Chapter 30
Vera didn’t realize how long she’d been in Merlin’s study until she emerged from the cellar expecting daylight and finding it was dusk.
The sounds of dinner from the great hall drifted to her on the breeze.
She hoped it meant she wouldn’t run into anyone on her way to her room, but luck was against her.
She’d been staring at the ground and looked up barely in time to avoid running head-on into Thomas.
She stumbled backward and would have fallen if he’d not caught her at the elbow.
“I’m sorry,” she said. Her vision swam as she tried to focus on him and pretend to be fine.
It didn’t work. “What’s happened, Your Majesty?” His voice pitched up with concern. “You look unwell.”
She wished he’d let go of her arm. She tried to pull away, but he held fast. It was probably keeping her upright, though.
“You’re near to swooning,” Thomas said. She was close to passing out, but the way he said it added a flare to her anger. “I’ll get the king.”
“No, please don’t—”
“You need your husband,” he insisted.
“I don’t,” Vera said through gritted teeth.
“I—I can help you, my queen.” Thomas’s fingers dug painfully into her arm, and Vera wrenched away from his grasp.
“Don’t fucking touch me,” she snarled.
He recoiled, looking at her like she was a stranger. His mouth opened and closed like a fish before he swallowed heavily and took a hesitant step aside, allowing Vera to pass.
The pain and exhaustion only continued to mount as the initial shock faded.
She was in such physical agony that she barely made it to her room, collapsing to the floor after she closed the door behind her.
Vera had no idea if she stayed there minutes or hours before she realized she was drenched in sweat and crawled the length of her chamber to her window.
Somehow, she fumbled the shutter open so she could lean her cheek against the cold dowels and let the evening wind lash at her face.
For a while, she closed her eyes and tried to sleep sitting there by the window, but all she could see were Guinevere’s hands clawing at Arthur’s shirt, and all she felt was the void of the destroyed memory.
The one truly born in love, replaced by fear and desperation.
She remembered every second of her time in Merlin’s study and felt like she would melt into nothing.
It was too much. She leaned her full body weight against the window’s bars, eyes open and unfocused.
It would have been all right if the bars didn’t hold, and she fell.
She knew she wouldn’t feel that way in the morning, but the pain of right now ravaged her.
When the door opened, Vera didn’t notice. The sound of conversation between friends, so out of place, brought her vision back into focus. She turned in time to watch the light dying in Arthur’s eyes as they locked on her. Matilda was with him, and her face fell next.
He stepped toward Vera and stopped, looking helplessly at Matilda. She nodded and set right into action.
“Let’s get you to bed,” she said. It was a different tone than Vera had grown used to, the one quick to a smile or a joke. She spoke with the purpose of someone who’d dealt with such a crisis before.
“I’m fine,” Vera mumbled.
“Yes, well, all the same.” Matilda took her hand with a frightened smile. Vera allowed Matilda to help her down and to the bed without objection, if nothing else, because it seemed to make her friend feel better.
“I’ve got her,” Matilda said over her shoulder. Vera turned her head, but it was more of a lolling roll of her neck. She didn’t quite have control over her body.
Arthur stood there, fists clenched at his sides, frozen between staying or going.
He met Vera’s eyes and took one shaking breath before he turned and left, not to the side door but back into the corridor.
She didn’t bother to guess where he went from there.
She couldn’t focus. It still felt like shards were stabbing all through her brain.
As Matilda helped her change into her nightgown, her hand brushed Vera’s face. She gasped. “You’re burning up!”
Vera noticed a cold rag on her forehead as she drifted into unrestful oblivion.
She woke from what must have been a dozen nightmares before the sun rose, skin stinging like she had a sunburn, sick like she was hungover, but her mind was clearer, and she had an unbearable urge to move.
She didn’t even care if Lancelot showed up today.
They hadn’t confirmed their run, but Vera would go on her own if needed.
When she opened the door, she nearly tripped over him. Lancelot sat right outside her room, on the floor with his knees up.
“Hey,” he breathed with a mix of relief and worry. Vera wondered what medieval greeting was translating via magic to “hey” even as a twinge of annoyance rang through her at his concern.
