Chapter 20 #2
Vera tore over to her mother. Allison’s face flitted through a range of emotions from the fear she must have felt to being appalled that Vera was here and then to a stalwart reassurance that only a mother could manage, and then—her face shimmered like it was under water.
It wasn’t Allison anymore. For a moment, Vera stared into the mirror image of herself. Another shimmer.
The new woman was a stranger, though her expression hadn’t changed across the three iterations.
But she was just as real. Vera’s sobs joined hers, her heart just as wrecked as when it had been Allison.
There was so much blood pumping from the gaping wound.
She hadn’t known that freely flowing blood was so thick and, as it congealed, it was nearly purple.
Vera pressed her hands to the wound, but they were too small, or the wound was too big.
Her fingers slid through the slick mess of blood.
Her hands were covered in it after seconds, and the sharp smell of rust overwhelmed her.
All she could see and smell and feel was blood, and the only sound was screaming, though now it was her own, for the woman was silent.
Vera’s eyes shot open, and she rose from the tub with a gasp. There was a hand clutching her wrist and another on her shoulder.
“You can’t touch her!” Merlin scolded.
She ripped the blindfold free. The hands on her were Lancelot’s. His breath came in heaves. “You were screaming,” he said.
She couldn’t spare a moment to reassure him. Vera grabbed Merlin by the wrist. “It’s my mum—I saw her dying. I have to go back. I have to—”
Merlin cupped her face in his hand. “Guinevere,” he said sternly but not unkindly. “Allison is fine. Nothing has happened to her. You were dreaming. It is not uncommon to fall asleep during this process.”
She was shaking her head to protest even as she remembered the way Allison’s face had morphed. It had all been real except for that.
“Her face turned into mine, too. Do you think … was I remembering Guinevere’s death—Viviane’s attack from before?” Vera asked.
Lancelot’s hand tightened on her shoulder as Merlin cocked his head thoughtfully to the side. “Where was the wound?”
Vera pointed to the spot on her stomach.
Merlin shook his head. “No. No, that’s not it.” His eyes glazed like he saw nothing in front of him. He was quiet so long that Vera was surprised when he spoke. “Your previous injury was to the heart. You were dreaming. That was a nightmare.”
It had felt like more than that. Vera dropped her forehead onto the tub’s edge, and Lancelot rubbed the back of her neck.
She took a slow and rattling breath. Put it away, she instructed herself.
Another deep breath, this one steadier as the memory of what she saw receded.
One more breath, smooth and deep. She lifted her head to meet Lancelot’s wary gaze.
“I’m okay,” she said.
“Shall we try again?” Merlin asked.
Vera said “Yes,” as Lancelot barked a hard “No.”
“This feels dangerous. I do not like it,” he said through gritted teeth.
“I was asleep,” she insisted. “I’m fine.”
He pressed his lips together and shook his head.
“I have to do this,” she said. “After the last few days, you must understand that.”
She thought he wanted to argue. If he did, he might convince her to change her mind. She didn’t want to do it again, but she had to.
Vera grabbed both of his hands to peel them off of her and firmly placed them on the tub’s wall. “I’ll be fine.”
“We’ll have to do a bit more potion,” Merlin said, “to get you back under.”
Fear lurched in her stomach. “Can we try without it?”
Merlin pressed a second vial into her hand as he answered. “It won’t work. You’ve been touched.”
It was a pointed jab that landed how he’d meant. Lancelot cast his eyes down. She didn’t want him to feel guilty.
“I don’t mind.” Vera drank the second vial’s contents. This time, she didn’t remember lying back and the blindfold was barely over her eyes before the words came. In the final seconds before her consciousness fully evaporated, she felt a swell of trepidation. This was wrong.
She was back in the field. The dying woman only bore the third face: the woman Vera recognized in one breath and felt certain was a stranger in the next.
This time, she found herself squinting into the morning sun.
Too bright. As she walked toward the woman like before, the grass beneath her feet that before only gently scratched her weathered soles felt sharp as shards of glass.
Come to that, everything was … more than it should have been; colors oversaturated, edges sharper, smells overwhelming.
It was all worse.
When the woman wailed, her screams pierced Vera’s ears to the point that she thought if she reached up, she’d find blood trickling from them.
The woman’s fear of death that held her with a sure grip, the woman’s attempts to be brave, her whimpers …
it was so unendurable that Vera tried to help far more frantically than before.
She tore her skirt to use as a compress, but there wasn’t enough of it—it was only a light summer dress.
