now

“Embry, it’s Ash. I know it’s late…or early, I guess. Greer just told me about Abilene, and I wanted to tell you that if you need anything, I’m here. I love you, little prince.”

I end the call and toss the phone on the table in front of me, Abilene’s death like a millstone around my neck. Even though I don’t regret finally confronting her, I do regret her death. Less for her sake than for Greer and Embry’s, who will have to sift through all the complicated holes her suicide will leave in their lives. For the sake of a little boy named Galahad, who no longer has a mother.

How funny life is, I think, spinning the phone idly on the table with one finger. That both Embry and I should have found ourselves widowed in the crucial moments leading up to an election. And I know exactly the circus it will become. Within an hour or two, the news will be frenzied with it, and Embry will have to give a statement, he will have to perform a grief he might not feel, and it will dog his steps for the rest of the campaign.

At least it means the press will turn their attention away from Lyr.

I stand up and stretch for a moment, looking around my hotel suite, feeling so tired and lonely for a moment that I almost just want to go straight to the airport and fly back home. After speaking with Abilene, Greer and I had both flown out in the dark hours of the morning to separate campaign events, and now I’m in Kansas City having done a rally, a speech, and dinner with my mom, and then spending the remainder of the night restless and alone. When Greer called at four a.m. to say that they’d found Abilene’s body in the Potomac, I gave up on sleep. After making sure my wife was okay, I called Embry, and now here I am, awake and alone in my hometown.

I open my hotel door and call for Luc. “I’d like to go for a drive,” I say.

“Yes, sir,” he says, as if there’s nothing unusual about me wanting to go somewhere in the freezing pre-dawn cold. “Tell me where and we’ll get it ready for you.”

So an hour later, I’m bundled in a coat and scarf and walking through the dark leafy hollows of a nature trail I used to enjoy as a young person. The agents are fanned out around me, but they give me space, and after a while, it almost feels as if I’m alone. Just me and the crisp darkness of early morning, the bright splash of a stream running next to the path.

The water sounds so happy, so lively, so different than the cold Potomac, and I feel a chord of pity for Abilene. She tried to have Greer killed, she blackmailed Embry, she exposed my son to the worst kinds of public censure and ridicule—and yet, I do still pity her. She only knew love as a mangled, mechanical thing, she never knew it for the extraordinary gift from God it is, and for all the times my heart has been broken for this gift, at least I can say I’ve lived with it in abundance.

“I thought you might come here,” a voice says from behind me. I turn to see Merlin, lean and at home in the murky woods. Through the branches, the hazy blue light of dawn casts a net of shadows over his face. The shadows move as he walks towards me, and for a moment, I feel as if I’ve seen this before, as if I’ve dreamed it. Yes, it would have to be a dream, because when I saw it before, he wasn’t wearing a wool coat and a fashionable scarf and even more fashionable glasses. He’d been wearing something else, something ancient, but the net of shadows had been the same, a cold forest that looked much the same as this…and had there been a cave?

How strange.

Just a dream.

“I suppose you’ve heard about Abilene Corbenic?” Merlin asks, interrupting my thoughts.

“I have.”

“A sad thing,” he says, and together we start walking down the path again. “A very sad thing.”

“She said she loved me,” I say. “I feel culpable somehow, although I wouldn’t have done anything differently.”

“What did you say to her when you saw her the night before last?”

I push a branch out of the way as we walk. “That I wouldn’t choose her. That I wouldn’t forgive her. I told her to stay away from my family.”

“She was dangerous, Maxen, and it was time she knew that her antics weren’t working. And you have a duty to the people you love to protect them,” he says. “No one is responsible for her death save for herself.”

“I wish it had ended differently.”

“So do I, but there was no possibility of it. Not this time.”

The way he says it sends a sear of déjà vu sizzling through me. “Not this time?” I ask, and then immediately wish I hadn’t. Suddenly, I don’t want to be in these woods any more, I don’t want to be with Merlin, in this morning. I want to rewind time to last night, or to the last time Embry, Greer and I were together and then just stay in that moment forever, because somehow I know that this morning is going to change something, and it’s going to change it profoundly and terribly.

“Never mind,” I say quickly. “Don’t explain it.”

