Chapter 3
Vera snatched her hand from Allison’s like the touch burned her.
She looked desperately at her mother, the person she trusted most in this world.
“Mum, it’s impossible! This doesn’t make sense. You’ve got to know this doesn’t make sense.”
Allison nodded, her eyes wide. “It doesn’t. It really doesn’t. At first, I didn’t believe it either. Merlin had to show us—”
“Merlin?” Vera croaked.
This seemed as good a time as any to throw back the rest of her whiskey. She choked on it and hastily wiped the escaped dribble from the corner of her mouth.
“Ah, yes.” The man cocked his head to one side and raised a finger. “That would be me.”
Vera leaned back as she took him in. “You don’t look like Merlin.”
“Oh?” he said with a raised eyebrow. “It’s my hair, isn’t it?”
“A bit,” Vera said as she breathed a laugh. She’d have pictured a long silver beard and not his dark, manicured facial hair with only glimmers of grey through it. Vera thought better of saying that she’d have expected someone claiming to be Merlin to be far older, too.
“I try not to dabble too deeply in knowledge of your time, but I’m well enough acquainted to know that my name is rather familiar in your legends.
They have gotten little else about me correct.
” He offered both hands, palms up in front of him.
“I’m sorry for not introducing myself sooner, but I thought it would only hinder our conversation. ”
Vera shook her head. This was madness.
“It was only after Merlin showed us that we believed any of it,” Allison said. “Your father and I thought he’d kidnapped you at first. I was ready to ring the police when—”
“He showed you … magic, or showed you time travel?” Vera asked.
“Magic.” It was Merlin who answered. “Proving to someone you’re from the past is considerably harder than you might imagine. I can tell you many things about our time that your history books have gotten wrong, but my word proves nothing.”
Vera eyed him skeptically but spoke to her mother. “What did he show you?”
“He,” Allison shrugged sheepishly and turned her glass in her fingers, “he turned water into wine.”
“You’re kidding,” Vera said. “Like Jesus?”
Allison let out a short laugh and nodded.
“And what will you show me, Merlin?” Vera said, a sharp emphasis on his name.
Merlin cast his eyes down, grinning at his hands.
She thought she heard a snort of laughter.
But he sobered and grew focused. Without moving or answering, the lights went out in the entire room.
Though the sun hovered in the sky, its light didn’t fully penetrate the front window.
The pub took on a heavy darkness. Merlin held his hand out, palm up, and a glowing orb formed millimeters above his fingers.
At first, Vera thought it was white, then she saw the edges were black, and in some moments blue. But at the center, she saw a vision.
She couldn’t place if the orb projected an image in her mind or if it played like a film inside the ball of swirling light.
Vera saw herself clearly there. It was her face and body, but she wore a medieval gown, deep green with gold trim.
Her eyes were dark even as she smiled. It was a grim expression Vera recognized, one she herself had worn on trying days.
The ball faded from Merlin’s hand, and the lights flickered back to normal around them.
Vera blinked and shivered. “Fuck.” She exhaled the word more than saying it.
There wasn’t any way around it. That was magic.
And, though she had no memory of being in that place, that had been her in the orb.
No, not her. It couldn’t be her. But … it was certainly someone exactly like her, down to the expression.
“Am I her clone?” Vera asked, grasping to make sense of it.
“No. That was you. You are her. That,” Merlin looked pointedly at his now empty hand where the ball had been, “is your body—everything about you before I reverted you to an earlier life stage.”
“But why?” Vera asked in exasperation. She’d never even liked Arthurian legends—though she’d attributed her annoyance with them to her father’s obsession with consuming every film, book, and show on the matter, an obsession which now made more sense.
She knew that the legend was about Arthur and his knights, not Guinevere.
Why would the king’s wife have any vital role—
Vera’s lips parted with dawning dread. “Was she supposed to have his child?” The notion was a vise grip on her throat. She wouldn’t do it. She’d sooner fight the wizard and die than be some time-traveling broodmare.
“It’s nothing like that,” Merlin said emphatically. “That’s not the way succession works for us. Magic chooses the king, not blood. Whether or not you decide to have any children will be your choice.”
“What is it, then?” Vera asked. “What is she supposed to do that’s so important?”
