Merlin Read Online Free Page B

would not let him. To silence them, he drank it all. At last, with aching, taut belly, he tried to stand and found his legs would not hold him up.
    "I feel..." he began, not knowing what he was feeling. And turning his head to one side, he was suddenly and quite efficiently sick.
    When he was done, the women helped him stand and guided him to a place somewhere on the edge of the camp. Through slotted eyes he tried to make it out, but could not. His head was swimming about and he was afraid he might be sick again.
    "This be thy place now," the black-haired woman with the cheek brand was saying, her voice remarkably similar to the bulldog's.
    Place.
That was good, he thought drowsily. He needed a place.
    The woman gave him a little push in the small of his back and he fell, rather than walked, into it.
    The place was small and dark and closely covered. There was some sort of mattress, thin and old smelling. He did not care. He curled up on it and fell instantly to sleep.
    This time he dreamed.
    He dreamed of the bear again, but now he was in the dream as well, holding a sword in one hand, a large stone in the other. The bear took off its crown and flung it onto the sword. At that, sword and crown dissolved and he woke sweating and ill.
    It did not help that his small, closed-in tent seemed to be swaying. It did not help that the air stank of his sickness. He tried to get to his feet and banged his shoulder painfully against something. His head hurt. His belly ached. The slightest noise hammered at his temples like a blacksmith's hammer on an anvil.
    Heavily he fell again onto his pallet where he slept, dreamed, woke, slept again. The dream images all blended into one great dream of kings and kingdoms.
    Suddenly an enormous light—like the light of heaven itself—flooded into his dream. He opened his eyes and found that he was lying in an open space. The tent had been lifted away and the light was the new day.
    Only then did he see what his
place
really was. He was in some sort of large wicker cage hanging from a tree limb some five feet off the ground. When he tried the cage door, it would not open. Not that this was exactly a surprise. It was tied shut with a complicated knot on the outside that he could not reach, no matter how hard he tried.
    A cage. Like a criminal hung up at the crossroads to starve. Or like the sacrifice of the Druid priests.
    "Or like," he whispered to himself, "a beast in a trap." He thought wildly:
They are fattening me for a feast.
    He gazed about. He seemed to be alone. Once more he tried to reach the knot, straining his arm as far as it could go. He could touch it ... but just. There was no way he could get it untied.
What a fool I have been,
he thought.
Stuffing myself when I should have been starving.
He sat back down heavily on the pallet. The movement caused the cage to sway and his stomach to heave.
    "Dreamer!" A woman's voice called and reluctantly he looked toward the sound. It was the redheaded woman. How could he ever have thought such a witch beautiful? "Dreamer!" Her voice made his head ache the more. "Here be herbs for thy sickness. For thy stomach, cuckoo's meat; it will strengthen thy belly and procure thy appetite. And this other..." she pointed to a smaller vessel, "bruisewort. That thee must sniff up into thy nostrils and it will purge thy head. We apologize for the ruse. But it be necessary to take thee, unprotesting, to thy place."
    "Go away, witch," he mumbled. His own voice hurt his head as well.
    "Once thy sickness be gone, we will hear thy dreams."
    "I will take nothing from your hands. Nothing. I will starve myself before I take something from you. Then what kind of a meal will I make?" It was, he thought, a strong speech. That was why he was stunned when she began to laugh. It was a pretty laugh, soft, tinkling.
    "Eat thee? Eat another human soul? What does thee take us for?"
    Was this a trick?
He could not think, his head hurt so.
    "All we want from thee are thy