“I do,” she said. “And you did. You said she was a Nameless End and that it meant we needed to run. Why? I mean, obviously anything called a ‘Nameless End’ is going to be bad, but whatkindof bad?”
“You are a very curious mortal,” Raven grumbled. “Normally, I like that, but curiosity kills more than cats, and considering the state of your own feline, I wouldn’t push it.”
“Leave Ghost out of this,” Marci said, hugging her poor faded spirit’s tiny connection close to her magic. “You’re the one who brought this up. I see Bob all the time. If he’s walking around with something dangerous, I want to know.”
“Like being around the greatest seer ever born to the dragons on this plane isn’t dangerous enough,” Raven grumbled, rolling his eyes. “Don’t you want to ask a different forbidden question? I can tell you tales of the Merlins of old.”
That was so tempting, Marci almost didn’t mind the blatant change of subject, but she refused to be put off. She didn’t have to be a dragon to know that Bob was the shadowy hand behind Julius’s rise. He was the force powering all of this, and if he was consorting with something sinister, that made it their problem, too.
“No, I don’t want to ask another question,” she said firmly. “I want to know what a Nameless End is,andI want to know why you were so afraid of it. The whole point of this trip is that I might be the Merlin, and the whole point of Merlins is that they’re mages strong enough to protect humanity from all the other big hitters out there. If that’s really the case, then something big enough to frightenyoudefinitely seems like the sort of thing the first Merlin should know about.”
“You’re not a Merlin yet,” Raven reminded her. “But you do make a good point.”
He leaned over, peeking around the chair to glance up the aisle at General Jackson, who was sitting at the front of the plane, waving her hands through what looked like mountains of invisible AR screens. Across the aisle from her, Myron had taken over an entire table with his papers and was scribbling on them while simultaneously conducting a loud and angry phone call in German.
When it was clear neither official was paying any attention to the two of them, Raven flapped his wings and hopped across the gap between the facing seats to perch on Marci’s knee. “Very well, maybe-Merlin,” he whispered, looking up at her with wise black eyes. “You want to know about the Nameless Ends? Here’s what I can tell you.”
He fell silent, and Marci leaned forward eagerly, ears straining as she waited for him to speak.
And waited.
And waited some more.
“Um…” she said at last. “What can you tell me?”
“That was it,” Raven said. “Nothing.”
“Oh, come on!”
“Don’t ‘oh, come on’ me,” the spirit snapped, glaring at her. “Try to see this from my point of view. Ilovehumans. The moment you started talking, you became the most interesting thing that’s ever happened to this planet. You have entertained me for thousands of years now, but that doesn’t change the fact that you are very,veryyoung. The oldest of your kind barely constitutes the blink of an eye for most spirits. That’s not your fault. I’m sure you would much rather not die if given the choice. Unfortunately, though, you do, and that mortality produces a critical inability to survive long enough to acquire what my kind considers a mature and responsible nature.”
Marci pulled herself up, affronted. “So just because we don’t live for thousands of years, we can’t be mature?”
“Exactly,” Raven said. “You’ll never be anything but babies to us, and many spirits, including Algonquin, say this is why you can’t be trusted with anything important. Admittedly, looking at the mess you made of our planet while we were asleep, I can’t blame them for thinking that way, but I’ve always felt humanity had to be taken as individuals rather than a whole. Herds of humans invariably sink to their lowest common denominator, but I’ve met thousands, perhaps millions of individual humans who possessed amazing levels of sophistication, intelligence, and maturity considering how brief your lives are. All that said, there are things in this world humans are legitimately too young to understand. It’s not a matter of intelligence or morality or even magical knowledge. It’s an issue of experience and the ability to take the long view, and when it comes to the spirit level of long view, your kind simply doesn’t have the grasp of time necessary to wrap your heads around it.”
As much as she hated to, Marci had to give him that one. Humans worked in years and decades, maybe even centuries if they were really organized. But spirits lived for millions of years. They functioned on a geologic timescale, and it wasn’t an insult to say humans couldn’t grasp that. How could you even conceive of a million years when the humans with the most money and best health care still died at a hundred and twenty? But while Marci was willing to spot him that one, it still didn’t explain why Raven couldn’t tell her about the Nameless End.
“All right,” she said. “We can’t appreciate time on the same level you can. Fair enough. But if this thing is as dangerous as you seem to think, ignorance isn’t going to help us. Why don’t you just try explaining it to me? I might not understand everything, but I’ve seen that pigeon a lot more than you have. You might be amazed at what I can come up with despite my mortality handicap.”
“I’m sure you could,” Raven said, touching her arm condescendingly. “But I’m afraid this is bigger than you and me. The Nameless Ends are not something to be invoked casually. I don’t even think the dragon knows what he’s doing, and he’s a seer.He can literallysee the future, and I still don’t trust him to be wise enough to make the right choice when the time comes.”
“The Nameless Ends,” Marci repeated, smiling. “So there’s more than one?”
Raven snapped his beak shut. “You see?” he said, glaring at her. “Too clever by half and never knows when to quit. No wonder most spirits would rather stay silent forever than tell a human anything.”
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Marci said quickly. “I’m just worried. Even if I’m fundamentally incapable of understanding the Nameless Ends fully, I still want to know enough that I won’t have to blindly trust you spirits to handle them alone. Not that I doubt your wisdom and experience, but most of you don’t seem to value human lives very highly, and frankly that’s not the kind of guardian I want protecting me from something so dangerous you won’t even tell me about it.”
“I suppose that’s fair,” Raven replied grudgingly. “But my answer is still the same. When it comes to something this big,anyknowledge can be dangerous. If you were a Merlin, things would be different, but as I keep reminding you, you’re not there yet.”
“I know,” she said. “I’m trying, okay? But I don’t know how to get there, and neither does Ghost.” She looked pleadingly at Raven. “I don’t suppose that’s one of the forbidden questions youwouldanswer?”
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “Though it’s not from lack of wanting this time. I can’t tell you how to become a Merlin, because every Merlin I’ve ever met became one in a different way.” He shrugged. “I guess you’ll just have to figure it out for yourself.”
“Great,” Marci groaned, flopping back in her chair. “And what happens if I don’t make it?”
“I suppose you’ll go on as you are now,” Raven said. “At least until your Mortal Spirit eats you.”
She blinked at him. “What?”
