  Merlin aimed a slap at her—she’d always figured him for a slapper, and here it was. But Tumbo lent her his strength, the strength of a hill, its power and its mineral hardness, and with hands hard and heavy as rock Nimue stopped Merlin’s slap and slapped him right back, knocking him sideways.

  It shocked him. He scrambled away and she strode after him, back on the offensive. She was going to show him that he couldn’t touch her. For his part Merlin was furiously whispering streams of spells and invocations, and as he did his body bulged and distorted crudely, adding big muscles and thick ligaments and overbuilt bones.

  “No one.” His new body’s voice was deep and hollow; his newly thick tongue made him lisp. “No one strikth me and livth.” He grinned, big yellow tusks.

  They traded blows, punching and kicking, heavy with anger and magic strength but clumsy. She was strong as a seam of granite, but neither of them was skilled at using their fists. It felt good to punch Merlin in the face, God knew, but she wasn’t going to beat him like this. She had to get away soon. She had all the strength Tumbo had to give, but Merlin was still getting stronger.

  But now the whole landscape around them was coming alive. The spirits of Britain had a limited interest in the doings of men, but a fight between Merlin and his Jesus-loving apprentice would be drawing some attention. They’d be taking sides and gossiping up a storm. Merlin ripped a tree out of the ground and hefted it like a club.

  “Awel, take me!” she cried out to the wind. “By the debt you owe me, take me away!”

  With a rush and a roar the easterly wind of Awel dragged Nimue somersaulting into the air, like a large ungainly leaf, and she was racing over the land. This was all a joke to Awel—winds found everything funny—so it wasn’t a gentle ride or a gentle landing. She chucked Nimue down carelessly on the bank of the river Slip a mile away. She sat up dizzy. Even from here she could see Merlin following at a run, the size of a young giant now, twenty feet tall, kicking down trees as he ran. One hand glowed red, and the air warped around it; the other was so cold it shed trails of mist.

  Sometimes looking at raw feral magic like this made her feel like she was going mad. Merciful God, why do You allow such things?

  “Let me go, Merlin! I’m not yours!”

  “All you are is mine!” giant-Merlin boomed back. “That is all you are! You were nothing when I found you!”

  “Aid me, beloved Slip! I call in my debt!”

  The Slip had the face of a little girl, sketched in light ripples on its surface, but she was far older than Nimue. Now she answered the call and heaved herself out of her channel and rushed violently over the land. The torrent snatched Merlin’s feet out from under him, bowling him over and sweeping him backward, smashing him into rocks.

  Nimue became a common swift, crescent-winged and swallow-tailed; she’d thought about becoming a merlin as a fuck you, but a swift was faster.

  She had to admit that when she’d thought this through ahead of time she’d rather hoped that Merlin would be down by this point, and that she would be beyond his reach. More trees grabbed for her as she went up but she slipped and fluttered between their twiggy fingers and bounded into the sky. She had to get free of him, free of this man and his grasping hands and his stifling tower. She beat up toward the clouds. She knew he’d be following, as a hawk maybe, an eagle, something big; she doubted he knew what she did, which was that no raptor could beat a swift in level flight.

  She urged herself higher and higher, calling out to other birds, crows and choughs and ravens and rooks. Mob him! she twittered. Mob him!

  But no one answered her. A quick glance over her shoulder told her why. He wasn’t a hawk. Merlin had become a dragon, big as a blue whale but coal black, with poisonous golden stripes, snorting smoke, ripping his way up into the sky on billowing black wings.

  She was grudgingly impressed: a dragon was not a natural form, and she had not thought it was within even Merlin’s abilities. But was it fast? Let’s find out. Her own featherlight wings took her higher and higher—

  That was when she realized her real mistake.

  Clouds. Stupid. Stupid. The dragon wasn’t the trap. She’d flown right into the trap.

  The clouds had been thickening all afternoon, and they were swollen with power now, crackling with it. Nimue couldn’t see it but she felt the great starry outline of Taranis above her, hefting the wheel of the world jauntily in one hand, a thunderbolt in the other. She’d been so close, she was almost free, but the trap had closed on her in the end. Nimue could feel the lightning building. She only wished she’d had time to tell someone what Merlin was planning to do. Or at least tell Merlin himself that she was glad to die because she would rather be dead than be touched by him ever again. Mary—!

  Everything went quiet. All color vanished. The green earth far below turned suddenly gray. The sky was black. The sun was gone.

  What just happened? The air was blowing with what looked like black snow.

  Was she dead? If so, this didn’t look like Heaven. Nimue clung to the thin notion that she couldn’t be dead because she was still flying, and, logically, if the lightning had hit her then her human body would’ve been restored to her in death. A technicality at best.