“Ready?” she said stiffly.
She didn’t wait for an answer. She started toward the stairs and let him scramble to catch up. His eyes flitted to her every few steps. Vera ignored them.
“Is everything—”
“I don’t want to talk. I just want to run,” she said, even more frustrated because her voice shook, the words sounding like a plea.
Lancelot pressed his lips together. “All right. You set the pace. I’ll follow.”
It was the coldest winter day yet, but Vera was on fire. She ran harder than usual. They’d barely set out, and her shirt was drenched in sweat. She stopped at the clearing where they usually chatted after their runs, yanked her shirt over her head, and tossed it over a low tree branch.
Now clad in her sports bra and running trousers, Vera turned on Lancelot, daring him to say a word—to laugh or make a joke, but he didn’t. His even gaze met hers unflinchingly. “Better?” he asked.
She nodded bitterly, and they set off. Vera inwardly raged for the first few miles.
Arthur must have run to tell Lancelot about the previous evening.
Why else would he have been sitting there at her door, all fraught with worry?
All along, Lancelot had known things about her life and kept them from her.
Come to think of it, he’d probably been telling Arthur what she shared during their runs, too. The resentment pushed her pace.
She huffed angrily, wanting Lancelot to say anything so that she could have a reason to yell at him.
He stayed silent, dutifully pounding the same pace as her, right at her side.
As the miles wore on, endorphins began to dissolve Vera’s wrath.
The fog of her brain lifted enough for her to realize that being angry at Lancelot was simply easier than facing the potion-sharpened experience of the day before.
She called out a peace offering in the last kilometer before their clearing. “Lancelot?”
“Yes?”
“Tree root,” she said, pointing down the trail.
His face broke into a half smile, and Vera gave a winded huff of a laugh. “There you are,” he said with relief.
They came to the clearing and flopped down on the ground.
Vera sat closer to him than she would on most days.
When she lay on her back, he followed her lead and lay next to her.
The sun rose so late in the morning now that it stayed dark their whole time together.
Mostly, it was an inky blanket of clouds above them, with brief glimpses of a star twinkling through the gaps.
After a stretch of silence, Lancelot spoke.
“I can’t believe you aren’t freezing.”
She’d forgotten that she wasn’t wearing a shirt. Her sweat had barely dried, and the air had only just started to feel cool. “I think I might have had a fever.”
“Gods, Guinna. If that’s how fast you run with a fever—” He stopped speaking abruptly, his face contorting with pain as his hands snapped to his calf. “Oh fuck, that hurts.”
Vera sat up on her elbows, eyebrows raised. “Cramp?” she asked, totally unnecessarily. His calf muscle was visibly seizing into a tight ball under his skin.
He nodded, eyes clenched shut.
“Here.” She rolled onto her side and pressed her thumb firmly on the knot. “You need more potassium.”
“What the hell is that?” He strained to say through his writhing.
“It’s a nutrient in bananas and potatoes—of course, neither of which you have yet,” Vera said with a chuckle as she massaged the knot.
Lancelot moaned his pleasure as his muscle released under the pressure of Vera’s thumb, only making her laugh harder. “It’s a good thing there’s no one around or—”
The leaves over Vera’s shoulder rustled. She and Lancelot froze. They listened as something crashed through the trees, retreating away from them.
He was on his feet in a heartbeat. “Is someone there?” he shouted.
The only answer was the whisper of the breeze, distinctly different from the other sound they’d heard.
“Shit.” Lancelot palmed his orb, considering it briefly before he heaved it in the direction of the sound.
It hung above the undergrowth, alighting a bubble of space around it.
“If that were a person, we’d probably be able to see them running off. ”
“Probably,” Vera said, more a wish than an agreement. She hadn’t moved from her place on the ground.
He nodded as he seemed to make a decision.
“It must have been an animal—no doubt thinking my pathetic cramp noises were a dying rodent for an easy breakfast.” Still, Lancelot grabbed Vera’s shirt from the tree branch and tossed it over to her as he kept his eye on the light in the distance.
