Chapter 10
At the very least, Vera could throw herself into Guinevere’s life.
Matilda took her to nearly every corner and crevice of the castle grounds throughout the afternoon.
They started in the kitchen and caused a stir as Vera pretended to know the cook and the half-dozen kitchen staff members who flooded her with their welcomes.
They visited the gardens, went to the stables, and met with the castle staff.
Matilda turned to Vera before each stop. “Would you prefer to lead the conversation, Your Majesty?” she’d ask. Or, “Please chime in as you like.”
Vera smiled politely but observed in silence, knowing she’d betray her ignorance if she opened her mouth to say more than greetings. And each time, Matilda’s offer became more of a formality.
When it was time for dinner, Vera let out a long sigh, assuming that Arthur would be there and that this would be her opportunity to finally speak with him.
Her relief was short-lived. The great hall was the largest room in the castle, with two tables that ran the length of it on either side.
They were already more than halfway filled with people.
A much shorter table was perpendicular to the rest at the front atop three short steps.
There were only six seats at this table, and the two center chairs were more ornate than the rest, throne-like.
They were all empty—save for the one next to the smaller throne.
Lancelot occupied it. When he saw Vera, his eyes lit up. She nearly stopped in her tracks.
He remembered her. He wasn’t the only one. All the gathered diners’ eyes shifted to Vera as she took her place on the throne next to him.
But they remembered Guinevere. Lancelot remembered her.
“Good evening,” he said with a cordial bow of his head as he passed her a goblet of wine. “Arthur sends his apologies. He will not be here this evening.” Vera thought she heard frustration, even accusation, beneath his words.
So there it was. Arthur was continuing to avoid Vera, and evidently, Lancelot didn’t approve. Her affection for him bubbled. She scanned the room as she took a sip, and her eyes found Merlin, his mouth fixed in a frown as his gaze darted from Vera and Lancelot to the door.
“How was your first day back?” Lancelot asked, pulling her attention to him.
“It was fine,” Vera said, more a habitual response than an answer. He turned his whole body and squared up with her, his eyebrow raised.
“A bit overwhelming,” she said.
Lancelot propped his chin on his hand. “How so?”
“Do you really want to know?”
“I do, if you’re inclined to share.” He seemed to mean it, too.
“All right,” Vera said. Maybe it was loneliness that drove her, or maybe the warm tug of kinship with him.
Either way, honesty came forth in a hurried whisper.
Lancelot leaned closer. “I don’t think I have Guinevere’s memories and all of magic and the kingdom as you know it and likely even the future that I grew up in is going to be doomed.
And I spent the afternoon behaving like a daft fool who doesn’t know anything because, as it turns out, I don’t know anything. ”
“I see,” he said, matching her volume. “Why are we whispering?”
“I—” She hadn’t done it on purpose. Vera looked out across the hall, finding far too many pairs of eyes staring back at her.
She swallowed and told him about how it had been before, how no one could remember her.
“I’m not used to being known or even noticed by anyone. And who even are all these people?”
Lancelot let out a long exhale. “Overwhelming is an understatement,” he said gravely before he turned to the room, and his severity dropped away.
“And these are all the noble folk in town. Most helped to fund our war efforts, some are successful merchants. And that man who just sat down over there …” He inclined his head toward the recently occupied seats on the other side of Arthur’s empty chair.
“Don’t look,” he added a half second after Vera had turned.
“Sorry,” she said, whipping back to face him.
“It’s all right.” He grinned. “My fault. That man,” he went on more quietly, “has brought his daughter in an effort to tempt me to marriage.”
“You aren’t married?” Vera had assumed that people from the Middle Ages married young. She couldn’t exactly place Lancelot’s age, but she was sure he was at least a few years older than her.
“No. I was eighteen when the invasions started, and life became war for the better part of a decade. Ordinary things like getting married were postponed. You and Arthur only got married three years ago,” he added in a way that felt practiced, as if he’d mounted this defense before.
“I haven’t gotten around to it. Most of the knights haven’t, for that matter. ”
Much more nonchalantly this time, Vera adjusted in her seat as if she were merely repositioning herself while the food was being served instead of what she was actually doing: getting a glimpse of the hopeful lord and his dejected young daughter.
“There are three more planning to come this week,” Lancelot said through gritted teeth that he was somehow able to keep in the shape of a smile. “I am not being modest when I say that I am really not a catch.”
Vera battled the sudden urge to argue that point as she noticed the muscles in his neck tense and his teeth lock together. He hated this.
She leaned toward him seriously. “If one of the others this week catches your fancy, shall I sing the praises of Lancelot the loud and foolish?”
His eyes flashed to her, a surprised smile playing at one side of his lips.
“Or, perhaps,” Vera continued innocently, “I should tell them that, if the lady is lucky, he might bring her along to scare the piss out of some little shits at sword point?”
Lancelot laughed in earnest. “You may have noticed I left that bit out when we met Merlin last night.” He stared down at his cup, turning it in his fingers.
“I did,” Vera said, and before she had time to overthink it, she kept going. “And what about Arthur? Did you tell him?”
Lancelot grimaced. “I, er, hadn’t gotten around to that.”
This time, it was Vera who laughed. “A convenient theme for you, it would seem.”
Eating dinner on what amounted to a stage in front of a hall of courtly attendants, craning their necks for a view of the long-awaited queen, was a much more pleasant affair with Lancelot at her side, distracting her with courtly gossip.
Vera didn’t even notice that the hall had begun to empty and even the seats on the other side of Arthur’s empty chair had been vacated by the lord and his daughter by the time Matilda was standing next to her.
