"Merlin!" Robin blurted.
The stranger nodded. "The task is to find a sword, and give it back to the lake."
"Merlin," Robin repeated, and this time Marian heard adult disbelief colored by a young boy's burgeoning hope.
Merlin had spent his entire life being—different. People feared him for it, distrusted, disbelieved; some of them were convinced he should be killed outright, lest he prove a danger to them. But that life, that time, was done. He faced a new world now, a different world, and far more difficult challenges. In his time, magic at least had been acknowledged if often distrusted; here, clearly, no one believed in it at all. Which somewhat explained the inability of the young man and young woman to accept what had happened.
An enchantment, he had told them as they knelt to wash their bloodied faces at a trickle of a stream, a spell wrought by Nimtie, the great sorceress. He did not tell them his own part in the spell, that he had allowed himself for the first time in his life to be blinded by a woman's beauty and allure, to permit her into his heart. Once she had learned enough of him, enough of his power, she had revealed her true goaclass="underline" to imprison him for all time and thus remove the impediment he represented to the new power in Britain.
A Britain without Arthur.
He grieved privately, letting no one, not even Nimüe, recognize the depth of his pain. Arthur he had wrought out of the flesh of Britain herself, a man destined to unite a world torn awry against the threat of the Saxon hordes. And so he had for a time; but then other forces took advantage of a childless king and a queen in disrepute, dividing Arthur's attention when it was most needed to settle an uneasy court. By the time the Saxon threat became immediate, Arthur had lost too many supporters among the noblemen — and too many knights. The advent of a bastard got unknowingly on his own sister had sealed his fate. Merlin, in retirement, had done what he could, but Arthur died and Britain was left defenseless.
A Britain without Arthur could not survive as Merlin had meant her to, safeguarded by the one man empowered with the natural ability to keep her whole. Hundreds of years had passed since Arthur's death, and even now Merlin had only to look at the man kneeling at stream's edge, with his fall of white-blond hair and pale greenish-brown eyes, his height, to see that the Saxons had triumphed. And so the man agreed when asked, explaining that Britain's people were now called "English," born of "England," that once had been "Angle-land." The land of Angles and Saxons.
Marian, however, was not. It was clear when Merlin looked upon her. She was small, slight, and black-haired, bearing more resemblence to the people of his time in her features, despite the blue of her eyes. She called herself English, but her blood was older than Robin's.
And now England — Britain — had fallen again. To a people called the Normans, Robin explained, who refused even to learn the language of the people they conquered. A people who had a king whose excess of temper was legendary, along with the greed and turbulence of his reign.
"Then we should waste no more time," Merlin told them. "Arthur is dead, but his legacy may yet be realized."
"By finding the sword," Marian said dubiously, rebraiding her hair.
Robin's smile, even as he felt at the clotted slice in his head, was very nearly fatuous. "Excalibur."
"The sword belongs to the lake," Merlin said, "now that Arthur cannot wield it. Britain's welfare resides in it. Arthur, with Excalibur, drove away the Saxons once, but Mordred and his faction kept him from completing his task. You have told me of other invasions. To keep Britain from ever being invaded again, we must find the sword and return it to the lake."
"That will be enough?" Marian asked. "No one ever again shall invade England?"
"No one."
"You are Merlin the Enchanter," Robin said. "What use would we be to you?"
"You will recall it was you who got me out of the tree," he reminded them dryly.
They exchanged glances, still perplexed.
"You are the Sacrifices," Merlin explained gently. "Just as Arthur himself was."
And as he saw the confusion deepening in their eyes, he realized that with the years had disappeared the knowledge that was beginning to die out even in his time.
He gestured back toward the way they had come. "That was a Holy Grove, sacred to the Druids. It was Nimüe's conceit to imprison me there — and, apparently, others as well." His expression reflected regret that he, Marian, and Robin had been unable to free the others. "There are men and women born into the world who are meant to be Sacrifices for their people, for their times, to keep the land strong and whole. They need not be killed upon an altar, though that was done once, but merely die in defense of their land and ideals. To die serving the greater whole."
"We are outlaws," Robin said. "We are fortunate if we can feed ourselves each day; what service can we offer England?"
"Hope," Merlin answered. "Have you not told me you give over most of what you take to peasants?"
"Because the king is taxing the poor to death," Marian declared.
Merlin nodded. "And so you steal from those who have wealth to spare, and divide it fairly among those who have none." His eyes were unwavering. "At the risk of your own lives."
He had made them uncomfortable. Neither of them fully understood what they represented to the folk they aided. Perhaps they never would. It was the nature of Sacrifices to do what was required without acknowledging the selflessness of it, because they saw only the need and simply acted. Arthur had not been raised to be a king per se, but to be a decent, honest, fair man of great ability, capable of leading others to the goal he perceived as worthy, because it served the people.
Arthur had come into privilege and kingship because it was the position needed to guide Britain. Robert of Locksley and Marian of Ravenskeep had been stripped of their privilege because that loss led them to the position of aiding the poor, when no one else in England appeared willing to do so.
Who else was worthy of aiding him in his task?
"We had better go," Merlin said.
"Wait." Robin's brows were knit beneath raggedly cut hair. "Do you even know where the sword is?"
Merlin smiled. "Do you expect a quest? To be a knight of the Round Table, searching for the Grail? But the answer is disappointing, I fear: Nimtie told me, as my body was turned to wood."
Robert of Locksley, born the son of an earl — albeit last, and was thus inconsequential — wanted very much to say he disbelieved the nonsense the stranger told them. He recalled too vividly the beatings meted out by his father, wishing to purge what remained in his sons of anything fanciful, such as stories of Arthur and his enchanter, Merlin. But Robin's mother had told him to believe as he wished, that stories were good for the soul as well as the heart. And so he had learned the stories, and loved them, and believed them, until he grew up and joined a Crusade that took the lives of innocents as well as warriors. He could not say when he had come to understand that there were stories and there were truths, with a vast gulf between the two, but he knew that Merlin, Arthur, and all the others of the legend were not real.