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Guinevere is a good queen. Kind, generous, noble. Her decisions are characterized by a profound benevolence and an unerring compassion, mercy woven into her every judgment. She rules about as well as anyone could’ve hoped for, restoring magic to its rightful place and striving, as her husband did, to promote round-table ideals of equality. But in the end, Merlin was right—there would never be another like Arthur.
It takes Leon several weeks to notice. He was the first to swear allegiance to the new queen, the one to rally the Knights to her side, the adviser who stood behind her when others dismissed her views, but eventually he notices.
The training ground feels a little too quiet, no laughter, just the clang of blunt swords and grunts of those who wield them. There are no ridiculous, impromptu tourneys on mornings when the sun shines something fierce and the mood is too bright for endless drills—blindfolded combat, one-legged duels, contests with the most outlandish fighting styles conceivable as a break from striking and parrying and blocking.
He never quite had a way with words like Arthur, so there are no more rousing speeches about the importance of the Knight’s Code. No one is there to lead the weekly contests on sigils, levy routes, the history of Albion, indecent things to say to a girl—anything that sprung into Arthur’s mind, really (“Loser buys at the tavern, winner gets a day off!” he would always say with glee, except he’d usually end up buying drinks for the lot of them anyways). There are no more antics performed purely for the sake of making Merlin laugh on a gloomy morning.
There’s another thing Leon misses: Merlin never comes to watch training again.
Training is just...training. They get stronger and sharper and quicker with a blade, they smile at victories and scowl at defeats, but it feels strangely hollow. He knows Queens don’t run training, knows that even Arthur passed many of those duties over to him as he became more and more entrenched in his obligations as King, but once a week he made a point to lead the men himself—it was always the day with the most attendance.
The first time they head into battle under Queen Guinevere, it’s little more than a skirmish—rogue soldiers causing trouble on the border with Essetir, nothing a few dozen Knights can’t handle. Leon takes some of Camelot’s best as well as a handful of men new to the ranks, something he learned from Arthur. As First Knight of Camelot, Arthur always rotated new Knights in for some of the more routine situations, trying to help them learn from the veterans before it was too late.
The rogue soldiers are easily defeated, little match for the steel and strength of Camelot. Leon knows his men have thirsted for a good battle since Arthur’s death, as if by defeating Camelot’s enemies they can avenge their King, and it shows in the way their swords bite with every blow.
Even for him, the blade somehow plunges more easily into the enemy’s flesh when he thinks of it as Mordred, as the Knight he trained with his own hands to kill the King.
It’s a thought that keeps him company long into the nights, these days.
Given the quick victory, Leon remembers little from the battle itself except this—the ache in his chest, wide and raw and threatening to swallow him whole, when he looks to his right just before riding into the fray, so accustomed to seeing a head of glowing blond hair and sharp blue eyes meeting his own in silent solidarity, to find nothing but air. He rides alone at the head of the army, now, and some days that burden is too heavy to bear.
He doesn’t begrudge Queen Guinevere her lack of military experience, or her reliance on advisers to form battle plans. She wasn’t trained to lead men into combat, and he’s happy to shoulder the burden because there is much the Queen can do—comfort a crying mother, charm visiting nobles into forging much-needed alliances, draw up decrees for peace with the Druids—that others cannot even dream to achieve.
But Leon misses having a King that was also a Knight, a true Knight in the sense that he would offer himself first for any kind of dangerous quest until someone more logical (usually Merlin) would remind him that endangering his life when there were twenty Knights ready and willing to go that weren’t also King would be the height of stupidity. He misses meeting Arthur’s eyes across a room and knowing they’re thinking the same thing about whatever was just said—it’s too dangerous to approach by the western border, or the guard should be doubled in that area, or the rations will only last a fortnight.
Inanely, as much as he hated it every single time, he even misses standing helplessly on the sidelines, bursting with equal measures of fear and pride, watching Arthur duel in single combat with the enemy of the week in a desperate effort to save the lives of his soldiers. They fight true wars when it’s required now, long and vicious slogs against their foes in which they ultimately emerge victorious but blood runs in rivers on the ground and too many boats are lit aflame with the bodies of his men.