  You are not dead, a voice said. You are in the realm of dreams.

  It was another swift, a black one, flying along beside her. So not dead, not yet. But how? She doubted she’d dozed off on the wing.

  I am Durelas, the liminal god, the other swift said. I keep watch over the doorways and boundaries of the world. Death and life, waking and sleeping, beginnings and endings.

  She had heard of such.

  “The Romans called you Janus, the god with two faces.”

  The Romans cherished many misconceptions.

  “So this is where dreams happen?”

  Any attempt at explanation would be tedious and imprecise. You have come a long way. This realm lies beyond even the Otherworld, for even the fairies dream.

  But you cannot stay here long. It is incorrect to be in this realm bodily, and in a waking state.

  “Thank you, Durelas. I am grateful, you saved my life. I think. But why? Why bring me here?”

  You have been gracious to some of my children. Fritu, and the spirit of the Whin Sill. Certain minor interstitial colors of the rainbow. They petitioned me on your behalf.

  She remembered Fritu, a saucy, foul-mouthed spirit who looked like a tiny person made out of sticks. He embodied the place where a forest met a meadow. He’d asked Nimue for a small pearl. Thank you, little Fritu! She must get him another one, if she lived long enough. She had no idea what the Whin Sill was but they could have whatever they wanted too. Within reason.

  “I thought the Great Gods were all on Merlin’s side.”

  You are loyal to the Christian God, Nimue, which I cannot approve of, but at least you are loyal to someone. Merlin asks us for our loyalty while he sells his own to the highest bidder. Better he had died with the others on Ynys Môn.

  Tell your Jesus that He owes us a debt.

  “I will. And my Jesus will tell you that no one but a Christian would’ve been so kind to your children.”

  Instead of answering, the liminal god made a strange noise, a grunt of surprise or discomfort. Not a very divine noise. The black swift banked away sharply.

  “What is it?”

  Merlin has followed you here. Fly, little bird. Do not tarry.

  But it was too late for that, there was nowhere for the little bird to fly. Nimue looked back to see a flash of the impossibly huge, horrible jaws of the Merlin dragon before they snapped shut on her. Then not just the sky but everything went black.

  And still she didn’t die. She was in Merlin’s mouth, a thought as revolting as it was terrifying. She fluttered her wings desperately, but his great dry, black dragon’s tongue had her tiny bird-body pressed to the roof of his mouth. He had not swallowed her yet.

  She heard his voice in her mind.

  I cannot let you go, Merlin said, or he thought, it was hard to tell the difference when you were literally inside his head, breathing his burned breath. She thought back at him.

  Then kill me. You can screw a dead bird.

  I must have you. You can’t conceive of how much I want you.

  Swallow me. I’ll stick in your throat and choke you.

  It is strange, at times our partnership was torture to me. And here Merlin’s thought-voice turned plaintive. There are times when I have wanted to marry you, Nimue.

  You are dreaming, Merlin. You could never love anybody.

  It was one of the hazards of communicating by thought that one always said more than one meant to. She wondered how long he would keep her here before he killed her.

  You cannot refuse me, Merlin said. You would not, if you understood who I am. The druids chose me from among tens of thousands, and of those they chose, half died in the trials. The rest of us trained for twenty years before we were initiated. We were the lords of Britain. Armies followed us. Forests bowed to us. We spoke with gods. We passed judgment on kings.

  And then the Romans came and harried us west across Britain with dogs. They bayed us like animals on the beach at Ynys Môn.

  With his mind Merlin made Nimue see it, the flat gray strand littered with sea wrack, bonfires burning behind it in the scrubby headlands. An army of druids, men and women both, howling and dancing on the sand at dusk, spinning torches, chewing acorns to bring on a trance state.

  The Roman cavalry swam their horses over from the mainland, across the narrow, green strait, and then the infantry splashed ashore through freezing shallows from flat-bottomed boats. They were terrified but their officers lashed them on. Such was the druids’ faith that they wore no armor. They called on their gods to destroy the invaders.

  But their gods did not respond. Perhaps the Romans had bought them with gallons of slave blood. When the soldiers saw they were powerless it became a massacre. Ordinary soldiers, common men from the east, put the greatest minds in Britain to the sword.

  But not you, Nimue thought.

  Not me.

  Goodness, only get him talking to a dead bird and it all comes out.

  Because I had seen it all coming. I, Merlin the Prophet, saw the future, and it was not ours, so I did what the other druids would not. I groveled and humiliated myself and prostituted myself so that at least one druid could live, and our knowledge would live on within me. If I hadn’t, then all of it, the treasure of centuries, would’ve been lost.