“Ah,” Merlin says carefully. “But it’s time for me to explain things.”

We’ve come to a wooden bridge that arches over a wide, shallow stream, and I stop in the middle, leaning against the railing and looking down at the water below. “Is this the secret you told me I had to wait two years to learn?” I ask.

“It is, and it’s been two years. It’s time.”

“This secret of yours, will it change anything?”

“It will change everything.”

“And I must know?”

“I can’t see any way around it. No good way at least.”

The last time Merlin hid secrets, I’d slept with my sister. I’d gotten her with child. And that child had been kept from my knowledge for fourteen years.

Merlin’s secrets are not usually good ones.

I chew on my lip, watching the water frill and lace around the rocks jutting above the surface, reaching a decision. It is wrong to be afraid of the unknown—it’s cowardly and ignoble. I take one last look at the water, breathe in a last breath free of knowing whatever he’s been hiding, and then I turn to face him with all the courage I can muster.

“Okay, then. I am ready to hear it.”

* * *

Later that night, it would be the stream I remembered the most. The clear song of it, the ordinary, everyday prettiness of water going where it needed to go. It seemed so normal, so sane, that it was impossible to reconcile its sweet presence with the things Merlin was saying to me. Surely those things were only said in books or in badly scripted TV shows. They weren’t said on a bridge that I’d stood on a thousand times as a boy, they weren’t said in some little nature park in Kansas as the sun rose above the trees and tried valiantly to chase away the near-Halloween chill.

But it isn’t later tonight yet, it’s right now, on the bridge still, and I’m listening to Merlin tell me a secret. An impossible secret. And right now the water below us barely registers as anything other than noise.

“I knew who I was when I was born,” he says, leaning backwards against the railing in an uncharacteristically relaxed and unalert pose. His eyes are fixated on something I can’t see. “As soon as I became aware of myself, as children do, I became aware that I was someone else. Or had been someone else.”

I study him. Throughout our friendship, Merlin has been the definition of pragmatic, grounded, interested in practical details. It’s true that Greer has told me he was very cryptic with her once upon a time; I’ve met Nimue, Embry’s aunt and Merlin’s former lover, and it’s hard to believe that you wouldn’t have to be a little spiritual to love someone who wears as many crystals as she does. But with me, Merlin has always been brass tacks. War, politics, information. We’ve never dealt in the abstract, him and I, and I’m not sure how to react now.

“Like…a past life?” I say. I know my voice is uninflected and open—a skill I’ve perfected while sitting down to make deals with querulous Democrats and Republicans—but there must still be something in my face that makes Merlin smile.

“Yes, I know how it sounds,” he says, amusement crinkling around his eyes. “And it won’t get easier to believe, but I need you to keep listening.”

“Of course,” I say. “Go on.”

Merlin looks back out over the stream. “My grandfather came from a long line of what they use to call cunning folk. He took one look at me after I was born and knew I was born dyn hysbys. A wise man. A conjurer.”

“A conjurer,” I repeat.

He smiles again. “Wizard might sound more palatable to you, if you prefer that. At any rate, the Welsh take these things seriously, or at least they did in my village, and I was put into the frequent care of my grandfather so he could teach me how to train my Sight. Make it useful. See what I needed to see.”

He sounds completely calm, completely normal, even though he’s using words like wizard and sight as if they are common, everyday things. “Like, for example,” he continues, “that it was crucial that the President of the United States find his way to the room of his advisor one night almost forty years ago.”

At the mention of Penley Luther, my stomach turns a little; my so-called ‘father’ has that effect on me. “You knew what was going to happen between Penley and Imogen?”

“I mean, I didn’t know there would be a child named Maxen Colchester and that he would win a war and become President himself,” Merlin says wryly. “But I knew that it had to happen, even as young as I was. That if it didn’t, everything would shift sideways and off balance.”

“And then there were more things you knew?”

“Yes,” he says. “Yes, there were more. The older I grew, the clearer things became. My grandfather helped me, and I…that other self that was born with me, he remembered things. I know that sounds schizophrenic, and all I can do is assure you that it’s not, that it’s real.”

“I see,” I respond slowly. “So this is the secret? That you were—” for the sake of our friendship and also from years of politics, I find the least insane way to rephrase what he’s said “—able to perceive the future?”

