And when they saw this, they turned about and caught up with their companions and told them what they had seen. And when the others heard it, they said, “Our clerks behaved like complete fools when they ordered this clever little boy to be killed.”

And the first ones said that they would rather suffer great harm to their persons than kill him; they said this among themselves in secret, for they did not think that Merlin would know it. When they came to where Merlin was, he thanked them for what they had said, and they asked him, “What have we said that you should thank us for
it?”

He repeated what they had said word for word, and when they heard it they were astonished and said, ‘We can’t say or do anything that this boy doesn’t know about.”

Vulgate Merlin