  Nimue said nothing. There was nothing she could add that would make the inferno of his shame hotter. It was his soul that had been lost, and like so many who’d lost their souls, he had to insist the bargain was worth it and show contempt for those who still had theirs.

  I have carried it for centuries in the fragile vessel of my mind. And why? To give it to you. A nobody, a pretty Christian whore who betrayed me. Damn me for a fool.

  I betrayed you, Merlin?

  She sensed the dragon landing, settling on its great haunches somewhere in the dark countryside of dreamland.

  I will grieve for you, Nimue. Your death will hurt me, but letting you live would be careless, and I have lived too long for that. Time will dull the pain. I will mourn for a decade, or two, or three, but no more. You will not go to Heaven, Nimue. Your God will never find you here in dreams.

  But I might visit you from time to time.

  But still he didn’t devour her. An idea had come to her, a guess as to what might really be happening here. Mary, pray for me, wherever you are. Give me strength and luck. You too, Moo.

  I have prepared something special for your grave. I have called down a falling star, Nimue. Merlin showed her that, too, in her thoughts: a bright blue sky with a new light in it, a second sun, harsher and whiter than the old yellow one. A meteor is its correct name, a great hot stone plucked from the Sphere of Stars. When it’s all over there will be a hill here to remember you by.

  “You shouldn’t have followed me, Merlin,” Nimue said.

  I didn’t have to. The gods brought me to you.

  She could hear the amusement in his voice. Still so calm.

  “You never listen,” Nimue said. “You talk and talk but you never listen, Merlin. I told you you were dreaming. You’ve lived too long. The hounds of Hell are baying for you.”

  The god of boundaries had told her she couldn’t stay long, and he was right. She’d returned to the world.

  But Merlin had not.

  Perched on his snout, like a plover on an alligator, the little bird whispered the words in the ear of a sleeping dragon.

  “Taranis didn’t strike me with his thunderbolt. He struck you, and he knocked you senseless. Your sleeping mind is in the world of dreams, but your body is still here, where it cannot save itself.”

  In your extremity your wits have deserted you.

  “I must away, Merlin, but before I go I will tell you a secret: Arthur frightens you not because he’s weak, but because he’s strong. Stronger than you.

  “And another secret: Jesus will always win. Because unlike you He’s not a shit.”

  His dragon-body was stirring, trying to wake up, but it was no good. Sleep held him fast. She must be gone, and soon. The falling star was not a dream, it was close now, she could see the flickering phosphorus glare of it pressing through from behind the clouds. She took flight.

  When he spoke again, Nimue sensed that Merlin had grasped the change in his fortunes, but he could do nothing to reverse it.

  No one will believe you when you tell them what I did, Nimue. That is your curse.

  There was no panic in his thoughts. Give him that. He was an old pro.

  I remember the day I found you, in the hall at Rutupiae. If it were anyone else Nimue would have taken his tone for fondness. Your hair was loose. Your gown was filthy and you smelled of piss, but you were so beautiful I thought the gods must have sent you.

  The falling star wouldn’t kill him but it would bury him deep. She flew all the way back to Merlin’s Tower, now Nimue’s Tower, where she alighted on the roof to watch it. She became human again.

  No one ever made the comet sparkle before.

  When it hit, the flash lit up the whole sky. It was so bright she had to turn away, and even then she had a sunburn for days.

  Twenty-nine

  The Wild Hunt

  They stopped in a meadow flooded with wildflowers, pignut and yellow rattle and red clover. Nimue built a fire of birch wood to work Merlin’s spell. When she raked the stone out of the embers it cut easily and there, inside, like a swirl of cinnamon in a loaf of sweet bread, was the promised word.

  “Should’ve known that,” Nimue muttered when she saw it. Collum tried to look but she pushed him away. “No peeking.”

  She threw the two halves of the rock into the woods.

  “Wake the others. We’re going.”

  While they broke camp, Nimue took a rabbit out of a bag and as its feet desperately paddled the air she cut its throat and called out the word from the stone—it was something long and sibilant that Collum somehow forgot as soon as he’d heard it. She shook the hot blood out on the grass and tossed the rabbit’s little body unceremoniously into the trees where she’d thrown the stone.

  Collum grimaced.

  “Merlin didn’t mention that part.”

  “Did you think magic was free?” Nimue squatted and wiped her hands on the grass. “But by all means, you can walk all the way to Bryneich.”

  Even as she spoke two beech trees reached out and touched their branches together, as if they were holding hands. The joined branches formed an arch, and under the arch was somewhere else, a rolling grassland with a thin seam of blue sea in the distance. One by one the knights stopped what they were doing to stare at it. It made Collum a little dizzy, as if he were standing on a high cliff and might fall down into it somehow.