She pressed it to the wound. The stench of blood was so strong that it covered Vera’s tongue, and she began choking on it and sputtering.
Helpless and defeated, she lay on the ground next to the woman whose breathing crept to a stop until Vera gazed at the empty shell of a human. She closed her eyes. Something else would happen now. It had to. And if it didn’t, Merlin could pull her out. When she opened her eyes, it would be gone.
Vera inhaled through her nose, relieved to smell only fresh air instead of the heavy odor of blood, and opened her eyes.
She was still in the field.
In the spot where she’d started both times before. She turned to look, and there it was.
The woman, her hands on her abdomen. Bleeding.
It was starting over.
There was nothing for Vera to do but live it again, in its new hyper vibrancy that made the scene, already so real, even more so. She was on her knees, clutching at her hair, unsure whether the screams in her ears were hers or those of the poor dying woman.
When the screaming stopped and the smell abated and only the sound of the breeze cut through the air, Vera dared to open her eyes.
Again. In the field. And two times more after that.
It was torture.
The next time, Vera didn’t even stand. She curled into a tight ball on the ground and screamed into the nothingness, into the void of sinking despair that the potion had gone wrong, and she was doomed to relive these awful moments until she lost her mind and there was nothing left of her.
So it came as a shock to Vera when the cycle stopped with the smallest shift.
There was a hand in hers. Like a lost deep-sea diver finding their rope, it led her out of the ill-fated loop. The next moment, Vera was somewhere else.
The hand was still in hers as they walked beside a stream.
She couldn’t explain it, but it was like the feel of his hand had a smell, and she knew without having to look it was Arthur.
She turned for confirmation and there he was, face taut with nerves as he stared out at the horizon.
Vera knew, in a distant way, that they hadn’t known one another long.
A glance behind her gave more evidence: her father and Merlin trailed some ways behind them.
Chaperones. Merlin’s presence brought a rush of feelings—Guinevere’s feelings.
He was the only one she trusted. He was the one who cared for her the way her father never had.
A flash. The stream was gone. They were in the throne room for court. Guinevere had made a comment that Arthur found amusing. He squeezed her hand and gave a sly smile.
Then it was the great hall. Vera recognized the men of the king’s guard gathered around a table in the middle—not the one on the dais, and no one was their usual self.
Lancelot slumped in his chair, his head only kept from slamming onto the table by the way it was perched on his hand.
His hair was unkempt, and his eyelids seemed to require a great effort to keep open.
Vera felt pity, but this wasn’t her memory—it was Guinevere’s.
And Guinevere felt the strangest guttural surge of disgust toward him.
Lancelot wasn’t the only exhausted one in the room.
Another older man with wavy silver hair, unkempt and hanging loose, dozed in his seat and snored softly there.
The ones awake enough bore more severe expressions.
Percival chewed at his thumbnail as he looked at a map unfurled before them, and the way his eyes darted to the more senior leaders in the room betrayed his fear.
Randall had a ghostly expression of resignation from his spot in the corner.
And there were other faces interspersed among the ones she knew so well.
Two more men and women at their sides, focused and forlorn.
Vera turned to Arthur. He studied the map, too, his face hard and determined.
Under the table, though, he’d taken Guinevere’s hand.
She rubbed her thumb over the back of it, a gesture of comfort in this moment that tasted of hopelessness.
It was the end of the war—one way or the other, it would all be over soon. They’d withstood innumerable invasions and the largest was yet to come. The faces in this room were a microcosm of Arthur’s forces. Even the best among them had little left to give.
The sense of knowing struck her like lightning. Guinevere knew what to do—Vera could access that in her mind but couldn’t penetrate deeper … couldn’t know the what of her thoughts.
“I have an idea,” Guinevere said. Vera’s voice said.
The room was gone. She lay in bed, and Vera had no context as to why, but she felt what Guinevere felt, and it frightened her.
Even in her darkest moment, even the day of—of—ugh.
What was his name? She’d loved him and he died.
Vera was nauseous as the dualities of her life and Guinevere’s competed within her.
Then the name came to her. Even on the day of Vincent’s death, she had never felt this deep of despair. Arthur sat next to the bed, his hand over hers, eyes filled with regret and an odd glimmer of awe.
The edges dimmed like night was falling on the visions. Vera wondered if that meant the potion’s effect had begun to lose its hold. Blackness closed in from all sides until her mind’s eye was only a pinprick of light at the center—and then nothing. Sensation returned to her waking body.
Vera came up with a spluttering gasp, the last vestiges of the vision gone except one piece which remained: her hand wasn’t empty.