He stretched his palm to the sky, and the orb zoomed back to him.
Neither said aloud what else the noises might have sounded like to someone passing by.
Lancelot sighed, one hand on his hip and the other worrying at his brow. “We need to be more careful.”
“Ugh. That’s exactly what Merlin said.” A flare of annoyance shot through Vera as she hastily pulled her shirt over her head.
“Why would Merlin say that?”
“It’s nothing,” she said quickly.
“No, it’s not.” He crossed his arms and frowned. “I’d say that’s rather something. Since it involves me, I think I have a right to know.”
Vera had a lot to say about everything she felt she had a right to know.
Her raised eyebrows said as much, but she held her tongue.
“Just all this time together between only the two of us … like Percival said and—and you did sort of look at me all swoony-eyed when I taught you tic-tac-toe.” She tried to keep her voice playful, though she realized her error almost as soon as she’d said it.
Lancelot cocked his head to the side, the smile gone from his eyes. “Merlin wasn’t there for that. Did you tell him?”
“I—well—”
“Because if you didn’t, I’m not sure who did.”
“No, I—”
“Then who did?” He wasn’t giving her time to think.
“No one! He saw it when—” The mental fog from earlier was creeping back in. “I sort of showed him. I didn’t mean to.”
“All right.” His eyes softened as he watched her struggle through it. He sat back down and patted the ground next to him. “Out with it, you.”
Vera sank to the dirt beside him. She told him nearly everything: that she knew about Guinevere’s betrayal with Viviane, her desperation to get her memory back, the potions, and the horrid procedure Merlin had tried.
That he’d seen how close Vera and Lancelot had grown.
She hesitated when she got to Vincent’s part, but only for a second, making a gut decision to trust him with the whole story.
He’d laid his free hand on her knee, drawing closer to her in the deepening of her hurt.
When she told him how painful Merlin’s procedure had been and how her body burned from it even now, he went rigid, his face darkening, especially as she relayed how her memory had shattered.
“So, if I seem broken, it might be that my mind stabbed itself in a thousand places. My brain could be actively bleeding for all I know.” It was a feeble attempt at a joke.
“That was an awful thing he did to you.” Lancelot rolled his jaw back and forth and stared at his feet. “Did you tell Arthur?”
Vera barked a cold laugh. “No. Last night, I couldn’t even string a damn sentence together.”
“He’d want to know. You have to tell him, Guinna.”
“Did you not hear me about the ‘betraying everything he stands for’ bit?” she said, her spark of anger reigniting. “And the potion he had to have just to be able to be near me?”
Lancelot had the gall to look exasperated. “Come off it. I don’t believe for a second that he drank that potion. And we all know what Guinevere did is not what you did.” Vera started to protest, and Lancelot raised his voice. “Stop! You have to actually try to talk to him.”
“Are you fucking kidding me? I have tried. I do try.”
“No, you don’t. You get weird and quiet.
Why don’t you talk to him like this? Why haven’t you told him what an ass he’s been?
You’re half a room away from him every night, and you’ve never railed at him like you would at me.
What’d you say to him when you found out about that potion, hm?
Did you tell him off or just bolt out of there? ”
Vera scoffed but said nothing.
“That’s not trying.”
Her jaw hung slack. “I can’t believe you’re blaming me for this.”
“You don’t understand what he’s been through—”
“You’re right! I don’t. That’s the problem. You both know all these secrets about me and my life that I’m not entitled to. Fuck you. You deal with it.”
She got up to leave, stumbling a few steps from the exhaustion of having pushed their run so hard. Vera heard Lancelot scrambling to stand and help her before she whirled on him.
“Don’t,” she said. She was confident he caught all her meanings with the one word. Don’t touch me. Don’t help me. Don’t follow me.
She stormed back to the castle alone.
Losing Vincent’s face was like having him die all over again. The shattering of that memory brought the day he died into sharper focus. It had been the worst day of Vera’s life. And it would remain as such for some time to come.
But this day—the day that had barely begun, the sun coyly waiting to kiss the horizon with her warmth, would bring its own darkness.
Thus began the second worst day of Vera’s life so far.