I have never seen a depiction of the original Merlin, but in this moment, in this old world engulfing my own, I know his features like I know Alice’s. They are familiar, reassuring, trusted. They are the features of a friend. My friend. No, Arthur’s friend—

“Medel galon, gafaelad…,”

Beside him lie bodies covered in shrouds and shields.

The ceremony for the Legendborn reminded me of my mother’s funeral, but the losses are so far from one another, there is no comparison. And yet, in this world, for fallen knights I don’t know, I feel a devouring echo of the pain I know, eating through my defenses.

It is Arthur’s pain. He has just lost four more knights.

His grief pulls at the scar tissue of my mother’s absence, tearing the wound open at the edges. It drags over the gaping hole of Nick’s disappearance. The possibility of death coming to him, too, rises inside of me like a ghost to come, a haunting of what could be…

—what if it happens again, it could happen again, loving them just to lose them, I’d lose them, I’d lose them, lose him, not again—

Arthur’s grief pulls words from my throat in a harsh whisper. “Eisyllud ei dad a’i daid…” The words don’t belong to me, but I recite them with the sorcerer and with Aldrich both, our voices layers of past and present.

Eyes close.

Eyes open.

Now I am myself, speaking alongside Aldrich. “Pan laddodd Owain Fflamddwyn…” Aldrich and I say, “Nid oedd fwy nag ei gysgaid.”

Jagged half images flash across my vision, horrors splashed over the shining world: Nick’s body, broken and twisted at the feet of a laughing goruchel. Blood pooling beneath his skull because I was too late to save him. Sel, torn apart by a Shadowborn legion, his body carved open to the world—too much for any Merlin to heal. Alice, chased through campus, cornered by a fox that she can’t see. My father, defenseless as a Morgaine hunts him down to find his daughter.

My mother, alone and dying from a hit-and-run—

“Oi.” Lark nudges my shoulder, and I jump. “I didn’t know you spoke Old Welsh.”

“I—” I blink rapidly, try to free my eyes of the nightmares. They won’t go. I can barely speak. “What?”

“Old Welsh? You speak it?”

“I—don’t.”

Lark tilts his head. “You just did.” He pulls the silver pocket square from his breast pocket and offers it to me. It’s only then that I realize I’ve been crying.

My hands tremble in my lap. I clutch the cloth in my fists and will them to stop shaking.

It takes another five stanzas before I hear a word Aldrich says.

“Will the families of the fallen step forward?”