Chapter 9
It was still night when Vera first woke.
She only partly noticed that The Hobbit was now on the bedside table and the light overhead extinguished, but she didn’t think to wonder how they got that way before she rolled over and was asleep again within seconds.
The next time she woke, it was to Matilda’s hand shaking her shoulder, and it was nearly midday.
There was no jolt, no momentary confusion about why she hadn’t woken up in her bed at the George and Pilgrims. She knew where she was. More importantly, she knew when she was. Her eyes flicked to the door next to the desk, now slightly ajar. Curiosity about what lay beyond purred within her.
“Merlin wishes to speak with you,” Matilda said, “and he insisted it can’t wait.”
If Vera had expected Matilda to do anything other than wait attentively, expectantly, she was sorely mistaken.
“You’ll want to help me get ready, won’t you?” Vera said, and Matilda nodded. “I don’t mind doing it myself, I—”
“Your presence is urgently requested, and this will take much longer without my help,” Matilda said.
“Your Majesty, I’m not certain what it is you’re afraid I’ll see that’s any different than it was before.
It doesn’t matter to me if you have scars or deformities or …
multicolored spots on your skin. If I promise not to say a word or ask a question, will you allow me to help you? ”
Vera sighed. “Oh, all right.”
True to her word, Matilda didn’t betray any expression of surprise or confusion at Vera’s knickers as she helped her into a burgundy gown with sleeves that opened dramatically at the wrists, making Vera feel like she had delicate wings when she held her arms out.
Matilda combed the tangles from her hair and arranged the circlet crown on her head over a tidy plait. She was ready in all of five minutes.
Under the guise of a detour to put The Hobbit back in its place on the desk, Vera pulled the side chamber door open a few inches more and peeked inside. There was no one there, and the room was all but empty save for a neatly made bed with the book Arthur had taken atop the blankets.
Matilda led Vera downstairs and into another courtyard, this one flanked by the tower with Vera’s room and the one with the rounded roof that didn’t match all the rest. Pipes she hadn’t been able to see in the dark came from the top, tracing their way down the sides and running along the castle walls.
She followed Matilda through an arched doorway in the tower’s side.
The inside couldn’t be more different from the tower with Vera’s quarters.
No stairs climbed up, though there was a much narrower stone staircase descending into darkness.
On the wall opposite was a ladder from the floor to the high ceiling, clearly visible because this tower was hollow.
Right in the middle of the dirt floor was a brick-walled well with a bucket pulley system.
Wooden buckets rose from the well on one side, filled with water that sloshed as they rocked and clanked upward before the ascent stabilized and the buckets steadied.
The filled buckets disappeared into one of two holes in the ceiling and reemerged from the other, upended and empty as they lowered down to continue the cycle.
Vera gawped at the medieval brilliance before her. This was a water tower.
Merlin’s study was down the staircase at the end of a narrow hallway.
Matilda left Vera to enter on her own, and it was something like entering a pristinely ordered kaleidoscope.
She wanted to look everywhere at once. One side housed a chemist’s kitchen, with a large sink basin next to a chunky wooden worktable—and within arm’s reach, a cauldron near the fireplace.
Lining the back wall were shelves and shelves of glass vials and jars, filled with a rainbow of contents: a cerulean paste, red pellets, flaky green herbs, inky black goo, and hundreds of containers.
She heard water trickling over rocks. The chamber was so expansive that Vera strained to see where the sound came from in the farthest corner.
Water flowed from the sculpted mouth of a stone boar’s mouth into a bathing pool below it.
In between where she stood and the pool was a veritable excess of treasures.
There were baskets of rolled-up scrolls, wooden gears, metal globes, and delicate instruments ordered in cabinets from floor to ceiling, crystals in every color and size imaginable, and at the room’s center, seated behind one of two desks pushed together, Merlin was bent over a book so enormous it nearly covered the entire desktop. He stood as Vera entered.
“You look well-rested,” he said, a twinkle in his eye.
“I am. Thank you,” she said.