“I know, Maxen, I know. Believe me, if I thought there was a way I could convince you to do what needs to be done without telling you all of this, then this conversation wouldn’t be happening. Alas, I can see no other way.”

“And what needs to be done, Merlin?”

“Always a man of action,” he smiles. “You were last time too. Fascinated by God but disdainful of what you couldn’t see.”

I’m reluctant to ask, but I think he wants me to. “‘Last time.’ What does that mean?”

“Surely, Maxen, you’ve noticed that things about your life are different? Extraordinary and strange? Have you never wondered why?”

“I’ve never thought myself or my life extraordinary,” I say. “It simply is itself. And I simply am myself.”

Merlin presses his fingertip to his mouth, gazing at me. “Being a secret child of a world leader? Winning a war? Having a child with your sister? The love between you, Embry and Greer? All of that seems common and unremarkable to you?”

“Well, anything can sound remarkable if you say it like that.”

“No. Not like that. You’ve never come across anything, any stories that feel strangely familiar? That seem to echo your own life?”

Before I can start to answer in the negative, he follows up with, “You’ve never felt like the air has gone heavy? Like the world is holding its breath? Like something is singing in your bones?”

I don’t respond.

“Like…right now, in fact? Can you feel it right now?”

I can. I can feel it. It feels like gravity, like God, like everything has been crystalized and cut from stained glass into a vivid, magical tableau, something out of a fairy tale book.

“How do you know about that?” I ask quietly. I haven’t ever told anyone about that feeling, ever. Not once, not even Embry or Greer, and not because it wasn’t real the times I felt it, but because those times had been so important to me, so private, so…I don’t even know, because there aren’t words for it. It had always felt like a secret between God and me, and for someone to just know without me telling them…

I look at Merlin with fresh eyes.

“They are the echoes, Maxen. And perhaps they do come from God, as you’ve always privately believed, but if they do, then God has allowed them as such. Anchors to a life you lived long ago.”

“I don’t believe in past lives,” I say, but my voice sounds strange in the thick air, like it lacks conviction in itself now. Maybe it does.

How did he know about the feelings?

“It’s not quite a past life,” Merlin says. “It’s a life. One life. The same.”

“I don’t understand,” I say, my brow pulling together. “The same as what? The same as who?”

“Have you not guessed?” he asks. “Have you never once sifted through Greer’s research and wondered?”

I stare at him as something stirs in my mind, like dreams I’ve only just now remembered. Memories that can’t be memories. The low cry of a baby smuggled somewhere secret. A sword flashing in the light.

The sun setting behind an island. A golden circlet set in a wave of flowing hair the color of light.

And all of the faces I’ve ever marked dear to me, all of the faces that I’ve found around me, but in places that I know I’ve never been, in memories that can’t be real.

Greer.

Embry.

Morgan.

Kay.

Belvedere.

Vivienne Moore and Luc and Galahad and Gawayne and Nimue and—

“Stop,” I say, turning away abruptly and gripping the railing. And I don’t know whether I’m speaking to him or to my own thoughts. “Just…a minute. I need a minute.”

From the edge of my vision, I see Merlin give me a gracious nod. “Of course.”

I stare at my fingers clenched tight around the weathered wood and rusting nails of the railing. I take a breath and try to push away whatever just happened.

It’s the power of suggestion, I tell myself. He’s started talking about past lives and now you’re imagining the same thing. That’s a natural response, right?

One image keeps rising to the surface though, and I find that I don’t want to push it away. Embry, Greer and me alone under a massive tree, both of my lovers stretched out in the grass looking rumpled and well used, and me with my back to the trunk, looking at a flat-topped hill in the distance. The air smells like apples and sex, and next to my feet, there are two thin circlets of gold and two swords, a careless pile of metal shucked off in our hurry to love each other. Embry is dozing with his arms wrapped around Greer, and Greer is reaching for my hand. Her dress is still pushed up to her thighs and Embry is still shirtless.

“Come take us again,” she murmurs. “Before we have to go back.”

And I fill my lungs with the smell of summer and love, and I crawl back over to them.