“It’s not she. It’s you. You bore witness to an act that is draining magic from the kingdom. You were the sole witness. It is not a matter of if it will destroy our world; it is when. And your memories are our only chance of fixing it.”
“You need me to remember what she saw?”
Merlin stared at her, considering it. He seemed like he was choosing his words carefully. “You need to remember everything.”
Vera had never had any notion of a life other than the one that she’d lived. No visions of battles or castles. “I don’t remember anything.”
“You used to dream about it.” Allison had been quiet so long that Vera jolted at the sound of her voice—and more so at the content of what she said. “You must have been three or four years old, and you never remembered in the morning, but you’d wake up in the middle of the night talking about him.”
“About who?” Vera hadn’t meant to whisper.
“The king. Once, you said you went on a walk with him and that everyone knew him and wanted to talk to him.” Allison laughed a little. “You thought he must be tired after carrying on as if he liked them all.”
Vera never had more than a passing hello with strangers on the street.
She agreed with her toddler self’s assessment.
Still, that was a child’s dream. Glastonbury was reputed to be the ancient Isle of Avalon, and the thirteenth-century monks at the abbey had claimed they unearthed Arthur and Guinevere’s tombs.
Even with her aversion to Arthurian legends, she could hardly go about town without hearing some reference to it.
She was an imaginative child. She could have come up with some King Arthur story. That proved nothing.
“You talked about Merlin, too,” Allison said.
Merlin straightened in his seat, and Vera thought he gripped his whiskey glass more tightly. But when he spoke, he merely sounded interested. “Really?”
“Yes,” Allison said. She shook her head and offered a half grin. “She said you made … water balloon animals to cheer her up. It sounded like nonsense. Does that ring any bells?”
“It does,” Merlin said.
“Do you remember what her favorite was?” Allison asked as she leaned toward the wizard. It seemed an odd question to Vera.
Merlin considered a moment before he flicked his wrist at his whiskey glass. The liquid soared out of it, and, at the twist of his fingers, it gathered into the unmistakable shape of a monkey, bulbous and fluid though not sweating a single drop.
“Oh,” Allison cooed at the whiskey sculpture. Vera felt the unbidden smile on her lips. It did resemble a balloon animal, and it was indeed made of liquid.
Merlin turned his fingers downward, and the drink flowed like a wave back into the glass as Allison relaxed into her chair. Vera realized with a jolt that her mother had been testing him.
She turned back to Vera. “And there was a woman called Matilda. You woke up crying once and asked me to braid your hair … that Matilda lived in the castle and plaited your hair when you were sad.”
“She’s your chambermaid,” Merlin said. “You see? The memories have always been within you. It might take some time, but when you’re back home, we’ll be able to begin unlocking them.”
It was jarring to hear somewhere else, sometime else, referred to as home.
This was home. Vera was not a queen. She wasn’t—she couldn’t be—Guinevere.
But she couldn’t deny that they were made from the same (what was the word Merlin used?) essence, nor could she deny her own childhood memories.
Perhaps she was some sort of … container for Guinevere’s story.
Accepting that brought the possibility of actually leaving into sharp relief. It frightened her. “If I go back with you, will I be stuck there forever?”
Merlin frowned, and there was pity in it. “If you can remember and get the course of history back on track by late spring, we will have another chance for you to return. If returning to this time is what you want.”
“But I can come back?” Vera asked, with a glance at her mother. Allison seemed to be working to keep her face impassive. “It wouldn’t rip the fabric of time or whatever?”
Merlin took a careful sip of his whiskey. “After you’ve helped us set things right, I can bring you back—if that’s what you want.”
Vera clenched her teeth together to keep from grimacing. He kept saying that: “If you want.” Of course she would want to. But as much as the timing was important for Merlin and Arthur, it was for Vera, too.
“Will that bring me back to right now, or will six months have passed here, too?” Vera asked.
Allison gave a sad hum as she reached over and squeezed Vera’s shoulder. “My love, you cannot map your life around his treatment.”
Vera yanked away from her. “Can you guarantee he will survive six months?”
“The treatments are going well—”
“We won’t even know if they’ve worked for another month.” She glared at her mother to stifle her rising tears.
“Ah …” Merlin said quietly. “I gather Martin is ill?”
Vera rubbed at the side of her glass. She’d rather chuck it at the wall. “Yes. Fucking cancer.”