He does not allow himself to grieve for the King they lost, for Arthur—no time, there’s a trainee to Knight and a skirmish to settle and a patrol to dispatch and a message to deliver and a kingdom to run—until he’s clearing out his chambers and preparing to move into a renovated wing of the citadel.
Deep in the corner of a drawer, buried beneath extra sword belts and spare tunics, he finds a silver coin. It’s coated in dust and a sort of black grime, but Leon can clearly make out the Pendragon crest emblazoned on the side. The coin rests heavy and solid in the palm of his hand—real silver, valuable enough to go a long way toward food or, as was its original intent, medicine. He originally found it slipped amongst his earnings one month with a simple note in Arthur’s scrawl—for anything Gaius needs. His mother was sick at the time, back when Uther was King and Arthur was hardly even Crown Prince and every day felt like an adventure stretched before them, and the imperative to get her the most quality help in Camelot was clear.
She ultimately died later that night and there was nothing anyone could’ve done about it, but Leon kept the coin—it never felt right to use it for anything else.
His first tear lands with a little plop along the coin’s rim, teetering on the edge before falling off, and it’s like the dam breaks. He skips the morning Council meeting and afternoon training session, trailing his fingers over and over across the coin’s surface long after it once again gleams in the light, and aches.
It is a very poor physician indeed, Gaius often thinks, who outlives all of his patients. Perhaps not all, but the most important ones, in any case—the Pendragons, now little more than ash floating in a river, even as their physician still wakes each morning with creaky joints and white hair and a weary note in every breath. Ultimately he couldn’t save any of them, and it’s a regret that floats behind his eyelids every night until the merciful kiss of sleep chases everything away.
In many ways, Queen Guinevere is easier to attend to than any of the Pendragons ever were. She doesn’t hobble onto his table every other week with some incessant injury brought upon by completely unnecessary physical exertion, and rarely fusses when he insists on bedrest or sends up a Sleeping Draught after a long day of negotiations. Her first instinct is to speak the truth, always, not to hide the extent of her pain or ignore a problem until it becomes unavoidable.
It is strange, then, that some days he still misses having to sneak a tonic for steady nerves or a tincture for bad dreams into Arthur’s supper, stifling a smile the next morning when the King aimed a mighty scowl in his direction but sported a healthy color in his cheeks that had been missing for weeks. He does not stand guard in the King’s (now the Queen’s) chambers anymore, knowing without having to sacrifice his easy slumber that Gwen will not disobey his instructions when sick. It’s a comfort that does not bring him peace.
Once a week Leon brings several of the Knights by, just as Arthur did, and has him tend to their various scrapes. Gaius enjoys the levity in those moments, as they tease one another about fighting like a girl and try to compare who delivered the mightiest blow that week (“Look at the size of that bruise, I told you I gave him a solid wack!”). Knights will always be Knights, he knows—a little thick, sometimes a little crude, but every one of them a good man at heart.
They accept his ministrations with little more than a token grumble, and part of Gaius hates that he still has fond memories of having to chase Arthur around the room just to wrap a bandage across his clearly injured arm. It usually took the combined effort of his sternest voice and Merlin’s most obnoxious insults before Arthur would slump down onto the cot and grudgingly strip off his tunic, shrugging sheepishly when Gaius tutted at the state of him.
Little more than a fresh bandage later, he’d usually be off (“There’s an emissary visiting from Cornwall, Gaius, there’ll be a war if I miss it,” he’d apologize, refusing a pain draught in case it dulled his mind, and Gaius would have argued if he didn’t agree that Odin certainly was the type to start a war over a perceived slight like tardiness). The King was many things, but a good patient was hardly one of them.
A good statesmen, however, was another matter entirely. He usually heard from Merlin later in the day that the meeting with Odin’s emissary or Cenred’s messenger or whoever it was that time had ended in a treaty, that Arthur’d signed the agreement with his left hand but otherwise looked unbothered.