That’s it, that’s all of the memory—or the echo or the dream—and it has me completely transfixed. I’m still staring down at my hands, thinking of that tree, of that flat-topped hill and the long limbs of my wife and lover when Merlin speaks again.

“Arthur.”

And when I look up at him, it’s out of instinct, like I’m responding to my name.

“You see it, now,” he says.

“No—I—this is not real, Merlin.” I shake my head, trying to clear away all the false memories. “It can’t be real, it’s literally not possible for it to be real.”

“Arthur—”

I flinch. “Don’t call me that.”

“You’re upset.”

“I’m not upset,” I say in a voice that betrays exactly how upset I am. I clear my throat and start again. “This is insane. I can’t believe we’re standing here talking about nonexistent past lives when we should be talking about the campaign or the country or anything other than…”

I can’t actually bring myself to say the words. They feel childish and silly in my mouth.

“Than the fact that you are the person people call King Arthur?”

I push back from the railing to leave. This is ridiculous. I heard what he had to say, it was nonsense, and now I’m leaving. There’s too much to do to entertain this…this fantasy.

“There’s one more part, and then you can leave,” Merlin says, reading my body language correctly. “One last thing.”

No. No more things, I want to shout, but I don’t, I only nod at him and tug at my scarf. I’m hot all of a sudden, hot and anxious. “What is it?”

“Embry is going to die.”

My hands drop from my scarf, and everything is in slow motion, even the water trilling underneath us. I can’t even get the words to make sense together in my head.

Embry.

Die.

Jesus help me.

“The last debate,” Merlin adds. “A Carpathian terrorist is going to infiltrate the venue.”

I force my mind to catch up, to absorb—I’ve always been good at reading things on my feet, at assessing a combat field within an instant—but this is different, it’s so different, because it’s insane. It’s madness to think Merlin can somehow see the future, that he and I and Greer and Embry are all some kind of annual plant that springs up periodically with new flowers but the same roots.

But the moment he said Embry’s name, something opened up inside me. Because am I willing to risk being wrong? No matter how foolish, how slight the chances are that Embry could die, am I willing to refuse to listen? No. I’m not. I’ll be all kinds of foolish for my little prince.

“I can’t see the details,” Merlin says apologetically. “I couldn’t last time either. I don’t think I’m supposed to. It’s like there’s a veil between it and my sight, and no matter how I try to part it, it’s not meant to open for me.” He sighs, looking up at the sky. “It’s quite bedeviling, actually.”

“Merlin.”

“Yes?”

“I need you to start over, and explain to me exactly what you know.”

“Yes, yes, of course.” He looks down to the railing, his gloved hands gesturing across the wood. “You’ve succeeded into containing the Carpathian threat and Melwas—almost entirely. The outliers are the extremists, and in a normal course of events, they would be no more dangerous than your average political dissident, but after Melwas’s deposal, they are angry. Embry is the obvious target because he’s been so publicly inflammatory about Carpathia. Kill him, and they might finally get another war, which is what they want more than anything. A war would put Carpathia back in the hands of men like Melwas, stop what the extremists see as a corrupted spiral of European integration.”

“We’re not going back to war with Carpathia,” I say, my jaw tight. Good God, if I’ve done anything in my painful, flawed life, please let it be that. Please let it be that I brought peace, for however short a time.

Merlin raises an eyebrow. “Even if they killed Embry? Even if you cradled him as he died and his blood soaked through your shirt, and the last thing he whispered to you was your little Greek pet name and—”

I hold up a hand to make him stop, my eyes closing tight. He can’t know, he can’t, how much that image terrifies me, how it used to terrify me, how I spent every day in that fucking Carpathian hellhole terrified that Embry would die and die on my watch.

I take a breath. Listen to the water.

“Not even then,” I finally say. “It would kill me, but not even then.”

“I thought so,” Merlin says, sounding gentle…and a little relieved? As if he hadn’t been sure what my answer would be.

“But obviously,” I state, “I’m not letting anything happen to that man.”

“I know. And you will do your best to stop it—you did last time as well, although last time it wasn’t Embry at the end.”

“Then who?” But the moment I say it, I see it. A green field under a sky heavy with unspilled rain. Lyr’s face as our eyes meet, his jaw set in trembling determination. “Fuck,” I mumble, rubbing my thumb across my forehead as if I can rub away the unbidden image.

