Merlin said to be with him at dawn, so I arrived in the hour before that, when night still clung to the sky. The door to his tower stood ajar, three flights of stone steps leading to the large room that he kept as his study.
The sorcerer’s inner sanctum was suitably overwhelming, every wall, surface and shelf crowded with star charts, manuscripts, strange implements and jars containing goodness knew what. It was well lit by sconces and large candle stands, ghostly twilight filtering through a jumble of windows. An incongruous oriel bloomed from a back corner, glazed with a curved pane and bearing a sizeable bird perch. A bowl of raw meat sat next to it, but there was no other sign that anything feathered had ever lived there. Opposite, a small stone stairway spiralled its way up to a locked doorway, presumably leading to the tower top where Merlin watched the stars.
I was unsurprised to find Merlin already there, seated behind an enormous chunk of desk carved from the muscular grooves of a tree trunk, its outer edges still covered in bark. Drawn by its strangeness, I approached and touched the pale, polished top, fingers tracing the half rings that spoke of great age.
“It’s as ancient as it looks, and was once twice as big,” Merlin commented. “Cut from a storm-struck ash that stood on this very spot in the time of the old gods.”
He stood abruptly; I jolted back despite myself and he gave a derisive chuckle. “I didn’t expect you so early.”
I forced myself to hold his gaze. “I am eager to learn.”
“Good. For if your dedication truly is to this work, then there is much to learn and little time. Perhaps not enough time.”
“I’m a very quick study when properly taught.”
“We shall see.” He cast his eyes about the room. “Now, where to begin?”
“We begin with Arthur,” I said.
“What I do for King Arthur is prophecy, tracking and interpreting the stars. You have no interest in such things.”
“I’m not talking about squinting at the heavens,” I said. “You may keep your obsession with that. When I first came here, you were late because you confirmed to Arthur a prophecy that was troubling him greatly. You have foreseen his death.”
Merlin turned sharp black eyes on me. “Why do you say that?”
“I told you, I am a quick learner. And I know Arthur, both as my brother and as a King. Nothing else would unsettle him so much.”
The sorcerer said nothing for a long moment, aligning his hands and lifting them until his fingertips rested under his chin.
“Very well,” he said eventually. “I have foreseen his death. Many times now. No matter how I look for it—in the skies, in the stones I cast…” He gestured at a large sphere of purple quartz on a stand, its interior swirling with smoke. “In the clouds of the Fates. Even on the lines of his palms, the same message comes. King Arthur will die, not yet but too soon. And if he does, Britain will fall.”
“So he didn’t take it well.”
“Would you?” Merlin retorted. “He is a young man, hopeful, brimming with plans and ideals, goodness he has upheld in the hopes God would realign the stars for him. But there is nothing to be done.”
“Yet you are doing something,” I said. “It’s been too cloudy for stars for three weeks, but you’ve been working yourself almost into madness. Why?”
The sorcerer swept away from the desk, turning to the deep window recess at his back. Outside, the sky was lightening to a weak, mousey grey, obscured by the enormous oak tree within the moat.
“Arthur has told you to change his fate, hasn’t he?” I pressed. “You’re looking for a way to prevent his death.”
“It isn’t possible,” he said tersely. “Ninianne even asked the water and it sang the same lament. A fate written into the fabric of existence with such certainty cannot be denied, despite kings demanding it be otherwise.”
I was no great believer in the inconstant, shape-shifting art of prophecy, especially not Merlin’s manipulations, but the idea of my brother’s untimely death struck my heart. I looked down at the desk: the open manuscripts; scattered pages; a shallow bowl filled with ash and the remnants of bird bones—another attempt to wheedle out a different answer to Fate’s death warrant. A piece of parchment caught my eye: a list written in the sorcerer’s spidery scrawl, headed Objects of Resurrection. Every item was struck out apart from one, circled so many times in red ink it had blotted like blood.
“What’s the Shroud of Tithonus?” I asked.
In one dramatic movement Merlin swung around and charged towards the desk, gathering scrolls and pages with a sweeping arm. “It’s nothing. An idea, a useless notion.”
But the revelation had already come to me. “Of course, the language of prophecy,” I said. “Telling the truth in one way but lying in another. You said that if Arthur dies, Britain will fall. His fate cannot be prevented, but it can be changed in result. The solution to Arthur’s death is resurrection.”
Merlin straightened and regarded me with a seriousness he had never before bestowed. “Very good, Lady Morgan. You are a quick study. Not that there is any gain in you knowing. Resurrection in its purest form is death magic—an art dark and ancient, one I have never been taught. Its tenets are apocryphal at best, scarcely written down. A skill lost to the ages, if it ever existed at all.”
“Even still, you are trying,” I pointed out. “Burning bones, attempting to commune with otherworldly spirits, seeking objects purported to bring the dead to life. There must be something in it.”
“I am more than trying. It is everything to me. To bring the greatest High King ever known back from death, to save Britain a second time—it would carve my name into this land for eternity.”
