“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.