Except later that night, if Gaius was exceedingly lucky, the King would shuffle through the door just as the sun sank over the horizon, shoulders tight with tension, and ask haltingly, “About that draught, Gaius?” as if the Court Physician would ever deny the King of Camelot. As if Gaius would ever refuse Arthur when his eyes were so wide and unguarded, looking for just a moment like little more than a young boy with the weight of the world on his shoulders.
“Of course, sire,” he’d respond, reaching for the draught he’d usually already brewed in the hope that Arthur would ask, and that was that.
Gaius looks down at the vial of Pain Draught in his hand and slips it into his satchel, blinking away the memories. The full moon shines bright tonight, so he ambles about his chambers, gathering various pre-brewed tinctures and herbs—comfrey, sage, always some yarrow—and stuffing them between whatever bandages he can spare. Tomorrow the Knights will leave for battle against rogue Essetir soldiers, and he cannot be short of supplies should the worst happen.
Only when he is halfway out the door, stooping with the weight of the supplies in his satchel, does he hear Merlin call softly, “Gaius.”
Merlin doesn’t live with him anymore, having been allotted much nicer chambers in the citadel befitting his role as Court Sorcerer, but he spends a majority of his day here with Gaius anyways. It’s nice, comforting—a relic of a much simpler time.
“What is it, Merlin?” he asks, not turning. He doesn’t want to be late.
“They won’t—it’s not happening today.” Merlin sounds small and so, so far away. “Not anymore. Gaius.”
He gasps and looks down at the satchel, the world coming back into focus again. For four years he did this on every full moon, gathering everything he could spare and meeting Arthur outside a tent in the lower town square just as the first steaks of dawn broke out across the sky. Some months he treated thirty, forty people before the supplies ran out and Merlin’s hands stung red from grinding poultices, Arthur steadily engaging potential patients and filtering them through to the tent until Merlin poked his head out of the flap to signal that they were done.
“Right. Yes, of course.” He steps back into the room, gingerly shrugging off the satchel, and wonders if anyone even bothered to set up the tent in the square. Perhaps this tradition was yet another casualty of the Battle at Camlann.
“We should ask Gwen to keep it going, from next month,” Merlin suggests. “It’s what he would’ve wanted.” The words are detached and clinical, robbed of any kind of emotion, but he hears the earnestness regardless.
“I am sure the Queen would be more than happy,” he agrees. They could certainly employ a Knight, perhaps even Sir Leon himself, to triage potential patients and control the crowd when they clamored to be chosen and to reassure, over and over, that no one would be hounded for even a single shilling in return for the care they received that morning.
The effect would not be the same as the King of Camelot regaling waiting patients with stories and inquiring after townsfolk by name, but they could try.
Merlin was right—it’s what Arthur would have wanted.
News usually takes a long time to reach backroad villages like Ealdor, but not this one. Hunith hears it whispered between the rustling of trees and roaring of the river long before an official messenger arrives from Camelot—The King is dead.
When the truth is confirmed, she thinks only of Merlin. It was plain to see even during their very first visit to Ealdor—Arthur was her boy’s heart and soul. She knows all too painfully what it’s like to live with nothing more than memories of one who is gone, and it’s a fate she wouldn’t wish on her worst enemy, never mind on her sweet little boy who used to smile so wide she sometimes worried it would tear his face right in two.
If it wasn’t soon to be harvest season, she would have gone to Camelot that instant. Instead, she takes half a day off from the fields and gazes out the window at the clumps of flowers she’s taken to growing for company, Balinor’s face clear in her mind, and wonders what it is about this family that they’re never destined to be happy.
The harvest is hard, long work, leaving no time for anything except the feel of fresh air in her lungs and Earth beneath her feet. It’s easy to think of nothing but the task at hand, except every few minutes she turns and glances at the village gate, still holding onto a half-desperate hope that a red and gold banner will come into view just as it has every year since Kanen.
No one comes.
Hunith prays to every higher power she can think of that this won’t the year brutes and brigands return for what are now easy pickings.