He gestured at the seat next to his desk and she obligingly sat down, eyes still combing over the treasures of his study. “You inevitably have questions, and I owe you answers.”
That pulled her attention back. “Yes, only about a hundred.” She hoped she was smiling in a way that didn’t betray her fear.
“Go on, then,” he said encouragingly.
Vera went straight to the one that had bothered her most. “Why didn’t you come to tell me who I was sooner? You can travel through time. That’s the one thing we should have plenty of!”
Merlin chuckled. “The irony of it all is not lost on me. But the magic of time travel is not so simple, and it is limited. There are only certain times when the wormhole is accessible, and even then, the magic stabilizing it is different from the gifts most are born with. It was developed by mage study, and it is finite. Once it’s spent, it is gone, and travel will become impossible. ”
If something happened, and she couldn’t get back to her parents—to her father. Vera looked at her hands in her lap and squeezed her fingers into her thighs as a physical shiver of fear seared through her. What if she was stuck here?
“Which is why I didn’t use it more than was necessary,” Merlin added more quietly, his eyes tender with understanding.
“I promised I’d give you the option to leave after your work here is done, and I’ll do everything in my power to keep that promise.
Now,” he said more brightly, “what else would you like to know?”
Vera groaned. “I don’t know where to begin. I don’t know anything about magic or this kingdom …”
“All right. Basics,” Merlin said. “When the Romans departed after a long occupation, it left what you know as England as thousands of scattered tribes, vulnerable and enticing to conquerors. That much is likely in your history books. After years of relative chaos, magic intervened and chose Arthur, and he brought the kingdom together.”
“Was it Excalibur?” Vera asked, unable to stop herself from interrupting. “Did he pull a sword from a stone or a lake or … whatever?”
Merlin smiled like he was speaking to a child. “It wasn’t so dramatic as any of that. A mage met him and was able to see him—to really see him and sense that he was chosen.
“Miraculously, all the other mages in the land who met Arthur confirmed it, too. That was a compelling testimony, as it didn’t benefit any of them.
But that’s just it. It was undeniable. Anybody with even a less powerful gift could sense it when they met him, and that’s no meager part of the population—nearly one in four.
It gave him a firm foundation for ruling. ”
“Sorry.” Vera stopped him. “A quarter of people here have magic? Is everyone with magic—or the gift—is that what you call it? Is everyone with magic a mage?”
“No. In fact, nearly all with the gift are born with one ability, and that’s that.
Mages are far rarer. We have multiple gifts, and we acquire more throughout our lives.
Most towns in the kingdom have a mage who provides powers for their citizens.
The greater the castle and surrounding town, the greater the mage.
Our largest cities often have two.” He waited, looking at Vera expectantly.
The implication dawned on her. “Are there two here?” she asked.
“There used to be. We shared this study.” He gestured to the other desk. “She betrayed the kingdom by trying to kill the queen and nearly succeeding.” Merlin folded his hands in front of him as Vera realized that, by the queen, he meant her.
“You said what happened was an accident,” she said.
He nodded gravely. “The official story from the throne is that you were in an accident and that Viviane, our second mage, happened to be on a mission in Saxon lands when she was killed by captors. Only Arthur, Lancelot, and now you know the truth; Viviane attacked you, and she died for her crime. But we have kept it from our people.”
That raised hairs on Vera’s arms. “Why?”
“Peace, and even Britain itself, is young. The wars ended three years ago, and here we had an unprecedented force of unity, a land and a people rich with magic, and more mages with greater power than any nation has ever seen. The people are building infrastructure, knowing they’re a part of something different, something bigger than themselves.
This time is golden. Have you noticed how few guards there are roaming the castle grounds?
That you only have the one chambermaid? That Arthur isn’t constantly accompanied by a king’s guard? ”
She had noticed, but she’d thought it merely a coincidence that there’d been no guards in the corridors last night.
“We’re not yet so established as to be confined by the structures and formality demanded by an older and larger country.
It’s a special time of growth and prosperity that few nations enjoy, and we only have it this once.
