“Now is the time. Tell the others.”
Merlin blinked. “What?”
“Let her in, Merlin. Open the gates to her. Take her power, if possible. If not, I will have to find another way.”
“Another way to what?”
“To kill her. What else. Every spell will be broken. Will it not? She is the one who brought all of them back. It is my duty to stop her. The threat to everyone here and to the timeline will be gone.”
Merlin nodded.
“I can stop her if she is here. My sword…”
“Yes.” Merlin’s eyes opened a little wider. “Yes. Of course!”
They blinked and he was gone.
Camelee stared at Wolf and then threw herself into his arms. “This is all real. She’s real. I’m not ashamed to say I’m afraid of her.”
“She will not be victorious, Camelee. I’m on the right side.” He grinned and closed his arms around her. “What can we do until she gets here?” He dipped his head and kissed her neck, letting her know what he wanted to do.
“Let’s go back inside for starters,” she said. “I’m freezing.”
“There you two are,” Sir Nicholas called out when they entered the palace. “Kestrel wants me to hear her music. We have gathered in the great hall to dance. The king sent me to look for you.”
“So, what is it like being a knight?” Camelee asked her brother-by-marriage while they followed the knight through the long corridors leading to the hall.
“The same as any warrior I would imagine. I fight for my king and country as your husband does.”
“Depending on the country,” Wolf murmured, walking.
“Aye, after meeting you,” Nicholas answered him as they turned a corner and came to the king waiting at the doors, “’twas easy to forget that your people are conquerors.”
There was no judgment in his eyes, only the truth. Wolf thought King Arthur must have been happy that Kestrel had found a man who could likely sit at the Round Table.
Come to think of it—“Where are Sirs Gawaine and Lucan?” he asked, turning to the king.
Arthur greeted his daughter with open arms. Wolf’s heart swelled with happiness over what she had found.
“Most of my men are human,” the king answered him, sending his daughter inside where the sounds of her family waited.
Wolf brought her hand to his lips and smiled after he kissed it. “I will be in shortly.”
“That’s right, you will!” she called back over her shoulder. “I’m going to teach you how to dance.”
“I do not know why that feels like a threat,” he leaned in and told her father.
Arthur laughed softly. “Because it is, Son.”
Wolf liked King Arthur. He liked the things that Arthur stood for, according to Genevra—the mother he never had, and who had not changed despite the change of her name.
He looked over the king’s shoulder to see Nicholas nodding his head at him.
The three of them laughed, and then the king cleared his throat.
“There is nothing better than the sound of happy men, unless two of them are the men married to your daughters, then, it is better.
“Now, as for my knights,” the king continued while they lingered at the entrance. “The sisters don’t like having men here, especially human men. I sent them off to protect your loved ones and try to find Morgan.”