Usually three young Knights, clearly new to the ranks, would gallop through the village gates in the early days of the harvest, adorably reluctant to part with the Pendragon cloaks draped over their backs but more than willing to get their hands dirty in the fields. By the time they were ready to leave, however, their cloaks, armor, and even tunics were usually bunched off in a corner, no match for the relentless toil of earning a living from the land. They would break bread with the villagers and rebuff the coy looks of young maidens with good-natured gentleness, usually having lost the haughtiness characteristic of so many fresh Knights after just a few days of working side-by-side with the villagers.
The Knights always kept their swords at the ready, however. Hunith assumed that was the intended purpose of their annual visits, before she had the idea to put them to work a few years back—a layer of protection, in case someone like Kanen attempted to come back and terrorize Ealdor again. Or perhaps they were always meant to offset the loss of good workers like Will and Matthew at a time when their absence was felt most keenly.
She never asked Arthur. Never got a chance to thank him.
Now he’s dead, and she knows there will be no more men crossing the border from Camelot for tiny little Ealdor in Essetir, no more men to help with the harvest and scare off bandits and serve as a fierce reminder that Arthur never forgot what happened here.
She does not fear hard work, but sleep came easier under the watchful eye of the Knights, and her home felt just a little less empty during those weeks in their company.
The next time she glances over at the gate, there’s a lone horse trekking through. Her blood runs cold before she sees him—Hunith would recognize those black curls anywhere.
“Merlin?!” she calls, dropping the basket in her hand without a second thought and running to her boy.
He looks terrible. Gaunt and thin, with shadows around his eyes standing out in sharp contrast to pale skin and a haunted expression plain on his face that screams of unbearable pain.
“Mother,” he whispers, voice like broken glass, and tears pool in his eyes. “Mother, he’s—“ Merlin cuts off with a choked sound and closes his eyes, letting the tears fall before taking a shuddering breath. “He’s—“
Hunith pulls him into her arms and squeezes, like she can stop the way he trembles all over with power of will alone.
“I want to forget,” he breathes into the hollow of her neck.
“No you don’t,” she says softly, infinitely gentle the way only a mother can be. She knows her son, knows it’s the pain talking and not him. “It’ll get better, Merlin.”
For both their sakes, she tries to believe that with every fiber of her heart.
There’s a vigil. It’s bigger than any in recent memory, drawing citizens from every corner of Camelot despite the harvest and lasting for three dusks until guards order the square cleared.
On the very first day, there is a thick silence in the air. Candles flicker with the whim of the wind, the only source of warmth during the chilly night, but the vigil attendees merely bear the cold with a stoic determination rivaling that of their lost King. The quiet carries a near-tangible weight, like a blanket draped over the Kingdom, a pause between breaths when all is still. Even children, huddled in the skirts of their mothers, dare not disturb it.
The second day, the stories start.
Over and over, the question is asked: What brought you? because they all came for their King, but he touched their lives in very different ways.
There is a farmer whose taxes were forgiven the year his crops fell victim to bandits. The parents of a slain Knight Arthur rode three days to notify and console in person. A little boy, his leg mended over the course of four of Gaius’s medical sessions in the lower town. The son of a Mercian Knight spared in a tournament, the tip of the then-Prince’s blade having been a hair’s width from his neck before being cast aside into the sand. Two serving girls, whose master beat them for misbehavior until a letter arrived stripping him of all wealth and titles.
A widowed seamstress with four kids, each of them holding a little candle, who fed her family off an annual commission for magisterial robes (as an active Knight, the King did not actually wear or need courtly garments other than chainmail, but he requested a new robe each year nonetheless). An elderly man with a limp, spared from a 40-lash sentence for stealing bread back in the days when Uther was too blind with anger to notice whether his judgments were carried out by the Prince or not.
Their voices are strong when they speak, bold—proud of a King who was brave and just and wholly dedicated to his people until his last breath.
When the vigil ends, the candles are lined in neat rows along the corridors of the citadel and around the square. Merlin keeps them alight for a fortnight, neither wind nor rain nor trivialities such as the melting of the wax enough to extinguish them over the power of his magic. The Miracle of the Candles is hailed as a reminder that light can be found among the very darkest of days.
So even as Camelot mourns for the King robbed away too soon, she whispers of stories that one day he will return again.