“You did everything you could. You parlayed, you sued for peace, offered half your kingdom. The lengths you’ll go to avoid war are commendable. But you failed, Arthur.”

“Don’t call me that,” I say absent-mindedly, because my mind is already racing ahead to any and all practical measures to keep Embry safe. I still don’t know if I believe any of what Merlin is telling me, but I refuse to dwell in any uncertainty when it comes to my prince’s life. “We’ll move the debate. Or we’ll do it remotely, each of us in a secure location, no audience.”

“If he agrees,” Merlin reminds me.

“Of course, he’ll agree,” I growl. “If I—”

“If you what? Command him? Force him?”

I glare at Merlin. “If I prove there’s a credible threat.”

“You won’t, because there won’t be any evidence for it. And you can try to move venues, try to arrange for something more secure, add an army of Secret Service agents, but even if he agrees, it won’t be enough.”

“You’re telling me,” I say, my anger growing, “that there’s nothing I can do or say to stop this? That I’m supposed to be resigned to the possibility that the man I love will die?”

“I’m not saying that,” Merlin says, “but I am saying that you will be given a choice when the time comes.”

I look at him. Study those dark eyes, that face still vibrant and handsome even with the faint lines around his eyes and mouth. “This is really it, isn’t it?” I ask. “What you’re about to say? It’s the real thing that I need to know.”

Merlin gives me a look full of compassion. “The choice in the moment will be your life or his, Maxen. I’m sorry. I wish I could tell you exactly how it will unfold and why and when, and how we could stop it, but I can’t see any of that. The only thing I can see with any certainty is the moment itself, the choice. Embry’s life or yours.”

I sit. I don’t care how ridiculous it looks, me sitting on the damp wooden bridge, my coat bunching around my torso as I lean my head back against the railing. I just need to sit for a minute—just sit and think.

“If Embry dies, you won’t go to war with Carpathia, and all your hard work will stay in place. But if you give your life for his and he becomes the President…then he might very well go to war over your death.”

Merlin’s right. If Embry was willing to leave me and climb his way to power just to avenge Greer’s abduction, then I can’t even imagine what he would do in the face of my death at Carpathian hands. And I give a bitter laugh, because now I’m faced with the same choice he was two years ago—a person or a nation. One soul or three hundred million.

The king in me knows the right answer.

But the man in me does not.

“Of course…” Merlin says cautiously, “there’s always the chance that Embry wouldn’t go to war. That he’s grown and changed enough over the last two years. That if he knew it was your express wish that he keep the country at peace…”

“I don’t believe any of this,” I say, perfunctorily, because a small part of me is starting to believe. I don’t know why, and I shouldn’t, because it’s clearly lunacy, but despite all that, there’s this sliver of recognition inside me that I can’t dislodge or pluck out. This feeling at my core that he’s right, and no matter how fantastical, how delusional it sounds, that I’m somehow walking steps in this life that I walked fifteen hundred years ago. “I can’t believe it.”

Merlin sits next to me. “Close your eyes,” he says, and I do it, although not before shooting him a look that’s half begging him to stop this and half desperate for him to say more.

And I feel Merlin move around me, straddling my legs in a position that feels intimate in a way that isn’t sexual, necessarily, but vulnerable. And then he presses his forehead to mine. “Breathe in,” he says. “Breathe when I do.”

I breathe with him, and then he presses his lips to mine, and it’s still not sexual, it’s not a kiss, our mouths are still as we literally share breath, in and out, in and out, and then whatever curtain separates his mind from mine is pulled back, and I see everything. Swords and guns and castles and barracks, and a coolly beautiful queen and an impetuous prince and the White House and a flat-topped hill and Vivienne Moore’s lake house, and a bright green tor soaring over a glassy, fog-shrouded lake.

I see it all.

I see myself, and I see all the people I’ve loved and all the people I’ve fought, and all the ways that our lives have doubled back in on each other’s. I see all the ways we were the first time, all the ways we are now, and the shimmering silver threads that sew us together, twines of fate that restrain and chafe and anchor every heart to the other.

I see the beginning.

And I see the end.