“It is fortunate, then,” I said, “that you now have me to try with you.”
Merlin laughed, rasping until he coughed. “Admirable ambition, Lady Morgan, but if I cannot see my way through these shadows, why should you?”
In one way, it wasn’t an invalid question, given our disparity in years and hours spent learning, but he seemed to have forgotten I possessed skills he did not. What was resurrection, if not healing in its purest form?
“Because maybe I am a different kind of light,” I said. “In any case, to deny me is to deny Arthur’s wishes, and you won’t want me riding back to Camelot with your resistance on my tongue.”
The sorcerer eyed me with interest. “Your determination impresses me, Lady Morgan. It’s a pleasure to watch you think. An even greater one, I’m sure, to see you work.”
With a flick of his wrist, a chair scraped across the floor, stopping beside his desk. I scowled and stayed standing; flattery from him afforded me nothing but a creeping sensation under my skin.
“What’s the Shroud of Tithonus?” I asked again.
Merlin sighed and retook his seat. “A garment of great and wondrous enchantment. You know the Greek myth of Tithonus. The lover of the goddess of dawn, a man made immortal.”
“Doomed to age for all time, until he became a particularly musical cicada,” I supplied. “An immortal would have no need for a shroud.”
“Not many magical objects had the owners their names claim. The creature he became renews itself, breaking free of the carapace of death. The Shroud of Tithonus symbolizes the shed skin of a man returning to life again and again.”
“Resurrection,” I concluded.
He inclined his head. A slight pressure twinged as the child within turned over and settled its spine against my back, so I took the seat that had flown to my side. “I assume that you have this Shroud?”
“I do,” he replied in unexpected honesty. “It was given to me many years ago, though I did not know its true significance until recently. Discovering my possession lent a feeling of providence to my endeavours.”
“Yet you are still failing,” I said. “You cannot use it.”
Merlin’s brow pinched. “The right formula must be found first. The Shroud has enough enchantment for one use, one resurrection, and then it will be gone forever. Dust.”
“Where is it?”
“Hidden,” he said curtly. “Where it will stay.”
Sighing, I rose. “Then I might as well go. Either I’m part of this, or not.”
I had half turned away when the sorcerer pounced up and grasped my arm, pulling himself into my orbit. “You push me too far, Lady Morgan.”
His face was so close to mine I had repulsive visions of him either kissing me or biting my neck, but I didn’t let myself flinch.
“Show me the Shroud,” I said.
Just as suddenly, he let go and vanished up the spiral stair, where I did not pursue him. Instead, I gathered myself, walking along the bookshelves with their vertical stacks of manuscripts and various scrolls, imagining the knowledge contained within. A volume of anatomy sat open on a worktable and I leafed through it, past the skeleton, a man’s tangled gut and then a diagram of the human heart. A chime of recognition rang like a bell in a far-off room: the memory of a notion; a swift scribble in blue ink; of Accolon, reclining in a windowsill and smiling at me in that way of his.
“Here, upon your insistence.”
The sorcerer reappeared, interrupting my thoughts. He placed a polished ebony box on his desk and reached inside with extreme care, extracting a rectangle of folded fabric the colour of old bones. I approached with interest.
“Hold out your hands,” he commanded.
For a moment I assumed he had brought a fake and felt foiled because I wouldn’t know any better. Then the unbleached cloth touched my skin, and a silver-white force hurtled through my body like an exploding star, filling my blood with an unstoppable, diamond-bright vitality. The child inside me awoke, kicking hard as a wild pony. I rocked backwards and sucked in a gasp.
Merlin snatched the Shroud back at once. “What is it?”
I steadied myself against the window seat, vision glittering with light. “The Shroud is real,” I heard myself say. “But it’s not enough.”
Merlin stared at me, kneading the fabric with his fingertips, and I was reminded of Arthur holding Excalibur’s scabbard. The sorcerer could no more sense the Shroud’s blaze of power than my brother could feel the scabbard’s life-song.
“Do not get ahead of yourself,” he said officiously. “This Shroud is the end of a process, not the beginning. You do not know more than me.”
He returned the Shroud of Tithonus to the box, its absence tugging at me as the lid closed. “For all your boldness, I assume the word necromancy still makes your heart shiver, like a child hearing tales of All Hallows’. To master this art, what you will learn, by most sane minds, is considered to be the stuff of nightmares.”
He flourished his hand, sealing the Shroud behind an unspoken locking charm. A swift, protective anger bristled down my back, like a she-wolf kept from her cubs.
“Spare me your concern, Merlin,” I said. “I’ve wanted to unravel the veil between life and death since I was a girl of fourteen. My heart can withstand more than you can imagine.”
I remembered it then, as he sneered and took the box away; my attention lost in a memory and the warm peace of Camelot’s library, reading a phrase captured in a fleeting moment.
Every life, in its entirety, can be found written upon the heart. So it can be read there in death, and lived again.