Can you imagine how that would have shattered when the king’s own mage, the most trusted and powerful position at court aside from the king himself, betrayed him?
We couldn’t sacrifice what we’d built, so we made the difficult decision to keep it all a secret. ”
“But you can’t keep it a secret for long, can you?” Vera leaned back in her seat as if this would help her absorb the blow of this information. “You said yesterday that magic was draining from the kingdom. Won’t they begin to notice?”
“Yes, and noticing will be the least of our problems, I’m afraid,” Merlin said, and his face drew taut.
“When I said that the magic rate was one in four, it was a misrepresentation of our current situation. It is the number most know and will say offhandedly, and it was true … before. Viviane cursed us. The magical birthrate is closer to one in ten now. This nation was founded on magic, and we will not survive without it. I can only imagine the designs she must have had for the kingdom to lay such a curse.”
Merlin tilted his head to the side. “But you knew. You found her out, and you alone know what she did. She locked up your memories because they are our key to undoing her wrongs. It is a miracle we didn’t lose you in her attack.
” He closed the massive book before him and opened his hands palms up toward her.
“You’re a one-of-a-kind anomaly, my dear.
The type of magic I used to save your life has never been used before. ”
“Then how do you know it will work?” she asked, and with a swallow, mustered the nerve to voice her fear. “Merlin, I’m not her. I don’t know how I could possibly have her memories.”
“They’re your memories,” he corrected. “And I know because you’ve already begun to remember.”
“No, I haven’t,” she said adamantly.
“You have.” There was that measured patience in Merlin’s smile. “I saw it.”
Vera stared at him. There wasn’t a single point in the last twenty-four hours when she had been anything but dumbfounded. The closest she had come to a memory was her unnerving affection for Lancelot, something she hoped Merlin hadn’t noticed.
His eyes glinted. “How much horse riding do you recall doing during your life in Glastonbury?”
“Horse riding?” She blinked. “Hardly any.”
“Any formal training?”
She shook her head.
“Guinevere, there’s a particular way a lady wearing a gown is trained to dismount her horse. I watched you do it last night precisely as you were trained as a young lady in our time. You did it as if it was second nature to you because it is.”
As soon as Merlin said it, she realized it was true.
At the time, Vera had been consumed with what would come next.
She hadn’t noticed getting off the horse at all, and if someone had asked her to recount step-by-step how to do it, she wasn’t sure she could.
But Vera felt an easy conviction that she could do it again.
“That’s enough for you to feel certain the rest of it’s in there? ”
“It is enough, and I am certain,” he said.
“Is there some magical way to make me remember?” Vera heard desperation creeping into her shaking voice. “Can’t you pull it out of my head or something?”
Merlin steepled his fingers in front of his lips.
She thought he wanted to say yes, but he sighed and clicked his tongue.
“Ultimately, we’ll need to use a magical procedure to penetrate the final barrier—to get to the heart of what Viviane didn’t want you to remember.
But …” He took a slow breath before he nodded, resolved.
“The more you can wear away at what she’s done to block you, the better magical intervention will ultimately work. ”
“How am I supposed to do that?”
“Familiarity is fundamental to unlocking both your conscious and unconscious memories. Immerse yourself into what was your ordinary life as thoroughly as possible. As queen, you’re responsible for all matters in the castle, so you’ll be well-equipped to perform those duties.
I didn’t plan it this way, but it works out rather well that you helped run the hotel with Martin and Allison.
But the most important thing you can do is reconnect with Arthur—in every way you can. ”
She inhaled sharply. Her eyes flashed to Merlin. Did he—was he implying something … physical? She was probably blushing.
Vera cleared her throat. “Why would that help me remember?”
“There was no one you were closer to than the king. That’s why this is so difficult for him.” Merlin smiled sadly. “He scarcely dares to hope he might have you back. His love for you is the core of breaking through to your memories.”
Vera had a hard time believing that the man she met last night, so cold and intimidating, would ever want to have anything to do with her, much less reconnecting. Still, she resolved to try.