“Matilda,” Lancelot said with a twinkle in his eye. “Will you please marry me and save me from the parade of lords desperate to be rid of their daughters?”
She pursed her lips, feigning annoyance, though a sly grin seeped through. “As tempting and romantic an offer as that is—no.”
Lancelot shrugged as he pushed out his chair. “Worth a shot. Good evening, lady Matilda.” He bowed to each in turn and winked at Vera. “G’night, Guinna.”
She pressed her lips together to stifle her smile as he departed. Maybe he’d always called Guinevere Guinna, but the endearment was brand new to Vera.
Matilda watched with her head cocked to the side and her expression unreadable. “Let’s retire, Your Majesty,” she said.
After Vera’s mission of connecting with Arthur had been so thoroughly thwarted, she held out hope of even a short interaction in their chamber like they’d had the previous evening.
This time, she was prepared. She’d decided that when she saw him, she’d be blunt as a mallet and tell him that she didn’t believe she was actually Guinevere either.
They weren’t—they couldn’t be—the same person.
If Arthur knew she had no designs to try to replace the woman he’d lost and that all she wanted was to unearth those memories for the kingdom, for him, surely he would help her.
But when she returned to their chambers, the door to the side room was already locked. The next morning, Arthur was gone before she woke.
Matilda knew everything that happened in the castle, so Vera was positive that she’d noticed the strange situation between what should have been two reunited lovers, but she didn’t let on.
She dutifully accompanied Vera in the tasks of running castle life and murmured kind corrections in her ear when she got details wrong, which she frequently did.
That too must have sounded some alarm bells that Matilda ignored, save a raised eyebrow here and there.
By far, the highlight of Vera’s first week came on her third morning when she was woken before dawn to a knock at her chamber door.
She sat up in bed, thinking she’d imagined the sound in the silence that followed when it happened again.
Three sharp knocks. Vera crept from her bed, her bare feet hissing along the cold stone floor, eyeing the locked door to Arthur’s chamber as she considered whether she should call for help.
“Who’s there?” she asked in an awkward half-whisper.
“It’s Lancelot!”
She opened the door right away, worried something was wrong, but there he stood with a broad smile. “Fancy going for a run?” he asked.
“Yes!” Vera said. She left him in the hallway while she dressed.
A quick rummage through the wardrobe produced a tunic shirt, heavier and more blousy than the one Lancelot wore, and a pair of thick brown trousers. Neither was ideal, but Vera was so desperate for the release of a run that she’d have gone in her nightgown if it was all she had.
They left through a back gate in the castle wall, an ordinary and underwhelming wooden door (that didn’t at all match up with the rest of the main gate’s defensive measures), and set out.
The sun had not yet risen, and the trail they ran on was dark, but Lancelot’s orb bobbed along between them. Their pace was easy and left air in their lungs for conversation, which came rather effortlessly.
Vera nearly ran Lancelot off the trail in panic when a squirrel burst out of the bushes near them, prompting him to yell out an overly loud warning for any animal he saw after that.
“Bird!” he’d shout and point, even if it was high in the sky.
But his dedication to the joke served him poorly when he was mid-point and stumbled on a root that stuck up in the path, only barely avoiding a face-first wipeout.
Vera grinned to herself in the darkness, patiently waiting for her moment as they ran on. Then she saw it lying in the path ahead.
“Stick!” she shouted when they came upon it, a puny thing no bigger than her arm. Lancelot jumped at her voice and then had to full-on stop to recover from his laughter.
She’d started hundreds of mornings running. This was like every one of those runs, except this time, she wasn’t alone. Vera was so grateful she didn’t even think to complain about how heavy her clothes were and how quickly she was drenched from head to foot in sweat.
After about an hour, Lancelot guided them to the back gate where they’d started as the sun was beginning to peek over the horizon. He flopped down on the grass outside the wall and held out his hand as his orb zoomed back to him and shrunk in his palm.
“Is that your magic?” Vera asked, nodding toward his light as she sat down next to him.
“What? Oh, this?” He spun it in his fingers before pocketing it. “No. No, I don’t have a scrap of magic. Merlin provides all the lights … well, most magic for Camelot, truth be told.”
“And what about Arthur? Does he have magic?” Vera asked, making a great effort to sound casual.
“That,” Lancelot said emphatically, “is a much more interesting question altogether. Not explicitly. But when the invasions began, and Arthur started uniting the people … I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t been there.
So many things had to come together just right for us to stand a fighting chance.
And we’d have been thoroughly fucked without the mages, but,” his eyes clouded with admiration, “I don’t say this because he’s like my brother, but this country and this peace—none of it would exist without Arthur. ”
“He sounds remarkable,” Vera said, feeling like something leaden had dropped into her stomach.
Lancelot smiled sympathetically at her. She could read in his face that he knew far more than he was willing to share.
“What’s wrong with him?” she asked, more bluntly than she meant to.
“Ah,” Lancelot leaned toward Vera so that his shoulder pressed lightly against hers. “It’s … not my story to tell.”
Fiercely loyal. Vera heard Merlin’s words in her mind as Lancelot shook his head and picked at the grass near his feet. “You should talk to him, though,” he told her.
She scoffed. “He’d have to be willing to be in the same room with me first for that to happen.”
He set his jaw and an unspoken exchange passed between them as their eyes met. He wouldn’t say it out loud, but Vera felt like, at least in this matter, he was on her side. He reached up to pat her back but quickly pulled his hand away. “Gross. Gods, you are dripping in sweat, aren’t you?”
Vera laughed as the wave of tension broke between them. “This shirt is so damn heavy.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Then let’s get you better clothes.”