“I know. Time is of the essence.” Lancelot held up a single finger. “One moment.”
He leaned toward Vera across the table as Garth took a few reluctant steps away.
“These thieves … they’re boys. Barely more than children,” he said quickly. “Little shits, no doubt about it. They’ve been ambushing travelers on the King’s Road for three weeks—and successfully evading the local soldiers, which says something about the boys’ cleverness.”
“Or about the soldiers’ competence,” Vera quipped.
Lancelot grinned down at his hands. “Fair point. In any case, we didn’t unite the whole damn nation and fight off invaders for ten years for those boys to make the King’s Road unsafe. Word is that they don’t have homes. They’ve clearly fallen through the cracks, but we can’t allow their actions to continue. One of two things will happen; they choose to rob the wrong person and get themselves killed or … little shits grow up to become big shits. And big shits make for a mess that can’t be cleaned up, if you’ll pardon my language.”
“No pardon needed,” Vera said. “It’s quite illustrative.”
Garth cleared his throat and shifted his weight from foot to foot.
“I think I can scare the piss out of them and set them straight on our way out of town. If you’re all right with it, that is,” Lancelot said. “And if all goes to plan, they’ll have a better life tomorrow than they had today. You won’t have to do anything, and we’ll keep you out of view. You won’t be directly in harm’s way.”
Vera feigned disbelief as she raised an eyebrow, but a startling thrum of excitement quivered through her stomach. “Not directly?”
Lancelot’s half-smirk nearly undid her façade. Shit. He was adorable—and too damn likeable. But it was the next that had her reeling. The smile dropped and he looked at her with ardent sincerity. “I will keep you safe, Your Majesty.” He sounded far more somber than he ought to.
And she believed him.
After Lancelot peppered Garth with a rapid-fire onslaught of quesions, Lancelot picked up his pace to lead Vera to the stables. He kept casting sidelong glances at her as he tempered his strides to her far shorter legs.
“We could run,” she offered before she had time to second guess herself.
His eyes went wide. “Really?”
Rather than answering, Vera started jogging. She heard his laugh before he joined in and drew even with her. Now it was Vera casting glances in his direction, satisfied that he looked delightedly dumbstruck when they got to the horses.
“Guinevere, this is Calimorfis,” he said, brushing the neck of a sweet-natured brown-and-grey spotted mare. “Calimorfis, I’m sure you remember Guinevere.” For the briefest of moments, Vera wasn’t sure if Lancelot was being playful or if the horse might answer back. Talking animals didn’t seem outside the realm of possibility here. But Calimorfis responded with only conventional horse noises, and Vera found that she liked Lancelot a little bit more.
He moved with impressive efficiency: digging through his saddle bag, procuring a traveling cloak for Vera to pull over her dress, helping her onto her horse, and gracefully climbing onto his saddle, all within about a minute.
As they rode away from town, Lancelot explained the plan. The boys’ tactics had been the same each time they attacked. They waited outside town, and when their target approached, one pretended to be alone and injured. As the traveler helped the young boy, the other two came from behind and stole all they could. By the time the target realized what was happening, the thieving boys had made a run for it, and the one feigning injury would scurry off, too.
Lancelot’s plan was a hearty dose of their own medicine. He would pretend to be in distress on the road, where he hoped they’d take the bait of an unexpected easy job. He’d catch them in the act of their thievery and, as Lancelot said, “scare the piss out of them.”
Vera was to remain hidden with her hood up the whole time. He strapped his sword to her horse, committing fully to the bit of appearing unarmed and vulnerable. It was a decision that seemed risky to her as it, in fact, didn’t merely create an appearance of vulnerability but a reality of it.
When Vera questioned him, he held his sword balanced on his palm, considering her query, and then assuredly holstered it behind her saddle.
“I think I’ll manage,” he said.
Merlin’s description of Lancelot echoed in her mind, and it now rang as a warning: loud and foolish. But then there was her instant fondness for him that led to something Vera knew was more dangerous: she already trusted him.
The road from Glastonbury was a downhill stretch until it flattened out in all directions before them. Ahead, the only solid ground was a strip of road that cut through the countryside. Sparse groves of trees hugged close at the road’s edges. But the surrounding terrain wasn’t green. Beyond the hard-packed dirt road, stretching as far as she could see, the last light of day shimmered across the earth like a mirage in the desert, an illusion of water. In truth, it was no mirage at all. They were surrounded by marshland, the shallow water creating an expansive lake. She knew Glastonbury had long ago been an island and found herself staring at that reality.
“That looks good.” Lancelot nodded toward an especially thick clump of trees and brush growth down the road. Vera guided her horse into the grove. She had only ridden a horse twice at summer camp but could tell this was an exceptionally well-trained animal. What Vera lacked in skill, the horse made up for in intuition. She seemed to know exactly where Vera wanted her to go, and once they’d gotten positioned behind the heaviest growth, Lancelot confirmed they were well enough hidden.
And then, they waited.
Vera leaned to her side to watch Lancelot through a gap in the branches. She wasn’t supposed to be seen, but that didn’t mean she wanted to miss the action. He dismounted his horse on the road and stood face-to-face with it, stroking affectionately between its eyes while crooning words she couldn’t hear. There was a faint sound of raucous laughter on the wind. Lancelot stopped, looking over his shoulder. Then, he unceremoniously flung his sizable, graceful body down into the dirt. Vera had to cover her mouth with her hand to keep from laughing out loud. He turned his head in her direction with his own silent laugh.
“Keep it together,” he said, just loud enough for her to hear. “Stay in it, Guinevere.”
It was jarring to hear him say it. She’d admonished herself with that exact phrase earlier in the evening. Vera craned her neck to see the road as indistinct shapes grew nearer and took the form of three boys.
One was rather enormous. He lumbered along, moving more like a toddler than a man, with hands and feet bigger than his body knew what to do with. He was twice as wide as the littlest. They were a comical match-up, the one hovering around six feet tall, the other a full foot and a half shorter. The littlest one had mousey features and hair the color and texture of dirty straw. The third bore an angry expression on his acne-covered face, but he had the same nose as the mousey boy, and Vera suspected they were brothers. All were filthy and wearing clothes that desperately needed washing or even to be thrown away. Their shirts and trousers were more patch than garments. None wore shoes. Vera felt a pang of sadness.
They were so thoroughly engulfed in their boisterous bantering that they were nearly even with Vera’s grove of trees when the tiny one cried out.
“Look!” His whisper was far too loud to keep any secret. They stopped, and their faces grew hungry.