Flora wasted no time in dashing over to Vera, pulling Arthur with her with one hand and grabbing Vera’s hand with the other. “Come on!” she said. “It’s your turn!”
Vera looked from Flora’s sweet face with her big, pleading eyes up to Arthur and the others preparing for the game.
“Go on.” Lancelot nudged her with his elbow.
“I—” This was not a part of Vera’s plan. “I shouldn’t …”
“I insist,” Arthur said. “Let’s play.”
So she played, and that was merely the beginning of it. As often as weather permitted, dinners with performers were moved into the town square. There was dancing, initiated by Arthur, no less, on more than one occasion. Vera didn’t have to become more formal because Arthur became less so, and all of Camelot seemed to fall in stride.
In the midst of it all, her training with the king’s guard had begun in earnest. It was grueling and absolutely humbling, but it was something of a treat, too. She often stayed after to watch their faster, much more intense sparring that left her slack-jawed at their prowess. But today, Randall was helping Percival into full, plated armor and helmet while Lancelot set up the strangest rig on the far end of the field, a pole with a wooden arm extending from it and a chest plate dangling beneath. He gave it a smack, and the arm spun about the pole. Lancelot caught it on its way back around and nodded, satisfied.
At the other end of the field, Percival was on horseback, and Randall passed him a hefty spear at least two meters long. Her jaw went slack. Surely not …
Percival tucked the lance beneath his arm and set his horse galloping toward the dangling chest plate. The tip of his lance slammed into it, sending the hinged arm spinning about the pole.
“Is he … jousting?” Vera asked. “You lot have jousting?”
Arthur nodded. “We have a tournament in Camelot every spring. It’s the only time of the year all the knights gather in one place. Largest tourney in the kingdom,” he said with no small measure of pride.
“That …” Percival looped back around to make another pass. “I’m a poor historian, but I am almost certain this should not exist yet. Not for several hundred years.” Plenty of Camelot had advancements beyond what she expected, all owing to magic. But things like having the orb lights and magically heated water made sense. Of all things, why would magic advance the advent of jousting?
Arthur nodded to Randall in the distance, who raised his hand and gave a stiff wave. “It came about during the wars. I think it was a soldier from the Frankish Kingdom who introduced us to it … but we started playing at it between battles to ease the tension, and it became rather popular.”
Maybe that explained it, and jousting had some earlier origin in France.
Percival dropped the shattered remnants of one lance, rode close to Randall to take a fresh one from him, and started his next charge.
“Just watching him practice is rather thrilling,” she said.
Arthur leaned against the fence next to her and eyed her.
“What?” she asked defensively, but Vera lived for moments like this. Tiny, private gestures that proved his promise of friendship wasn’t merely for show.
He grinned. “Do you want to try it?”
“Me?” Vera laughed, though Arthur didn’t. “I—oh God, I could never. I’d be a wreck … If I didn’t fall or die, I’d probably lose control and kill someone.”
“No, you wouldn’t,” Arthur said in his quiet way. “You should give it a go.”
“And pray tell, who’s going to teach me?”
“I can,” he said.
Not two days later, Grady saddled their horses, and Vera and Arthur rode into the woods where she and Lancelot often ran. She followed him to a clearing, fully outfitted the same as the jousting practice arena in town.
He’d thought of everything and prepared accordingly, having at the ready armor that was likely made for a teenage boy, her running clothing to wear under, and three sizes of lances. After turning away to give her privacy as she changed from her gown to trousers and top, he helped her dress in the armor. First, a thicker pair of breeches to go over her own. On top, a long-sleeve padded shirt.
“This is called a gambeson,” Arthur said helpfully as he held it aloft, ready for her to dive her head and arms into it, followed by chest plate with metal skirting that hung down over the tops of each of her legs, then shoulder and arm pieces strapped on somewhat like a harness.
He knelt down to secure the full leg pieces, each one tying at the back just beneath her bottom. Her skin tingled as the backs of his fingers brushed against her thighs. She needed it over immediately—and wanted it to never end.
He armored up as well. They started by working on simply riding a horse in armor, which was challenging enough. She practiced with the lightest lance next, and he took her through the motions with the practice plate at an absolute snail’s pace. She still missed twice. But this was their first of a handful of sessions over the following weeks. Session by session, Arthur added more elements of the joust.
All along, he told her how well she was doing and how quickly she was learning. Vera gave a perfectly adequate performance, but he treated her like God’s gift to medieval sport. And she charged into practice runs shouting quotes from films that would be pure nonsense to Arthur, but it made him laugh, which was a lovely sound, so she kept at it.
He made the other part of their act, the feigning love, easy … far too easy.
He needed only to catch her eye while his face was bright with laughter for Vera’s insides to dance. When he took her hand, when his arm casually snaked around her waist at the market, or, worse, when they shared even a quick, chaste kiss in public for show, any notion of pretense evaporated. Her mind was utterly addled for him. The potion had done its work well, and it hurt every time Vera remembered the truth: that her feelings weren’t really hers.
But she didn’t want it to stop—and it was effective. The more affectionately Arthur behaved toward her, the more people sought her attention nearly as much as his. And he was either a practiced diplomat aware of the impacts of their act, or he was still magic-addled into adoring her, too.
Perhaps both, because he behaved that way when it was just the two of them as well. Before Arthur retreated to the side chamber to sleep, they spent most evenings together. They’d sat down to finish the last chapter of The Hobbit when a knock came at the door. It was a letter for Arthur. A shadow passed over his expression as he read it.
“What is it?” Vera asked from where she sat on the bed with her legs crossed beneath her.
“The Northern Lords.” He sighed as he tossed the letter on the desk. “They’re threatening to secede from the kingdom.”
Hearing it was like being punched in the stomach. Vera pressed her hands to her face. “It’s my fault. Guinevere’s father. Wulfstan … they were fine until I showed up.”
Arthur began shaking his head before she finished speaking. He sat down in the chair next to the bed. “They’ve had different notions of how to structure a kingdom all along. There wouldn’t even be an alliance without this marriage. The lords were hesitant about how unification diminished their power, but with the threat of invasion and the need for protection so high, they had little choice.” He chuckled ruefully as he leaned forward in his seat and rested his elbows on his knees. “But their people want to be a part of Britain. How do we capitalize on that? Come to that, how do we help the whole nation remember that we’re trying to build something different?”
“By doing it,” Vera said without thinking. “You have to actually build something different and not just say you’re different.”