Chapter 11: The Vision

Arthur woke three nights after Morgause’s death with the feeling still fresh in his chest, though he could not, in the first confused moments of waking, have said whether he had truly slept at all or simply passed through something closer to a message than a dream. The chamber around him sat exactly as he had left it — candle guttered low, Guinevere’s breathing slow and even beside him in the dark — and yet some part of him understood, even before his eyes had fully adjusted to the dimness, that whatever had just passed through his mind had not been the ordinary, forgettable stuff of sleep.

Merlin had stood before him in it, whole and upright though thinner than Arthur remembered, wrapped in robes he did not recognize against a backdrop of stone and dripping water that suggested somewhere deep and hidden, far from any road Arthur’s own memory could place. The old man had not spoken in the usual way — no sound had passed between them at all, and yet Arthur woke certain, in the way a person is certain of their own name, of everything the vision had meant to tell him.

I live, the vision had said, without words. Her poison very nearly finished what she intended, but I know her hand too well to have been caught entirely unprepared by it. I have gone to ground in a place no one living knows how to find, myself included, most days, until the fever finally breaks fully. I will recover. I ask only patience, and I promise you this in return — I will stand before you both, whole and steady, on the day your knight takes his bride. I would not miss that morning for anything this world or the next could offer me instead.

Arthur told no one but Tetsuya of the vision at first, sharing it over a private breakfast the morning after, and watched something ease in the samurai’s face that had sat tight and unspoken since the night at Crowshollow Keep — a worry, Arthur understood only now, that Tetsuya had carried silently rather than burden anyone else with, given everything else the kingdom had already been asked to bear that week.

“Then he lives,” Tetsuya said, setting down his cup with a care that did not quite hide how much the words had cost him to hear plainly. “I did not tell you, that night, how much I feared otherwise. A kingdom does not easily recover the loss of a man like that. Nor, I think, does the man who might have arrived only hours too late to prevent it.”

“You could not have known where to look,” Arthur said. “Even now, we do not know. He has kept that secret even from his own vision.”

“No,” Tetsuya agreed. “But I would have looked regardless, had there been any road left to try. It is a great mercy that there was not one I failed to find in time.”

Preparations

The wedding was set for a fortnight hence, in the great hall where so much of Tetsuya’s story in this kingdom had already unfolded — the tournament that had first won the court’s grudging respect, the induction that had bound him formally to Arthur’s service, the feast where Guinevere had first watched Elaine’s face open toward a stranger with an ease she’d never once managed to offer any of the kingdom’s own sons. It felt right, to all who discussed it, that the marriage should be spoken in the same walls that had witnessed everything leading toward it.

Elaine threw herself into the preparations with an energy that surprised even her own household, though Tetsuya suspected, watching her direct seamstresses and debate flower arrangements with a focus that bordered on the fierce, that the flurry of activity was doing at least as much to keep her mind from dwelling on the very real danger the past weeks had held as it was doing to actually plan a wedding. He did not begrudge her the distraction. He had learned enough of grief and fear both, across a lifetime spent closer to war than to peace, to recognize when a person needed their hands full of small, solvable problems rather than the large, unsolvable ones that had so recently threatened to swallow them whole.