The stone was warm.
That was the thing no one had told him. Every bard who had ever put the legend to song described cold iron, immovable rock, a trial of worthy men stretching back through generations of failure. No one mentioned warmth. No one mentioned the way the hilt seemed to recognize his palm the way a sleeping animal recognizes a familiar hand — not with violence, not with thunder, just a slow, certain yielding. The leather wrapping exhaled against his skin. The weight of the crossguard shifted upward, almost eager.
Arthur Pendragon, sixteen years old and breathing too fast, felt the blade begin to rise.
Then the world came apart at a seam he hadn't known was there.
No sound. That was the first wrongness. Everything in that moment should have been sound — the crowd gathered in the torchlight behind him, the priests' murmuring, the wind off the winter fields carrying wood smoke and anticipation. Instead there was a silence so absolute it had texture, like wool pressed against both ears, and then a light that didn't illuminate anything so much as erase it, and then his fingers were closing on nothing, and the ground that had been frozen British soil tilted ninety degrees and hit him in the face.
He did not lose consciousness. He wished, afterward, that he had.
The cold came first, and the cold was a different animal entirely from the cold he knew.
British winter was grey and patient, a cold that accumulated, that settled into stone and bone and waited. This cold was active. It had intent. It found the gap between his collar and his jaw and put a knife there, found his hands on the ground and wrapped them in something that made his knuckles ache down to the marrow within thirty seconds of contact. He was facedown in something that crunched when he breathed — ice, a thin crystalline skim over mud — and the smell coming up from the earth beneath him was wrong. Not the peat and chalk of the hill at Caerleon. Something heavier. Older. A mineral darkness he had no name for.
He pushed himself upright.
The ditch was perhaps four feet deep and twice as wide, its banks overgrown with dead sedge that rattled in a wind that couldn't decide which direction it preferred. At the ditch's bottom, a finger of ice-rimed water ran between frozen mud banks, and he had been lying directly in it, and his left side was soaked through to the skin. He registered this with the distant clarity of a mind that had not yet caught up to the scale of what had happened.
He stood. His legs held. His hands were shaking, though he told himself it was the cold.
Above the ditch, a sky that was definitively, irrevocably wrong.
He had grown up watching stars. Cei had made a pastime of pointing out constellations — the bear, the hunter, the serpent winding between them — and Arthur had learned them as he'd learned everything, which was by absorbing them sideways while pretending to be occupied with something else. He knew the British sky the way he knew the particular groan of the great hall's door, automatically, without thinking, because you did not spend sixteen years somewhere without its basic facts becoming part of you.
Not one of these stars was where it should be.
He stood in the ditch with ice water soaking through his boot leather and looked up at a sky that was entirely populated by strangers, and something very large and very quiet moved through the center of his chest.
Not panic. He would not examine too closely what it was.
He climbed out of the ditch.
The road was there, which was something. Roads meant people, and people meant the possibility of answers, which in his experience you rarely got but occasionally stumbled into sideways. It was more of a track than a road — two parallel ruts frozen into the earth, each one deep enough to swallow a cartwheel to the hub, which told him something about the traffic and the rain that apparently preceded him. Leafless trees leaned over both sides, their branches interlocking overhead in a lattice that let the wind through but would be theoretically useful in rain. He was already cataloguing, already assessing, because the alternative was standing in the dark asking himself the question he was not yet ready to ask.
He walked.
The cold was a problem he addressed by moving. He had no cloak — had shed it at the stone, some half-memory of ceremony, don't kneel in wool, do the priests some courtesy — and the tunic he wore was good wool but not prepared for this, whatever this was. He swung his arms. He maintained a pace slightly faster than comfortable. He thought about the stars and then deliberately stopped thinking about the stars.
What he thought about instead, because a mind will find its level, was the moment just before.
His fingers on the hilt. The warmth. The specific sensation of something enormous moving toward him — not threatening, not violent, but definitive. A door opening. A sentence completing itself after sixteen years of dependent clause. And then nothing, the crack in the world, and now this track and these wrong stars and the sound of water somewhere in the dark beyond the trees and absolutely no one to tell him what had happened.
Merlin, he thought. And then, because that was not a useful thought: stop.
He walked for what he estimated was forty minutes before the trees thinned and the road widened and he smelled woodsmoke, which was among the finest things he had ever smelled in his life, because woodsmoke meant fire and fire meant warmth and warmth meant people were awake somewhere ahead of him, which was a problem and a mercy simultaneously. He slowed his pace and took stock of himself.
Wet to the hip on the left side. Hands functional but unreliable. No weapons, no coin, no cloak. His boot was beginning to make a sound on the frozen road that he could only describe as dishonest. His hair was plastered to one side of his face with mud from the ditch and he had a strong suspicion, running two fingers across his cheek, that the ditch had provided him with a cut above the cheekbone that had since dried but would look dramatic in firelight.
The sum total of his material worth was his education, his hands, and a talent for getting people to like him that had always functioned better than he deserved.
He adjusted his tunic. He stood up straight. He walked into Vel.
