Sequel to Challenge. Not actually related to the original chapter by this name, but it does have a similar theme. This is to finally fulfill that prompt from my poll, and, incidentally, Wolfdragon's challenge.
Oh! And this is not the Relius from Queen's Thief. I'm just borrowing the name.
. . . . .
Relius was a man who dealt in practicalities. How he felt about Uther's actions was irrelevant. How it affected his liege's kingdom was everything.
His advice to the king had been to quietly take in any magic users fleeing in their direction. Quietly, so as not to attract the ire of the larger Camelot. Take them in, because they were invaluable resources who would be very, very grateful.
(There was a little girl who didn't talk and was afraid of fire but could make the most beautiful butterflies appear from thin air. That was all the magic she knew. Invaluable? Jara had asked him. Her mother is, he'd said. She was teasing him, of course, but weakness such as sentiment was for lesser men. And her mother had saved the king's life in the plague. Invaluable, as he'd said.)
He had wondered how Uther would manage without magic, particularly when so much of it was vengefully snapping back at him. Tatters of answers came back to him, but it came as no surprise when he learned how many citizens Camelot was losing and how small their pool of knights had grown. The kingdom was growing weak. There might be an opportunity there.
(There was a border town that would be a logical place to raid. It was plagued by a familiar whose witch had been slaughtered, and the people were starving and hopeless. If they raided, the shacks that made up their homes would burn. If they made a successful play for the land, the people - murderers, children, cowardly, struggling people - might survive the winter.)
(They could not afford a war with Camelot. They did nothing. Relius was a practical man.
He was also a wealthy one, so he didn't bother complaining too loudly when a shipment of goods from a merchant front he used went missing. He ended up with a great spy on the border out of the bargain. Relius was a very, very practical man.)
Past incidents aside, he had wondered. Especially when Prince Arthur had come of age, and suddenly everything in Camelot was going suspiciously better. None of his spies could tell him why.
And now, years later at a treaty talk with the man, he had finally figured it out.
That servant.
Normal servants did not spill food (creating suspiciously timely distractions) and remain employed. Normal servants did not steal food (every meal in order to check for poisons) and remain employed. Normal servants did not talk back (and give surprisingly good advice) and remain employed.
Normal servants also did not locate the charm some idiot had put under the king's bed, destroy them with appropriate methods, hunt down those responsible and . . . Well, Relius hadn't seen that suspicious kitchen maid recently, and in their business that meant he didn't really expect to see her this side of the Cailleach's veil.
Normal servants didn't spend their midnight hours carefully blocking the spyholes in the king's guest room. Normal servants didn't divert arrows from assassins who got too close.
Normal servants didn't have magic, particularly in Camelot, particularly if they directly served the king.
It was easy enough to see how the king had done it, of course. If the choice was burn or serve, you'd get most people's lip service although it was harder to tell how King Arthur had actually secured this level of devotion instead of a knife to the back. Large amounts of money was one possibility, certainly, but Merlin had been serving the king back when he was still a prince and while princes were hardly destitute, they didn't have free reign with the treasury either.
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Merlin Headcanons
Fanfiction. . . As well as theories, drabbles, and rants on ships.