The village resolved itself from darkness in pieces: a cluster of low buildings with thatch that had seen better decades, a single street of the same frozen ruts he'd been following, and at its far end what appeared to be a market of the early-morning variety, the kind that gets started before dawn because the people running it have no surplus warmth to spend on waiting. Three carts. Perhaps a dozen figures moving between them, their breath making small clouds in the pre-dawn dark. Tallow lanterns on hooks, throwing yellow light that turned everything amber and everything else into shadow.
He heard their voices first.
Not a language he knew. That should not have been a surprise — already knew he wasn't in Britain, wasn't going to find Latin or the native tongue here — but there is a difference between understanding something in the abstract and hearing a human voice make sounds that your entire mind slides off of, unable to find purchase. He stopped at the edge of the market and listened anyway, the way you listen to music in a tradition you haven't learned, searching for pattern and feeling rather than meaning.
He found pattern. That was something. The cadences were not entirely unlike something. There was a word that repeated, which might have been a greeting or a price or a complaint — the tone covered all three possibilities. There was laughter, brief and cold-breathed, from somewhere behind the middle cart. People who laughed before dawn were generally not being menaced, which made this a low-risk approach, conditionally.
He walked into the lantern light and watched three faces turn toward him.
The expressions were universal enough: a stranger, wet, muddy, bleeding decoratively above the cheekbone, arriving in your market before the sun. His mother — in the days when he had thought of her as his mother — had once told him that first impressions were a kind of argument, and that you should always know what argument you were making before you opened your mouth. He had, in the years since, extended this to include the entire body.
He made the argument of someone who had been on the road a long time and found it less interesting than expected. Hands open, unhurried pace, the particular quality of tired that reads as nonthreatening because it's real. He nodded to the nearest figure — a woman in a wool wrap who was regarding him with the specific wariness of someone who has encountered trouble before and is currently running probability assessments — and he tried the only word of greeting he knew, which was Latin, and watched her face confirm that this was useless.
He smiled instead. The smile cost him nothing and bought him a slight relaxation in her shoulders, which was the first successful negotiation of his time on the Continent.
He looked at the carts.
Grain on the left, sacked and stacked in the careful way that meant someone was counting and had strong feelings about the number. Root vegetables, middle cart, turnips and something he didn't recognize, small and dark red. And the right cart, closest to him, bread. Rounds of it, dark rye from the color, sitting in a cloth-lined tray still carrying faint warmth from wherever it had been baked.
His stomach addressed him in terms that were not diplomatic.
He had not eaten since the previous morning, in a Britain that apparently no longer contained him, and the bread was approximately two feet from his hand. He looked at it the way a man who has been raised to have principles looks at something that is testing them.
Then he noticed the child.
Not in the market proper — at its edge, where the lantern light failed and the dark reclaimed things. A figure small enough to be between years rather than having them, crouched against the wheel of the grain cart in a posture he recognized: pressed small, made quiet, hoping to be unnoticed until opportunity presented itself. The child was wearing what appeared to be an adult's coat cut down badly, the sleeves rolled into thick sausages above thin wrists, and the upturned face was watching the bread cart with an expression of desperate professional focus that Arthur recognized from his own reflection in various windows over the past sixteen years.
Someone was going to move. The child was waiting to see who.
He made his decision in the time it took to breathe out.
He stepped to the bread cart with the unhurried ease of someone who belongs there, lifted a round of bread, and turned away before the belonging could be questioned. He walked back toward the road. Behind him he heard a sound that might have been the beginning of an objection, and he turned, and he bowed — a proper bow, the kind that confuses people into silence because it implies a social contract they can't immediately interpret — and he kept walking.
Ten paces down the road. Twenty. The objection, if it had been one, did not follow him on foot.
He stopped.
The bread was dense and dark and still held heat from the oven at its center, and it smelled of caraway seed and something sour-sweet that was either the starter or a grain he didn't know. He had not eaten in over a day. He had been deposited, wet and weaponless and without a single familiar star, into a world that didn't speak any language he possessed.
He looked at the bread for a moment.
Then he broke it.
The child had followed him. Of course the child had followed him — he'd made no real effort at concealment, and a child watching a bread cart has all their reasoning directed toward bread, and someone who simply takes bread and walks and doesn't shout is considerably less alarming than the alternative. The small figure stopped six feet away with the caution of something that has been shouted at often enough to keep its distance by default.
Dark eyes. Thin face, the particular thinness that isn't temporary. Seven years old, perhaps. Eight. Old enough to be doing the mathematics of strangers very quickly.
Arthur held out half the loaf.
The child didn't move immediately. This was good sense. Arthur held his position, arm extended, patient in the way that he'd found worked better than urgency with small frightened things. Three seconds. Five. Then the child moved forward and took the bread from his hand with the decisive swiftness of someone completing a transaction they'd already decided on, and retreated to a safe distance, and ate.
He ate his half.
It was the best thing he had tasted in his life, which was partly the hunger and partly the caraway and partly some quality of relief he didn't have adequate language for in any tongue. He chewed and swallowed and let his back find a tree at the road's edge and stood there in the cold pre-dawn of a world that was entirely wrong, eating stolen bread next to a child who was eating the other half, and he looked up at the wrong stars and thought: well.
Someone had to.
He didn't know yet what that sentence finished. He would spend three years finding out. But the bread was warm, and the child was eating, and the stars, for all their wrongness, were very bright above the frozen trees, and he was still standing.
He started there.